The Led Gazette, August 2026
News
Bookstore Updates
Opening
We opened our doors on July 18th. It took a lot of hard work from a lot of beautiful people to get to that point. But for anyone who has worked really hard to start something, you know that the beginning, the actual first day, can bring a renewed assault on your confidence. But on July 18th and 19th, you all made us believers all over again. Thank you so deeply for your support and for your willingness to be a part of this adventure.
Storytime
A big thank you to all the listening ears, big + small who gathered here with us on August 7th for our first Storytime.
Storytime: Fridays at 1030a in The Wood between the Worlds.
We’ll read to your kids, which is the best thing we can do for them.
First Fridays
We stayed open until 830p this past week on First Friday and had a ball. We will be open late on all First Fridays henceforth. Please go eat at Casa de Arte and then come see us after dinner (or vis versa). Chances are Soulside is probably doing something cool as well.
Big Table Availability
Our big table is available to book clubs and conversation groups during open hours, free of charge. Please email us to reserve it at office@oldsymposium.org
If you have a regularly meeting book club that meets outside of our regular hours, we may be able to accommodate. Either way, send us an email and we’ll figure it out.
If your book club would like us to stock your club’s next read so that folks can purchase it locally, please reach out via email on that as well!
Around the Symposium
From the Desk of the Resident Designer
The act of making place.
As vivid evidence of what is achievable through community, The Old Symposium is the tangible result of those willing to explore, challenge, and create together. The very community it sits within, the community encompassing you.
The creation of this space is the honest embodiment of collaboration and relationships, evidence of the beauty found when perspectives collide, combine, and in the most beautiful way are challenged.
The view from my desk is one that allows quiet observation. The observation that has only reaffirmed the truths I’ve known to be. It is in the observation, the silent moments, the pause before the action that I encourage in my practice.
The breath, the quiet exhale as one enters this space, is evidence of how, more broadly, I believe we all contribute.
Much like literature, this journey is uncovered not on the first page, or even the first chapter, but through the continual turning of each page. We do not encounter place as the same person each time. At times we return hurried; at times slow. Who we are in those moments guides how we interpret and contribute to the ever-evolving place.
The powerful, yet tempered, energy required to bring forth a new vision is a cadence of listening, responding and allowing.
It is the willingness to trust change, the trust we place in one another, that place is found.
Reagan Leslie, Resident Designer
Community Institute Progress
If you’ve checked out our web page or read some of our posts, you know that we are working to launch The Old Symposium Community Institute in the new year. We are planning three formats of programming: lectures (one off talks from special guests with Q&A), seminars (8-10 person discussions of selected topical readings, meeting once per week for 4-8 weeks), and reading groups (monthly meetings to discuss different books under a given theme, sometimes called, “book clubs”).
The purpose of the institute is to be a space for the love of learning, full stop. We’re going to read books and we’re going to talk about them. The institute’s focus is broadly on the humanities, literature and topics of contemporary or enduring social importance. If you are someone who loves learning, or wants to learn to love learning, we are eager to see you register for a seminar or reading group, or show up for a lecture when we announce our first cycle of programming for early 2027.
On the lecture front, we have received a commitment from a wonderful thinker, teacher and writer who will give our first lecture in February 2027. More details to come but we’ll say for now that prior to the great honor of speaking at Peoria’s Old Symposium Institute, our guest has given feature lectures at University of Notre Dame, Yale, Princeton, Harvard, and University of Chicago. We are very excited to share more soon.
On the seminar and reading group front, we have been meeting with several wonderful local minds who have expressed interest in leading seminars and facilitating reading groups. We plan to offer a few options in each format on different topics for our first cycle of programming in the Spring (February – May). More to come, more to come.
All institute programming will be made available to the public free of charge. There will be limited spots filled through an online registration process. We will release more news and details throughout the remainder of 2026 via The Led Gazette and online platforms.
Becoming a member of The Old Symposium is the best way to support the work of the institute.
Letter
In 2027 we look forward to launching our PRINT literary newsletter. It is in the spirit of the coming print gazette that we will periodically (in both senses of the term) include some longer form writing in our email newsletter, the first installment of which comes now.
Action for Thought: The Age of Reading is in our Hands
Philosophers like to debate about the active versus the contemplative life. Aristotle claimed that contemplation was the highest form of existence. Hannah Arendt defended the life of action in her book, The Human Condition. Byung-chul Han has recently made a renewed case for contemplation in his Vita Contemplativa. The debate is older and wider than I can describe. Personally, my head tends toward the contemplative, but my gut tends toward the active.
