Dear Direct Response Letter Subscriber:

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In an article in The New Yorker (12/9/25), Jay Kang writes:

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"One of the more common doomsday scenarios about social media goes something like this: an internet-addicted public, hooked on the dopamine hits of engagement and the immediate satisfaction of short-form video, loses its ability to read books and gets stupider and more reactionary as a result.

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"And the statistics regarding our collective reading habits are not pretty. In a recent National Literacy Trust survey of 76,000 children, ages eight to eighteen, only one in five said they read something daily in their free time--a historically low mark for the survey.

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"In a National Endowment for the Arts poll conducted in 2022, the number of adults who said they had read at least one book in the past year dipped below 50%, down roughly ten per cent from a decade before."

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Meanwhile, Australia has begun to enforce laws banning children under 16 from major social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, and YouTube.

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Regards,

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