Reading Is Magic

The argument

Sam Kriss has republished an essay arguing that literacy does more than deliver facts — it shapes the way we think. The piece, originally in the spring issue of Jacobin and reposted on Kriss’s Substack, mines Alexander Luria’s 1931 fieldwork in the Alai foothills to dramatize the claim: when people learn to read, their minds reorganize in striking ways. It has been reported that Kriss received several thousand emails from readers asking for access to the Jacobin piece, and he used the post both to summarize the argument and to nudge readers toward a subscription.

The evidence

Luria’s tests are the heart of the drama. Given simple geometric figures, newly literate collective-farm students grouped shapes by category — circles with circles, squares with squares — while illiterate peasants described the same marks as moons, tents, or tools and grouped items based on practical relations: a saw with a log, not a hammer. Everyone with basic literacy could answer a syllogism; none of the wholly illiterate subjects would play along, insisting they couldn’t speak about places they’d never seen. It’s a crisp, unsettling vignette: learning to read didn’t just teach words. It retooled attention and abstraction.

So what now?

Kriss frames this as more than anthropology. He warns of a possible decline in literacy — a “second peasanthood,” where political life and public debate are impoverished because fewer people habitually think in the modes shaped by sustained reading. Sound alarmist? Maybe. But consider the broader context: short-form feeds, attention markets, and generative AI are already changing how we consume text. What do we lose when sentences get skimmed and thought grows shallow? That’s the hard question Kriss wants us to sit with.

Kriss’s essay reads like a provocation. It leans on historical evidence to make a contemporary political point, and whether you find it persuasive depends on how worried you are about the future of deep reading. Want to judge for yourself? Kriss includes links and subscription notes — not subtle, but then again, what’s an argument without a little persuasion?

Sources: samkriss.substack.com, Hacker News