Opinion The end of writing and reading will be the end of freedom
Why graduation season is so heartening to me. Yesterday at 6:00 a.m. ED. 6 min
By Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss is a novelist and a 2025 Guggenheim fellow.
For the past year I’ve lived away from my home in America, in Rome, among the achievements and the ruins of 3,000 years. It’s made me deeply aware of the long arc of history, which saw the rise and fall of almost everything: democracies and dictators, gods and humans, war and peace, that which was feared, and that which was loved and cherished. And though the countless crossroads people arrived at in history, arguing about which way to go, may have since faded into the indelible road chosen, I’m also acutely aware that we now stand at another. That the direction we choose will determine not only our children’s future, but the future of what it will mean to be human — and the conditions under which human life will unfold.
Whether the still relatively young values of liberalism will survive, whether reading and writing will continue to be the underpinnings of culture, whether the constructs and algorithms of AI will replace the freedoms of selfhood, whether we will dominate and destroy nature or salvage and protect it: We now stand before these questions. Stand and, I hope, pause. For in the stillness of that pause, the lessons of history sometimes speak to us.
