One of the most baffling and depressing realities of life in the digital (and now AI) world is the way young people resist books that challenge their worldview.

The problem is particularly bad among liberal, college-aged students. Now, with all the world’s literature available to download on a phone, students still resist reading books that might upset their ideology. They can explain the plot of The Handmaid’s Tale, renounce colonialism, and expound on the history explored in The 1619 Project, but they don’t know who Whittaker Chambers was and have never read The Gulag Archipelago.

Recommended Stories

The myth of Goethe

Ian McEwan’s literary future

New novel uses multiple voices to talk ‘banned books,’ blasting liberals