Not quite 2,300 years ago, but more like 17 years ago, the story goes, the executives of Barnes &amp; Noble asked their engineers to build a device that could hold every book ever printed. The company, which had spent a century filling oak shelves one store at a time, envisioned a library small enough to slip into a coat pocket yet vast enough to safeguard the sum total of a reader&#8217;s collection. These files were stored on a bank of humming servers in New Jersey, a kind of reliquary modeled after the chain&#8217;s old flagship store on Fifth Avenue. A scanned first edition of &#8220;Moby-Dick&#8221; was said to be among the holdings.
Much of the Kindle reader panic has been done away with. But at one time, there was an outcry that the bookstore would die. That the sites of learning and information would soon be done away with. That public libraries would deteriorate, and children would ask their mothers on the street what these dilapidated, weather-worn buildings of old were. Maintaining the collection of books in your own library was an enormous expense, they said. Humidity, mice, and insects will slowly eat away at your books. Might as well just copy all your books onto an e-reader and burn all the rest of your paper books. Eventually, the challenges of running a bookstore became greater than the will to preserve it, and all bookstores and libraries on Earth disappeared.
Except that’s not what happened. Twenty years later, I am writing this in my own little personal library, with physical copies of books on my bookshelf and some lovely new independent and small bookstores in my area that I frequent – including some Barnes &amp; Noble stores as well — the very epicenter of the e-reader epidemic. This is what the last reading-is-dying panic looked like, and it was wrong too.
And so Rose Horowitch is standing on the street corner with a cardboard sign that reads: &#8220;<a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/2026/08/reading-crisis-postliterate-age/687618/">The End of Reading Is Here</a>.&#8221; Yet another reading-is-dying panic essay. And I can’t help but roll my eyes and walk by. Because the Atlantic is saying the end of reading is near, but I am seeing the exact opposite. It just takes some looking.
I run a number of book-related YouTube channels, so it’s possible I am just insulated and living in my own little world where I don’t see the light of day and don’t think there’s a problem with reading. I actually see it as flourishing. I see people wanting to talk about books more often than they did when I was growing up. I see more people interested in book clubs and book analysis than ever before because of the decline in reading. It’s just going to take a bit of time for the rest of the world to catch up.
I know this might sound strange, but as fewer and fewer people read, it will become increasingly important to read. This is human nature. And the one thing, besides wisdom and patience, that Horowitch lacks is the ability to understand: that it is precisely the human spirit to do things that are unpopular. This is why I got off Facebook during my Junior year. Because my mom joined it.
When dating apps became all the rage among millennials, Gen A went completely off them.
Vinyl has posted 19 straight years of growth and crossed $1 billion in U.S. revenue in 2025, in the middle of the streaming era, not despite a lag in it. Half of new vinyl buyers are 18-34.
Flip phones and &#8220;dumbphones&#8221; are having a real moment, too, among the exact generation that grew up with a smartphone in hand: brick-phone purchases among 18- 24-year-olds jumped 148% from 2021 to 2024, and #BringBackFlipPhones has 59.8 million views on TikTok.
Film and instant photography are back in a generation that has a professional camera in every pocket: Gen Z instant-camera use is up 45%, and 2024 was called &#8220;film&#8217;s best year in decades&#8221; by industry press.
The social platforms themselves aren&#8217;t immune. Horowitch writes that people don’t know how to read and are replacing books with social media and endless scrolling. But 52% of Gen Z tried to quit social media in 2025, versus 33% of the general population, with mental health cited as the top reason.
CNBC has dubbed the whole cluster (flip phones, vinyl, logging off) a &#8220;quiet revolution.&#8221;
And this is the thing with revolutions. They are invisible at first. The French Revolution didn’t begin with people yelling on street corners to join the movement. They didn’t publish articles in the papers. It was a growing dissatisfaction with the way things were and a pressing on to a better way for these people (not sure the guillotine was the better way, but I digress).
I have always found that when sensationalism exists, there are people on the sidelines just waiting. There are people biding their time and just reading in spite of the numbers. When the very same people who are addicted to scrolling social media finally get off the diet of junk food, they&#8217;ll need to replace it with something good. And the replacement will be the rise of books. Mark my words: in a few months to years, you will see new articles popping up about book clubs’ resurgence, the rise of the classics, and how Gen Z just cannot stop reading &#8220;The Count of Monte Cristo&#8221; or &#8220;Anna Karenina.&#8221;
Let&#8217;s not just sit back and romanticize the past and be Luddites. We praise the kinds of writers like Dumas and Dickens and Dostoevsky, but they were writing serialized content and were paid by the word. Yes, sentences are getting shorter, not because our attention spans are dropping, but because writers are getting better. This is the kind of crucible that will make writers crack their knuckles and learn how to capture an audience even better. Their writing will sharpen because their competition isn’t just other novels, but now it’s the world of social media.
Writing is still a relatively young form of storytelling. We have had thousands of years to master verbal storytelling, but writing is much different. The last few hundred years have been some of the only times when the mass audience has had access to write stories. And so we’re learning. And I don’t think I would commend anyone in a writing class to consistently write the long sentences of a Dickens. He is a brilliant storyteller, no doubt, and a brilliant writer, but some of his sentences are lackluster and just laborious. And he made it so because he wanted to get more money.
The same thing with Dumas. Although I am reading that now and I adore it, there are some things in there that just don’t need to be there and distract from the story. I am a purist and don’t love abridged versions of anything, but abridged versions are there for a reason: they’re likely better-written stories. This is kind of like &#8220;The Lord of the Rings&#8221; extended edition. I love it much more than the theatrical cut, but the theatrical cut is objectively a better-paced story and a much better film.
So maybe I&#8217;m not as insulated as I am worried. The work that I am doing and what I am seeing with the reading world counters the idea that Americans cannot swallow words and sentences – that they are losing the ability to think deeply about works of literature. The majority of my audience across my channels is under 35. And about 20% of them are between 13 and 24. And all I do on this channel is analyze literature and think deeply about books that I love, like The Lord of the Rings.
The older a child gets, the less likely they are to read. And this was true of me as well. I didn’t really read all that much until a passionate English teacher put &#8220;To Kill a Mockingbird&#8221; in my hands. And I fell in love with a good story. And then I read more and more because I found that while reading, I felt better. It was a break from everything else, and it felt like it nourished my mind. And that isn’t going away. As reading disappears, it will start becoming cool again, and you’ll see new generations start to read and consume books and become better writers and craft more brilliant stories.
Reading panics happen all the time.
And so let Rose Horowitch keep her sign up on the corner. The panic will run its course, the way it always does — the paperback, the television, the Nook, and now this. Because when the dust settles, and the feeds have moved on to whatever comes after doomscrolling, I already know where I&#8217;ll be: in my comfy chair, sipping tea, working through my half-destroyed copy of &#8220;The Return of the King&#8221; for the 17th time, enjoying one of the greatest stories ever told. The rest of the world will catch up soon.
***
Jonathan Minnema is the founder of First Timers (<a href="https://youtube.com/@firsttimereaders">https://youtube.com/@firsttimereaders</a>) and was previously the managing editor of Fathom Magazine.

