Sally Thomas says that young adults from ages 18-24 are not buying what is offered from our "cultural cany shop" which offers access through iphones classic films to ancient texts. But few are turning on to it.

Literary reader rates, Thomas informs us, have declined by 17 percentage points since 1982. This does not represent a temporary cultual shift, but an avalanche of social change. This would be easy to dismiss, except...

...were not already so evident...interviewees, from the “Jaywalking” segment of The Tonight Show, who don’t know where the pope lives (“England?”) or the tenure of a Supreme Court justice (“I’m guessing four years?”), or the title of any classic work of literature.