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Molly Woodworth was a kid who seemed to do well at everything: good grades, in the gifted and talented program. But she couldn't read very well.
"There was no rhyme or reason to reading for me," she said. "When a teacher would dictate a word and say, 'Tell me how you think you can spell it,' I sat there with my mouth open while other kids gave spellings, and I thought, 'How do they even know where to begin?' I was totally lost."
Woodworth went to public school in Owosso, Michigan, in the 1990s. She says sounds and letters just didn't make sense to her, and she doesn't remember anyone teaching her how to read. So she came up with her own strategies to get through text.
Strategy 1: Memorize as many words as possible. "Words were like pictures to me," she said. "I had a really good memory."
Strategy 2: Guess the words based on context. If she came across a word she didn't have in her visual memory bank, she'd look at the first letter and come up with a word that seemed to make sense. Reading was kind of like a game of 20 Questions: What word could this be?
Strategy 3: If all else failed, she'd skip the words she didn't know.
Most of the time, she could get the gist of what she was reading. But getting through text took forever. "I hated reading because it was taxing," she said. "I'd get through a chapter and my brain hurt by the end of it. I wasn't excited to learn."
No one knew how much she struggled, not even her parents. Her reading strategies were her "dirty little secrets."
Molly Woodworth (left) with her aunt, Nora Chahbazi, outside the Ounce of Prevention Reading Center in Flushing, Michigan. Emily Hanford | APM Reports
Woodworth, who now works in accounting,1 says she's still not a very good reader and tears up when she talks about it. Reading "influences every aspect of your life," she said. She's determined to make sure her own kids get off to a better start than she did.
That's why she was so alarmed to see how her oldest child, Claire, was being taught to read in school.
As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.
A couple of years ago, Woodworth was volunteering in Claire's kindergarten classroom. The class was reading a book together and the teacher was telling the children to practice the strategies that good readers use.
The teacher said, "If you don't know the word, just look at this picture up here," Woodworth recalled. "There was a fox and a bear in the picture. And the word was bear, and she said, 'Look at the first letter. It's a "b." Is it fox or bear?'"
Woodworth was stunned. "I thought, 'Oh my God, those are my strategies.' Those are the things I taught myself to look like a good reader, not the things that good readers do," she said. "These kids were being taught my dirty little secrets."
She went to the teacher and expressed her concerns. The teacher told her she was teaching reading the way the curriculum told her to.
Woodworth had stumbled on to American education's own little secret about reading: Elementary schools across the country are teaching children to be poor readers — and educators may not even know it.
For decades, reading instruction in American schools has been rooted in a flawed theory about how reading works, a theory that was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, yet remains deeply embedded in teaching practices and curriculum materials. As a result, the strategies that struggling readers use to get by — memorizing words, using context to guess words, skipping words they don't know — are the strategies that many beginning readers are taught in school. This makes it harder for many kids to learn how to read, and children who don't get off to a good start in reading find it difficult to ever master the process.2
A shocking number of kids in the United States can't read very well. A third of all fourth-graders can't read at a basic level, and most students are still not proficient readers by the time they finish high school.
Percentage of U.S. fourth-graders below basic level in reading
When kids struggle to learn how to read, it can lead to a downward spiral in which behavior, vocabulary, knowledge and other cognitive skills are eventually affected by slow reading development.3 A disproportionate number of poor readers become high school dropouts and end up in the criminal justice system.4
The fact that a disproven theory about how reading works is still driving the way many children are taught to read is part of the problem. School districts spend hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars on curriculum materials that include this theory. Teachers are taught the theory in their teacher preparation programs and on the job. As long as this disproven theory remains part of American education, many kids will likely struggle to learn how to read.
Percentage of U.S. 12th-graders proficient in reading
The theory is known as "three cueing." The name comes from the notion that readers use three different kinds of information — or "cues" — to identify words as they are reading.
The theory was first proposed in 1967, when an education professor named Ken Goodman presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association in New York City.
In the paper,5 Goodman rejected the idea that reading is a precise process that involves exact or detailed perception of letters or words. Instead, he argued that as people read, they make predictions about the words on the page using these three cues:
graphic cues (what do the letters tell you about what the word might be?)
syntactic cues (what kind of word could it be, for example, a noun or a verb?)
semantic cues (what word would make sense here, based on the context?)
Goodman concluded that:
Skill in reading involves not greater precision, but more accurate first guesses based on better sampling techniques, greater control over language structure, broadened experiences and increased conceptual development. As the child develops reading skill and speed, he uses increasingly fewer graphic cues.
Goodman's proposal became the theoretical basis for a new approach to teaching reading that would soon take hold in American schools.
Previously, the question of how to teach reading had focused on one of two basic ideas.
One idea is that reading is a visual memory process. The teaching method associated with this idea is known as "whole word." The whole word approach was perhaps best embodied in the "Dick and Jane" books that first appeared in the 1930s. The books rely on word repetition, and pictures to support the meaning of the text. The idea is that if you see words enough, you eventually store them in your memory as visual images.
The other idea is that reading requires knowledge of the relationships between sounds and letters. Children learn to read by sounding out words. This approach is known as phonics. It goes way back, popularized in the 1800s with the McGuffey readers.
These two ideas — whole word and phonics — had been taking turns as the favored way to teach reading until Goodman came along with what came to be known among educators as the "three-cueing system."
In the cueing theory of how reading works, when a child comes to a word she doesn't know, the teacher encourages her to think of a word that makes sense and asks: Does it look right? Does it sound right? If a word checks out on the basis of those questions, the child is getting it. She's on the path to skilled reading.
Teachers may not know the term "three cueing," but they're probably familiar with "MSV." M stands for using meaning to figure out what a word is, S for using sentence structure and V for using visual information (i.e., the letters in the words). MSV is a cueing idea that can be traced back to the late Marie Clay, a developmental psychologist from New Zealand who first laid out her theories about reading in a dissertation in the 1960s.6
Clay developed her cueing theory independently of Goodman, but they met several times and had similar ideas about the reading process. Their theories were based on observational research. They would listen to children read, note the kinds of errors they made, and use that information to identify a child's reading difficulties. For example, a child who says "horse" when the word was "house" is probably relying too much on visual, or graphic, cues. A teacher in this case would encourage the child to pay more attention to what word would make sense in the sentence.
Goodman and Clay believed that letters were the least reliable of the three cues, and that as people became better readers, they no longer needed to pay attention to all the letters in words. "In efficient word perception the reader relies mostly on the sentence and its meaning and some selected features of the forms of words," Clay wrote.7 For Goodman, accurate word recognition was not necessarily the goal of reading. The goal was to comprehend text.8 If the sentences were making sense, the reader must be getting the words right, or right enough.
These ideas soon became the foundation for how reading was taught in many schools. Goodman's three-cueing idea formed the theoretical basis of an approach known as "whole language" that by the late 1980s had taken hold throughout America.9 Clay built her cueing ideas into a reading intervention program for struggling first-graders called Reading Recovery. It was implemented across New Zealand in the 1980s and went on to become one of the world's most widely used reading intervention programs.10
But while cueing was taking hold in schools, scientists were busy studying the cognitive processes involved in reading words. And they came to different conclusions about how people read.11
First-graders in Oakland, California, practice reading. Hasain Rasheed for APM Reports
Scientists take on three cueing
It was the early 1970s, and Keith Stanovich was working on his doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. He thought the reading field was ready for an infusion of knowledge from the "cognitive revolution" that was underway in psychology. Stanovich had a background in experimental science and an interest in learning and cognition due in part to the influence of his wife, Paula, who was a special education teacher.