Male student reading a book

The Age of Reading Isn’t Over

Doomscrolling

DW Opinion

Literature

Reading

This article is part of <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/introducing-upstream-a-lifestyle-and-culture-section-of-the-daily-wire" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Upstream,</a> The Daily Wire’s new home for culture and lifestyle. Real human insight and human stories — from our featured writers to you.
***
When Buckingham Palace announced that King Charles and Queen Camilla would visit the United States to mark the 250th anniversary of American independence, I knew I had to call Mark Helprin.
The bestselling author’s fifth novel, 2005’s “Freddy and Fredericka,” is a thinly veiled sendup of Charles and Princess Diana — who, in this case, must travel to America and recapture “the colonies” in order to be blessed by an immortal, magical falcon who selects the true kings of England.
If you’ve never read one of Helprin’s novels, that summary is a pretty good glimpse into the experience: discursive and funny with a healthy shake of magical realism.
“Freddy and Fredericka” is a darkly comic romp across the United States that finds our heroes falling in love with the country they were sent to recapture, urging Americans to “let everything in the nation flow through you” and to return to “your original principles … immaterial and bright, ever enduring.”
It’s been more than a decade since I first read “Freddy and Fredericka,” and I’ve returned again and again to this book, essentially “Democracy In America” in novel form. So I was excited to ask Helprin how much Tocqueville was on his mind while he wrote the novel.
“He wasn’t,” Helprin said, for one simple reason: He had never read Tocqueville.
He was, however, in the process of reading “Democracy in America” in French, along with &#8220;The Wealth of Nations,&#8221; another classic he’s never gotten to. Shakespeare and Dante are in heavy rotation, however, as is fiction until the Lost Generation. Nothing after Fitzgerald and Hemingway holds much interest for Helprin, which, he stresses, has everything to do with his personal taste and nothing to do with snobbery.
There’s nothing about Helprin’s oeuvre or demeanor that would suggest he is anything other than well-read. But if yielding at Dos Passos for some reason stirs up doubts about Helprin’s literacy, the thousands of volumes that line the shelves of Helprin&#8217;s Charlottesville home should put them to rest. I once heard that Helprin has every paper he’s ever written, going back to his undergraduate career at Harvard, if not high school.
I didn’t ask him about this because I didn’t want it to not be true. After our conversation, I’m certain it is.
Helprin is everything you want him to be. Smartly dressed in a light check blazer, occasionally self-effacing and always captivating, he’s like a character from one of his novels — the latest of which, <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Elegy-Blue-Novel-Mark-Helprin/dp/1419786083">“Elegy In Blue,”</a> hits shelves this week. All told, he’s written nine novels, three collections of short stories, and three children&#8217;s books illustrated by “Jumanji” author Chris Van Allsburg.
In addition, Helprin maintains a steady stream of political commentary, weighing in on everything from copyright law to foreign policy. Helprin’s fans, myself included, say he’s one of the greatest living American novelists. Helprin almost certainly wouldn’t say that about himself, which is likely why, despite a half-century in the public eye, he manages to fly somewhat under the radar.
Helprin’s relative anonymity is especially ironic considering his downright cinematic backstory. His mother was an actress in the Golden Age of Hollywood who left the Silver Screen to join the Group Theatre, a famous Method acting collective. His father, an American commando who worked for Winston Churchill during the Second World War, later became the head of London Films. It was there, in an office in Mayfair, that the first seeds for “Freddy and Fredericka” were planted by the king and queen themselves.
“Part of his job was, when the Queen and Prince Philip wanted to see a film, they would come in one Rolls Royce, no security or anything like that,” Helprin recalls. “He would greet them on the sidewalk and then escort them upstairs and into the screening room, where there was a buffet laid out with caviar and shrimp and everything, champagne, whatever.”
“And they would sit down, and then he would introduce the film, tell them about how it was made, what the subject was, whatever screen the film,” he continues. “And then afterwards, he would take questions from them, if they had any, and then escort them down to the street and see them off and say, thank you very much for coming.”
“They never thanked him, ever,” Helprin notes.
Helprin never forgot that. Not as he did his graduate work, which kept him at Harvard before taking him to Oxford; not during his time in the Israel Defense Forces, a tour of duty he embarked on after he was asked — and declined — to move to Cairo and serve as the Middle East editor for the New York Times.
Somewhere toward the end of his itinerant youth, he began a career as a writer. His first novel, “Refiner’s Fire,” was published in 1977. He achieved mainstream success with 1983’s “Winter’s Tale” and 1991’s “A Soldier Of The Great War.”
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<div id="attachment_1086299" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1086299" class="wp-image-1086299 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-50466632.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="655" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-50466632.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-50466632-300x192.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-50466632-900x576.jpg 900w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-50466632-768x491.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Photo by Mario Ruiz/Getty Images</div>
It was during a three-month book tour for the latter novel that the seeds planted by his family’s royal connection finally began to sprout. It was the &#8217;90s, and Charles and Di were all over the news. Seeing a man and a woman washing dishes at a restaurant kitchen one night, one of his daughters asked if the scullions were the duke and duchess.
Helprin saw an opportunity for “misapprehension,” which he calls “the funniest part of all humor.”
“If you think about the royals in Britain, they have so much opportunity for that because they live in a completely different world,” Helprin says. “But there&#8217;s even greater opportunity if they&#8217;re here amongst the colonials incognito.”
“Freddy and Fredericka” was a success in the United States. It was not published in Britain, where audiences were less receptive to Helprin’s take on the monarchy. Helprin has no regrets.
“I mocked the royals because they&#8217;re mockable,” he says. “They&#8217;re insanely mockable. They&#8217;re freaks, right? And they live in a freakish world.”
But Helprin appreciates that by separating their head of state and the head of government, the British monarchy “allows a really stable, decent government.” That attitude didn’t fly with “the loony Left” across the pond.
At least one person in Great Britain received a copy, however.
“Just by chance, I was invited to dinner that Prince Charles was supposed to attend in Washington, D.C.,” Helprin recalls. “And I said, &#8216;Well, you know what I better do? I better send Freddy and Fredericka to the palace,’ because, you know, to give them advance warning you don&#8217;t want to sandbag people.”
“So I sent it to the palace,” he explains, “and then without any word whatsoever, I was just disinvited to the dinner.”
Had he met Charles, Helprin says, he would have “approached him as an American.”
“We don&#8217;t believe that people are born with privilege, that, in other words, that privilege is legitimate, that they&#8217;re entitled to it, and we see them eye to eye,” Helprin adds. “That&#8217;s what America is about, and that there&#8217;s a very, very powerful force behind that, our history, our power, our ethos and the founding, which was, I think, divinely inspired.”
“If I&#8217;m sitting across from the King of England,” Helprin says, “I don&#8217;t feel lesser in any way.”
It’s a line that could have been spoken by most of Helprin’s protagonists. The typical Helprin hero is a kind of Aristotelian great-souled man with a Brooklyn accent. Most of Helprin’s novels take place in and around New York City, where Helprin was born and lived the first five years of his life, and a city that still captivates him and feels like home, despite the oppressive scale of “way too tall” buildings and the scourge of bike messengers zipping around with food, &#8220;because everybody has to have instant gratification.”
Of all Helprin’s New York novels, “Winter’s Tale” stands alone. Set simultaneously at the turns of the 20th and 21st centuries, the novel has at least 100 characters, a lengthy subplot about rival 19th-century newspaper barons, a magical realist upstate New York town with its own magic language, and a flying white horse.
That barely scratches the surface of what “Winter’s Tale” is about, and I’m not sure I could accurately describe it if I tried. The book has stuck with me, almost haunted me, for years. Whenever I’ve read another of Helprin’s books, I hope to find within it the key to understanding it. I never have.
Helprin, it seems, is in the same boat.
“I can&#8217;t explain it, but it possessed me day and night,” he says. “I would spend days in the New York Historical Society … and I&#8217;d walk the streets, looking at things and getting very, very obsessed and emotional about it.”
“So in a sense, I&#8217;m not the one to explain it, because it seizes me as much as other people who report that it did the same to them,” Helprin adds. “I felt as if I was just a medium of something that was speaking through me.”
To the extent that the book is about one thing, Helprin says, it’s about justice. Divine justice.
“People say God works in mysterious ways. Well, they&#8217;re not necessarily mysterious,” he says — they just come “from the past.”
“Who said that everything has to be made right in the timeline that we can perceive? Maybe it&#8217;s different, maybe from the divine perspective, the timeline is infinitely long, and the balances are affected and affect justice over a long period of time, so that after an injustice, maybe 20 years later, there&#8217;s some sort of a compromise,” Helprin adds.
“If you look at the whole of humanity and the whole of the universe as being one construct, if you think that from the divine perspective, that&#8217;s what it is, because you see from very far away, and it&#8217;s as one thing actually, without time.”
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<div id="attachment_1086301" style="width: 1034px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1086301" class="wp-image-1086301 size-full" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-502546985.jpg" alt="" width="1024" height="763" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-502546985.jpg 1024w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-502546985-300x224.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-502546985-773x576.jpg 773w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/04/GettyImages-502546985-768x572.jpg 768w" sizes=" (max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px" />Photo by John Mahler/Toronto Star via Getty Images</div>
We mortals, of course, cannot see as God sees. But this is what Helprin aims to do in his novels. More than that, it’s how he sees the world, day in and day out.
“If you ask my wife, she would tell you, it&#8217;s very difficult to be married to me,” he says. “Very, very difficult.”
To stay grounded while thinking these lofty thoughts, Helprin works. He has been an agricultural worker, a surveyor, a dishwasher, and a stevedore.
“I spend so much time working, doing hard, physical, exhausting labor, that while I&#8217;m doing that often I think of things and think of what I&#8217;m going to do about the book, and when I get the chance to actually write the book, I’m so grateful for it because it&#8217;s different from, you know, spending hours on a tractor in the hot sun or getting rid of trees that fall,” he says. “So you come in from the heat and the dust and the dirt and the blood — if you work on a farm, you&#8217;re gonna have a lot of blood, and you&#8217;ll be lucky if you keep your fingers when you come in — then you have a refuge. And it&#8217;s a great privilege.”
“It&#8217;s almost like — to return to where we started — almost like being a royal,” he adds.
Helprin is on the cusp of turning 80, and while he says nothing to suggest that he wants to give up the punishing labor that’s driven so much of his life (and allowed him never to take a publisher’s advance), mortality is at least a little on his mind.
“Elegy In Blue,” he notes, “is probably not going to be my last book, as I&#8217;m working on another one. But, who knows, I may not be able to finish the other one. I might die before I do.”
Like his novels, Helprin feels neither outdated nor contemporary. He is a man out of time, a bridge between this century and the last who would likely feel equally at home in both. He speaks as he writes, and he lives like the characters he creates, a true American original.
But, unsurprisingly, the anti-monarchist with Tory sensibilities does miss the world he grew up in.
“I have to say, I do miss it, I really do,” he says. “When you&#8217;re going to be 80, then you&#8217;ll probably miss it, too. You know, that&#8217;s the way it is. And it&#8217;s okay.”

