There's always something going on with men. They can't make friends; they're very lonely; they're 'losing' to women; they listen to Andrew Tate. And, we are told, they do not read. Over the past few years, multiple articles have observed the so-called decline of the male reader, whose tastes once made best sellers of swaggering authors including Philip Roth, John Updike, and David Foster Wallace, and whose disappearance from the contemporary literary scene is troubling. 'If you care about the health of our society'especially in the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster'the decline and fall of literary men should worry you,' David J. Morris wrote in The New York Times. The argument that society's problems can be traced to the fading prominence of Infinite Jest on dorm-room bookcases feels like a stretch; so does the underlying evidence. The source of such laments seems to be a widely circulated (but poorly sourced) factoid showing that...
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