Five For Friday, October 11, 2025: Atlantic Dirty, Doom Scrolling, Asheville, VT/NH, ICYMI

~ Laura

Busy week with work and family. We’re staying close to home this weekend to recover. This morning, it’s a quick Five for Friday. 

The Atlantic Dirty Story

In a viral substack article, Carrie M. Santo-Thomas writes that “the Atlantic did me dirty.” Over the summer, Santo-Thomas, a high school teacher, was interviewed by Rose Horowitch as part of an article about the book-adverse college students. She felt that Horowitch cherry picked quotes from their lengthy interviews, which did not reflect her true views on the subject. 

Full disclosure: I wrote regularly for the Atlantic between 2012 and 2020. That comes with a certain amount of baggage, which I shan’t discuss in a public forum. 

All magazine writers cherry-pick, in that they can’t publish every thought that an interviewee tells them. Often, a one-hour conversation will lead to one-sentence quote. Authors, who are constrained by practical issues like word counts, interview a dozen people for each article. Their job is to tell a compelling story by weaving together multiple viewpoints and positions, with the hope that their aging readers have a longer attention span the average college student. Santo-Thomas’s thoughts were just one of a mix of people.

But I wish I had heard more about Santo-Thomas in the Atlantic, because she’s entertainingly woke. She says that college professors might be upset that students won’t read Les Miserables, but that’s their problem.

…while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system, my colleagues and I have developed professional toolboxes with endless other ways to inspire our students to read about justice, compassion, and redemption.  

She’s given up teaching books by pompous men, because Gen Z and Gen Alpha “don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake.” She’s annoyed that Atlantic writers and college professors are imposing their expectations on the high school classroom. Kids aren’t reading the big books, but that’s just fine with her. Although she wishes that she could have said all that in the Atlantic, she will settle for Substack.

Read more at Apt. 11D, the newsletter

Published by Laura

22 thoughts on “Five For Friday, October 11, 2025: Atlantic Dirty, Doom Scrolling, Asheville, VT/NH, ICYMI”

  1. So, I’ll say that I place great value on the ability to read standard texts such as Les Miserables or Shakespeare. If I were looking for a high school for my children, I would avoid any school in which the teacher celebrated not teaching advanced texts to advanced students.

    Good to know that low expectations now includes honors students who go on to the best colleges.

    Cranberry

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    1. I admit that I’ve never read Les Miserables and didn’t even sit through the whole movie (Russell Crowe is not a singer). I liked Shakespeare in high school. It’s full of really bad jokes that the teacher did not want someone to draw everyone’s attention to.

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      1. Les Miserables seems to be a bit of hyperbole on the part of Santo-Thomas; it doesn’t seem to appear in the original article. It is a weird book to claim students don’t want to read, as any version would be in translation, rather than the original French.

        This article, referenced in the story, is interesting about the current state of affairs: https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/how-to-build-students-reading-stamina/2024/01

        Cranberry

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  2. I am a fan of John Warner, who writes for Inside Higher Ed and also has some substacks, including https://biblioracle.substack.com/ . He wrote on the Atlantic article here: https://biblioracle.substack.com/p/my-favorite-high-school-book . I didn’t really pay attention to his writing about the Atlantic article, other than not to be surprised that he described the article as “an example of a common genre at The Atlantic, essentially, “You Elites Are Screwing Things Up, Signed, We Elites.” 

    I was more interested in his central question, which was “what was your favorite book by the end of high school?”

    I spent more time than I should have in my busy, stressful, overtired week thinking about this question, and one thing I can assuredly say is that with the exception of Hamlet, I didn’t like any of the books I was assigned to read in high school (note: I hated MacBeth, Lear, and R&J). I can’t even remember most of them. I remember doing poorly on a quiz on Great Expectations, mainly because I couldn’t finish the book. Silas Marner? Red Badge of Courage? Sister Carrie? The Bell Jar? Catcher in the Rye? Those sound plausible. I don’t remember a word of them.