Untitled design – 2026-04-29T101512.647

He Turned The Royals Into A Joke. His Take On America Is Anything But.

America 250

Books

King Charles III

Novel

Royal Family

Special Reporting

Upstream

Second Lady Usha Vance just launched a new podcast aimed at children’s literacy, her office announced Monday.
The project, which is called “Storytime with the Second Lady,” will include Vance and special guests reading “good books out loud” and discussing why they love to read. 
&#8220;We will have someone come in—a &#8216;special reader,&#8217; we&#8217;re calling them—read a fun book, have a very short little conversation, and then invite children to pick up books on their own,” the <a href="https://x.com/SLOTUS/status/2038588810921996517">announcement</a> said. 
“It’s sort of just a little advertisement for reading,” Vance <a href="https://x.com/RapidResponse47/status/2038595454527484055">said</a> during an appearance on NBC News. When asked why this initiative was so important, the second lady mentioned the decline of literacy rates, calling the trend “worrisome.”
<iframe loading="lazy" title="Episode One: ‘The Tale of Peter Rabbit’ by Beatrix Potter, read by Second Lady Usha Vance" width="500" height="281" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/HlqxCvyjlP4?feature=oembed" frameborder="0" allow="accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture; web-share" referrerpolicy="strict-origin-when-cross-origin" allowfullscreen></iframe>
The first three episodes are already posted, featuring the books “Peter Rabbit” by Beatrix Potter, Disney’s “Cars” featuring Danica Patrick, and “Playground Lessons” written and read by Brent Poppen.
Vance has made children’s literacy a focus of her office. At the beginning of March, she celebrated National Reading Month by reading to young patients at Children’s National Hospital in Washington, D.C., as The Daily Wire previously <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/usha-vance-visits-children-at-hospital-for-national-reading-month">reported</a>.
“Childhood literacy is something that’s very important to me, both as a parent and as someone who grew up reading avidly,” Vance said at the time. “In particular, when children are spending a lot of time in the hospital it’s important that they have access to books, both as entertainment and to ensure they develop the essential literacy skills they will need for the rest of their lives. It’s an honor to spend time with these children and to encourage them to keep reading after they complete their stay here at the hospital.”
Earlier this year, the Vance family announced the happy news that they were expecting their fourth child together. The vice president, 41, and his wife, 40, have been married since 2014. 
With the birth of their new son expected in July, the couple will have joined a small club of presidents and vice presidents to have had a child while in office.
Episodes of “Storytime with the Second Lady” are available on YouTube and Spotify.

