The Byrds - The Monday Morning Memo

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Deep reading is in free-fall everywhere in the developing world, as the smartphone has hijacked our brains. Professors at even elite colleges are finding their students have lost the ability to read at length and in depth; talking has replaced reading; images have replaced ideas; engagement has supplanted reflection; and the various cognitive skills that reading once conferred to the masses since the printing press are fast atrophying.

Professors at even elite colleges are finding their students have lost the ability to read at length and in depth; talking has replaced reading; images have replaced ideas; engagement has supplanted reflection; and the various cognitive skills that reading once conferred to the masses since the printing press are fast atrophying.

Large language models have created an existential crisis for teachers trying to evaluate their students’ ability to actually write, as opposed to their ability to prompt an LLM to do all their homework. ‘College is just how well I can use ChatGPT at this point,’ one student said. ‘Massive numbers of students are going to emerge from university with degrees, and into the workforce, who are essentially illiterate,’ a professor echoed.

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- Andrew Sullivan, Sept. 26, 2025

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