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The enormous fireball from the “Apache” device used in Operation Redwing, which was detonated in 1956 on a barge in the crater left by a previous explosion on Enewetak Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. It doesn’t take a political genius — whose ranks seem to have grown lately, based on the sheer number of very confident post-election takes over the past week — to see that many, many Americans have voted to blow up the system. Donald Trump has, if nothing else, incarnated a belief that the way America was being run was fundamentally broken and needed to be overhauled from top to bottom.  That, more than any policy specifics around taxes or immigration or foreign policy, was my takeaway from November 5. A (bare) majority of Americans wants to take a wrecking ball to everything. But those feelings and the anger that feeds them runs deeper than just Trump voters. One bit of news that caught my attention this week was Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) asking her Instagram followers why some of her constituents cast ballots both for her and for Trump. What I see in these answers is that frustration with the system isn’t something that can be attributed just to one party or another, even if it is currently concentrated in the GOP. An avowed leftist like AOC and President-elect Trump are about as far apart as two American politicians can be, but large segments of their supporters are united by anger at the way things are and by a thirst for radical change of some sort.  I can understand their point. In the nearly 25 years that I’ve been a professional journalist, I’ve seen a catastrophic overreaction to 9/11 lead to a two-decade war on terror; thousands of dead American soldiers and hundreds of thousands of dead civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere; and a Middle East that remains chaotic. I’ve seen the 2008 Great Recession and the years of economic misery that followed.  I’ve seen the failure to prepare for a major pandemic that many people saw coming, and I’ve seen the failure to learn from it in a way that prepares us for the next one. I’ve seen political barriers harden to economic and technological progress that could meaningfully improve people’s lives. And I’ve seen very few people in power held accountable for those failures. Depending on where you fall on the political spectrum, you can undoubtedly add your own points to this list. I may believe, as I have written repeatedly, that the long run has seen human life improve immeasurably, and I retain confidence that better days ultimately lie before us. Yet I can still understand why voters on both the right and the left would look at the wreckage of the past 20 years and pull a lever for radical change, consequences be damned. Here’s the thing, however, about radical change. It is, as our more numerate readers might say, a “high-variance strategy,” meaning that the range of possible outcomes is far wider than what we might expect from more incremental, within-the-system change.  Perhaps we nail the jackpot and manage to hit upon the political choices that really can create something meaningfully better out of a broken system. But just as likely — perhaps more likely if you know anything about political revolutions in recent history — is that radical change will leave us worse off, and it will turn out that the system so many had come to despise was, in fact, our last line of defense against something much, much worse. The night is dark and full of terrors If you, like much of the electorate, think things couldn’t possibly get worse, I have some reading for you. Less than a week before the election, the pointy-heads at the RAND Corporation published a 237-page report on Global Catastrophic Risk Assessment. (I did not say it would be light reading.)  The report is a response to the 2022 Global Catastrophic Risk Management Act, which required the Secretary of Homeland Security and the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency to assess really big risks to human survival and develop and validate a strategy to safeguard the civilian population in the face of those risks. If the ultimate purpose of government is to keep us safe in a dangerous world, that law is meant to prompt the US government to anticipate and prepare for the most dangerous risks of all.The RAND report breaks down catastrophic risk into six main possibilities: asteroids and comet impacts; supervolcanoes; major pandemics (both natural and human-made); rapid and severe climate change; nuclear conflict; and, of course, artificial intelligence. (I’d call them the Sinister Six, but I suspect that might send Marvel’s trademark office calling.) What these six have in common, the report notes, is that they could “significantly harm or set back human civilization at the global scale … or even result in human extinction.” It’s important to pause for a moment on what that really means. We just finished an election in which a majority of Americans indicated that they were very unhappy with the way things are going. They’re mad about high prices, mad about immigration, mad about Joe Biden, or mad about Donald Trump.  Despite all the fury, however, these are fairly ordinary things to be mad about, ordinary political and economic problems to suffer through. Thinking about catastrophic risks helps put them in some perspective. A nuclear war — a possibility that is more likely now than it has been in decades — could kill hundreds of millions of people, and leave the planet so battered that the living would envy the dead.  We already know from Covid the damage a pandemic with a relatively low death rate could do; something more virulent, especially if it were engineered, could resemble something out of dystopian fiction — except the possibility is very real. The risk from out-of-control powerful artificial intelligence is almost entirely unknowable, but we would be fools to completely dismiss the dire warnings of those in the field. And with the exception of asteroids and comets — where actual, intelligent space policy has helped us better understand the threat and even begin to develop countermeasures — the RAND report judges that the threat of all of these risks is either static or increasing. (Supervolcanoes, the one risk that remains unchanged, is largely outside human prediction or control, but thankfully we know enough to judge that the probability is very, very low.) The system matters So why are the risks from nuclear conflict, major pandemics, extreme climate change, and artificial intelligence all increasing? Because of human decisions, otherwise known as policy. Will we act as though climate change is the catastrophic threat so many of us believe it to be and engineer our society and economy to mitigate and adapt to it? Will we reverse the collapse of global arms control treaties and edge back from the brink of nuclear conflict? Will we actually learn from Covid and empower the policies and unleash the science to stop the next pandemic, wherever it comes from? Will we do anything about AI — and can we?The answers aren’t easy, and no one political party or candidate has a monopoly on all the best ways to handle catastrophic risk. Reducing the risk of extreme climate change may mean getting serious about the consequences of what we eat and what we drive, in a way sure to anger Republicans — but it may also mean taking the brakes off rapid energy development and housing construction that have too often been defended by Democrats. Minimizing the danger of future pandemics may require defending the global health system, but it may also demand cutting the red tape that often strangles science.  Above all, it will demand dedication and professionalism in those we choose to lead us, here in a country where that’s still possible; men and women who have the skill and the understanding to know when caution is required and when action is inescapable. And from us, it will demand the wisdom to recognize what we need to be defended from. The system has failed us. But there are far worse things than the failure we’ve experienced. As we continue down a 21st century that is shaping up to be the most existentially dangerous one humanity has ever faced, we should temper the pull of radical change with an awareness of what can go wrong when we pull down all that we have built. 