Usha Vance

Usha Vance Offers American Parents A Fix As Kids Drift From Books

Literacy

Podcast

For now, Facebook is still technically called Meta. But the “metaverse,” Mark Zuckerberg’s ambitious virtual reality project, is in shambles. Tech outlets <a href="https://www.engadget.com/ar-vr/meta-isnt-shutting-down-its-vr-metaverse-after-all-165520696.html">reported</a> last week that the company would be sunsetting Horizon Worlds, its VR social media platform. Then CTO Andrew Bosworth clarified that Horizon Worlds would remain operational, even if users could expect little in the way of updates or new content. The parallel reality that Zuckerberg invited his clientele to dream of will linger quietly on — like the mostly forgotten game &#8220;The Sims,&#8221; that nerds of a certain age sometimes spin up for old time’s sake, except with real people pretending to be virtual instead of the other way around. Meta’s rebrand was perhaps a bit premature.
But then, it wasn’t so much the “Meta” part that grated. It was the “Verse”: the all-encompassing and boundlessly presumptuous claim about how life would be from now on. Pretensions to metaversality were part of the enthusiasm for “Web 3,” a supposedly epochal transition from a world of siloed apps and websites to a paradise of digital interconnectivity. It was one of those tech projects that consists of a doomsday scenario presented unblinkingly as a sales pitch. In &#8220;Snow Crash,&#8221; a 1992 cyberpunk fantasia, the novelist Neal Stephenson gave the name “metaverse” to a digital world that his characters would escape into when socioeconomic conditions conspired to make their embodied lives unbearable.
Zuckerberg, striding confidently through a sea of early adopters wearing insectoid VR helmet-goggles for a photo op, didn’t seem to notice how viscerally unappealing the whole thing was. He comes across as totally deaf to these sorts of concerns, although maybe acting that way is part of his job. It also has to be said how profoundly the mood back then was affected by COVID-19, which spiked people’s screen time and created the impression that everything was getting ported to the cloud.
<div id="attachment_1063987" style="width: 874px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1063987" class="size-large wp-image-1063987" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-1236189437-864x576.jpg" alt="Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer of Facebook Inc., speaks in a virtual Horizon Home environment during the virtual Facebook Connect event, where the company announced its rebranding as Meta, in New York, U.S., on Thursday, Oct. 28, 2021. A major theme at the annual conference will be the company's ambitions for the so-called metaverse, a new digital space that it believes will supplant smartphone apps as the primary form of online interaction. Photographer: Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images" width="864" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-1236189437-864x576.jpg 864w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-1236189437-300x200.jpg 300w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-1236189437-768x512.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2026/03/GettyImages-1236189437.jpg 1024w" sizes=" (max-width: 864px) 100vw, 864px" />Michael Nagle/Bloomberg via Getty Images</div>
Lots of things were, but it was silly not to expect an imminent counter-revolution once people grew disgusted with the effects of too much scrolling. In the first round of mass layoffs that followed his pandemic hiring spree, Zuckerberg regretfully <a href="https://about.fb.com/news/2022/11/mark-zuckerberg-layoff-message-to-employees/">acknowledged</a> that he had seen the rush of users to the site and “predicted this would be a permanent acceleration.” Whoopsie. The four most foolhardy words in the English language are “if present trends continue.”
Present trends generally do not continue. In &#8220;<a href="https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/titles/shoshana-zuboff/the-age-of-surveillance-capitalism/9781478947271/?lens=publicaffairs">The Age of Surveillance Capitalism</a>,&#8221; the social psychologist Shoshanna Zuboff used the word “inevitabilism” to describe how technologists labor to make their designs seem inevitable “when they are actually meticulously calculated and lavishly funded means to self-dealing commercial ends.” What Zuboff called “the prediction imperative” puts tech companies in “the reality business,” where profit models depend on passing off corporate aspirations as unalterable, world-historical developments that must and will take place. Then the only question becomes whether you’ll get on board or, in the words of Ebenezer Scrooge from the 1951 adaptation of Dickens’s &#8220;A Christmas Carol,&#8221; “be crushed under with the weak and the infirm.” This is why product launches so often look and sound like something out of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of History, and why emissaries from the c-suite tend to talk like Thanos from &#8220;Avengers: Endgame&#8221;: &#8220;I.Am.Inevitable.&#8221;
What I want to propose is that inevitabilism is neither unique to tech nor especially modern. It’s just the standard advertising strategy for aspirants to global power. In 1817, anticipating the arrival in London of a colossal pharaonic statue from Egypt, Percy Shelley and Horace Smith embarked on a friendly competition to write a poem on the theme of monarchic pride. Shelley won with “Ozymandias,” a sonnet on the ruins of a dead king’s towering monument whose “vast and trunkless legs of stone” stand on a pedestal inscribed with the words “‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings. / Look on my works ye mighty, and despair!’ / Nothing beside remains. Round the decay / Of that Colossal Wreck, boundless and bare, / The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
The real Ozymandias was Ramesses II, god-king of Egypt’s mighty New Kingdom. The Greek version of his name, which Shelley used for his title, came from the royal epithet he adopted at his coronation: Usermaatre Setepenre. It means roughly “Strong Justice and Chosen one of Ra,” the Sun God. Shelley neither invented nor exaggerated Ozymandias’ claims to ultimate power. The statue’s inscription in the poem is a rough paraphrase of a real one quoted by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus: “King of Kings am I, Osymandias. If anyone would know how great I am and where I lie, let him surpass one of my works.”
Ozymandias, Nebuchadnezzar, Sennacherib, Ashurbanipal&#8230;they came and they went. It used to be standard practice for imperial monarchs to boast of their sacred, eternal, and universal dominion. The fiction is appealing because it offers things people crave: permanence, stability, order, and certainty about the future. It’s tragic because, as Shelley observed, none of these are things that even very good men can guarantee. The sands of time’s desert are littered with trunkless legs. Nothing beside remains.
Understand these things, and you understand the politics of the Old Testament. The constant refrain of the Hebrew Prophets was that people look for eternity in the wrong places. “Put not your trust in princes”: again and again, the Jews of ancient Israel were invited to observe the wreckage of dynasties whose total dominion was once depicted — plausibly, at the time — as inevitable.
As it winds down its VR program, Meta will be diverting its resources and attention toward Artificial Intelligence. AI technology has so far proven vastly more useful and workable than the metaverse. It seems unlikely that we’ll look back on it as a passing fancy. At the same time, the predictions about the world AI will make — its powers to transform the universe, or come to life, or usurp God — have all the flavor of inevitabilism.
The same people who went all-in on the metaverse have moved on with undiminished confidence to telling us that AI will change everything, everywhere, all at once, that the whole thing is a fait accompli, that it’s pointless to speak of exercising restraint. “Look on our works, ye mighty, and despair.” I submit that we will continue to fall for this routine, chasing like hamsters after the next forever, just as long as we expect a company or a king to secure the future of the universe. If we want eternity, we will have to look elsewhere.
* * *
Spencer A. Klavan is co-host, with his father Andrew Klavan, of the “Klavans on the Culture” podcast. He is associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books and author, most recently, of &#8220;Light of the Mind, Light of the World: Illuminating Science Through Faith.&#8221;
The views expressed in this piece are those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The Daily Wire.

