I just read a great post informing me that sales for non-fiction books have fallen off a cliff. Of course, reading in general has swan-dived; I see it in the classroom, I hear about it on podcasts, etc etc. But within that trend, fiction is now selling more favorably than non-fiction, which reverses the historical norm.
The decades-long trend against reading has always put a pit in my stomach. So, initially, I was especially dismayed at the news that non-fiction sales have become such shit. I write non-fiction for a living, and I have to imagine that all of you who read this are also non-fiction readers, which means you might share my sense of dread about the state of (non-)reading.
But I thought about it as I went about my day, returning to the issue only as I sat down in the evening, belly full, kid asleep, dogs walked, glowing box displaying forgettable content in the background.
I’m not sure this non-fiction trend heralds anything new, or at least it’s not a distinct kind of problem threatening democracy.
One way of understanding the decline of non-fiction is as the shrinking market for specifically airport bookstore slop. I think back to how much crap I read from about 2000 to 2018—The World is Flat, Freakonomics, books uncritically explaining terrorism and the Iraq war… Millions of words that amounted to justifying the status quo. There were some gems, of course, but the ratio of bad to good was lopsided, and if it was on the New York Times bestseller list, it typically had the effect of numbing—rather than activating—my critical thinking capacities.
Why is reading a virtue? Because it thickens your humanity, activates your political consciousness, expands your awareness of what has been and what could be. How many best-sellers in 2025 do that? Do Tim Marshall and Robert Kaplan books about why geography is a primordial reason for us to slaughter our fellow humans plausibly do any of that? Do Malcolm Gladwell’s pop social-science texts?
Just as bad, most of what appears on non-fiction bestseller lists the past 20 years is celebrity slop anyway, which just happens to also appear at airport bookstores. What do we gain from leadership lessons by Matthew McConaughey or Gwyneth Paltrow? Are self-exculpating memoirs ghostwritten on behalf of failed politicians making us smarter or expanding or emotional reservoir? Increasingly, the big advances and the big marketing campaigns that generate big sales are, with precious few exceptions, limited to celebrities with big audiences and nothing to say.
That ain’t me or anyone I know.
For those of us doing the public intellectual thing without influencer-level fame, nothing much has changed. It’s always been hard to get the attention of an editor at a publishing house, and, in my lifetime, the advances on royalties have never been enough to live on, assuming you’re lucky enough to secure an advance.
But academic and indie publishing is still doing its thing. Some of the best books I’ve ever read were published in the last decade…you’d just never find them at an airport or on a bestseller list.
For sure, a society incapable of deep reading will struggle to defend itself against demagogues and despots. But that’s a decades-long problem in the making, accelerated by the AI investment bubble that could not froth without most of the people lamenting reading’s decline in The Atlantic thinking the bubble is a worthwhile risk in order to beat China in the AI race in their minds.
The non-fiction list has too much crap on it. Spending money to read what’s on it has become a class signifier for a rapidly shrinking class. After all, if you want to read crap, you can scroll Substack Notes for free.
Hey, friend! You might have noticed that I’m offering more of Un-Diplomatic without the paywall; I’m trying to keep as much as possible public. But to do that requires your help because Un-Diplomatic is entirely reader-supported. As we experiment with keeping our content paywall-free, please consider the less than $2 per week it takes to keep this critical analysis going.