by Joe Miller
By the time most of you are reading this column, I’ll have finished up my fourth and (as of right now) last week hosting trivia at the Old Mountain Tavern. I’ve had a blast, and I’m grateful for everyone who has come out.
Several people have asked where I get my questions. The honest answer is that I mostly just ask questions that I already know the answers to.
I’ve always been pretty good at trivia. I made my high school quiz bowl team as a sophomore. Everyone else on the team was a senior. By my own senior year, I was our team’s captain. We got to go to Charleston and appear in televised competitions against other schools. We were doing pretty well until we ran into the then-largest school in the state.
I made our college quiz bowl team as a freshman, though I was far from a star there. Our best player went on to win several days on Jeopardy!
It was also during college that I discovered that my knack for trivia is based on a quirk of my brain chemistry. I’ve an unusually poor short-term memory. My brain has compensated by overdeveloping my long-term memory.
I forget a bunch of stuff. But the things I do manage to get into memory are pretty much there forever.
Last fall, for example, I had the smallest part in the Drama Workshop’s production of Breaking Legs. It took me several weeks to learn a handful of lines. But, a year later, I can still recite them all.
Good long-term memory is handy professionally, too. I’ve spent time as a philosopher, a journalist and an information architect. Each job rewards practitioners who can find novel connections between large and often disparate sets of information.
Being able to remember things across long time spans makes it easier to see connections.
But my poor short-term memory isn’t the sole reason for my better-than-average long-term memory. I got a big assist from my environment.
My parents taught me to read when I was very young, then encouraged me to do so regularly. My elementary and grade schools employed a self-directed curriculum. We had a series of booklets for each subject. We’d read, take quizzes every few pages, then take a test at the end of each booklet.
That style of education incentivizes reading speed and comprehension—catnip for a kid who already enjoyed reading.
The widespread ability to read deeply and comprehensively is the cornerstone of the modern world. The written word is like a pause button for language. We can freeze a piece of speech, examine it from every angle, unpack its nuances.
That unlocks a kind of thinking that simply isn’t possible in an illiterate society.
For example, Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica is one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. A single proof spans the first 362 pages of the book. The proof shows that 1+1=2.
Now that might seem like a silly thing to prove. But its implications are profound. It means that mathematics is grounded in logic. And that, in turn, means that the universe—which follows predictable mathematical rules —also follows the rules of logic.
That’s a cool thing to learn about the universe!
It’s also a thing that would be impossible to learn in an illiterate world.
This following is a screenshot of part of one page of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica.
Note that this is just the introduction. We haven’t even gotten to page one of the proof.
Imagine trying to speak that out loud. Now imagine doing it for 673 pages without forgetting anything.
It’s not just esoteric mathematical logic that relies on writing. You can’t manage logistics for Walmart without a spreadsheet. Good luck navigating an aircraft carrier without charts. That probably won’t be a problem, though, because you couldn’t build an aircraft carrier without blueprints.)
Protestant Christianity, science and mathematics, engineering and commerce are all built on literacy.
Alarmingly, American literacy rates are declining. The most recent results from the Nation’s Report Card (the largest and most comprehensive assessment of American students) shows that only 35% of U.S. 12th graders are proficient readers. The 2024 results show declining reading scores for 4th, 8th and 12th graders.
That’s not surprising given that adult literacy levels are also in decline.
The percentage of American adults who read at or below Level 1 increased by nine percentage points between 2017 and 2023.
James Marriott, culture critic for the UK’s The Times, openly worries that we are headed toward “post-literacy,” a world in which most people simply lose the ability to read complex texts.
Over the next few weeks, we’ll look at some of the evidence for (and against) Marriott’s claim and explore some of the reasons we might be seeing a slump in reading scores.
