"it's concerning if university students are genuinely struggling to read full adult-level books for class" and "don't overstate the reporting of a single news article" and "if this shift is genuinely real, it's reflective of broad curriculum changes in lower education levels, probably at least in part due to remote schooling during COVID, and doesn't mean the new generation is being willfully Stupid and Vapid" and "when reading for personal pleasure people should read whatever they like without shame" and "reading from a broad variety of genres, styles, and authorial backgrounds will improve your understanding of both literature and the real world" and "actively mocking people for their tastes in books does not encourage them to become more adventurous you're just being mean" and also "but seriously adult books are not just boringly pretentious nothingburgers padded with pointless sex scenes, and claiming they are just shows how little you've read" all can and should co-exist.
one of the teachers interviewed for that article said the reporter flat-out ignored anything the teacher said that contradicted the reporter's thesis
she said her kids DO actually read books all the way through, including classics like the Odyssey, and the reporter just cherry-picked her words to focus on the books the class reads as excerpts only
remember that the atlantic is the same paper that wrote the scaremongering article about how kids are transitioning too fast and too often even though they didn't even have any examples