Event

Chris Hedges: The End of Literacy

Newspapers are folding across the country, but we can't get enough 140-character Twitter Tweets. Presidential debates and political rhetoric are delivered at a sixth-grade reading level. Serious film, theater, and books are pushed to the margins of society. It's as if we live in two Americas, says Pulitzer Prize-winner Chris Hedges: One, now the minority, functions in a print-based, literate world that can cope with complexity and separate illusion from truth. The other, the majority, is retreating from the scary reality-based world into one of false certainty and squalid celebrity pseudo-events. Hedges, author of Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle, visited professional wrestling bouts, the Adult Video News Awards, and Ivy League graduation ceremonies to expose the mechanisms used to divert us from confronting the economic, political, and moral collapse around us, and to chronicle the terrifying spiral of a dying culture. Presented by the Town Hall Center for Civic Life, with Elliott Bay Book Company.