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Donald Trump’s election victory evoked disappointment and distress for millions across the country. Many people fear for the future of reproductive justice, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, tariffs, labor unions, the environment, and much more. Some feel so hopeless about the future that they want to give up. Others are fired up and ready to get more involved in local issues or politics, but they may have no idea how or where to start.  Why I wrote this In August 2020, I moved to Washington, DC. Outside of my roommates, I didn’t know anyone there. I was feeling alone and anxious about the world, so I decided to search for local organizations and see what was around me. I ended up joining two local groups, and over the course of a couple years, I got pretty involved with community organizing. It was a lot of work, but it was also a big source of joy for me. I learned a lot about local issues and made lifelong connections. Today, I’m hearing a lot of valid concern about where our world is heading and what to do about it. I wanted to write something for those people and give them a framework I wish I’d had. I hope you find your community and that the work is as rewarding as it was for me.Have questions? Email me at samantha.delgado@voxmedia.com. All of those reactions are valid. But if people are serious about improving our flawed democracy, they must participate — and not just by voting. Voting is an important aspect of civic life, but presidential elections happen only once every four years. If we want to make a change beyond the ballot box and find meaning in these challenging times, we need to engage with the people around us. Look at the social movements of the past that created lasting impact, like the Civil Rights movement securing legislation to outlaw segregation and discrimination, or the labor movement establishing weekends and the 8-hour workday. Powering these campaigns were longstanding relationships between different people with different skills and roles, forged together into a collective by their shared values and a desire for a better world. They built communities that were able to create sustained public pressure for change outside of the presidential election cycle. Despite the need for real community networks, our country’s social fabric has been fraying. According to the US Surgeon General’s 2023 report on the “loneliness epidemic,” approximately half of US adults have reported feeling lonely. People are spending more time alone and less time with others. We’re more online than ever before, yet we feel more disconnected. We trust each other less. Belonging to a community provides the interpersonal support human beings naturally need to survive and thrive. But building a real social network doesn’t happen overnight. It requires consistently showing up, being willing to give and take, and managing uncomfortable disagreements. “There is no Amazon one-click for community,” says Katherine Goldstein, a writer who covers care and a fellow for the Better Life Lab at New America.  Creating community takes time. It demands discipline. But it’s not impossible — and there are many other people out there looking for the same connections and sense of purpose.  The civic, health, and practical benefits of community In 1970, American political scientist Robert Putnam was in Rome studying Italian politics when a unique research opportunity opened up. The Italian national government had relinquished some of its power and delegated a wide range of responsibilities to 20 new regional governments. These institutions were structured nearly identically, but each region had different economic, political, and cultural dynamics. For Putnam, this was a perfect situation to study what makes successful (and unsuccessful) democratic institutions. He found that the governments that were able to effectively operate internally, propose relevant policy, and implement legislation all shared a deeply embedded sense of trust and cooperation among their citizens. “Some regions of Italy, we discover, are blessed with vibrant networks and norms of civic engagement,” he wrote in his 1993 book about his research, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy, “while others were cursed with vertically structured politics, a social life of fragmentation and isolation, and a culture of distrust.”  Does the latter environment sound a little familiar?  When Putnam came back to the US years later, he noticed a trend that disturbed him: American social life seemed to be disappearing. Membership in groups and clubs was declining. Across unions, religious groups, sports leagues, and political groups, people were reporting less time spent participating and being in these spaces. Putnam wrote the influential book Bowling Alone, published in 2000, in which he claimed that the social structures these groups provided were key to our physical and civic health. A 2023 documentary called Join or Die

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President-elect Donald Trump takes the stage for his last rally of the election year at Van Andel Arena on November 5, 2024, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images The 2024 election has conclusively proven something that we really should have known since 2016: America’s gatekeepers have failed. The premise of “gatekeeping,” as a political enterprise, is that there is a mainstream consensus that can be enforced by institutions designed to protect it. It works not by outright violent repression, but by deplatforming and shunning certain ideas, people, movements, and the like. Gatekeeping, when successful, involves a collective of recognized authority figures declaring that something is out of bounds — and then that thing actually getting consigned to the fringes. No politician will engage with it, no talk show hosts will give it a respectful hearing, and only a tiny number of citizens will have heard of it. Think of how nearly everyone agreed, after 9/11, that conspiracy theorizing about the attack deserved scorn. Trump’s wins are proof that gatekeeping doesn’t really work anymore. Immediately after the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, there was a brief moment when leaders across the political spectrum agreed Trump was too dangerous to be allowed to remain in politics — and even tried to drive him out. In a January 8 email, Rupert Murdoch wrote that “Fox News [is] very busy pivoting … We want to make Trump a non person.”  Yet Murdoch failed, pivoting back to pro-Trump coverage almost immediately. Every other attempt to shun Trump into political nonexistence has met with similar failure. This isn’t just a Trump phenomenon.  