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Hello in our time, listeners.

I'm Tristan from The Global Story, a new daily podcast from the BBC.

The latest season of In Our Time with Misha Glennie will be available from next week.

But in the meantime, here's an episode of our show that we think you'll enjoy.

We interviewed the writer James Marriott on what he's calling the death of reading.

James believes that we're now entering a post-literate age, and that could have huge consequences

for education, culture, and democracy itself.

It's a fascinating discussion that we hope you'll enjoy. If you do and want more,

you can listen to episodes of the global story every weekday wherever you get your BBC podcasts.

Cheerio. When was the last time you opened a book and you were able to really concentrate on it?

No interruptions for more than five or ten minutes. No scrolling on your phone between paragraphs. For many of us, that kind of

deep, immersive reading is being lost. There's this quote from the writer Neil Postman,

and he says, what George Orwell feared were those who would ban books.

What Aldous Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book

because there would be no one who wanted to read one.

We first came across this quote in a piece written by our guest today, James Marriott.

He's worried that Aldous Huxley might be right,

and he's written an essay on Substack that's gone viral about the dawn of a post-literate society,

which basically means what happens if people stop reading books altogether. This essay was so

gripping that we wanted to break away from our usual format to explore it.

From the BBC, I'm Asma Khalid in Washington, D.C.

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