People Around the World Are Talking Less
FamilyPeople Around the World Are Talking LessA recent study found that people spoke fewer words a day in 2019 than in 2005. Why?By Olga KhazanMatteo Giuseppe Pani / The AtlanticJuly 27, 2026, 7 AM ET ShareSave In Europe in the 1700s, coffeehouses were sources of coffee, but also conversation. For the study, the psychologists Valeria Pfeifer, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and Matthias Mehl, of the University of Arizona, analyzed data from thousands of participants in the United States, Mexico, Australia, and Europe.
- ▪FamilyPeople Around the World Are Talking LessA recent study found that people spoke fewer words a day in 2019 than in 2005.
- ▪Why?By Olga KhazanMatteo Giuseppe Pani / The AtlanticJuly 27, 2026, 7 AM ET ShareSave In Europe in the 1700s, coffeehouses were sources of coffee, but also conversation.
- ▪For the study, the psychologists Valeria Pfeifer, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, and Matthias Mehl, of the University of Arizona, analyzed data from thousands of participants in the United States, Mexico, Australia, and Europ
The Atlantic files mainly under culture. We currently carry 338 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | The Atlantic |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theatlantic.com/family/2026/07/talking-less-reasons/688074/?utm_source=feed |
| Publication time | 2026-07-27T07:00:00-04:00 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T11:01:16.454Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T11:01:16.454Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | SxY5yqogBtXw · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
FamilyPeople Around the World Are Talking LessA recent study found that people spoke fewer words a day in 2019 than in 2005. Why?By Olga KhazanMatteo Giuseppe Pani / The AtlanticJuly 27, 2026, 7 AM ET ShareSave In Europe in the 1700s, coffeehouses were sources of coffee, but also conversation. As the MIT psychologist Sherry Turkle points out in her 2016 book, Reclaiming Conversation, many people went to coffeehouses specifically to have rich, deep, sometimes even confrontational discussions: She quotes the British essayist and politician Joseph Addison, who wrote in 1714, “I have taken a particular Care never to be of the same Opinion with the Man I conversed with.”Contrast this with how, some 300 years later, I engage with my local coffeehouse, Starbucks.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at The Atlantic.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from The Atlantic