His chief allies and messengers — like Elon Musk, Joe Rogan, and Steve Bannon — have all been shunned or blacklisted to varying degrees. X/Twitter suffered a post-Musk ad revenue collapse, liberal musicians pulled their music from Spotify to pressure the streaming giant to drop Rogan, and Bannon just spent four months in federal prison (for good reason). None of these tactics have durably eroded these figures’ influence. Nor is the failure of deplatforming even a famous person thing. I’ve written extensively and repeatedly about the influence of obscure radicals on the mainstream Republican Party — the way that, for example, Vice President-elect JD Vance has explicitly cited someone who openly wants to topple American democracy as a key influence in his thinking about the executive branch. I’m hardly the only one: There’s a whole cottage industry of journalism devoted to tracing the linkages between the true fringe — internet weirdos with names like Bronze Age Pervert — and the Republican mainstream.  Such links are no longer hidden, but out in the open. Yet, with a few exceptions, this kind of reporting doesn’t seem to have hurt, and it sometimes even helps the targets of the gatekeepers’ ire by raising their profiles. Again and again, we’ve seen the gatekeepers’ efforts to deplatform their enemies into oblivion fail. And I think it has a lot to do with a mistaken analysis of power — specifically, a failure to appreciate just how much people with devoted followings can get away with in the 21st-century political-media environment. Trumping the gatekeepers In the past, the American mainstream consensus was enforced through bipartisan political agreement and a cultural apparatus dominated by elite institutions: a shared set of norms in those environs helping to define the rules of the political game. If you broke those rules, either by (for example) insulting the troops or particular ethnic groups, you could risk electoral defeat or even being exiled from polite public life. Trump’s 2016 rise to power and 2024 political resurrection help us see why neither political nor cultural elites can enforce their old rules anymore. Anyone who heads one of the two major parties already has a baseline floor of about 46 to 47 percent of the electorate. The most important voters in deciding the general election are swing voters. In a highly polarized country with two very different parties, swing voters tend to be people who definitionally don’t have very strong partisan preferences, seeing both parties as potential options.  Candidates like Trump who enjoy unified support of a major party cannot truly be gatekept. They are definitionally part of the mainstream, and thus potentially electable thanks to the basic gravity of a two-party political system.  All of this raises the question: How is it that Trump, an extremist, managed to seize control of the Republican Party in the first place? For reasons I’ve documented extensively, including in my book The Reactionary Spirit, Trump managed to build a direct bond with a critical mass of GOP primary voters rooted in shared resentments and fears. These voters, like Trump and unlike Democratic partisans, were largely disdainful of any elite attempts to gatekeep him — either from the cultural mainstream or even the alternative elites of the Republican Party, which back in 2016 tried and failed to stop his initial rise in power. In other words, Trump short-circuited the gatekeeping capacity of both the Republican Party and mainstream media. After January 6, when some Republican elites tried again to break with Trump, they faced immense backlash from their base. Three days after his “non-person” email, Murdoch was walking things back — telling his son Lachlan that “we have to lead our viewers, which is not as easy as it might seem.” Fox’s viewers actually forced its CEO to reboard the Trump train. So it’s Trump’s personal support, his mass following, that gives him and aligned Republicans the power to resist gatekeepers.  The death of the old political-media order There’s something else too. Shifts in the media landscape have allowed his allies in the cultural space to survive and even thrive for similar reasons. In the past, it used to be hard enough to create a mass media enterprise that only a handful of people — the sorts who could operate television stations and mass newspaper distribution networks — could do it. Today, anyone can find fans on social media and work to monetize that following. Given direct access to a mass audience, unpopularity among cultural gatekeepers is far less of a concern than it used to be.  Joe Rogan has millions of dedicated fans; those fans like him much more than the people trying to make listeners feel bad for enjoying his show. Steve Bannon’s War Room show is super popular among the Trump faithful, and remains so despite (or perhaps because of) his stint in prison. Nick Fuentes’s weird and creepy fans don’t really care if the mainstream media calls them weird and creepy for stanning a Nazi incel. All enjoy a level of influence and power because of their ties to Republicans who are unwilling to be shamed for said connections. This fragmented landscape means there’s not enough cultural unification to ever really expel anyone from the discourse. When Fox News fired Tucker Carlson, many wondered why it took them so long: it was Fox that held the power, not its popular but increasingly difficult employee. Yet Carlson’s post-Fox trajectory — a successful turn to Twitter/X broadcasting that earned him a seat next to Trump at the Republican National Convention — reveals that even the Murdoch empire couldn’t cancel someone with Carlson’s devoted following. Even if someone doesn’t have the personal draw of a Carlson or a Rogan, there are institutions dedicated to serving ever more extreme audiences that might be willing to hire you. If you get “canceled” at a mainstream outlet, you can go to Fox. If you get kicked off Fox News, NewsMax and One America News Network are out there waiting. To be clear, there are benefits to the end of gatekeeping. By concentrating power in a smaller number of people and institutions, the old consensus encouraged groupthink, resulting in, for example, widespread cheerleading for the 2003 Iraq War. The era of gatekeeping was also meaningfully less democratic, in that it gave elites far more power than the people as a collective to set the terms of public debate. The creator economy, for all its faults, gives citizens the ability to financially empower voices they believe are unfairly cut out of public life.  Yet those faults are undoubtedly immense.  Donald Trump, a man who literally incited a riot on the Capitol and has openly vowed to attack democratic institutions in his second term, is president-elect largely — if not primarily — because he built a following that allowed him to short-circuit elite gatekeepers in both parties. And the gatekeepers, for all their flaws, adhered to basic standards of evidence and decency that simply can’t be enforced in our new political-media environment. Does anyone really think this country is better off now that someone like Fuentes has the juice to secure dinner with the once and future president? Regardless of how you normatively evaluate these trade-offs — ones that I think point to thorny conceptual problems for liberalism itself — we need to be clear on where we’re at empirically. And the fact is that Trump and aligned Republican extremists clearly can’t be criticized into defeat. Nor can Musk be shamed into managing X more responsibly or Rogan ignored into political oblivion.  Their opponents need a new tactic.