Stanovich wanted to understand how people read words.12 He knew about Goodman's work and thought he was probably right that as people become better readers, they relied more on their knowledge of vocabulary and language structure to read words and didn't need to pay as much attention to the letters.
So, in 1975, Stanovich and a fellow graduate student set out to test the idea in their lab. They recruited readers of various ages and abilities and gave them a series of word-reading tasks. Their hypothesis was that skilled readers rely more on contextual cues to recognize words than poor readers, who probably weren't as good at using context.
They couldn't have been more wrong.
"To our surprise, all of our research results pointed in the opposite direction," Stanovich wrote. "It was the poorer readers, not the more skilled readers, who were more reliant on context to facilitate word recognition."13
The skilled readers could instantly recognize words without relying on context. Other researchers have confirmed these findings with similar experiments. It turns out that the ability to read words in isolation quickly and accurately is the hallmark of being a skilled reader. This is now one of the most consistent and well-replicated findings in all of reading research.14
Other studies revealed further problems with the cueing theory:15
Skilled readers don't scan words and sample from the graphic cues in an incidental way; instead, they very quickly recognize a word as a sequence of letters. That's how good readers instantly know the difference between "house" and "horse," for example.
Experiments that force people to use context to predict words show that even skilled readers can correctly guess only a fraction of the words; this is one reason people who rely on context to identify words are poor readers.
Weak word recognition skills are the most common and debilitating source of reading problems.16
The results of these studies are not controversial or contested among scientists who study reading. The findings have been incorporated into every major scientific model of how reading works.
But cueing is still alive and well in schools.
Picture Power!
It's not hard to find examples of the cueing system. A quick search on Google, Pinterest or Teachers Pay Teachers turns up plenty of lesson plans, teaching guides and classroom posters. One popular poster has cute cartoon characters to remind children they have lots of strategies to use when they're stuck on a word, including looking at the picture (Eagle Eye), getting their lips ready to try the first sound (Lips the Fish), or just skipping the word altogether (Skippy Frog).
There are videos online where you can see cueing in action. In one video posted on The Teaching Channel,17 a kindergarten teacher in Oakland, California, instructs her students to use "picture power" to identify the words on the page. The goal of the lesson, according to the teacher, is for the students to "use the picture and a first sound to determine an unknown word in their book."
The class reads a book together called "In the Garden." On each page, there's a picture of something you might find in a garden. It's what's known as a predictable book; the sentences are all the same except for the last word.
The children have been taught to memorize the words "look," "at," and "the." The challenge is getting the last word in the sentence. The lesson plan tells the teacher to cover up the word with a sticky note.
In the video, the wiggly kindergarteners sitting cross-legged on the floor come to a page with a picture of a butterfly. The teacher tells the kids that she's guessing the word is going to be butterfly. She uncovers the word to check on the accuracy of her guess.
"Look at that," she tells the children, pointing to the first letter of the word. "It starts with the /b/ /b/ /b/." The class reads the sentence together as the teacher points to the words. "Look at the butterfly!" they yell out excitedly.
This lesson comes from "Units of Study for Teaching Reading," more commonly known as "reader's workshop."18 According to the lesson plan, this lesson teaches children to "know and apply grade-level phonics and word analysis skills in decoding words."19
But the children were not taught to decode words in this lesson. They were taught to guess words using pictures and patterns — hallmarks of the three-cueing system.
The author of Units of Study for Teaching Reading, Lucy Calkins, often refers to cueing in her published work.20 She uses the term MSV — the meaning, structure and visual idea that originally came from Clay in New Zealand.
Then there is Fountas and Pinnell Literacy, started by Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell, teachers who learned the MSV concept from Clay in the 1980s.21
Fountas and Pinnell have written several books about teaching reading, including a best-seller about a widely used instructional approach called "Guided Reading." They also created a reading assessment system that uses what are called "leveled books."22 Children start with predictable books like "In the Garden" and move up levels as they're able to "read" the words. But many of the words in those books — butterfly, caterpillar — are words that beginning readers haven't been taught to decode yet. One purpose of the books is to teach children that when they get to a word they don't know, they can use context to figure it out.
When put into practice in the classroom, these approaches can cause problems for children when they are learning to read.
'That is not reading'
Margaret Goldberg, a teacher and literacy coach in the Oakland Unified School District, remembers a moment when she realized what a problem the three-cueing approach was. She was with a first-grader named Rodney when he came to a page with a picture of a girl licking an ice cream cone and a dog licking a bone.
The text said: "My little dog likes to eat with me."
But Rodney said: "My dog likes to lick his bone."
Rodney breezed right through it, unaware that he hadn't read the sentence on the page.
Goldberg realized lots of her students couldn't actually read the words in their books; instead, they were memorizing sentence patterns and using the pictures to guess. One little boy exclaimed, "I can read this book with my eyes shut!"
"Oh no," Goldberg thought. "That is not reading."
Goldberg had been hired by the Oakland schools in 2015 to help struggling readers by teaching a Fountas and Pinnell program called "Leveled Literacy Intervention" that uses leveled books and the cueing approach.23
Around the same time, Goldberg was trained in a program that uses a different strategy for teaching children how to read words. The program is called "Systematic Instruction in Phonological Awareness, Phonics, and Sight Words," or SIPPS.24 It's a phonics program that teaches children how to sound out words and uses what are known as "decodable books." Most words in the books have spelling patterns that kids have been taught in their phonics lessons.
Goldberg decided to teach some of her students using the phonics program and some of her students using three cueing. And she began to notice differences between the two groups of kids. "Not just in their abilities to read," she said, "but in the way they approached their reading."
Goldberg and a colleague recorded first-graders talking about what makes them good readers.
One video shows Mia, on the left, who was in the phonics program. Mia says she's a good reader because she looks at the words and sounds them out. JaBrea, on the right, was taught the cueing system. JaBrea says: "I look at the pictures and I read it."
Courtesy of Margaret Goldberg, Oakland Unified School District
It was clear to Goldberg after just a few months of teaching both approaches that the students learning phonics were doing better. "One of the things that I still struggle with is a lot of guilt," she said.
She thinks the students who learned three cueing were actually harmed by the approach. "I did lasting damage to these kids. It was so hard to ever get them to stop looking at a picture to guess what a word would be. It was so hard to ever get them to slow down and sound a word out because they had had this experience of knowing that you predict what you read before you read it."
Goldberg soon discovered the decades of scientific evidence against cueing.25 She was shocked. She had never come across any of this science in her teacher preparation or on the job.
And she started to wonder why not.
Balanced Literacy
People have been arguing for centuries about how children should be taught to read. The fight has mostly focused on whether to teach phonics.
The whole language movement of the late 20th century was perhaps the zenith of the anti-phonics argument.26 Phonics instruction was seen as tedious, time-consuming and ultimately unnecessary. Why? Because — according to the three-cueing theory — readers can use other, more reliable cues to figure out what the words say.27
Marilyn Adams came across this belief in the early 1990s. She's a cognitive and developmental psychologist who had just written a book summarizing the research on how children learn to read.28 One big takeaway from the book is that becoming a skilled reader of English requires knowledge of sound-spelling correspondences.29 Another big takeaway is that many kids were not being taught this in school.
Soon after the book was published, Adams was describing her findings to a group of teachers and state education officials in Sacramento, California. She was sensing discomfort and confusion in the room. "And I just stopped and said, 'What is it that I'm missing?'" she recalled. "'What is it that we need to talk about? Help me.'"
A woman raised her hand and asked: "What does this have to do with the three-cueing system?" Marilyn didn't know what the three-cueing system was. "I think I blew all of their fuses that I did not [know what it was] since this was so fundamental to being an elementary reading teacher," she said. "How could I present myself to them as an expert on reading and not know about this?"