My head has been encouraged for a long time by something Theodor Adorno said about the life of thought (contemplation) and my gut has been haunted for as long by something Zadie Smith said about action. That courage and that haunting have done much to help shape the possibility of The Old Symposium. Here are the things they said.
"Resistance today should be sought in the drive toward theory [we could say contemplation/thinking]. For that something should be done is a belief held by everyone nowadays; what is found to be problematic is when someone decides not to do anything for once, but to retreat from the dominant realm of practical activity in order to think about something essential." – Theodor Adorno, Problems in Moral Philosophy
"As improbable as it often seems, it is possible to act. To lead. To use your imagination to build practical structures that will in some form improve the lives of the people who enter them. Paranoia about action – and the motivations for action – is the sickly indulgence of intellectuals and philosophers." – Zadie Smith, Intimations
With reference to these two seemingly conflicting statements, I’ve come to think of The Old Symposium as action for thought. It required and continues to require much building, creating, and collaborating. That is, it requires a departure from the characteristically contemplative life, the one stereotypically lived alone, in a small room, reading, writing, thinking, perhaps eating unleavened bread like Thoreau or fasting for visions of Christ like an anchoress. But at the same time, the purpose of this active endeavor called The Old Symposium is the defense and nourishment of the contemplative culture of reading and thinking. It is action for thought.
Though someone can come here, buy a book, and then go read it alone in their room or cabin or cell, there is a necessarily communal dimension to our efforts here. As a bookstore, that dimension is always at least minimally present. That is, you have to be here and talk to us in order to get a book. For the coming community institute, our work of defending and nourishing thought will be even more intensely collective. Via the lecture, seminar, and reading group, we will not just read and think but read and think and talk about it. Oddly enough, we believe the fate of reading hinges not simply on the practice of reading but even more importantly on the practice of talking together about reading.
The day before we opened (a bookstore, I remind you), we received the August issue of The Atlantic. The cover story was stamped in block letters:
THE AGE OF READING IS OVER
The irony was almost too blatant. After our opening weekend, my initial response was, “well, Rose Horowitch, nobody told Peoria the age of reading is over because we just had an awesome weekend of readers buying great books!” But assuming there might be more nuance to the story than the titular claim, I went ahead and read it.
The lost library of Alexandria is the organizing metaphor of the article. Once a glorious archive of textual knowledge, the library was lost not to fire and war as the more dramatic lore relates, but as most historians now agree, it was lost to neglect. The cultural forces that motivated and financed the tedious requirements of upkeep eroded which led to the eventual deterioration and decline of the library itself (and as the lore goes, helped precipitate the dark ages). Horowitch claims that we are in a similar situation today. The physical texts are not at risk, but our cognitive capacities for engaging with them are. Much of the article consists in a litany of statistical declines in time spent reading, the complexity of the content read, reading comprehension and reasoning skills in children and adults, etc. As cultural shifts created declining support for textual upkeep in Alexandria, today’s cultural shifts have created declines in the reading practices that act as the cognitive upkeep of our intellectual capacities.
There are various types of ‘cultural forces’ behind these declining practices that Horowtich references. Economic forces (e.g., the loss of well-paid journalistic and teaching jobs), media forces (rise of short form videos, dopamine cycle social media, endless playback television), and changes in the social status of reading (the fall of an intellectual elite that guarded the status of letters and the rise of a tech elite that brag about their lack of introspection and their education by chatbot) are all part of the conspiring winds. In this context, Horowitch claims that reading has changed from a society-wide practice to a subculture or hobby of a small portion of the population with diminished associated status (in the past, before the age of widespread literacy, reading was also a minority practice but linked to centers of cultural power). On the other side, Horowitch calls many Americans “proudly postliterate.”
Horowitch powerfully captures the decline of cultural forces that once structurally supported wide reading. She also volleys some powerful one-liners about the stakes. For example, what’s at risk in this decline of reading is “nothing less than the ability to think for oneself.” However, the resulting social bifurcation that she seems to leave us with (more or less a tech culture that mocks reading and virtue-signaling readers) is on the one hand too simplistic and on the other hand deflates the moral energy she builds up throughout the article by so exquisitely naming all that we are losing. The way Horowitch describes contemporary lovers of reading (which she herself is, or at least was), is a characteristic example of what Matthew Crawford has called our “moral squeamishness about being judgmental”, which, to capital, “smells like opportunity.” How so? Reducing reading to a hobbyist, sometimes performative, subculture absorbs a touch of ridicule into the image of the reader in order to eliminate the appearance of taking the moral high ground (which might look judgmental toward the nonreader). If I’m a silly reader, then I’m obviously not judging nonreaders for not reading. But this portrait of the ridiculous reader has a background effect. It lets the individuals and institutions cashing in on our intellectual decline (i.e., ‘capital’) off the hook (e.g., the more students who want to study philosophy, religion, and languages can be seen as silly hobbyists, the easier it is to cut whole humanities departments and free up cash for more pickleball, archways, and dormitory reno).
