The Atlantic is a magazine about the imminent loss of all that we hold dear. That’s a business model likely pitched to older readers, whose keener understanding of their own mortality can sometimes make them project it onto the world around them. The median age of an Atlantic reader, according to an August 2025 Pew survey, is 51, or eight years more than The New York Times, seven years more than The Washington Post, and four years more than The Wall Street Journal. The only print publication in Pew’s survey with an older median reader was Newsweek (57). The median age of readers of The New Republic, which was not included in Pew’s survey, is somewhere between 45 and 54, according to a sampling of roughly one-fifth of the total audience.
I don’t dispute that some things in life end, or that the United States right now has a very serious governance problem, or that the humanities are going through a pretty gruesome patch. Many aspects of life that I cherish are under siege. Independent coffee shops are disappearing, newsstands are repurposed to sell candy and snacks, and movie theaters are shuttering. On the other hand, an Oxford mathematician named Andrew Wiles finally cracked Fermat’s Last Theorem; deaths from heart disease are down 66 percent since 1970; the Democrats will likely win back the House in November; and Ann Patchett’s latest best-selling novel is a delight.
I mention this last because the latest Atlantic cover story announces “The Age of Reading Is Over,” and the story itself is headlined “The End of Reading Is Here.” Everything is always ending in the Atlantic. Did you know, for instance, that “The Golden Age of American Jews is Ending?” Neither did I. An otherwise strong March 2024 piece by Franklin Foer, about the troubling recent rise in anti-Semitism, went haywire in its final paragraph.
“The forces arrayed against Jews, on the right and the left, are far more powerful than they were 50 years ago,” Foer wrote. Okay, but that’s an unexceptional observation because antisemitism was negligible in 1974. The better point of comparison would be 70 years ago, which was right around the time my Jewish father spent a whole interview with a Madison Avenue personnel chief dodging the question, “What kind of a name is ‘Noah’?” Or maybe even 60 years ago, when it was still common to change your surname to sound less Jewish. Antisemitism is on the rise, and that’s worrying. But it’s nowhere near the level that pervaded the U.S. as late as 1964.
Foer went on to argue that antisemitic societies “are prone to decline” in other ways. “England entered a long dark age after expelling its Jews in 1290.” But excepting an epidemic of bubonic plague that crashed ashore 58 years later, I can’t fathom what Foer’s talking about. “Czarist Russia limped toward revolution after the pogroms of the 1880s.” That’s more plausible, because many of the revolutionaries were Jewish, including Leon Trotsky. “If America persists on its current course, it would be the end of the Golden Age not just for the Jews, but for the country that nurtured them.” Yes, it would be bad for the Jews. But we’re only 2.4 percent of the U.S. population, and America, sad to say, prospered through a much more fierce surge of antisemitism stretching from the Gilded Age through the Roaring Twenties. Can’t a recent increase in antisemitism be evaluated as its own specific problem?
Other things that the Atlantic has declared to be ending: “The End of Men” (July/August 2010); “The End of Diplomacy” (February 2026); The End of High-School English” (December 2022); “The End of Minimalism” (July/August 2020); “The End of Trust” (November 2021); “The End of Human Rights” (March 2026); “The End of Democracy Has Already Begun” (September 2024); “This is the Way A World Order Ends” (April 2025); “The End of Rule of Law in America” (May 2025); “How America Ends” (December 2019); “The End of the West” (November 2002); and, most hyperbolically of all, Francis Fukuyama flagging “More Proof That This Is Really the End of History” (October 2022). Only very occasionally does the thing that’s ending merit a “good riddance,” but in September 2025 the Atlantic did post a Hanna Rosin podcast under the heading, “Is This the End of Kids on Social Media?” Alas, it wasn’t, except on Facebook.
Sexual activity declines as people age (including, presumably, Atlantic readers), so it shouldn’t surprise us that the Atlantic repeatedly announces the end of sexual congress. “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” was a reasonable question to ask in December 2018, as the word “incel” was starting to acquire currency. But did we also need “The Bored Sex” (i.e., women, sexually) in February 2019, and “The Death of the Sex Scene” in February 2023, and “The Slow, Quiet Demise of American Romance” in December 2024, and “Sex Without Women” (about hetero male preference for porn) in March 2025? After all, Atlantic readers had already been fed “Dear Therapist: My Husband Doesn’t Want to Have Sex Anymore” in 2018 and “The Real Problem With Hookup Culture: Bad Sex” in 2013. What’s it going to take to get a little fucking going in the Atlantic?