    My favorite books were not high school-assigned books. I devoured Bobbsey Twins and Nancy Drew as a child. I loved the Narnia series (Dawn Treader and Silver Chair are my favorites of those). I loved Madeline L’Engle, especially A Wrinkle in Time. I read all of Judy Blume, and all of Paula Danziger, Paul Zindel, Elizabeth Honness, some Betty Cavanna, some Katie Letcher Lyle. I started to read romance novels at my best friend’s house, but my mom started me on Regency romance and Georgette Heyer. I read all the Agatha Christie mysteries. I weirdly got into Leo Rosten’s Hyman Kaplan books.

    These are the books I loved and still remember. And I am a better reader today because of them. For pretty much all my life people have given me sh1t about my reading choices, as if my reading choices were going to make me stupid, but I am the one with the Ph.D. in English now.

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    1. (Me above, but I think you all knew that.)

      So, two summers ago I got it into my head that maybe I could do a summer project of reading all the Pulitzer Prize winners since the beginning, so I downloaded the list. I got as far as starting Michener’s Tales of the South Pacific, but then my mom died and I was distracted.

      I just went back to the list and counted how many Pulitzer winners I’ve read, and the # is kind of low. But interestingly, I am surprised how many I read as a high school student. I’m pretty sure I read Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, Thornton Wilder’s Bridge of San Luis Rey, Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth, and Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men in HS. (Don’t remember any of them.) I feel I must also have read Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea, and ooh, I also read Melville’s Billy Budd, which is nowhere as good as Benito Cereno or Bartleby the Scrivener. I read Gone With the Wind on my own in 6th grade. I didn’t read To Kill a Mockingbird until I was in my 40s.

      Anyway, I thought of that because of what Marianne said below about 40 (!) years of literature having been written since we were in HS (!!!) and wondered which of those Pulitzer-winning books might be good to teach to high schoolers.

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      1. Winners of the Pulitzer for fiction since 1980 include: A Confederacy of Dunces, The Color Purple, Lonesome Dove, Beloved, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, A Thousand Acres, The Shipping News, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Middlesex, The Brief Wondrous Lofe of Oscar Wao, All the Light We Cannot See, The Underground Railroad, The Nickel Boys, among many others that neither rang a bell nor struck a chord with me.

        Plenty of good stuff in there, and some of it’s been around long enough to be considered classic by now.

        Doug

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      2. Yes, I was taught The Color Purple in college (kind of life-changing, as reading that and Their Eyes Were Watching God made me turn my focus to African American literature). Of those you listed, I’ve read Oscar Wao and Beloved. I started Nickel Boys because I want to read it before watching the new film, which I’ve heard is very good. Weirdly, my husband, who rarely reads fiction, has read Underground Railroad, but I haven’t. I also loved The Goldfinch, another recent Pulitzer winner. Not sure it’s all that teachable, though.

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      3. Small update: I went to a wake/visiting hours last night for my friend’s father (58, stomach cancer, way too soon, it sucks) and I ended up speaking to one of the other attendees, who is a HS English teacher. So of course I asked her what she was teaching. She had just finished teaching Animal Farm, and she mentioned future plans to teach To Kill a Mockingbird, Monster (Walter Dean Myers), and Everything Everything (Nicola Yoon).

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  3. I liked Santos Thomas’ article and found it interesting that she has had success with the Odyssey in a new translation. I do think the hand wringing over students not wanting to read many of the classics supposes that we dutifully read them back in the 80s. I did but plenty of my peers used Cliff Notes. I just had more time because I was less social. (Sometimes I was too busy and faked it by listening in class and just reading the important parts.). There has also been 40 years of literature being created since I graduated. Why not use it? I’m not advocating for tossing Shakespeare in the trash as I think his work is a great language muscle builder but there’s room for newer works too. Is it better that students speak up about what they want to read rather than using Cliff Notes on the sly?

    I also liked how she addressed the need to explain that the study of literature involves something different from the instant gratification of the internet and helps her students to adjust to a more “nerdish”space. This is a brilliant move I think as it meets her students where they are and helps demystify non cyberspace type interactions.

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    1. Was it Emily Wilson’s Odyssey? Because that was terrific! Maria Dahvana Headley’s Beowulf was quite the thing, too.