If we can’t imagine the remaining readers as any more than hobbyists, Horowitch’s whole critique loses the character of a genuine lament, which I think it is. There is a moral case to be made, but it requires considering the possibility that at least some of the people who continue to read might be true believers who are holding on to long and varied intellectual heritages, who think we might really be losing something and that it might really be worth fighting for. That moral case should not be made against non-readers. It should be made against the conditions of decline and for the possibility of community institutions that defend and nourish cultures of reading and thinking.
To imply that on the other side of the divide are the many Americans who are “proudly postliterate” is to inadequately consider the conditions that enable continued reading despite the broader context of decline. With the way digital media invades every aspect of our lives, Horowitch observes, “people have to be really determined to read. Most aren’t.” But why, then, are some people still determined to read? If we are losing our more universal modes of inculturation to reading, then those who are still determined to read likely find the source of their motivation in localized modes of inculturation. That is, we are still determined to read because we have some context in our lives in which it matters to do so. Most often, this means we have someone to talk to about reading. Whether it is a partner, friend, book club, teacher, the imagined audience of a journal or ghosts from our past, we tend to be in conversations and relationships that make reading matter. The divide of highest concern then is not the proudly postliterate versus a subculture of readers but rather those who have someone to talk to about reading and those who don’t.
If we don’t want to lose our cognitive capacity to engage with rich, meaningful texts, which Horowitch argues is tied to the very ability to think for oneself, and if we want to fight for wide access to the nourishment of these capacities, we need to create more spaces where we can talk about reading. Talking about reading, that is, being engaged in a community where reading matters, motivates the will to read. As wider cultural forces that motivate this will erode, we cannot expect there to be continued reading and thinking without action for thought. So, here at The Old Symposium we are taking action for thought, and we thank you for being a part of it. We believe reading, thinking, and being part of the long conversation of our wide and varied intellectual traditions is worth fighting for. Sometimes the fight for something collapses into the thing itself. We hope that The Old Symposium, which is indeed a fight for the culture of reading, can itself become that culture in a localized sense, alive and well.
Nick Mitchell, Administrative Assistant
Afterward: What’s a Led Gazette?
This is a one-time explanation. Henceforth, let it live in your hearts as old lore (which as the Resident Designer likes to say, is all there really is).
The name of the newsletter has a triple meaning.
1. Legend has it that the band name Led Zeppelin came originally from a joke that it would go down like a lead balloon (‘balloon’ eventually substituted with the edgier “Zeppelin” and the ‘a’ dropped from ‘lead’ so it wasn’t read as ‘leed’). In the world we live in, The Old Symposium is a doomed idea from the start. We embrace that reality. But sometimes, the doomed ideas are the ones worth trying.
2. Digital things are often branded as weightless and lofty (the cloud, meta, twitter, bluesky, etc.). The Led Gazette is a refusal of this kind of nomenclature. It’s a reminder that the digital world is heavy and anchored in heavy metals and human lives. There is no cloud without places like “the Grasberg mine in the Indonesian province of Papua, one of the world’s largest and most profitable…the excavated crater measures 12 square miles, and over 700,000 tons of tailings are dumped into local rivers every week. It employes 23,000 workers who earn less than $1.50 an hour” (from Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth).
3. At the heart of The Old Symposium is dialogue. It was built via a conversation with three people (trialogue?). Readers and texts are interlocutors. People come here to converse. Dialogue will be the central force of the institute. In this sense the name also gets its inspiration from a wonderful quote from Victor Goldschmidt in praise of the interlocutor who is full of lead:
“Despite what may have been said, Platonic thought bears no resemblance to a light-winged dove, who needs no effort to take off from earth to soar away into the pure spaces of utopia ... at every moment, the dove has to fight against the soul of the interlocutor, which is filled with lead. Each degree of elevation must be fought for and won” (from Pierre Hadot’s Philosophy as a Way of Life).
Thank you
1311 SW Adams St., Suite A
Peoria, IL 61602
oldsymposium.org
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