Day Two of MWC Barcelona 2023

The Metaverse Was Never Inevitable

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It&#8217;s Christmas break, so it seems like an appropriate time <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/bss-251222-member-exclusive?elementPosition=3&amp;row=2&amp;rowHeadline=Latest+Episodes&amp;rowType=Horizontal+Show+Episodes+Carousel">to discuss</a> one of my favorite books: “The Screwtape Letters,” by C.S. Lewis.
The book is all at once a deep rumination on religion, a high comedy rooted in the hilarity of both humanity&#8217;s flaws and Satan&#8217;s foibles, a tragedy about the nature of death, and a tale of redemption and everlasting life.
It is a spectacularly good book.
When you read “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Screwtape-Letters-Deluxe-C-Lewis/dp/0063487764/?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_w=hmHqX&amp;content-id=amzn1.sym.048a6e3c-8d40-4302-8312-26c626af6738%3Aamzn1.symc.050ea944-f1cf-4610-b462-3b604f2f4082&amp;pf_rd_p=048a6e3c-8d40-4302-8312-26c626af6738&amp;pf_rd_r=KNCVRDB5MGRR1B4K95QR&amp;pd_rd_wg=iizDa&amp;pd_rd_r=4e52d04f-0a0b-4d38-95e4-749c6da85b95&amp;ref_=pd_hp_d_btf_ci_mcx_mr_ca_id_hp_d">The Screwtape Letters</a>,” there are a lot of truly funny moments. Lewis himself said, though, “Of all my books there was only one I did not take pleasure in writing,” calling it ‘dry and gritty going.’ &#8220;At the time, I was thinking of objections to the Christian life and decided to put them in the form ‘That’s what the devil would say.’ But making goods ‘bad’ and bads ‘good’ gets to be fatiguing.”
The book is wildly entertaining because he is obviously writing in the voice of one of Satan&#8217;s minions. In Christian theology, Satan has a will of his own, and he&#8217;s rebelling against God, which makes him a really fascinating character.
Lewis opens the book with a couple of epigraphs, one by Martin Luther: “The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield the texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn,” and one by Sir Thomas More: “The devil, the proud spirit, cannot endure to be mocked.”
The book is written from the perspective of Screwtape as letters to his nephew, Wormwood. Wormwood has been given the on-the-ground task of convincing a young man away from his incipient Christianity and Screwtape’s job to advise Wormwood on the best way to procure the young man&#8217;s soul.
This gives Lewis extraordinary leeway to stick and move with Satan, to make fun, to mock, to play with the entire idea. And what emerges is a great work of literature.
There are a bunch of large-scale arguments that Lewis makes in “The Screwtape Letters.” The first one is that Satan&#8217;s best weapon is the “real world.”
That is correct.
If you talk to secular people, they&#8217;ll always say that the spiritual world and God are unreal. The real world is the material world. But then, when you ask them about what&#8217;s important to them, they&#8217;ll talk about their feelings, which, of course, are inherently unreal in the same way the spiritual world is unreal.
This is a point that Lewis makes: the definition of “real” is capacious and changing on a regular basis among secularists. Lewis believes that man&#8217;s draw to the divine can be rooted in reason, and that reason actually guides you toward something beyond yourself. It guides you toward the transcendent.
That&#8217;s an idea that I heartily agree with. I believe that the notion of free will and free choice in the universe guides you toward the idea that there must be something beyond us, that there&#8217;s a logic to the universe that guides you to the question of questions: Who is the Chief Logician, who made the rules?
<div id="attachment_1018735" style="width: 391px" class="wp-caption aligncenter"><a href="https://www.amazon.com/Screwtape-Letters-Deluxe-C-Lewis/dp/0063487764/?_encoding=UTF8&amp;pd_rd_w=hmHqX&amp;content-id=amzn1.sym.048a6e3c-8d40-4302-8312-26c626af6738%3Aamzn1.symc.050ea944-f1cf-4610-b462-3b604f2f4082&amp;pf_rd_p=048a6e3c-8d40-4302-8312-26c626af6738&amp;pf_rd_r=KNCVRDB5MGRR1B4K95QR&amp;pd_rd_wg=iizDa&amp;pd_rd_r=4e52d04f-0a0b-4d38-95e4-749c6da85b95&amp;ref_=pd_hp_d_btf_ci_mcx_mr_ca_id_hp_d"><img loading="lazy" decoding="async" aria-describedby="caption-attachment-1018735" class="size-large wp-image-1018735" src="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/71NsTMMQuGL._SL1500_-381x576.jpg" alt="Credit: HarperOne" width="381" height="576" srcset="https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/71NsTMMQuGL._SL1500_-381x576.jpg 381w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/71NsTMMQuGL._SL1500_-199x300.jpg 199w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/71NsTMMQuGL._SL1500_-768x1160.jpg 768w, https://dw-wp-production.imgix.net/2025/12/71NsTMMQuGL._SL1500_.jpg 993w" sizes=" (max-width: 381px) 100vw, 381px" /></a>Credit: HarperOne</div>
Lewis makes the same point, and then he says that the job of the secular materialist is to get you to focus on the thing-in-itself.
Screwtape says,
<blockquote>Even if a particular train of thought can be twisted so as to end in our favour, you will find that you have been strengthening in your patient the fatal habit of attending to universal issues and withdrawing his attention from the stream of immediate sense experiences. Your business is to fix his attention on the stream. Teach him to call it real life. Don&#8217;t let him ask what he means by real.</blockquote>
Thus, keep the person focused on the immediate and the now. There&#8217;s nothing that&#8217;s done this more than the internet age, where our attention spans have been reduced to the next 15 seconds. Sitting and ruminating on life leads you to higher ideas, and if you can prevent people from doing that sort of stuff, you end up with a very materialistic society.
So what exactly does reality mean? According to Screwtape,
<blockquote>People ought to be taught that in all experiences which can make them happier or better, only the physical facts are real, while the spiritual elements are subjective and in all experiences which can discourage or corrupt them, the spiritual elements are the main reality, and to ignore them is to be an escapist.</blockquote>
The idea is that when you&#8217;re thinking about death, the only thing that is real is the death itself. You&#8217;re not supposed to look at the spiritual element of death. Or, if you do look at something that makes you very happy, you&#8217;re not supposed to look at the spiritual element of what makes you very happy. Instead, focus on the pure materialism of the thing. The goal is to enmesh mankind in the world.
Screwtape says,
<blockquote>How disastrous for us is the continual remembrance of death with which war enforces. One of our best weapons, contented worldliness, is rendered useless in wartime. Not even a human can believe that he is going to live forever.</blockquote>
The material world, then, is the chief ally of Screwtape because people desire not to think of God. God is a distraction. God has obligations. God has duties. 
Screwtape says,
<blockquote>Human beings hate every idea that suggests Him just as men in financial embarrassment hate the very sight of a passbook. (meaning a checkbook.)</blockquote>
The idea is that if you&#8217;re not thinking about duty, and then you&#8217;re forced to think about duty, you don&#8217;t like it very much.
The other thing that Screwtape tries to get you to focus on is the future — at all times. If you can focus on the future at all times, then people will be very neglectful of the present.
So says Screwtape,
<blockquote>It&#8217;s far better to make them live in the Future. &#8230; The Future is, of all things, the thing least like eternity. It is the most completely temporal part of time — for the Past is frozen and no longer flows and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we have given to all those schemes of thought like Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism or Communism, which fix men&#8217;s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence, nearly all vices are rooted in the future.</blockquote>
The idea is, if you&#8217;re thinking about the future, then you&#8217;re not thinking about the spiritual consequences of the things you do in the here and now. You&#8217;re thinking about the material consequences of the things that you do in the here and now, and that allows you to do bad things in the name of a “better future.”
Screwtape says the best thing you can do is convince people that their utopian thoughts are the things that are mandated by God. So on the one hand, you try to get people sunk in reality, and this drives them away from God.
On the other hand, Screwtape advises Wormwood that people should be led to examine their own emotions constantly; if you can be narcissistic, checking yourself all the time, you&#8217;re going to end up without God.
Lewis teaches that very often in life, we engage at the beginning of a task with great enthusiasm, and then the enthusiasm wears away. This happens all the time with a variety of tasks, and once that happens, that is when you encourage people to look into being morose, look into being depressed, to reject the spiritual aspect of their duty, to stop trying to take joy in the spiritual aspect of what they&#8217;re doing, and instead focus on the fact that it&#8217;s just sheer drudgery.
Screwtape says that the rule of thumb for seducing mankind away from God is to encourage people to be unselfconscious when considering sin — to be unabashed, unashamed, blasé about your sin, but to be self-conscious and awkward when you consider acts of faith.
This is modern society in a nutshell. The more you sin, the prouder you should be. You should engage in festivals celebrating your sin. When it comes to going to church, you should be shy: “I don&#8217;t want to be judgmental; I&#8217;ll make you feel ashamed. But when it comes to my sin, man, I will tell you about my sins all day long because we can all be comfortable; we can be the boys when we&#8217;re talking about our sins.”
Screwtape also points out that one easy way to hell is to get people to disregard the individual human beings in front of them in the name of Mankind, writ large. This, obviously, is the project of the Left, which is willing to completely run over its neighbors in order to pursue a &#8220;better world&#8221; for everybody else.
The book has wonderful pieces of advice, even for people who are not totally religious, about how to act better in your inner world, how to treat other people better, and how to have better relations with your spouse.
It&#8217;s a beautifully written book.
* * *
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One Of My Favorite Books: ‘The Screwtape Letters’