The teachers drew her a Venn diagram of the three-cueing system. It looked something like this:
Adams thought this diagram made perfect sense. The research clearly shows that readers use all of these cues to understand what they're reading.
But Adams soon figured out the disconnect. Teachers understood these cues not just as the way readers construct meaning from text, but as the way readers actually identify the words on the page. And they thought that teaching kids to decode or sound out words was not necessary.
"The most important thing was for the children to understand and enjoy the text," Adams said. "And from that understanding and joy of reading, the words on the page would just pop out at them."
She would explain to teachers at every opportunity that explicitly teaching children about the relationships between sounds and letters is essential to ensure all kids get off to a good start in reading. But she got tons of pushback from teachers. "They didn't want to teach phonics!" she recalled in frustration.
In 1998, Adams wrote a book chapter about how the three-cueing system conflicts with what researchers have figured out about reading. She hoped it would help put three cueing to rest.30
By this time, the scientific research on reading was gaining traction. In 2000, a national panel convened by Congress to review the evidence on how to teach reading came out with a report.31 It identified several essential components of reading instruction, including vocabulary, comprehension and phonics. The evidence that phonics instruction enhances children's success in learning how to read was clear and compelling. National reports on reading a few years later in the United Kingdom and Australia came to the same conclusion.32
"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it."
-Stacey Cherny
Eventually, many whole language supporters accepted the weight of the scientific evidence about the importance of phonics instruction. They started adding phonics to their books and materials and renamed their approach "balanced literacy."
But they didn't get rid of the three-cueing system.
Balanced literacy proponents will tell you their approach is a mix of phonics instruction with plenty of time for kids to read and enjoy books. But look carefully at the materials and you'll see that's not really what balanced literacy is mixing. Instead, it's mixing a bunch of different ideas about how kids learn to read. It's a little bit of whole word instruction with long lists of words for kids to memorize. It's a little bit of phonics. And fundamentally, it's the idea that children should be taught to read using the three-cueing system.
And it turns out cueing may actually prevent kids from focusing on words in the way they need to become skilled readers.
To understand why cueing can get in the way of children's reading development, it's essential to understand how our brains process the words we see.
Reading scientists have known for decades that the hallmark of being a skilled reader is the ability to instantly and accurately recognize words.33 If you're a skilled reader, your brain has gotten so good at reading words that you process the word "chair" faster than you process a picture of a chair.34 You know tens of thousands of words instantly, on sight. How did you learn to do that?
It happens through a process called "orthographic mapping."35 This occurs when you pay attention to the details of a written word and link the word's pronunciation and meaning with its sequence of letters.36 A child knows the meaning and pronunciation of "pony." The word gets mapped to his memory when he links the sounds /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ to the written word "pony."
That requires an awareness of the speech sounds in words and an understanding of how those sounds are represented by letters.37 In other words, you need phonics skills.
Here's what happens when a reader who has good phonics skills comes to a word she doesn't recognize in print. She stops at the word and sounds it out. If it's a word she knows the meaning of, she has now linked the spelling of the word with its pronunciation. If she doesn't know the meaning of the word, she can use context to try to figure it out.
By about second grade, a typically developing reader needs just a few exposures to a word through understanding both the pronunciation and the spelling for that word to be stored in her memory.38 She doesn't know that word because she memorized it as a visual image. She knows that word because at some point she successfully sounded it out.
The more words she stores in her memory this way, the more she can focus on the meaning of what she's reading; she'll eventually be using less brain power to identify words and will be able to devote more brain power to comprehending what she's reading.39
But when children don't have good phonics skills, the process is different.
"They sample from the letters because they're not good at sounding them out," said David Kilpatrick, a psychology professor at SUNY Cortland and the author of a book about preventing reading difficulties.40 "And they use context."
In other words, when people don't have good phonics skills, they use the cueing system.
"The three-cueing system is the way poor readers read," said Kilpatrick.
And if teachers use the cueing system to teach reading, Kilpatrick says they're not just teaching children the habits of poor readers, they are actually impeding the orthographic mapping process.41
"The minute you ask them just to pay attention to the first letter or look at the picture, look at the context, you're drawing their attention away from the very thing that they need to interact with in order for them to read the word [and] remember the word," Kilpatrick said. In this way, he said, three cueing can actually prevent the critical learning that's necessary for a child to become a skilled reader.
In many balanced literacy classrooms, children are taught phonics and the cueing system. Some kids who are taught both approaches realize pretty quickly that sounding out a word is the most efficient and reliable way to know what it is. Those kids tend to have an easier time understanding the ways that sounds and letters relate. They'll drop the cueing strategies and begin building that big bank of instantly known words that is so necessary for skilled reading.
But some children will skip the sounding out if they're taught they have other options. Phonics is challenging for many kids. The cueing strategies seem quicker and easier at first. And by using context and memorizing a bunch of words, many children can look like good readers — until they get to about third grade, when their books begin to have more words, longer words, and fewer pictures. Then they're stuck. They haven't developed their sounding-out skills. Their bank of known words is limited. Reading is slow and laborious and they don't like it, so they don't do it if they don't have to. While their peers who mastered decoding early are reading and teaching themselves new words every day, the kids who clung to the cueing approach are falling further and further behind.42
These poor reading habits, once ingrained at a young age, can follow kids into high school. Some kids who were taught the cueing approach never become good readers. Not because they're incapable of learning to read well but because they were taught the strategies of struggling readers.
Margaret Goldberg (second from left) and Lani Mednick (right) are literacy coaches for the Oakland Unified School District. Dana Cilono (left) was with the charter school network Education for Change, and Erin Cox is with Aspire Public Schools. They are working on projects to rid their schools of the three-cueing system. Hasain Rasheed for APM Reports
'So what if they use the picture?'
Once Margaret Goldberg discovered the cognitive science evidence against cueing, she wanted her colleagues in the Oakland school district to know about it too.
Over the past two years, Goldberg and a fellow literacy coach named Lani Mednick have been leading a grant-funded pilot project to improve reading achievement in the Oakland schools.43
They have their work cut out for them. Nearly half the district's third-graders are below grade level in reading. Goldberg and Mednick want to raise questions about how kids in Oakland are being taught to read.
They meet every couple weeks with literacy coaches from the 10 elementary schools in the pilot program. They read and discuss articles about the scientific research on reading. At a meeting in March, the coaches watched the video of the "picture power" lesson.
"This teacher meant well," Mednick said to the coaches after they watched the lesson. "It seemed like she believed this lesson would ensure her students would be on the road toward reading."
Mednick wanted the coaches to consider the beliefs about reading that would lead to the creation of a lesson like "picture power." The Oakland schools purchased the Units of Study for Teaching Reading series, which includes the "picture power" lesson, as part of a balanced literacy initiative the district began about 10 years ago. The district also bought the Fountas and Pinnell assessment system.
The coaches saw right away that "picture power" was designed to teach kids the cueing system. But they said many teachers don't see any problem with cueing. After all, one of the cues is to look at the letters in the word. What's wrong with teaching kids lots of different strategies to figure out unknown words?44
"I remember before we started looking at the science and everything, I thought to myself, 'Reading is so hard for kids, so what if they use the picture?'" said Soraya Sajous-Brooks, the early literacy coach at Prescott Elementary School in West Oakland. "Like, use everything you've got."
But she's come to understand that cueing sends the message to kids that they don't need to sound out words. Her students would get phonics instruction in one part of the day. Then they'd go reader's workshop and be taught that when they come to a word they don't know, they have lots of strategies. They can sound it out. They can also check the first letter, look at the picture, think of a word that makes sense.
Teaching cueing and phonics doesn't work, Sajous-Brooks said. "One negates the other."