      Doug

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      2. I enjoyed reading Emily Wilson’s Odyssey. I also listened to Claire Danes’ audio, which was just okay. In contrast, Audra Macdonald’s rendering of Wilson’s first book of the Iliad was *killer*.

        The high school book question is great. I often talk about this with my students when we read literature in my Women’s Studies or Religious Studies classes, having them indicate which books they read in high school in their entirety, whether on their own or in class. So, so many To Kill a Mockingbird (1960) and Of Mice and Men (1937). (Fun fact: I just looked up Of Mice and Men to get the date and a section called “Things to Know” popped up. The first heading: “Sad story or not.”)

        These are good books, but there are a lot of other good, serious, real books written in the last 60 years that high school students could read and might prefer. Maybe I’ll spend some time thinking about that rather than grading.

        I’ve never been assigned Les Miserables (despite being an English major) and don’t think I’ve read more than short excerpts. I agree that high school students should read some Shakespeare. But college professors should be able to make a case for why the classic novels they assign are holding up. Don Quixote: yes! Anna Karenina: yes! Don’t know about Les Mis.

        af

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      4. I definitely recommend buying Wilson’s Odyssey, and her Iliad, too! As in, I bounced off of four or five Iliads and then read hers in about three weeks. Totally gripping. Thanks for the pointer about the audio version — I finally found a sample, and it was as good as you said.

        I know TKaM seemed like it came from another time because the Civil Rights era changed so much, but it was about the same distance in time from ’80s high school as the early 2000s are from now. Thinking about newer classics sounds like much more fun than grading.

        https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2022/10/29/premature-evaluation-the-odyssey-translated-by-emily-wilson/

        https://www.thefrumiousconsortium.net/2023/12/31/the-iliad-translated-by-emily-wilson/

        Doug

        ps MH, BB ftw!

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  4. I have to say that I love you guys because you have opinions about Odyssey translations. Love you all.

    K. We had a busy week. Ian’s brain decided it was time to return to seizures, so we’ve been playing with meds and visiting the emergency room. It’s all good. Back to normal now.

    I’m overcommitted with volunteer stuff in my community and need to pull back. I’m also keeping my consultancy business going, while I’m simultaneously helping to build a new nonprofit for autism. I’m still making dinner for everyone, and helping Ian keep track of his life. There’s not enough hours in the day.

    I just wrote two newsletters and am nearly done with a third one. I’ll post them all here soon. But it’s 4:00 on Friday, which is official QUITTING TIME. Steve and I are going out for a drink downtown.

    I’ll be back here later tonight.

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  5. I know you and Steve are doing very well under such pressures. Best wishes for a speedy recovery for Ian!

    As for reading, ok, it’s swell that a bunch of eager readers might want to add or subtract books from the “must read” pile. BUT, that wasn’t the point. While one might hope that high school (honors!) students are reading independently outside of the classroom, it seems that isn’t the default choice. It seems ever more (honors!) students aren’t reading entire books, whether in class or outside of class. As an example, “One public-high-school teacher in Illinois told me that she used to structure her classes around books but now focuses on skills, such as how to make good decisions. In a unit about leadership, students read parts of Homer’s Odyssey and supplement it with music, articles, and TED Talks. (She assured me that her students read at least two full texts each semester.) An Advanced Placement English Literature teacher in Atlanta told me that the class used to read 14 books each year. Now they’re down to six or seven.“

    If I were a parent of one of those students, would I think that their education has been watered down? Yes, yes I would. I would feel that my children were being cheated of a real education. Something like this can also explain some of the shift away from public school classrooms.

    (As an aside, it would help if long-term commenters would sign their comments.)

    Cranberry

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  7. Ian’s back to normal, everyone. He sleeps for 12 hours every night with the new meds, but is otherwise okay during the day. Thanks for your concerns!

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    1. really sorry to hear about Ian’s seizures but glad to hear he is back to normal.

      My high school AP class read books very very slowly. We spent like a full month on Othello. I was shocked when I got to college and read a play for every class, or something. But we all did pretty well on the AP test, back when the AP test was hard.

      A while back I told my friend who teaches AP English that I would donate some money for new books. The process for getting a new book into the rotation is complicated, and requires buy-in from a lot of teachers, so it’s a slow process.

      af

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