Photographs by Jeff BrownUntil a couple of years ago, Lucy Calkins was, to many American teachers and parents, a minor deity. Thousands of U.S. schools used her curriculum, called Units of Study, to teach children to read and write. Two decades ago, her guiding principles—that children learn best when they love reading, and that teachers should try to inspire that love—became a centerpiece of the curriculum in New York City’s public schools. Her approach spread through an institute she founded at Columbia University’s Teachers College, and traveled further still via teaching materials from her publisher. Many teachers don’t refer to Units of Study by name. They simply say they are “teaching Lucy.”But now, at the age of 72, Calkins faces the destruction of everything she has worked for. A 2020 report by a nonprofit described Units of Study as “beautifully crafted” but “unlikely to lead to literacy success for all of America’s public schoolchildren.” The criticism became impossible to ignore two years later, when the American Public Media podcast Sold a Story: How Teaching Kids to Read Went So Wrong accused Calkins of being one of the reasons so many American children struggle to read. (The National Assessment of Educational Progress—a test administered by the Department of Education—found in 2022 that roughly one-third of fourth and eighth graders are unable to read at the “basic” level for their age.)In Sold a Story, the reporter Emily Hanford argued that teachers had fallen for a single, unscientific idea—and that its persistence was holding back American literacy. The idea was that “beginning readers don’t have to sound out words.” That meant teachers were no longer encouraging early learners to use phonics to decode a new word—to say cuh-ah-tuh for “cat,” and so on. Instead, children were expected to figure out the word from the first letter, context clues, or nearby illustrations. But this “cueing” system was not working for large numbers of children, leaving them floundering and frustrated. The result was a reading crisis in America.The podcast said that “a company and four of its top authors” had sold this “wrong idea” to teachers and politicians. The company was the educational publisher Heinemann, and the authors included the New Zealander Marie Clay, the American duo Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, and Calkins. The podcast devoted an entire episode, “The Superstar,” to Calkins. In it, Hanford wondered if Calkins was wedded to a “romantic” notion of literacy, where children would fall in love with books and would then somehow, magically, learn to read. Calkins could not see that her system failed poorer children, Hanford argued, because she was “influenced by privilege”; she had written, for instance, that children might learn about the alphabet by picking out letters from their surroundings, such as “the monogram letters on their bath towels.”In Hanford’s view, it was no surprise if Calkins’s method worked fine for wealthier kids, many of whom arrive at school already starting to read. If they struggled, they could always turn to private tutors, who might give the phonics lessons that their schools were neglecting to provide. But kids without access to private tutors needed to be drilled in phonics, Hanford argued. She backed up her claims by referencing neurological research into how children learn to read—gesturing to a body of evidence known as “the science of reading.” That research demonstrated the importance of regular, explicit phonics instruction, she said, and ran contrary to how American reading teachers were being trained.Since the podcast aired, “teaching Lucy” has fallen out of fashion. Calkins’s critics say that her refusal to acknowledge the importance of phonics has tainted not just Units of Study—a reading and writing program that stretches up to eighth grade—but her entire educational philosophy, known as “balanced literacy.” Forty states and the District of Columbia have passed laws or implemented policies promoting the science of reading in the past decade, according to Education Week, and publishers are racing to adjust their offerings to embrace that philosophy.Somehow, the wider debate over how to teach reading has become a referendum on Calkins herself. In September 2023, Teachers College announced that it would dissolve the reading-and-writing-education center that she had founded there. Anti-Lucy sentiment has proliferated, particularly in the city that once championed her methods: Last year, David Banks, then the chancellor of New York City public schools, likened educators who used balanced literacy to lemmings: “We all march right off the side of the mountain,” he said. The New Yorker has described Calkins’s approach as “literacy by vibes,” and in an editorial, the New York Post described her initiative as “a disaster” that had been “imposed on generations of American children.” The headline declared that it had “Ruined Countless Lives.” When the celebrated Harvard cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker shared an article about Calkins on X, he bemoaned “the scandal of ed schools that promote reading quackery.” Queen Lucy has been dethroned.“I mean, I can say it—it was a little bit like 9/11,” Calkins told me when we spoke at her home this summer. On that day in 2001, she had been driving into New York City, and “literally, I was on the West Side Highway and I saw the plane crash into the tower. Your mind can’t even comprehend what’s happening.” Two decades later, the suggestion that she had harmed children’s learning felt like the same kind of gut punch.Calkins now concedes that some of the problems identified in Sold a Story were real. But she says that she had followed the research, and was trying to rectify issues even before the podcast debuted: She released her first dedicated phonics units in 2018, and later published a series of “decodable books”—simplified stories that students can easily sound out. Still, she has not managed to satisfy her critics, and on the third day we spent together, she admitted to feeling despondent. “What surprises me is that I feel as if I’ve done it all,” she told me. (Heinemann, Calkins’s publisher, has claimed that the Sold a Story podcast “radically oversimplifies and misrepresents complex literacy issues.”)The backlash against Calkins strikes some onlookers, even those who are not paid-up Lucy partisans, as unfair. “She wouldn’t have been my choice for the picture on the ‘wanted’ poster,” James Cunningham, a professor emeritus of literacy studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, told me. Indeed, over the course of several days spent with Calkins, and many more hours talking with people on all sides of this debate, I came to see her downfall as part of a larger story about the competing currents in American education and the universal desire for an easy, off-the-shelf solution to the country’s reading problems.The question now is whether Calkins is so much a part of the problem that she cannot be part of the solution. “I’m going to figure this out,” she remembered thinking. “And I’m going to clarify it or I’m going to write some more or speak or do something or, or—fix it.” But can she? Can anyone?On the last day of the school year in Oceanside, a well-to-do