Goldberg and Mednick want to show the district there's a better way to teach reading. Schools in the pilot project used grant money to buy new materials that steer clear of the three-cueing idea. Two charter school networks in Oakland are working on similar projects to move their schools away from cueing.
To see what it looks like, I visited a first-grade classroom at a charter school in Oakland called Achieve Academy.45
One part of the day was explicit phonics instruction.46 The students were divided into small groups based on their skill level. They met with their teacher, Andrea Ruiz, at a kidney-shaped table in a corner of the classroom. The lowest-level group worked on identifying the speech sounds in words like "skin" and "skip." The highest-level group learned how verbs like "spy" and "cry" are spelled as "spied' and 'cried" in the past tense.
Andrea Ruiz teaches a phonics lesson. Hasain Rasheed for APM Reports
There were also vocabulary lessons.47 The entire class gathered on a rug at the front of the classroom to talk about a book Ms. Ruiz read out loud to them. One of the words in the book was "prey."
"What animals are a chameleon's prey?" Ms. Ruiz asked the children. "Or we can also ask, what animals do chameleons hunt for food?"
The kids turned and talked to each other. "A chameleon's prey are bugs and insects and other chameleons and mice and birds," a little boy explained to his classmate. "That's it."
Other vocabulary words these first-graders had learned were posted on cards around the classroom. They included: wander, persevere, squint and scrumptious. The kids weren't expected to read those words yet. The idea is to build their oral vocabulary so that when they can read those words, they know what the words mean.
This comes straight from the scientific research, which shows that reading comprehension is the product of two things.48 First, a child needs to be able to sound out a word. Second, the child needs to know the meaning of the word she just sounded out. So, in a first-grade classroom that's following the research, you will see explicit phonics instruction and also lessons that build oral vocabulary and background knowledge. And you will see kids practicing what they've been taught.
After their vocabulary lesson, the kids did "buddy reading." They retreated to various spots around the classroom to read books to each other. I found Belinda sitting on an adult chair at the back of the classroom, her little legs swinging. Across from her was her buddy Steven, decked out in a yellow and blue plaid shirt tucked neatly into his jeans. He held the book and pointed to the words while Belinda read.
"Ellen /m/," Belinda paused, sounding out the word "meets." She was reading a decodable book about some kids who visit a farm. Almost all of the words in the book contain spelling patterns she'd been taught in her phonics lessons.
"I am a farm here," Belinda read.
Steven did a double-take. "A farmer here," he said gently. Steven's job as Belinda's reading buddy was to help her if she missed a word or got stuck. But that didn't happen much because Belinda had been taught how to read the words. She didn't need any help from the pictures, either. She barely glanced at them as she read.
Steven and Belinda do "buddy reading." Hasain Rasheed for APM Reports
To be clear, there's nothing wrong with pictures. They're great to look at and talk about, and they can help a child comprehend the meaning of a story. Context — including a picture if there is one — helps us understand what we're reading all the time. But if a child is being taught to use context to identify words, she's being taught to read like a poor reader.
Many educators don't know this because the cognitive science research has not made its way into many schools and schools of education.49
Ruiz didn't know about this research until the Oakland pilot project. "I didn't really know anything about how kids learn to read when I started teaching," she said. It was a relief when she came to Oakland and the curriculum spelled out that kids use meaning, structure and visual cues to figure out words. "Because I came from not having anything, I was like, 'Oh, there's a way we should teach this,'" she said.
I heard this from other educators. Cueing was appealing because they didn't know what else to do.
"When I got into the classroom and someone told me to use this practice, I didn't question it," said Stacey Cherny, a former teacher who's now principal of an elementary school in Pennsylvania. She says many teachers aren't taught what they need to know about the structure of the English language to be able to teach phonics well. She says phonics can be intimidating; three cueing isn't.
Another reason cueing holds on is that it seems to work for some children. But researchers estimate there's a percentage of kids — perhaps about 40 percent — who will learn to read no matter how they're taught.50 According to Kilpatrick, children who learn to read with cueing are succeeding in spite of the instruction, not because of it.
Goldberg hopes the pilot project in Oakland will convince the district to drop all instructional materials that include cueing.
When asked about this, the Oakland superintendent's office responded with a written statement that there isn't enough evidence from the pilot project to make curriculum changes for the entire district and that the Oakland schools remain committed to balanced literacy.
Oakland's situation is no different from many other districts across the country that have invested millions of dollars in materials that include cueing.
"It feels like everyone's trusting somebody else to have done their due diligence," Goldberg said. "Classroom teachers are trusting that the materials they're being handed will work. The people who purchase the materials are trusting if they were on the market, that they will work. We're all trusting, and it's a system that is broken."
'My science is different'
If cueing was debunked decades ago by cognitive scientists, why is the idea still in materials that are being sold to schools?
One answer to that question is that school districts still buy the materials. Heinemann, the company that publishes the Fountas and Pinnell and Lucy Calkins' products that the Oakland schools use, earned somewhere in the neighborhood of $500 million in 2018, according to earnings reports.51
I wanted to know what the authors of those materials make of the cognitive science research. And I wanted to give them a chance to explain the ideas behind their work. I wrote to Calkins, Fountas and Pinnell and asked for interviews. They all declined. Heinemann sent a statement that said every product the company sells is informed by extensive research.
I also asked Ken Goodman for an interview. It's been more than 50 years since he first laid out the three-cueing theory in that 1967 paper. I wanted to know what he thinks of the cognitive science research. Of the major proponents of three cueing I reached out to, he was the only one who agreed to an interview.
I visited Goodman at his home in Tucson, Arizona. He's 91. He uses a scooter to get around, but he's still working. He just finished a new edition of one of his books.
Ken Goodman with his wife and frequent co-author, Yetta Goodman. Emily Hanford | APM Reports
When I asked him what he makes of the cognitive science research, he told me he thinks scientists focus too much on word recognition. He still doesn't believe accurate word recognition is necessary for reading comprehension.
"Word recognition is a preoccupation," he said. "I don't teach word recognition. I teach people to make sense of language. And learning the words is incidental to that."
He brought up the example of a child who comes to the word "horse" and says "pony" instead. His argument is that a child will still understand the meaning of the story because horse and pony are the same concept.
I pressed him on this. First of all, a pony isn't the same thing as a horse. Second, don't you want to make sure that when a child is learning to read, he understands that /p/ /o/ /n/ /y/ says "pony"? And different letters say "horse"?
He dismissed my question.
"The purpose is not to learn words," he said. "The purpose is to make sense."
Cognitive scientists don't dispute that the purpose of reading is to make sense of the text. But the question is: How can you understand what you are reading if you can't accurately read the words? And if quick and accurate word recognition is the hallmark of being a skilled reader, how does a little kid get there?
Goodman rejected the idea that you can make a distinction between skilled readers and unskilled readers; he doesn't like the value judgment that implies. He said dyslexia does not exist — despite lots of evidence that it does.52 And he said the three-cueing theory is based on years of observational research. In his view, three cueing is perfectly valid, drawn from a different kind of evidence than what scientists collect in their labs.
"My science is different," Goodman said.
This idea that there are different kinds of evidence that lead to different conclusions about how reading works is one reason people continue to disagree about how children should be taught to read. It's important for educators to understand that three cueing is based on theory and observational research and that there's decades of scientific evidence from labs all over the world that converges on a very different idea about skilled reading.
The cognitive science does not provide all the answers about how to teach children to read, but on the question of how skilled readers read words, scientists have amassed a huge body of evidence.
Goldberg thinks it's time for educators across the country to take a close look at all the materials they use to teach reading.
"We should look through the materials and search for evidence of cueing," she said. "And if it's there, don't touch it. Don't let it get near our kids, don't let it get near our classrooms, our teachers."
