Alix Earle admitting she’s never read a book is crazy, not sexy — and universities are making it worse

It used to be embarrassing to admit you’re not well-read, but now it’s totally acceptable — if not chic.

In a Monday Instagram video for Interview Magazine, influencer and social media megastar Alix Earle was asked: “What’s the last book you read?”

“I’ve never read a book,” the 25-year-old said without embarrassment, curled up in a bathrobe in Milan. “Like, maybe Dr. Seuss.”

Apparently one of the most famous Gen Z women in the world — who boasts 8.7 million followers on TikTok and nearly 6 million on Instagram — thinks it’s cute to admit that she’s never read a book. That’s a terrible message being sent to the millions of girls who look up to her and follow her on social media, where she became famous with her “get ready with me” videos.

Earle, sadly, is not an outlier. She’s part of a larger generational trend. I’ve even heard from my own friends, in their 20s and early 30s, that they barely read, if at all. One recently told me she’d read two books in her entire adulthood.

But, it’s not just Gen Zers spending more time on their phones instead of the pages. People of all ages are turning their backs on sitting down with a good book.

In 2025, the American Time Use Survey analyzed 20 years of data from almost a quarter of a million people and found that the percentage of Americans who read for pleasure on a given day has nearly halved in recent decades, from 28% in 2004 to 16% in 2023.

Worse yet, while typical 15- to 19-year-olds spend 1.3 hours a day using the computer for fun, they spend just nine minutes on average reading for fun. In the UK, just 32% of children and teens say they enjoyed reading for pleasure — a 36% decline since 2005.

It’s not just that young people don’t want to read. Increasingly, they’re pretty bad at it. Only a third of American high school seniors got “proficient” level reading scores in the 2024 NAEP exams.

We have a crisis on our hands. A generation is growing up glued to their devices, sucking up easy-to-consume content. They’ve never experienced the serendipity of discovering an unexpected idea in a book or the satisfaction of finishing a difficult novel. Hell, they’re probably too TikTok-brained to get through one, even if they tried.

You’d think colleges and universities would be fighting against this trend, demanding kids keep their literary skills sharp. Instead, they’re capitulating to the decline in student interest in reading — as though it’s somehow optional. 

Professors at elite universities say that their students are shocked they need to read multiple books in a semester, according to reporting from the Atlantic. Some professors have even taken to trimming down the length of assignments or scrapping readings entirely.

Even at Columbia University, the required undergrad Literature Humanities course has been cut back. The school removed the 500-page tome, “Crime and Punishment,” from the reading list in 2024 in hopes that it will encourage students to actually engage with the roughly twenty remaining books students read over the course of the year. This is Columbia University, a school with a less than 5% acceptance rate.

A college professor I recently spoke to also told me that he’s taken to assigning educational videos instead of readings when possible, because students are more likely to actually watch them. How’s that for terrifying!

Thankfully, not all Gen Zers are smartphone-addicted illiterates.

Book clubs have become more and more popular; Eventbrite, an app many Gen Zers use to send invitations, reported that book club events were up 33% year-over-year.

BookTok, the book-oriented corner of TikTok, is exploding in popularity. As of April, there are more than 77 million posts on the #booktok hashtag, up 65% in just one year. Publishers Weekly even estimated that the app was responsible for 60 million book sales in 2023.

There’s also a number of girls wearing sweaters and tee shirts proclaiming that “reading is sexy.”

These trends are heartening, but we should all be distressed about our turn away from reading. An educated, literate populace is necessary for building a healthy society — and especially a healthy democracy.

Maybe Alix Earle could pick up a book and share that with her followers, rather than another makeup video or bikini picture.

If we let algorithms fill that empty space where reading once was, we risk heading down a scary path.