One Of My Favorite Books: 'The Screwtape Letters'

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Pulitzer-Prize-winning author and preeminent voice of American literature Cormac McCarthy died at 89 years old of natural causes on Tuesday at his home in Santa Fe, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/topic/new-mexico" target="_blank" rel="noopener">New Mexico</a>.
His son, John McCarthy, and publisher Penguin Random House, confirmed the passing of the iconic writer.
&#8220;Cormac McCarthy changed the course of literature,&#8221; Nihar Malaviya, the CEO of Penguin Random House, said in a statement to <a href="https://www.nbcnews.com/news/obituaries/cormac-mccarthy-pulitzer-winning-novelist-known-apocalyptic-westerns-d-rcna89128" target="_blank" rel="noopener">NBC News</a>.
&#8220;For sixty years, he demonstrated an unwavering dedication to his craft and to exploring the infinite possibilities and power of the written word,&#8221; Malaviya said. &#8220;Millions of readers around the world embraced his characters, his mythic themes, and the intimate emotional truths he laid bare on every page, in brilliant novels that will remain both timely and timeless, for generations to come.&#8221;
McCarthy was best known for &#8220;The Road&#8221; and &#8220;No Country for Old Men,” which would both eventually be adapted into award-winning films. The author published twelve novels during his lifetime, primarily focused on post-apocalyptic genres about Western civilization and violent tales about the American frontier.
Born Charles McCarthy Jr. on July 20, 1933, in Providence, Rhode Island, the author grew up in an Irish Catholic family with five siblings. At age 4, his family relocated to Knoxville, Tennessee, where his father worked as a lawyer.
&#8220;We were considered rich because all the people around us were living in one- or two-room shacks,&#8221; McCarthy <a href="https://www.usatoday.com/story/entertainment/books/2023/06/13/cormac-mccarthy-dies-author-of-the-road-pulitzer-winner/5663448002/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">told</a> The New York Times.
In the early 1950s, McCarthy briefly attended the University of Tennessee before serving in the U.S. Air Force for four years. He would later return to the university for another short stint before dropping out for good. During his time at the education institute, he published two short stories in the student literary magazine &#8220;The Phoenix.&#8221;
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When he began his writing career, McCarthy changed his first name to Cormac, which some reports indicate was a family nickname given to his father by his Irish aunts. Other reports say he changed the name to avoid confusion with ventriloquist Edgar Bergen&#8217;s dummy Charlie McCarthy or to honor the Irish chieftain Cormac MacCarthy, who constructed Blarney Castle.
In March 2007, McCarthy described the inspiration behind &#8220;The Road&#8221; during an interview with Oprah Winfrey for her book club. While taking a trip to El Paso, Texas, with his son, the author said he would watch the town from a window in the middle of the night while his child slept.
&#8220;There was nothing moving, but I could hear the trains going through and that very lonesome sound,&#8221; McCarthy said. &#8220;I just had this image of what this town might look like in 50 or 100 years. I just had this image of these fires up on the hill and everything being laid waste, and I thought a lot about my little boy.&#8221;
Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/the-10-sci-fi-books-everyone-needs-to-read" target="_blank" rel="noopener">placed</a> &#8220;The Road&#8221; in his top 10 science fiction novels.
&#8220;Nearly all science fiction is, in the end, a meditation on human nature,&#8221; Shapiro said. &#8220;Here, McCarthy meditates on the nature of parenthood, of life without hope, of carrying a flame where there is only darkness. The tale of a man trying to guide his son through a post-apocalyptic cannibalistic dystopia is essentially just the ancient tale of a man trying to guide his son through a dangerous world, leaving him with values to carry on.&#8221;
Following the critically-acclaimed and widespread success of “The Road,&#8221; McCarthy stayed silent for nearly 16 years until he published his last two novels, &#8220;Stella Maris&#8221; and &#8220;The Passenger.”
McCarthy, who was said to be a private man, was married and divorced three times and is survived by his two sons, Cullen McCarthy, and John Francis McCarthy.

