People Are Mad a Celebrity Admitted She’s Never Read a Book. Frankly, I Applaud It.

Fame Alix Earle Doesn’t Read. That’s Perfectly Fine. Everyone is mad that the last book she read, she claims, was by Dr. Seuss. By Enter your email to receive alerts for this author. Sign in or create an account to better manage your email preferences. Unsubscribe from email alerts Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Heather Schwedel? Oct 01, 20264:57 PM Photo illustration by Slate. Photo by Taylor Hill/Getty Images. Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily. I’ve spent the last day or so thinking about whether the world would be a better place if Alix Earle, the influencer who recently professed to have never read a book, was forced to suffer through a novel or a work of nonfiction. And the answer I’ve come up with is, an answer that feels pretty obvious, is: not really. So why are people so annoyed by Earle’s admission that, like most of the American populace, she doesn’t read? If Earle herself wasn’t attempting to ragebait when she dropped the crumb about not reading, certainly the rest of the media ecosystem knew it had the perfect morsel on its hands in her response, which came from an Interview magazine video and was promptly screenshotted and disseminated around the internet. “What’s the last book you read?” the magazine’s editor in chief, Mel Ottenberg, asked Earle. “I’ve never read a book. Like, maybe Dr. Seuss?” she replied. Could she have been joking? Earle is 25 years old and a graduate of the University of Miami, and presumably high school before that. She’s read books. Partly, the problem seems like one of the modern attention span: She also seems like someone who might have trouble naming the last TV show she watched, or movie she saw. But it also seems entirely plausible that she isn’t a big reader, and that she prefers the sort of content a lot of people her age like. She has never claimed to be an intellectual: She rose to fame making TikToks about getting ready to go out to party with her friends, and she recently starred in a Netflix reality show about her life and family. On the show, she comes off as a little naïve, particularly with regard to her feud with another blond Alex, Alex Cooper, the host of the Call Her Daddy podcast and Earle’s onetime employer. In contrast to Earle, Cooper comes across as someone who has read books, specifically business tomes like The Art of War and Girlboss. Reading, in other words, does not automatically make you a better person, and in some cases might make you a worse one. In proclaiming her non-reader status, Earle joins Hailey and Justin Bieber, who recently told WYouth (W magazine’s new teen offshoot) that their favorite books, respectively, are Angelina Ballerina and the Bible. I am not praising these stars for their refreshing, maybe even brave transparency in confessing that they don’t read. It’s more like, well, duh. Did Justin Bieber ever strike me as well-read, and the sort of person I might want to hear talk about books? Not once. When we read social media posts mocking celebrities for not reading, it allows us to temporarily feel superior to them, and absolve ourselves of the reality that we probably spend way more of our time reading tweets than we do reading books. It’s patronizing for Jenna Bush to suggest that Alix Earle read The Babysitter’s Club, as she did on Today With Jenna & Sheinelle this morning—while I do think Earle probably wouldn’t have to look too hard to find, say, some audiobook smut that she likes, what purpose would that really serve? Would it automatically be more enriching than all the ways she currently spends her time? Do people imagine her going on some sort of Poor Things–like journey of self-discovery and enlightenment? We don’t need Earle to fancy herself a literary tastemaker, start a romantasy book club, or worse, hire a ghost writer to pump out an inane novel she can put her name on. If you like reading books, you are free to continue to do so, but we all have free will, and if Earle chooses to use hers not to read books, that’s her business. While we’re celebrating illiteracy, let me invoke a book that I haven’t read and have no intention of ever reading, Let Them by Mel Robbins. If Earle doesn’t want to read books, I say, well, let her. Books Celebrities