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EXECUTIVE EDITOR Stephen Smith
EDITOR Catherine Winter
ASSOCIATE PRODUCER Alex Baumhardt
PRODUCTION HELP John Hernandez
WEB EDITORSAndy Kruse
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AUDIO MIXCraig Thorson
Chris Julin
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PROJECT COORDINATOR Shelly Langford
THEME MUSIC Gary Meister
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You may never have heard of FFmpeg, but you’ve used it. This open source program’s robust multimedia framework is used to process video and audio media files and streams across numerous platforms and devices. It provides tools and libraries for format conversion, aka transcoding, playback, editing, streaming, and post-production effects for both audio and video media.
FFmpeg’s libraries, such as libavcodec and libavformat, are essential for media players and software, including VLC, Kodi, Plex, Google Chrome, Firefox, and even YouTube’s video processing backend. It is also, like many other vital open source programs, terribly underfunded.
Corporate Responsibility vs. Volunteer Labor
A lively debate on Twitter began between Dan Lorenc, CEO and co-founder of Chainguard, the software supply chain security company, the FFmpeg project, Google, and security researchers over security disclosures and the responsibilities of large tech companies in open-source software.
The core of the discussion revolves around how vulnerabilities should be reported, who is responsible for fixing them, and the challenges that arise when AI is used to uncover a flood of potentially meaningless security issues. But at heart, it’s about money.
Thus, as Mark Atwood, an open source policy expert, pointed out on Twitter, he had to keep telling Amazon to not do things that would mess up FFmpeg because, he had to keep explaining to his bosses that “They are not a vendor, there is no NDA, we have no leverage, your VP has refused to help fund them, and they could kill three major product lines tomorrow with an email. So, stop, and listen to me … ”
The Growing Burden on Open Source Maintainers
The latest episode was sparked after a Google AI agent found an especially obscure bug in FFmpeg. How obscure? This “medium impact issue in ffmpeg,” which the FFmpeg developers did patch, is “an issue with decoding LucasArts Smush codec, specifically the first 10-20 frames of Rebel Assault 2, a game from 1995.”
Wow.
FFmpeg added, “FFmpeg aims to play every video file ever made.” That’s all well and good, but is that a valuable use of an assembly programmer’s time? Oh, right, you may not know. FFmpeg’s heart is assembly language. As a former assembly language programmer, it is not, in any way, shape, or form, easy to work with.
Many in the FFmpeg community argue, with reason, that it is unreasonable for a trillion-dollar corporation like Google, which heavily relies on FFmpeg in its products, to shift the workload of fixing vulnerabilities to unpaid volunteers. They believe Google should either provide patches with vulnerability reports or directly support the project’s maintenance.
Earlier, FFmpeg pointed out that it’s far from the only open source project to face such issues.
Specifically, the project team mentions Nick Wellnhofer, the former maintainer of libxml2, a widely used open source software library for parsing Extensible Markup Language (XML). Wellnhofer recently resigned from maintaining libxml2 because he had to “spend several hours each week dealing with security issues reported by third parties. Most of these issues aren’t critical, but it’s still a lot of work.
“In the long term, this is unsustainable for an unpaid volunteer like me. … In the long run, putting such demands on OSS maintainers without compensating them is detrimental. … It’s even more unlikely with Google Project Zero, the best white-hat security researchers money can buy, breathing down the necks of volunteers.”
Google’s Controversial Security Disclosure Policy
What made this a hot issue was that back in July, Google Project Zero (GPZ) announced a trial of its new Reporting Transparency policy. With this policy change, GPZ announces that it has reported an issue on a specific project within a week of discovery, and the security standard 90-day disclosure clock then starts, regardless of whether a patch is available or not.
Many volunteer open source program maintainers and developers feel this is massively unfair to put them under such pressure when Google has billions to address the problem.
FFmpeg tweeted, “We take security very seriously, but at the same time, is it really fair that trillion-dollar corporations run AI to find security issues in people’s hobby code? Then expect volunteers to fix.”
True, Google does offer a Patch Rewards Program, but as a Twitter user using the handle Ignix The Salamander observed, “FFmpeg already mentioned the program is too limited for them, and they point out the three patches per month limit. Please don’t assume people complain just for the sake of complaining, there is a genuine conflict between corporate security & usage vs open source support IMHO.”
Lorenc argues back, in an e-mail to me, that “Creating and publishing software under an open source license is an act of contribution to the digital commons. Finding and publishing information about security issues in that software is also an act of contribution to the same commons.
“The position of the FFmpeg X account is that somehow disclosing vulnerabilities is a bad thing. Google provides more assistance to open source software projects than almost any other organization, and these debates are more likely to drive away potential sponsors than to attract them.”
Differing Perspectives on Vulnerability Disclosures
The fundamental problem remains that the FFmpeg team lacks the financial and developer resources to address a flood of AI-created CVEs.
On the other hand, security experts are certainly right in thinking that FFmpeg is a critical part of the Internet’s technology framework and that security issues do need to be made public responsibly and addressed. After all, hackers can use AI to find vulnerabilities in the same way Google does with its AI bug finder, Big Sleep, and Google wants to identify potential security holes ahead of them.
The reality is, however, that without more support from the trillion-dollar companies that profit from open source, many woefully underfunded, volunteer-driven critical open-source projects will no longer be maintained at all.
Nearly two months into President Donald Trump’s aggressive immigration enforcement campaign, social media feeds from his administration and its right-wing allies paint a grim picture of Chicago: a city plagued by violent criminals that is at war with the federal government.
Made-for-Hollywood videos depict heroic military-style raids. “Criminal illegal aliens” are chased down and handcuffed. An immigration facility is shown bracing for attacks by “agitators” and “terrorists.”
Altogether, the media blitz aims to build public support for these enforcement efforts.
Yet the government’s storytelling doesn’t always match what’s happening in communities across the nation’s third-largest city and its suburbs. Nick Cull, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, calls it government “propaganda.”
“By propaganda, what I mean is mass political persuasion,” said Cull, who co-edited the book “Propaganda and Mass Persuasion: A Historical Encyclopedia, 1500-present.”
The Trump administration uses particular elements of propaganda to build its case that the enforcement is needed, Cull and other experts say.
Military imagery projects government strength in the face of Chicago’s dangers. Hyperbolic language describes unremarkable protests. Strong leaders like Gregory Bovino, commander-at-large of the U.S. Border Patrol, are propped up as the face of the campaign. Memes and references to pop culture tap into a younger audience. And social media influencers are deputized to spread the message.
This all coincides with a campaign to recruit more immigration agents that appeals to American nostalgia and patriotism while vilifying immigrants. One U.S. Department of Homeland Security ad with shadowy figures holding swords in a cloud of fog calls on Americans to “defend your hearth and home” because “the enemies are at the gates.” Another features a Coca-Cola bottle on a classic red Ford Bronco and says “America is worth fighting for.”
Cull said propaganda targets “people’s fears [and] darkest thoughts” and affirms them — in this case about immigration. But the techniques can also sway people who are on the fence.
“They are filming these raids and then making these sizzle reels of apprehensions and grappling and long guns that are very exciting for young people to see and to feel a sense of duty and purpose as a result,” said Boston University assistant professor Joan Donovan, co-author of the book “Meme Wars: The Untold Story of the Online Battles Upending Democracy in America.”
Cull said the diverging sources of information are creating “parallel universes.”
“There’s a battle in Chicago for one part of the American population,” he said, “and there’s just police and paramilitaries bullying people for another part of the population.”
With help from Cull, Donovan and a former senior DHS official, the Chicago Sun-Times analyzed five examples of these propaganda videos and the techniques they rely on to convey the government’s narrative.