town on Long Island, everyone was just delighted to see Lucy Calkins. The young Yale-educated principal of Fulton Avenue School 8, Frank Zangari, greeted her warmly, and at the end of one lesson, a teacher asked for a selfie.The lessons I saw stressed the importance of self-expression and empathy with other viewpoints; a group of sixth graders told me about the books they had read that year, which explored being poor in India and growing up Black in 1960s America. In every class, I watched Calkins speak to children with a mixture of intense attention and straightforward challenge; she got down on the floor with a group learning about orcas and frogs and peppered them with questions about how animals breathe. “Could you talk a minute about the writer’s craft?” she asked the sixth graders studying poetry. “Be more specific. Give examples,” she told a fourth grader struggling to write a memoir.With her slim frame, brown bob, and no-nonsense affect, she reminded me of Nancy Pelosi. “I can’t retire; I don’t have any hobbies,” I overheard her saying to someone later.School 8 showed the strengths of Calkins’s approach—which is presumably why she had suggested we visit it together. But it also hinted at the downsides. For generations in American public education, there has been a push and pull between two broad camps—one in which teachers are encouraged to directly impart skills and information, and a more progressive one in which children are thought to learn best through firsthand experience. When it comes to reading, the latter approach dominates universities’ education programs and resonates with many teachers; helping children see themselves as readers and writers feels more emotionally satisfying than drilling them on diphthongs and trigraphs.This tension between the traditionalists and the progressives runs through decades of wrangling over standardized tests and through most of the major curricular controversies in recent memory. Longtime educators tick off the various flash points like Civil War battlefields: outcome-based education, No Child Left Behind, the Common Core. Every time, the pendulum went one way and then the other. “I started teaching elementary school in 1964,” says P. David Pearson, a former dean at the Berkeley School of Education, in California. “And then I went to grad school in, like, ’67, and there’s been a back-to-the-basics swing about every 10 years in the U.S., consistently.”The progressives’ primary insight is that lessons focused on repetitive instruction and simplified text extracts can be boring for students and teachers alike, and that many children respond more enthusiastically to discovering their own interests. “We’re talking about an approach that treats kids as competent, intellectual meaning makers, versus kids who just need to learn the code,” Maren Aukerman, a professor at the University of Calgary, told me. But opponents see that approach as nebulous and undirected.My time at School 8 was clearly intended to demonstrate that Units of Study is not hippie nonsense, but a rigorous curriculum that can succeed with the right teachers. “There’s no question in my mind that the philosophy works, but in order to implement it, it takes a lot of work,” Phyllis Harrington, the district superintendent, told me.School 8 is a happy school with great results. However, while the school uses Calkins’s writing units for all grades, it uses her reading units only from the third grade on. For first and second grades, the school uses Fundations, which is marketed as “a proven approach to Structured Literacy that is aligned with the science of reading.” In other words, it’s a phonics program.Calkins’s upbringing was financially comfortable but psychologically tough. Both of her parents were doctors, and her father eventually chaired the department of medicine at the University at Buffalo. Calkins’s mother was “the most important, wonderful person in my life, but really brutal,” she told me. If a bed wasn’t made, her mother ripped off the sheets. If a coat wasn’t hung up, her mother dropped it into the basement. When the young Lucy bit her fingernails, her mother tied dancing gloves onto her hands. When she scratched the mosquito bites on her legs, her mother made her wear thick pantyhose at the height of summer.The nine Calkins children raised sheep and chickens themselves. Her memories of childhood are of horseback riding in the cold, endless hand-me-downs, and little tolerance for bad behavior.That is why, Calkins told me, “nothing that Emily Hanford has said grates on me more than the damn monogrammed towels.” But she knows that the charge of being privileged and out of touch has stuck. Her friends had warned her about letting me into her home in Dobbs Ferry, a pretty suburb of New York, and I could see why. Her house is idyllic—at the end of a long private drive, shaded by old trees, with a grand piano in the hallway and a Maine-coon cat patrolling the wooden floors. Calkins has profited handsomely from textbook sales and training fees, and in the eyes of some people, that is suspicious. (“Money is the last thing I ever think about,” she told me.)She became interested in reading and writing because she babysat for the children of the literacy pioneer Donald Graves, whose philosophy can be summarized by one of his most widely cited phrases: “Children want to write.” Even at a young age, she believed in exhaustively prepared fun. “I would plan a bagful of things I would bring over there; I was the best babysitter you could ever have,” she said. “We would do crafts projects, and drama, you know, and I would keep the kids busy all day.”When Calkins was 14, Graves sent her to be a counselor at a summer camp in rural Maine. She remembers two kids in particular, Sophie and Charlie. Sophie was “so tough and surly, and a kind of overweight, insecure, tough kid,” but she opened up when Calkins took her horseback riding and then asked her to write about it. Charlie loved airplanes, and so she asked him to write about those. The experience cemented her lifelong belief that children should read and write as a form of self-expression.After graduating from Williams College in 1973, she enrolled in a program in Connecticut that trained teachers to work in disadvantaged districts. She read everything about teaching methods she could find, and traveled to England, where a progressive education revolution was in full swing.Calkins returned to America determined to spread this empowering philosophy. She earned a doctorate at NYU, and, in 1986, published a book called The Art of Teaching Writing. Later, she expanded her purview to reading instruction.At the time, the zeitgeist favored an approach known as “whole language.” This advocated independent reading of full books and suggested that children should identify words from context clues rather than arduously sounding them out. Progressives loved it, because it emphasized playfulness and agency. But in practice, whole language had obvious flaws: Some children do appear to pick up reading easily, but many benefit from focused, direct instruction.This approach influenced Calkins as she developed her teaching philosophy. “Lucy Calkins sides, in most particulars, with the proponents of ‘whole language,’ ” The New York Times reported in 