It's Friday, October 3rd, 2025. I'm Albert Moller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.

We'll get to questions here pretty quickly. A couple of things I wanted to talk about, just as we begin the program today. One of them is a question asked by

the economist of London, and the question is, is the decline of reading making politics

dumber? Okay, I will simply say, it's pretty dumb to ask the question. Asking the question

makes you dumber. Certainly it is true that the decline of reading

is making politics dumber. It is also making every other dimension of life dumber. So most

articles in The Economists are not attributed by a reporter, columnist, or author. There's no name.

It is simply a report in the economist. And we are being told that it is becoming more and more a matter of observation

that politicians are reading less and their Senate structure is getting, well, it's becoming more

minimal. And the same thing is true, by the way, for authors. It turns out that just to give you one example when it comes

to numbers, the book Modern Painters by John Ruskin from the Victorian era, the first sentence

is 153 words long. More recently, you take them the Mel Robbins book, The Let Them Theory, and the first sentence is 19 words long.

So again, we've gone from 153 words to 19 words.

The bigger problem is people have gone from reading to not reading.

And this is pretty well documented.

And it certainly is showing up

in terms of, say, the political speeches that a candidate gives, almost no reference at all to

anything that would be called literature from any era whatsoever. We're now in a post-literature

age when it comes to America's civic discourse.

There are also those who are pointing out, however, that reading is a skill that has

trackable benefits.

So to put it another way, if you want to move higher up the socioeconomic ladder, if you

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