Hollywood-style heroes ‘neutralize’ the danger
It starts with the sound of helicopter blades whirring in the night sky and flashlights shining on an apartment building.
Then the action music kicks in.
Men in military-style clothing hold large weapons and look ready to storm the complex. Agents climb ladders to get inside. They smash down apartment doors. They come back out with Latino men whose wrists are zip-tied behind their backs.
Residents described this Sept. 30 raid of a South Shore neighborhood apartment building — conducted in the middle of the night — as terrifying. Witnesses said flash grenades went off in the hallways, and men, women and children were pulled from their apartments, some of them naked. A neighbor hid a screaming 7-year-old girl and her mother. U.S. citizens were zip-tied for hours.
The highly produced video published by DHS shows heroism — not any of those details.
“There’s movie-type music, there’s zooming in, you’re moving through a rapid-edited action sequence,” Cull said. “It’s like outtakes from a motion picture. High quality. Those are the ones where you see the people who have been rounded up. So the idea that something heroic is taking place, somebody dangerous has been neutralized.
“It’s striking and resonating with long-standing elements in American popular culture,” he said. “Like the sort of saddling-up scenes, when American cops or the military are getting ready for a mission.”
Donovan says editing out the “tears and screams of the children and families” helps DHS meet its goal of “normalizing” the militaristic activity for the American public.
And how does DHS make a video like the one from South Shore?
Security footage from a nearby elementary school gives an answer. Obtained by the Sun-Times through a public records request, it shows a camera crew of at least nine people wearing street clothing filming the entire raid, some with neon Department of Homeland Security Office of Public Affairs vests.
Surveillance footage obtained by the Sun-Times through a public records request from a nearby school shows a team of Homeland Security photographers capturing footage of the South Shore raid that later would be used in highly produced videos.
Gil Kerlikowske, a former commissioner of U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which oversees Border Patrol, said DHS “can’t burn barrels of cash fast enough” since getting a funding infusion from Congress this year.
“It’s abhorrent to me to see the taxpayer dollar being used in this way, in propaganda and show,” he said.
Military imagery projects government strength
The feds have publicized one other high-intensity nighttime raid in the Chicago area. It took place in suburban Elgin a few weeks prior.
The video DHS posted of the raid starts with dimly lit scenes and lyrics from a cover of the Nirvana song “Smells Like Teen Spirit”: “Load up on guns, bring your friends.”
Agents led by Bovino and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem drive in front of the Chicago skyline and pass Trump Tower — some of them hanging off the backs of trucks — as they prepare for a seemingly major military mission.
The video cuts to an overhead view of the target house from a helicopter — some 40 miles away from Downtown Chicago — before there’s a sudden explosion as the house’s front door is blown open.
Electronic music fades in, and men are brought out of the house under arrest.
“There’s no operational need for any of these techniques,” Kerlikowske said of the firepower. “This is all about showboating.”
Cull said the video is “implying the strength and capability of ICE and associating those operations with the iconography of the American military and American military capability,” which he describes as the “fetishization of the military.”
The military target is “designed not to be recognizable,” he said, so the Trump administration can sell the raid as an advertisement of “making America safe again” that can be repeated in any American city. The video doesn’t show that two U.S. citizens were among those detained.
Donovan said DHS intentionally uses “contentious messaging” to anger people who oppose the deportation efforts while entertaining those in support.
“Things don’t tend to trend or reach new audiences if they don’t upset one large part of a group while also making another group laugh,” she said.
An internet personality says ‘terrorists’ are attacking ICE
“What’s up guys! Today, we’re going on an ICE raid with Sec. Kristi Noem through Chicago,” right-wing internet personality Benny Johnson says to start his 12-minute, 41-second highlight reel. He has more than 12 million total followers on X, Instagram and YouTube.
“It’s going to be an absolutely wild day,” he continues. “Come along with us as we show you what a day in the life of an ICE agent inside one of America’s most Democrat, left-wing cities is actually like.”
Johnson, who lives in Tampa Bay, Florida, starts the day at Trump Tower with Noem, who gives him a hug.
At one point Johnson dons a Border Patrol vest during a raid outside a Walmart. But much of the video takes place in west suburban Broadview, home to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility, which Johnson calls the “No. 1 most-attacked ICE facility in America.”
DHS has claimed the daily protests outside the Broadview facility have been violent, classifying them as riots. A federal judge has been skeptical, ordering the feds to limit their use of force.
Johnson calls the protesters “agitators” and a “terrorist element” as he shows a few who have been detained. He doesn’t interview protesters at any point.
Cull said it’s jarring to see a social media influencer talking about “being with ICE as they face down dangerous terrorists,” when in the video, “You just see a rather unimpressive line of protesters with cardboard signs.”
“To dignify them with the vocabulary you use to describe the seasoned killers of ISIS is just absurd,” he said.
“It’s all anticipation and mood and atmosphere,” Cull said, pointing out that the video never shows the action that Johnson describes. “I wasn’t seeing great acts of bravery, I wasn’t watching something that would live on in the archives as an amazing moment of justice or heroism or anything really. … And by the end, I wanted to fast forward just to see, ‘Oh come on, at what point does something actually happen in this video.’”
Yet the propaganda technique works.
“You go straight to the comments, and you see how people are being affirmed by this,” Cull said. “They have comments on those videos like, ‘God bless ICE. Thank you for what you’re doing.’”
A trusted voice is given special access to share ICE’s perspective
Right-wing social media personality Ben Bergquam sits in a vehicle with ICE officers, listening to their perspective as they describe their mission and the people with criminal records they’re targeting.
The ride-along gives the audience a rare behind-the-scenes look at deportation efforts through the point of view of federal agents — whose faces Bergquam’s video blurs.
Commentator Ben Bergquam rides along with ICE officers, whose faces he blurs, in a video he posted to Instagram.
Cull said this type of access successfully gets the government’s message out through an internet personality whom an audience identifies with and trusts.
“DHS is able to borrow credibility,” Cull said.
But who exactly is the source, and how do they influence the content?
In Bergquam’s case, his show has peddled the great replacement theory, which falsely states that Democrats promote pro-immigration policies to dilute the white population. Bergquam often appears alongside Trump adviser and far-right leader Steve Bannon.
Bergquam has almost 200,000 followers on Instagram — a number that has grown during the feds’ two months in Chicago. He contributes to the right-wing news channel Real America’s Voice.
Main characters Bovino and Noem play the role of strong leaders
As he leaves a hearing with a federal judge in late October, Bovino hangs out of a DHS vehicle outside the courthouse and gives military hand signals to his agents.
With a popular social media song playing, the video cuts to glamour shots of Bovino in the field and posed photos. The DHS post says Bovino is “putting his life on the line to protect our citizens, and no amount of radical terror or anarchy will stop us in our mission.”
Cull said this propping up of key leaders turns into cosplay in which Bovino and Noem are main characters.
“The way that Kristi Noem has stylized herself over and over, you can get the feeling in some instances that you’re watching a movie,” Donovan said, adding that Bovino is “explicitly playing the role of GI Joe.”
“His image is very iconic,” Donovan said. “The way he dresses, the sharpness of the hand signals that may or may not mean something. All of those things fit the stereotype.”
Bovino has become an identifiable personality in recent months. He’s been the only federal agent with his name on his uniform in an enforcement campaign that has seen a federal judge crack down on unidentifiable agents. DHS has posted videos of him laughing and shaking hands with customers in a convenience store.
He and Noem have posed for photos and videos on the rooftops of buildings, in front of protesters and on the Chicago River. Noem arrived in Chicago for the Elgin raid and left hours later.
