“It’s changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,” Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. “Being bored has become unnatural.”
(The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books)[https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/11/the-elite-college-students-who-cant-read-books/679945/]
According to the article they have trouble sustaining discussion of a whole sonnet, too. One factor: many students now leave high school never having been assigned a whole book.