The August edition of New English Review has Theodore Dalrymple worried about the current cultural level of France specifically and the Western world more generally.

What most depressed me about the report was the evidence it provided of the diminution of reading as an important part of the cultural, indeed mental, life of young people in France. It is all the more depressing because, according to my observations which admittedly are of a casual rather than of a scientific nature, I think France is less far down the road of cultural disintegration, not to say degradation, than Britain. If things are as bad as this in France, what must they be like in Britain, or for that matter in the United States?