1997. Her heavyweight 2001 book, The Art of Teaching Reading, has only a single chapter on phonics in primary grades; it does note, however, that “researchers emphasize how important it is for children to develop phonemic awareness in kindergarten.”The author Natalie Wexler has described Calkins’s resulting approach, balanced literacy, as an attempt to create a “peace treaty” in the reading wars: Phonics, yes, if you must, but also writing workshops and independent reading with commercial children’s books, rather than the stuffier grade-level decodable texts and approved extracts. (Defenders of the former method argue that using full books is more cost-efficient, because they can be bought cheaply and used by multiple students.) “If we make our children believe that reading has more to do with matching letters and sounds than with developing relationships with characters like Babar, Madeline, Charlotte, and Ramona,” Calkins wrote, “we do more harm than good.”Sentences like that are why critics saw balanced literacy as a branding exercise designed to rehabilitate old methods. “It was a strategic rebadging of whole language,” Pamela Snow, a cognitive-psychology professor at La Trobe University, in Australia, told me. Even many of Calkins’s defenders concede that she was too slow to embrace phonics as the evidence for its effectiveness grew. “I think she should have reacted earlier,” Pearson, the former Berkeley dean, told me, but he added: “Once she changed, they were still beating her for what she did eight years ago, not what she was doing last month.”For the first decades of her career, Calkins was an influential thinker among progressive educators, writing books for teachers. In 2003, though, Joel Klein, then the chancellor of the New York City public schools, suddenly mandated her workshop approach in virtually all of the city’s elementary schools, alongside a separate, much smaller, phonics program. An article in the Times suggested that some saw Klein as “an unwitting captive of the city’s liberal consensus,” but Klein brushed aside the criticisms of balanced literacy. “I don’t believe curriculums are the key to education,” he said. “I believe teachers are.” Now everybody in the city’s public schools would be “teaching Lucy.”As other districts followed New York’s lead, Units of Study became one of the most popular curricula in the United States. This led, inevitably, to backlash. A philosophy had become a product—an extremely popular and financially successful one. “Once upon a time there was a thoughtful educator who raised some interesting questions about how children were traditionally taught to read and write, and proposed some innovative changes,” the author Barbara Feinberg wrote in 2007. “But as she became famous, critical debate largely ceased: her word became law. Over time, some of her methods became dogmatic and extreme, yet her influence continued to grow.”You wouldn’t know it from listening to her fiercest detractors, but Calkins has, in fact, continuously updated Units of Study. Unlike Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, who have stayed quiet during the latest furor and quietly reissued their curriculum with more emphasis on phonics last year, Calkins has even taken on her critics directly. In 2019—the year after she added the dedicated phonics texts to Units of Study—she published an eight-page document called “No One Gets to Own the Term ‘The Science of Reading,’ ” which referred dismissively to “phonics-centric people” and “the new hype about phonics.” This tone drove her opponents mad: Now that Calkins had been forced to adapt, she wanted to decide what the science of reading was?“Her document is not about the science that I know; it is about Lucy Calkins,” wrote the cognitive neuroscientist Mark Seidenberg, one of the critics interviewed in Sold a Story. “The purpose of the document is to protect her brand, her market share, and her standing among her many followers.”Talking with Calkins herself, it was hard to nail down to what extent she felt that the criticisms of her earlier work were justified. When I asked her how she was thinking about phonics in the 2000s, she told me: “Every school has a phonics program. And I would always talk about the phonics programs.” She added that she brought phonics specialists to Columbia’s Teachers College several times a year to help train aspiring educators. (James Cunningham, at UNC Chapel Hill, backed this up, telling me, “She was certainly not wearing a sandwich billboard around: DON’T TEACH PHONICS.”)But still, I asked Calkins, would it be fair to say that phonics wasn’t your bag?“I felt like phonics was something that you have the phonics experts teach.”So where does this characterization of you being hostile toward phonics come from?“Hopefully, you understand I’m not stupid. You would have to be stupid to not teach a 5-year-old phonics.”But some people didn’t, did they? They were heavily into context and cueing.“I’ve never heard of a kindergarten teacher who doesn’t teach phonics,” Calkins replied.Because this is America, the reading debate has become a culture war. When Sold a Story came along in 2022, it resonated with a variety of audiences, including center-left education reformers and parents of children with learning disabilities. But it also galvanized political conservatives. Calkins’s Units of Study was already under attack from the right: In 2021, an article in the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal titled “Units of Indoctrination” had criticized the curriculum, alleging that the way it teaches students to analyze texts “amounts to little more than radical proselytization through literature.”The podcast was released at an anxious time for American education. During the coronavirus pandemic, many schools—particularly in blue states—were closed for months at a time. Masking in classrooms made it harder for children to lip-read what their teachers were saying. Test scores fell, and have only recently begun to recover.“Parents had, for a period of time, a front-row seat based on Zoom school,” Annie Ward, a recently retired assistant superintendent in Mamaroneck, New York, told me. She wondered if that fueled a desire for a “back to basics” approach. “If I’m a parent, I want to know the teacher is teaching and my kid is sitting there soaking it up, and I don’t want this loosey-goosey” stuff.Disgruntled parents quickly gathered online. Moms for Liberty, a right-wing group that started out by opposing school closures and mask mandates, began lobbying state legislators to change school curricula as well. The reading wars began to merge with other controversies, such as how hard schools should push diversity-and-inclusion programs. (The Moms for Liberty website recommends Sold a Story on its resources page.) “We’re failing kids everyday, and Moms for Liberty is calling it out,” a co-founder, Tiffany Justice, told Education Week in October of last year. “The idea that there’s more emphasis placed on diversity in the classroom, rather than teaching kids to read, is alarming at best. That’s criminal.”Ward’s district was not “teaching Lucy,” but using its own bespoke balanced-literacy curriculum. In the aftermath of the pandemic, Ward told me, the district had several “contentious” meetings, including one in January 2023 where “we had ringers”—attendees who were not parents or community members, but instead seemed to be activists from outside the district. “None of us in the room recognized these people.” That had never happened before.I had met Ward at a dinner organized by Calkins at her home, which is also the headquarters of Mossflower—the successor to the center that Calkins used to lead at Teachers College. The evening demonstrated that Calkins still has star power. On short notice, she had managed to assemble half a dozen superintendents, assistant superintendents, and principals from New York districts.