“In an authoritarian system, you have identifiable leaders, and the leaders have answers,” Cull said. “So orienting toward leaders is one of the principles of this kind of politics.
“It’s a playbook that, to be 100% honest, I recognize from looking at Roman emperors rather than American presidents.”
Many tumors are “cold” — invisible to the body's immune system. We can make them “hot” by forcing them to display immune-triggering signals through a process called antigen presentation. Using their C2S-Scale 27B model, Google tasked the AI with finding drugs that acts as a conditional amplifier, one that would boost the immune signal under certain tumour conditions. C2S-Scale successfully identified a novel, interferon-conditional amplifier, revealing a new potential pathway to make “cold” tumors “hot". The effectiveness of the drug, silmitasertib, has been verified in vitro. While this is an early first step, it gives us a powerful, experimentally-validated lead for developing new combination therapies.
Background: Google's Gemma / C2S-Scale 27B model is a transformer model that is kind of like an LLM except that instead of words or tokens, the model processes gene-expression features from single-cell RNA sequencing (scRNA-seq) data. Each cell is represented as a high-dimensional vector of gene activity levels — thousands of genes per cell. During training, the model learns to predict and reconstruct patterns of co-expression, regulation, and cell-state transitions — analogous to how LLMs learn word co-occurrence and syntax. It is an “LLM for cells”: it learns the statistical structure of biological data rather than text.
I find the wording of the Paris Agreement rather hard to keep in my head, but I do remember the bit about “in the context of sustainable development and efforts to eradicate poverty” and “in a manner that does not threaten food production” and, well, there’s something about climate too.
In the large and varied response to a memo by Bill Gates, I haven’t heard this simple fact mentioned. See e.g.
It seems relevant.
Gates’ memo – three tough truths about climate – is eloquently rebutted in the above essays (etc). You might not agree with them, but they add context that Gates left out and are all well worth a read particularly on the stuff that Gates gets wrong.
Gates has responded, sort of. And there was a panel thingy which responds to the responses and all that meta gubbins and then more responses and more. It’s all interesting, thought-provoking stuff.
The memo and some of the responses to it reflect one of the big difficulties with climate change which is the difficulty…
of imagining this world as it is.
of imagining a world very different from the one we currently live in.
of imagining many worlds that are all very different from this one and each other.
The memo is predicated on a sort of techno-optimist view of the present projected out into the future; one where innovation saves the day (but only if it makes money), more energy use is always good, AI lives up to the hype, governments keep their promises about emissions reductions1 and the climate never swerves from the median of the projections. While the future will be warmer, it will – in this view – be warmer in a manageable way.
That this future might not be quite so rosy as it seems kind of forces its way into and back out of the text. “Some outdoor work“, Gates notes breezily, “will need to pause during the hottest hours of the day, and governments will have to invest in cooling centers and better early warning systems for extreme heat and weather events.“
Equally breezy is
“Every time governments rebuild, whether it’s homes in Los Angeles or highways in Delhi, they’ll have to build smarter: fire-resistant materials, rooftop sprinklers, better land management to keep flames from spreading, and infrastructure designed to withstand harsh winds and heavy rainfall.“
Every time governments rebuild <gestures airily>
In another example,
“What happens to the number of projected deaths from climate change when you account for the expected economic growth of low-income countries over the rest of this century? The answer: It falls by more than 50 percent.“
and what about the other 50%, Bill? The idea, I suppose, is that if they can just make enough money, they’ll all be saved. It requires a certain optimism that the world in 2100 will be a better place than it is now. Given that the whole memo is predicated on a withdrawal of aid and everything that goes with that2, it’s more hope than prediction. Also, Gates says this is “deaths from climate change” but it’s not, it’s just temperature-related mortality – just one of the many ways that climate change might kill you – so there’s that too.
Lurking behind his “three tough truths” therefore is an even tougher one3 which is that we might be changing the world hugely and irrevocably and the consequences will be worst for the poorest and, because climate is everywhere always, there’s no escaping it. Climate sensitivity might be higher than the median4, tipping points might actually get tipped5. Even within the neatly circumscribed and well-behaved future Gates lays out, we still have to consider sea level rise that changes coastlines forever, flooding of megacities, and… pausing during the hottest hours of the day and fleeing to the cooling centres when the sirens sound.
I suppose Gates could come back and say that climate activists have failed to imagine the technical sophistication of the future and don’t give enough credit to the extraordinary capacity of human innovation and adaptability. He’s already suggested that his critics lack the imagination necessary to see that with the cuts in aid, “tough” choices need to be made, or to grasp the misery of the hundreds of millions living in extreme poverty around the world today.
This is where most of the criticism hits: Gates just accepts that there’s less money as if that weren’t something that could be changed, as if it had nothing to do with the concentration of the concentration of wealth in the hands of a tiny number of people like himself, people who see the world as something to be directed in their own interests. In this view, Gates gets maximum props for actually caring about poverty – widely considered a good thing – but it all happens within the sphere that treats hecto-billionaires as a good thing, a point on which there is far less agreement.
My favourite bit of Gates’ memo is the little epilogue about another memo he wrote concerning the need for Microsoft to embrace the internet. The memo is quite a read from the vantage point of 2025 but as a metaphor for the current situation, I guess it works just fine: a lack of actual vision coupled with various musing about how to grab as much of it as possible for himself, all of which led to nothing of actual lasting value6 and was, in fact, a template for the whole crappy tech hellscape we have today.
-fin-
* on the other hand, according to at least one study, you are less likely to be poisoned.
It’s remarkable, the people you’ll hear from. Teach for even a little while at an expensive institution—the term they tend to prefer is “elite”—and odds are that eventually someone who was a student there, who maybe resided only on the far periphery of your professional orbit, will become one or another kind of famous. At that point, out of the vast and silent ether, messages will come glowing into your inbox one after another. Do you remember this person? they will say. Was he your student? Did you work with him? We’re hoping for some insight—would it be possible for us to talk for a bit?
I taught at a place called Bowdoin College for 16 years, and during the last of those there was a student in attendance you’ve perhaps heard of. His name is Zohran Mamdani. And so, shortly after his startling, spirit-lifting victory in the primary last spring, the gentle flood of inquiries commenced. Word had gotten out not only that he went to Bowdoin—again, a very pricey, very wealthy, quite comprehensively the-thing-that-it-is small liberal arts college on the East Coast—but that, while there, he had majored in something called “Africana Studies.” You can probably see where this is going.
The first few messages wondered if I knew him (I don’t think I did, though I certainly had students who did, and do), if I taught him (possibly? but in truth not that I remembered), but mostly if I could say something about what he might have been reading and doing and studying, there in his time at this little college on the coast of Maine. More than once, the name “Frantz Fanon” was broached—which had the virtue of certain hand-showing clarity.
It gives me no joy to admit that there are certain kinds of professors who love little more than seeing their names in the paper. It’s not great, but there it is. (These are often the same sorts of people who will drop into an otherwise ordinaryish conversation phrases like, “No sure it’s like when I was teaching that big lecture class, to my students at Yale University…”) But I like to think even they would’ve been able to spot the coiled wires and rusty springs of this particular trap.
Beneath its humdrum requests, every email said more or less the same thing: Can you explain how reading certain things can turn a person into a socialist—and, possibly, a terrorist-sympathizing antisemite? It’s a storied gambit of the right at its most grimly predictable. “People read Foucault,” the redoubtable David Brooks once wrote, in an actual column that I’ve all but committed to memory, “and develop an alienated view of the world.” God, did I love this. An “alienated view of the world”! Not by, like, trying to pay rent or having an insurance claim denied—no, no, it was probably the Foucault you read in 2003. Anyway, it was clearly time to get the elaborate machinery of manufactured bewilderment and sour indignation up and running again.