I asked Google AI: “How often has the Atlantic announced the end of something?” The bot turned out to be even more fed up than I am:
The Atlantic has proclaimed “the end of” various cultural, political, and societal concepts hundreds of times over its long history. It is one of the magazine’s most famous and frequently deployed headline tropes, framing everything from macro-political shifts to tiny cultural trends as a grand finale.
The publication has a well-documented fondness for “apocalypse stories,” routinely declaring that an era, a habit, or an institution has officially reached its expiration date.
In fairness, neither of the sources Google AI cited supported this interpretation, and the one used to undergird the claim that the Atlantic fancies “apocalypse stories” was neither an apocalypse story nor an assertion that the Atlantic runs a lot of them. Rather, it was a characteristically excellent analytical essay by Adam Kirsch about the appeal of apocalypse stories, under a headline (“Apocalypse, Constantly”) that would serve just as well for the piece you’re reading now. So Google AI’s assessment framed the guilty. On the other hand, Google AI had no trouble finding “End of” Atlantic stories. It furnished many of the examples I’ve cited already. (For the record, in anticipation of glass-house accusations, I acknowledge that The New Republic also has used “The End of ...” in a handful of headlines over the years, but nowhere near as frequently as The Atlantic.)
I then asked Google AI: “Has the Atlantic ever announced the beginning of anything?” Yes, it replied. But then I looked at its examples. The first was “The Beginning of a New DOJ” from last October, about the wrecking ball the Trump administration is taking to rule of law at the Justice Department, so really that was about the end of responsible prosecutions. Strike one. The second was “The Beginning of the End of NATO” from last September. Strike two. The third was “Caitlin Clark Is Just the Beginning.” That was a genuine “beginning of” piece about the (hopeful) future for female college athletics. But Google AI had to admit that beginnings in the Atlantic tend to be endings in disguise:
The publication frequently uses the beginning-of-a-new-era narrative to document profound changes in society. For instance, their writers have pondered whether we are witnessing the beginning of a postliterate or post-reading age, or the beginning of entirely new, reality-altering conspiracy networks.
In other words, the Atlantic published pieces about the end of reading and the end of accurate perception of reality.
Please don’t mistake my criticism for an argument on behalf of chirpy good-news stories. Rather, it’s an argument against Doom Porn (for which I’ve criticized the Atlantic before) and overgeneralization. Part of the difficulty is that the Atlantic cut back on-scene reporting decades ago, I presume to save money, though money doesn’t appear to be in short supply lately. It’s harder to issue grand pronunciamenti, either optimistic or pessimistic, after you’ve interviewed a lot of people face to face. Even if you don’t circle the globe, though—I certainly don’t—you can report and write about bad stuff in a spirit not of defeat but defiance. While I was reporting early last year a comprehensive guide to resisting President Donald Trump, I felt in a near-panic that some other news organization—maybe even the Atlantic—would scoop me. I needn’t have worried. Neither did The New Republic have to fret about being scooped by the Atlantic (or many others) when it initiated a series of short profiles about people who were resisting Trump in promising ways.
This is not a piece about the Atlantic’s new End of Reading piece. I haven’t read it, and for all I know it’s superb. Certainly it’s a legitimate social problem that high school and even college teachers struggle to get young people to read books (especially those published before 1900). The protagonist of Patchett’s novel Whistler is a middle-aged woman named Daphne Fuller who teaches English at an exclusive all-girls private school in New York modeled on Spence or Chapin. Her students, Fuller tells her stepfather, who’s a longtime editor at Random House, still read books. “When they read David Copperfield,” she says, “they read the whole thing. They read The Return of the Native. The AP girls read Anna Karenina and Moby-Dick last semester. Moby-Dick!” This is the only part of Patchett’s narrative that required, from me, a willing suspension of disbelief.
I’ve valued some of the Atlantic’s End-ist pieces in the past (Foer’s anti-Semitism piece minus its Endism; Hanna Rosen’s “End of Men” piece, which was really about economic displacement; Kate Julian’s Young-People Sex piece, which persuasively identified the problem as a “sex recession”; recessions don’t last forever). But The Atlantic is addicted to framing these and other stories as the End Of something. You’d think that a magazine that’s been around for 169 years would possess a better sense of life’s continuities. What I’d like to see end is “End Of” pieces in the Atlantic as it sails into its next 169 years.
