The Facts About Men and Reading

Are men giving up on reading? Or is the story we're being told about it wrong? A December op-ed in the New York Times argued that young men have all but disappeared from literary fiction, and that the gap is feeding the same isolation that's pushing them toward the manosphere. It split readers fast. So I went and talked to the people actually living this debate: the professor who wrote the piece, the journalist who fact-checked it, and the neuroscientist who's spent forty years studying what reading does to a brain in the first place. What I found wasn't the story I expected going in. Featuring: David J. Morris: former Marine, author of The Evil Hours (LA Times Book Prize finalist, NYT Book Review Editor's Choice), and author of the NYT op-ed that sparked this conversation. Constance Grady: Senior Correspondent at Vox, who traced the most-cited statistic in this debate back to its actual source. Maryanne Wolf: Cognitive neuroscientist and author of Reader Come Home and Proust and the Squid.