tl;dr: James Marriott's new book *The New Dark Ages* argues that declining literacy—accelerated by television and then smartphones—is reversing Enlightenment-era gains in reasoning, empathy, and democratic discourse, citing data like Norway's cable TV rollout correlating with measurable IQ drops. Culture is becoming more repetitive and simplistic, politics dumber (contrast Truman's autodidact reading habits with Trump's inability to finish memos), and even highly educated people today read less than mid-century workers. The author's key concern: elites themselves have abandoned cultural elitism, leaving institutions run by people ignorant of history and the classics.