Over the last 24 hours, this account has welcomed a huge number of new followers — so we want to reiterate why the Athenaeum exists: 🚨 Elite university students are now incapable of reading a book. 🚨 Instead of fixing this, universities are simply reducing reading requirements to shorter and shorter excerpts. In fact, professors are now saying they're unable to teach history because reading long books and passages is how a person learns history — college kids are incapable of reading more than a few pages. Those managing this decline think that reading is merely a way of receiving information. It is not. Proper reading is a way to build the mental muscle to synthesize and evaluate ideas. This decline in literacy and attention affects not just the young, but all who interact with attention-sapping technologies. We must all fight to retain our mental faculties. This is really urgent. If the decline is not addressed now, we risk losing everything. Western civilization cannot survive the death of reading because it was built by people with the kind of cognitive depth that deep reading brings: Complex reasoning, extended internal dialogue, the capacity to hold opposing ideas in tension. Our systems and institutions are complex, and they require well-ordered minds to maintain them. Reading forms minds, and the West was built by the richest minds in history. We must continue to form new minds in this same model if we're going to keep it. So, we set up this book club simply to return to the Great Conversation of the West — to sit with Homer, Plato, Augustine, Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, and study the Great Books together. Every 4–6 weeks, we read a new classic from the canon and gather at regular intervals to discuss. It takes effort to read these texts well. We're doing so attentively, knowing that the Great Books, read properly, are a guide to a more beautiful life and mind. Please join our group. Anyone can tune into our live broadcasts, or take out a paid subscription to join the discussions directly and get all of our resources. As a member, you'll get: - Live book club discussions (biweekly) - Access to our incredible community chat - Essays to guide you through the Great Books - All past recordings, essays, and podcasts - Ability to vote on what we read next athenaeumbooks.com/welcome Welcome.