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The following is a transcript excerpt from Dr. Jordan Peterson’s series, Logos &amp; Literacy. You can <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/legacy-literacy" target="_blank" rel="noopener">watch</a> the special on DailyWire+.
Episode time: 00:05
Jordan Peterson:
You might ask why I would be concerned with bringing the history of the Bible to a more popular audience. We inevitably and must see the world through the lens of a story. A story is a description of the implicit structure through which we view the world, prioritize our perceptions, and determine how to act. Now, because you can act in a very large variety of ways, that plethora of possibility has to be limited and focused: it has to come to a point, it has to have a destination, it has to have a moral, it has to have an ethic. What a story is, is a description of an ethic of potential and action prioritization. Peace is dependent upon us being brought together under the rubric of a single centralizing narrative, much of which is reflected in the metanarrative that the Biblical library constitutes. So I hope you enjoy this tour through the history of the world’s most significant book.
<h2>Chapter I: Museum of the Bible</h2>
I did not really know what to think to begin with. Being a northern Albertan cynic, I thought of the Museum of the Bible as kind of a backwoods fundamentalist enterprise in all likelihood, and that turned out to be unbelievably wrong. I did not really understand until I walked through the museum — or I did not understand as deeply as I might have — how key the Bible was to the spread of literacy around the world.
Brian Hyland (curator, Medieval manuscripts):
I am Brian Hyland. I am the associate curator of medieval manuscripts here at Museum of the Bible. What that means is, I get to work with manuscripts that were produced in Western Europe from about the year 800 up to the 1500s.
When we walk into the fourth floor of the history of the Bible, we see in front of us a mural, and this mural encapsulates the entire history of the text. On the far left, what you see is the Great Isaiah Scroll. It is one of the Dead Sea Scrolls, and it represents the original Hebrew texts. To its right, we have what we call the Bodner Psalms. The Bodner Psalms are actually a codex — so the idea of a modern, kind of hardcover book. And then to the right of that what you see is a medieval Psalter. This is the Rice Psalter; it is a 15th century Latin text. It represents the manuscript tradition. Immediately to its right, what we have is the Gutenberg Bible. We are going from manuscript to printing and the impact of the printing press. To the right of the Gutenberg, there is a leaf from the King James Bible. Printing kind of dominates the world down to the late 20th and early 21st centuries. Representing where we are today, at this moment, we have a cell phone. And on the cell phone, someone has a Bible app in Korean using the Hangul script.
Jordan Peterson:
Some of those online Biblical sites are extremely useful because you can go through the Biblical writings verse-by-verse with 50 translations simultaneously. It is so interesting to see the different interpretations of the translations because it fleshes out the connotations and the poetic allusions in the text — and cross-references as well.
Brian Hyland: 
And what this means is that the Bible is a text that reaches out, and it is still being interpreted today. 
Keith Getty (songwriter “In Christ Alone”):
If you look at the phone and the potential of the phone and you see all the languages, this is the first moment in history that the Bible has been available in almost every language and dialect. 
<h2>Chapter II: There Must Be Logos</h2>
Jordan Peterson:
I have read analyses of the story of Genesis, linking it to the Mesopotamian creation myth — the story of Marduk and Tiamat. Apparently, the word “Tiamat” is (what do they say?) etymologically cognate (I think that is the right phrase) with the Hebrew phrase, Tohu va-Vohu, and that is the chaos that God makes order out of at the beginning of time. And it looks like it is analogous symbolically with the idea that Marduk is contending with time at the force of chaos to bring about order and to reestablish it. I do not know if the Hebrew text was influenced by the Mesopotamian text or vice versa or if they both come out of an older historical tradition or if it is some combination of both.
Brian Hyland:
You have the Hebrews in a historical environment, and so you have ideas that are shared back and forth and common ways of looking at things. So, that idea of chaos, which you find also in so many creation stories from around the world, is that in the beginning there is this disordered state out of which comes the order. 
Keith Getty:
John 1 begins with, “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” God is before all time. If he is the creator of the world, he created beauty; beauty and truth are linked together. The post-modernists will tell us that beauty does not exist — that it only exists in whatever you can create for yourself in life. But we believe that all the evidence around us points to a world, to music, to human love, that all point to beauty, that point to a creator, God.
Brian Hyland:
In the Greek, it is “Én árchí ín ó lógos” — “In the beginning was the Word” — which Jerome had translated as in principio era verbum. Verbum just literally means “a word” where logos in Greek has so many broad intellectual contexts to it.
Vishal Mangalwadi (author, Christian philosopher):
If language is to make sense, logic is to make sense — beauty, music. There must be sense at the root of the universe. There must be logos — not just the spoken word, but also the unspoken word in the mind, which is the sense. In the beginning was reason; in the beginning was sense. Or, as the Old Testament said, “In the beginning was wisdom with God.” 
To hear the remaining seven chapters, <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/episode/legacy-literacy" target="_blank" rel="noopener">watch</a> Logos &amp; Literacy on DailyWire+.
<a href="https://www.jordanbpeterson.com/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Dr. Jordan B. Peterson</a> is a clinical psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto. From 1993 to 1998 he served as assistant and then associate professor of psychology at Harvard. He is the international bestselling author of Maps of Meaning, 12 Rules For Life, and Beyond Order. You can now <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/podcasts/the-jordan-b-peterson-podcast">listen</a> to or <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/watch/jordan-peterson">watch</a> his popular lectures on DailyWire+.