“Any kind of disruption like this has you think very carefully about what you’re doing,” Edgar McIntosh, an assistant superintendent in Scarsdale, told me. But he, like several others, was frustrated by the debate. During his time as an elementary-school teacher, he had discovered that some children could decode words—the basic skill developed by phonics—but struggled with their meaning. He worried that parents’ clamor for more phonics might come at the expense of teachers’ attention to fluency and comprehension. Raymond Sanchez, the superintendent of Tarrytown’s school district, said principals should be able to explain how they were adding more phonics or decodable texts to existing programs, rather than having “to throw everything out and find a series that has a sticker that says ‘science of reading’ on it.”This, to me, is the key to the anti-Lucy puzzle. Hanford’s reporting was thorough and necessary, but its conclusion—that whole language or balanced literacy would be replaced by a shifting, research-based movement—is hard to reconcile with how American education actually works. The science of reading started as a neutral description of a set of principles, but it has now become a brand name, another off-the-shelf solution to America’s educational problems. The answer to those problems might not be to swap out one commercial curriculum package for another—but that’s what the system is set up to enable.Gail Dahling-Hench, the assistant superintendent in Madison, Connecticut, has experienced this pressure firsthand. Her district’s schools don’t “teach Lucy” but instead follow a bespoke local curriculum that, she says, uses classroom elements associated with balanced literacy, such as the workshop model of students studying together in small groups, while also emphasizing phonics. That didn’t stop them from running afoul of the new science-of-reading laws.In 2021, Connecticut passed a “Right to Read” law mandating that schools choose a K–3 curriculum from an approved list of options that are considered compliant with the science of reading. Afterward, Dahling-Hench’s district was denied a waiver to keep using its own curriculum. (Eighty-five districts and charter schools in Connecticut applied for a waiver, but only 17 were successful.) “I think they got wrapped around the axle of thinking that programs deliver instruction, and not teachers,” she told me.Dahling-Hench said the state gave her no useful explanation for its decision—nor has it outlined the penalties for noncompliance. She has decided to stick with the bespoke curriculum, because she thinks it’s working. According to test scores released a few days after our conversation, her district is among the best-performing in the state.Keeping the current curriculum also avoids the cost of preparing teachers and administrators to use a new one—a transition that would be expensive even for a tiny district like hers, with just five schools. “It can look like $150,000 to $800,000 depending on which program you’re looking at, but that’s a onetime cost,” Dahling-Hench said. Then you need to factor in annual costs, such as new workbooks.You can’t understand this controversy without appreciating the sums involved. Refreshing a curriculum can cost a state millions of dollars. People on both sides will therefore suggest that their opponents are motivated by money—either saving their favored curriculum to keep the profits flowing, or getting rich through selling school boards an entirely new one. Talking with teachers and researchers, I heard widespread frustration with America’s commercial approach to literacy education. Politicians and bureaucrats tend to love the idea of a packaged solution—Buy this and make all your problems go away!—but the perfect curriculum does not exist.“If you gave me any curriculum, I could find ways to improve it,” Aukerman, at the University of Calgary, told me. She thinks that when a teaching method falls out of fashion, its champions are often personally vilified, regardless of their good faith or expertise. In the case of Lucy Calkins and balanced literacy, Aukerman said, “If it weren’t her, it would be someone else.” Jeff Brown for The Atlantic One obvious question about the science of reading is, well … what is it? The evidence for some kind of explicit phonics instruction is compelling, and states such as Mississippi, which has adopted early screening to identify children who struggle to read—and which holds back third graders if necessary—appear to be improving their test scores. Beyond that, though, things get messy.Dig into this subject, and you can find frontline teachers and credentialed professors who contest every part of the consensus. And I mean every part: Some academics don’t even think there’s a reading crisis at all.American schools might be ditching Units of Study, but balanced literacy still has its defenders. A 2022 analysis in England, which mandates phonics, found that systematic reviews “do not support a synthetic phonics orientation to the teaching of reading; they suggest that a balanced-instruction approach is most likely to be successful.”The data on the effects of specific methods can be conflicting and confusing, which is not unusual for education studies, or psychological research more generally. I feel sorry for any well-intentioned superintendent or state legislator trying to make sense of it all. One of the classrooms at Oceanside School 8 had a wall display devoted to “growth mindset,” a fashionable intervention that encourages children to believe that instead of their intelligence and ability being fixed, they can learn and evolve. Hoping to improve test scores, many schools have spent thousands of dollars each implementing “growth mindset” lessons, which proponents once argued should be a “national education priority.” (Some proponents also hoped, earnestly, that the approach could help bring peace to the Middle East.) But in the two decades since growth mindset first became ubiquitous, the lofty claims made about its promise have come down to earth.Keeping up with all of this is more than any teacher—more than any school board, even—can reasonably be expected to do. After I got in touch with her, Emily Hanford sent me seven emails with links to studies and background reading; I left Calkins’s house loaded down with units of her curricula for younger students. More followed in the mail.Even the most modest pronouncements about what’s happening in American schools are difficult to verify, because of the sheer number of districts, teachers, and pupils involved. In Sold a Story, Hanford suggested that some schools were succeeding with Units of Study only