Episode
The Book Club: James Marriott
- Podcast
- Best of the Spectator
- Published
- Sep 2, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2486
- Processing state
not_requested
Actions
POST https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/best-of-the-spectator-45373/episodes/the-book-club-james-marriott/transcription-requests
Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode.GET https://stenobird.com/podcast/best-of-the-spectator-45373/the-book-club-james-marriott.md
Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource.
Summary
In this week’s Book Club podcast, Sam Leith is joined by The Times columnist James Marriott, whose new book is The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-literate Society . Are we witnessing the end of the reading age? James explains why literacy has shaped not just our culture but the way we think – and why its decline could have profound consequences for politics, democracy and public life. They discuss how television, TikTok and short-form video have transformed our attention spans, whether AI will further erode the status of writing, and why the readers of the future may become a new cognitive elite. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.