FEBRUARY 12, 2026
VOLUME 9, ISSUE 4
Growing Fear
Need a Read?
Girlhood: 2026 Edition
All Hands on Deck
One year into the Trump administration, San Mateo County leaders reflect on the threats of ICE here and nationally.
Check out this review of independent bookstores near you.
Student Standoff: The Driverless Dilemma
What it means to be a teenage girl amid today's cultural and political landscape?
Natalia Razo '28 and Jackson Hayward '26 examine the implications of Waymo on labor and safety.
Nueva's Sailing Club navigates headwinds— on and off the water—to attend its first regatta.
Culture // Page 6
Features // Page 12
Opinion // Page 15
Sports // Page 19
News // Page 5
Across the nation, teenagers are reading less than ever. What’s driving this decline, and how are students and teachers responding at Nueva?
Across the nation, teenagers are reading less than ever. What’s driving the decline, and how are students and teachers responding at Nueva? By: Alexis Choi & Neel Gupta
DESIGN : Anwen C. / The Nueva Current
For years, Yezen H. carried his Kindle everywhere. Whenever he had time to himself, he would eagerly jump into his latest read, letting the stories completely occupy his attention. That all changed when the pandemic hit, and school moved online. Confined to his computer for a large portion of the day, Yezen set the Kindle aside and began spending more of his free time playing video games instead. He didn’t fall out of love with books. Casual reading simply lost its place in his day, routinely overpowered in the constant competition for his attention. “Video games just deliver more dopamine to my brain,” he said. Books, by comparison, feel outgunned. “It’s just words on a page versus flashing colors and extreme audio with quicker dopamine spikes.” The role that reading played in Yezen's life had fundamentally changed. Shaped by a media landscape engineered to constantly divert attention elsewhere, books surrendered their status as his go-to leisure activity and became synonymous with school assignments and tedious effort. Yezen is not alone in his experience.
THE NUEVA SCHOOL
Nationwide, American teenagers are reading for pleasure less than ever before. According to September 2025 data from the American Time Use Survey, more than 80% of Americans now read for five minutes a day or less. Compared to 20 years ago, the share of Americans who report reading for pleasure on a given day has dropped by 39%, even as books have become more accessible through phones, e-readers, and audiobooks. In 1984, 31% of 17-year-olds reported reading for pleasure almost daily. Today, that number has dropped precipitously to 19%, according to the 2020 National Assessment of Educational Progress. Meanwhile, social media use has become a daily habit for more than 80% of teens. Given Nueva’s reputation as an academically rigorous private Bay Area high school whose curriculum emphasizes critical thinking and curiosity, its students might be expected to show stronger reading habits than the national average. In a recent survey conducted by The Nueva Current, 29.8% of the 189 respondents said they voluntarily read long-form texts daily outside of school. This figure places Nueva well above the current national
percentage of 19%, yet still below the level of the average American teenager four decades ago. For many Nueva students, pleasure reading has been slowly crowded out by increasingly full schedules: 68.4% of respondents reported being “too busy” in their day-to-day lives to read sustained text for fun. Even students who enjoy reading on their own time, such as Hannah F., say it’s become a precious rarity rather than a habit. “I used to read a lot as a child, to the point where my parents would say, ‘You can’t read anymore until you do your homework,’” she recalled. “My love for it [has stayed] the same, but the amount of time that I get to spend reading has decreased.” Eric W. pointed to a simple tradeoff: reading requires sustained concentration, while devices offer instant gratification. When students need to decompress, they naturally reach for the easier, more frictionless option. Ronit D. has felt this tension firsthand: “I have free time to read—I just don't use it to read,” he admitted. “It is a lot easier
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to enjoy something online than it is to enjoy a book.” Teachers have also observed the shift. Upper School English teacher Brianna Beehler begins each semester by asking students for one thing they read or watched over break; this year was the first time she’d gotten “TikTok” or “an Instagram Reel” as an answer. “A lot of teachers often ask, ‘What's your favorite book?’” said Hubert C. “And I just feel more and more people are becoming not just disassociated from that question, but it’s like, ‘Oh man, what have I read in the past year?’” Short-form content, especially Instagram Reels, has turned ingesting any type of information into a question about maximizing efficiency and reward. “The payoff is so much faster than sitting down and reading a 300-page book,” said Mars R. This kind of media consumption comes at a cost, however. Studies have shown that intense social media use is also linked to deleterious effects on attention: CONTINUED ON PAGE 10
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