because parents hired personal tutors for their children. But corroborating this with data is impossible. “I haven’t figured out a way to quantify it, except in a very strong anecdotal way,” Hanford told me.Some teachers love “teaching Lucy,” and others hate it. Is one group delusional? And if so, which one? Jenna and Christina, who have both taught kindergarten in New York using Units of Study, told me that the curriculum was too invested in the idea of children as “readers” and “writers” without giving them the basic skills needed to read and write. (They asked to be identified only by their first names in case of professional reprisals.) “It’s a piece of shit,” Christina said. She added: “We’re expecting them to apply skills that we haven’t taught them and that they aren’t coming to school with. I’ve been trying to express that there’s a problem and I get called negative.” Jenna had resorted to a covert strategy, secretly teaching phonics for up to 90 minutes a day instead of the brief lessons she was instructed to provide.But for every Jenna or Christina, there’s a Latasha Holt. After a decade as a third- and fourth-grade teacher in Arkansas, Holt is now an associate professor of elementary literacy at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where she has watched from the sidelines as the tide turned against Calkins. “The dismantling of this thing, it got to me, because I had taught under Units of Study,” she told me. “I’ve used it, and I knew how good it was. I had lived it; I’ve seen it work; I knew it was good for kids.”Aubrey Kinat is a third-grade teacher in Texas who recently left her position at a public school because it decided to drop Units of Study. (The school now uses another curriculum, which was deemed to align better with the science of reading.) Suddenly, she was pushed away from full novels and toward approved excerpts, and her lessons became much more heavily scripted. “I felt like I was talking so much,” she told me. “It took the joy out of it.”For many school boards facing newly politicized parents who came out of the pandemic with strong opinions, ditching Lucy has had the happy side effect of giving adults much more control over what children read. Calkins and some of her dinner guests had suggested that this might be the true reason for the animus around independent reading. “I do start to wonder if this really is about wanting to move everybody towards textbooks,” Calkins said.Eighteen months after her series launched, Hanford returned in April 2024 with two follow-up episodes of Sold a Story, which took a less polemical tone. Unsurprisingly so: Calkins had lost, and she had won.The science of reading is the new consensus in education, and its advocates are the new establishment. It is now on the hook for the curriculum changes that it prompted—and for America’s reading performance more generally. That is an uncomfortable position for those who care more about research than about winning political fights.Some of the neuroscience underpinning Sold a Story was provided by Seidenberg, a professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. (He did not respond to an interview request.) Since the series aired, he has welcomed the move away from Units of Study, but he has also warned that “none of the other major commercial curricula that are currently available were based on the relevant science from the ground up.”Because the usefulness of phonics is one of the few science-of-reading conclusions that is immediately comprehensible to laypeople, “phonics” has come to stand in for the whole philosophy. In a blog post last year, Seidenberg lamented that, on a recent Zoom call, a teacher had asked if they needed to keep teaching phonemic awareness once children were good readers. (The answer is no: Sounding out letters is what you do until the process becomes automatic.) Seidenberg now worried that the science of reading is “at risk of turning into a new pedagogical dogma.”Hanford has also expressed ambivalence about the effects of Sold a Story. She compared the situation to the aftermath of No Child Left Behind, a George W. Bush–era federal education initiative that heavily promoted a literacy program called Reading First. “It became focused on products and programs,” Hanford told me, adding that the ethos turned into “get rid of whole language and buy something else.” However, she is glad that the importance of phonics—and the research backing it—is now more widely understood, because she thinks this can break the cycle of revolution and counterrevolution. She added that whenever she talks with lawmakers, she stresses the importance of continuing to listen to teachers.What about her portrait of Calkins as rich, privileged, oblivious? Forget the monogrammed towels, I told Hanford; there is a more benign explanation for Calkins’s worldview: Everywhere she goes, she meets people, like the teachers and children in Oceanside, who are overjoyed to see her, and keen to tell her how much they love Units of Study.But Hanford told me that she’d included the towels line because “the vast majority of teachers, especially elementary-school teachers, in America are white, middle-class women.” Many of these women, she thought, had enjoyed school themselves and didn’t intuitively know what it was like to struggle with learning to read and write.Reporting this story, I was reminded again and again that education is both a mass phenomenon and a deeply personal one. People I spoke with would say things like Well, he’s never done any classroom research. She’s never been a teacher. They don’t understand things the way I do. The education professors would complain that the cognitive scientists didn’t understand the history of the reading wars, while the scientists would complain that the education professors didn’t understand the latest peer-reviewed research. Meanwhile, a teacher must command a class that includes students with dyslexia as well as those who find reading a breeze, and kids whose parents read to them every night alongside children who don’t speak English at home. At the same time, school boards and state legislators, faced with angry parents and a welter of conflicting testimony, must answer a simple question: Should we be “teaching Lucy,” or not?No matter how painful the past few years have been, though, Calkins is determined to keep fighting for her legacy. At 72, she has both the energy to start over again at Mossflower and the pragmatism to have promised her estate to further the cause once she’s gone. She still has a “ferocious” drive, she told me, and a deep conviction in her methods, even as they evolve. She does not want “to pretend it’s a brand-new approach,” she said, “when in fact we’ve just been learning; we’re just incorporating more things that we’ve learned.”But now that balanced literacy is as unfashionable as whole language, Calkins is trying to come up with a new name for her program. She thought she might try “comprehensive literacy”—or maybe “rebalancing literacy.” Whatever it takes for America to once again feel confident about “teaching Lucy.”This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “Teaching Lucy.” When you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.

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