I’m not the only parent who feels increasingly anxious about their children’s media diet. For teenage boys in particular, entertainment often comes in the form of YouTube, which for any adult briefly glancing at the screen seems to feature an array of thumbnailed gawping imbeciles, besides an invitation to watch the latest work of creativity: ‘I took a bath full of Diet Coke and Mentos’ or ‘I cemented a microwave to my head’. In comparison to this, the mindless television I watched in the 1990s seems as narratively complex as Dostoevsky. Most of all, it’s notable that many children aren’t reading anymore, and it’s steadily become a topic of interest among fellow parents, then worry, and now panic. It’s impossible to ignore the fact that something quite bad is happening. Every catastrophe needs its Jeremiah, and for this we have Times columnist James Marriott, whose increasing anxiety about the decline of literacy was articulated in a hugely popular substack post last year. Having written extensively about how no one reads books anymore, he decided to turn the subject into a book, The New Dark Ages, published this week. I wouldn’t call the book ‘urgent’ because I usually take that to mean ‘worthy scolding by an ideological ally’; it’s entertaining, informative, often amusing and makes a coherent case in 50,000 or so words, which many of us can still manage. But the implications he lays out are disturbing, and influence everything around us. James and I have become friends over the past couple of years, drawn together by a mutual sense of despair, and he’s probably the only person in journalism even more pessimistic than I am. If you believe the media to be a circle-jerk of people helping their mates (which it is, obviously), bear that in mind, but reading his prose one gets a sense of how likeable as well as articulate he is, even if born in the wrong decade. His upbringing will seem as alien to those raised in the coming years as the world of Boethius would have...