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.

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