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Logos and Literacy: A Tour Through The History Of The World’s Most Significant Book

Logos and Literacy: A Tour Through The History Of The World's Most Significant Book

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Book publisher Puffin has announced a walkback of its woke rewrites of Roald Dahl&#8217;s classic children&#8217;s books after backlash.
Earlier <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/famed-childrens-author-roald-dahls-books-altered-in-massive-woke-effort" target="_blank" rel="noopener">this week</a>, the Roald Dahl Story Company, which manages the works of the British author, announced changes to his classic children&#8217;s stories, including “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda,” “James and the Giant Peach,” and “The BFG,&#8221; among others. But after a massive backlash from readers and commentators who enjoyed Dahl&#8217;s stories, <a href="https://www.penguin.co.uk/articles/company-article/puffin-announces-the-roald-dahl-classic-collection-to-keep-authors-classic-texts-in-print" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Puffin announced</a> it would release the original texts in addition to the woke updates.
“At Puffin we have proudly published Roald Dahl’s stories for more than forty years in partnership with the Roald Dahl Story Company,&#8221; said Francesca Dow, managing director of Puffin&#8217;s parent company Penguin Random House. &#8220;Their mischievous spirit and his unique storytelling genius have delighted the imaginations of readers across many generations. We’ve listened to the debate over the past week which has reaffirmed the extraordinary power of Roald Dahl’s books and the very real questions around how stories from another era can be kept relevant for each new generation.&#8221;
“As a children’s publisher, our role is to share the magic of stories with children with the greatest thought and care. Roald Dahl’s fantastic books are often the first stories young children will read independently, and taking care for the imaginations and fast-developing minds of young readers is both a privilege and a responsibility. We also recognise the importance of keeping Dahl’s classic texts in print. By making both Puffin and Penguin versions available, we are offering readers the choice to decide how they experience Roald Dahl’s magical, marvellous stories.”
A total of seventeen titles will be published, including: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, The BFG, Fantastic Mr Fox, James and the Giant Peach, The Witches, and others. The books will also include &#8220;archive material relevant to each of the stories,&#8221; the press release stated. They will be available later this year.
Earlier this week, Puffin announced that it had collaborated with the Roald Dahl Story Co., which manages the copyright and trademarks, to make hundreds of alterations in order not to offend anyone with Dahl’s original works. The Roald Dahl Story Co. admitted they had worked with Inclusive Minds, which monitors children’s literature for inclusion, diversity, and accessibility, The Washington Post reported. The <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/17/roald-dahl-books-rewritten-offensive-matilda-witches-twits/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">UK Telegraph</a> published a list of some of the hundreds of changes made by editors over the years. Lines have been altered, words and phrases have been removed altogether, and even added in some cases, in order to &#8220;ensure that it can continue to be enjoyed by all today.&#8221;
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The backlash to the woke rewrites was swift and fierce, and included none other than <a href="https://www.dailywire.com/news/queen-consort-camilla-supports-freedom-amid-roald-dahl-controversy-tells-writers-remain-true-to-your-calling" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Queen Consort Camilla</a>. Daily Wire editor emeritus Ben Shapiro summed up much of the reaction to the move on Tuesday. &#8220;Rewriting Roald Dahl to remove the nastiness and meanness removes half the charm of the books,&#8221; Shapiro <a href="https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/1628038974261321728?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1628038974261321728%7Ctwgr%5Ea31b0827e53ac4f11a7cece79ebdf89460af3720%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dailywire.com%2Fnews%2Fben-shapiro-reveals-how-to-beat-woke-censors-out-to-rewrite-classics" target="_blank" rel="noopener">tweeted</a>. &#8220;The whole point of the books is that the world is filled with nastiness and meanness, and children have to learn to navigate it in adventurous ways.&#8221;
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZeR4i3EvWfY" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Shapiro</a> and fellow Daily Wire hosts <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogOiF9zhmhw" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Matt Walsh</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4O1lg4ztn_w" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Brett Cooper</a> also commented on the news on their podcasts.

Willie Wonka Poster

Publisher Walks Back Woke Rewrites Of Roald Dahl’s Classic Stories, Will Release Original Text As Well

Publisher Walks Back Woke Rewrites Of Roald Dahl's Classic Stories, Will Release Original Text As Well

Roald Dahl

Wokeness

The publisher of Roald Dahl, the famed children’s author who wrote “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” “Matilda,” “James and the Giant Peach,” and “The BFG,” among other works, has collaborated with the Roald Dahl Story Co., which manages the works’ copyright and trademarks, to make hundreds of alterations in order not to offend anyone with Dahl’s original works.
The Roald Dahl Story Co. admitted they had worked with Inclusive Minds, which monitors children’s literature for inclusion, diversity, and accessibility, The Washington Post <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/2023/02/19/roald-dahl-books-revisions-salman-rushdie/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">reported</a>.
The <a href="https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/02/17/roald-dahl-books-rewritten-offensive-matilda-witches-twits/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">Telegraph</a> illuminated some of the changes made to Dahl’s books, and their report caused author Salman Rushdie, himself the subject of an Iranian death warrant for his work, to tweet, “Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed.”
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-width="500" data-dnt="true">
Roald Dahl was no angel but this is absurd censorship. Puffin Books and the Dahl estate should be ashamed. <a href="https://t.co/sdjMfBr7WW">https://t.co/sdjMfBr7WW</a>
&mdash; Salman Rushdie (@SalmanRushdie) <a href="https://twitter.com/SalmanRushdie/status/1627075835525210113?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">February 18, 2023</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
The Roald Dahl Story Co. argued that the changes were “small and carefully considered,” while insisting they wanted “to ensure that Roald Dahl’s wonderful stories and characters continue to be enjoyed by all children today.” Their statement added, “When publishing new print runs of books written years ago, it’s not unusual to review the language used alongside updating other details including a book’s cover and page layout.”
Some of the changes implemented by the publisher include the following:
In “The Twits”: “Have you ever seen a woman with an uglier face than that” became “Have you ever seen anyone with an uglier face than that.” “Oh do shut up, you old hag” became “Oh do shut up, you old crow.”
In “The Witches,” the following sentences were removed:
<ul>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">I do not wish to speak badly about women. Most women are lovely.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">“How horrid!” “Disgusting,” my grandmother said.</li>
<li style="font-weight: 400;">When an actress wears a wig, or if you or I were to wear a wig, we would be putting it on over our own hair, but a witch has to put it straight on to her naked scalp.</li>
</ul>
In “Matilda,” “mothers and fathers” became “parents.” “She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling,” became “She went to nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John Steinbeck.”
In “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” this sentence was entirely removed: “Mike Teavee himself had no less than eighteen toy pistols of various sizes hanging from belts around his body, and every now and again he would leap up into the air and fire off half a dozen rounds from one or another of these weapons.”
This sentence was also removed: “The Oompa-Loompas spent every moment of their days climbing through the treetops.”
In “The BFG,” the word “black” was consistently replaced by the word “dark” in sentences such as “It was something black,” “It was something tall and black,” and “Something very tall and very black and very thin.”

Famed Children’s Author Roald Dahl’s Books Altered In Massive Woke Effort

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