The storied choice between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely clear a good many years ago in the United States, and both major parties chose barbarism.
But then something strange happened. Some time after the initial rush died down, I got a message that seemed at least marginally less disreputable. A writer at the Times contacted me to talk. He said he was less interested in Mamdani himself than he was in the Africana Studies part—a department of which, for a handful of years back at Bowdoin, I was indeed chair. This was a kind of dilemma.
On the one hand, like a lot of my friends and peers I think it’s wise to decline speaking to the Times on principle. The reasons aren’t especially obscure: Palestine superabundantly, but also decades of hyper-sensationalizing crime reporting, the neverending centrist stooge’ing, all the unparody-able rest of it. On the other, though, this was not a request to write but to contribute something in the way of context, knowledge even, and I did in fact have some legit expertise on the question of Africana Studies, a discipline about which I have a lot of detailed, informed, enthusiastically ratifying things to say.
Then too there was a whole other set of incentives. It’s fair to say that, former student of mine or not, I’ve loved Mamdani’s campaign, and loved in particular the glad-hearted and admirably steady way he’s brought what not that long ago would have been absolutely ordinary social-democratic priorities (in respect to affordability, housing, health, food, education) back into the realm of mainstream political discourse.
For some time I’ve been saying that the storied choice between socialism and barbarism was made exquisitely clear a good many years ago in the United States, and both major parties chose barbarism. They are obviously and consequentially different barbarisms—one had reproductive freedom, vaccines, and trans health care in it, at least for a while—and I can tell you why I have sincerely preferred one to the other. But we oughtn’t to kid ourselves. From the perspective of a world of increasingly unimaginable maldistribution of resources, cascading ecological collapse, a genocide cheered on by a putatively liberal order, both are barbarisms. Mamdani seemed to me a small glimmering break in the wall of all that. A part of me wanted to do him a solid.
And so, after consulting with friends a little more media-seasoned than I, and exchanging some emails with the reporter laying out what I was and wasn’t interested in speaking about, I agreed to an interview. I did this because, in ways you might think I’d have outgrown by now, I’m a fucking idiot.
*
As it happened, the reporter and I never spoke. We made an appointment that he missed, and because my current job is something of a bureaucratic black hole, I wasn’t able to clear another time to talk. I did write him a longish message about Africana Studies, and he did speak with at least two of my former colleagues (who, bless them, acquitted themselves more than admirably). And he managed to write that story, which appeared in the Times less than a week before the mayoral election, under the anodyne title “How a Small Elite College Influenced Mamdani’s World View.” It’s a wreck, but of a form so pure, so purely Timesian, you almost have to admire it. It certainly is instructive.
Here’s the pitch:
Mr. Mamdani graduated in 2014 from Bowdoin College, in Brunswick, Maine, with a bachelor’s degree in Africana studies. And his experience there—readings of critical race theorists in the classroom and activism for left-wing causes on campus—is emblematic of the highly charged debate over what is taught in American universities.
Critics say the growth of these programs, which aim to teach about historical events from the perspective of marginalized and oppressed groups, has turned colleges into feckless workshops for leftist political orthodoxy.
“Critics say” is the tell, and does it ever go on telling. First, note that this criticism (“Majors like Africana studies, or any of its siblings such as women’s studies, these critics charge, promote a worldview that sees little to admire in American history. Some disparagingly call the entire field ‘grievance studies’”) gives to the article the whole of its contrapuntal structure of argument: these scholars and teachers say Mr. Mamdani’s education is substantial, yet critics say something else. But then note as well that this counter-position is substantiated, in its length and breadth, by: J. D. Vance and the National Association of Scholars (NAS), the former a man whose fervid anti-intellectualism needs no introduction, the latter a conservative 501(c)3 flush with money from the Olin, Bradly, and Castle Rock Foundations, and more lately affiliated with the Heritage Foundation and its delirious “Project 2025” document. The author refers to the group as “conservative-leaning,” which, ok. I guess you could say Latvia was a little antisemitic-leaning during the war.
What you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling “appraisal” surgically excised.
It was this very NAS who, back in 2013, issued a white paper about the decadence and depravity of Bowdoin College particularly, clutching at pearls by the ropefull in objection to the college’s justice-forward curricula, its alleged diminishment of the classical virtues, the bare existence of something called “queer studies.” (Full disclosure: I was, in my full-throttle commitment to destroying those heralded civilizational virtues, also chair of the Program in Gay and Lesbian Studies for a while there.) It for sure made a sort of splash when it appeared, although the Times author does not note it did so chiefly by gathering around itself pleasing and extensive ridicule, most all of it on the grounds of being a bathetically unscholarly corporate-sponsored piece of risible chaff. The great Gawker headline summed it all up best: “Conservative Scholar’s Investigation Says Bowdoin College is Awesome,” it read, which I can say was much appreciated in the hallways of the college back then.
For all that, I read last week’s Times piece with a genuine sinking of heart, though not because it was especially unforeseen or even because it will have any serious effect, either on Bowdoin or on Mamdani himself, whose path to decisive victory went on quite undiverted. The gall, you could say, had a different savor.
When writing to a journalist friend, I just said that it’s a bit unravelling, right now, to be on the receiving end of this kind of belated real-time education in elite metabolization. Like so many other bits of Times coverage, the whole of the piece is structured as an orchestrated encounter. Some people say this; however, others say this. It’s so offhand you can think you’re gazing through a pane of glass. Only when you stand a little closer, or when circumstances make you a little less blinkered, do you notice the fact which then becomes blinding and finally crazymaking, which is just that there is zero, less than zero, stress put on the relation between those two “sides,” or their histories, or their sponsors, or their relative evidentiary authority, or any of it. Instead, what you get is a piece making the various more or less bovine noises of studious grey-lady impartiality, with the labor of anything resembling “appraisal” surgically excised.
One can take some comfort, I suppose, from the sense that, in this instance at least, the stakes were pretty low. Unlike the austerity-battered and enormous urban working-class university where I now teach, Bowdoin is a preposterously rich school, beloved by and to the planetary ruling classes, and they’ll be fine. Shed no tears for the place, or for what is functionally a bit of prestige-media advertising, unlikely even in its most churlish moments to discourage any of its chosen demographic from applying. As for Mamdani, he cruised to a victory that was no less resounding, and no less heartlifting, for being achieved in the teeth of so much unhinged hatefulness.
But that comfort wears thin pretty quickly, and I imagine you can see why. In contexts not concerning the elite private colleges of New England and their decades-old conflicts and syllabi and on-campus squabbles, this mode of prestige media procedure matters absolutely and enormously, at scales difficult to tabulate. It’s not hard to call them all to mind: “Climate change is increasingly lethal, though critics say… it is not.” Or, “Israel is murdering journalists in Gaza at historically unprecedented rates, though critics say… it is not.” Or, “Trans people claim to be real, though critics say…”
Every bit of this is disheartening on its face. But it’s actually worse than any first-blush irritation, that familiar annoyance that comes from encountering still another textbook exercise in witless triangulation. Because what this sort of reporting ultimately means is that if you have enough money to get somebody, anybody, to produce a white paper for you, which you can then put on some think-tank stationery? Then, my friend, you are ready to enter into the rushing current of elite reportage. For no matter how unhinged the position you’ve taken, or paid someone marginally credentialed to sketch out on your behalf—“Can Woman Think?: We Investigate,” “Is the Negro a Man: A Reconsideration”—that opinion will, by virtue of such provenance, possess all needed evidentiary gravity for the Times. And then some. (Only yesterday the Times ran this actual story, which is not parody.)
It’s all a bit humiliating—or it is for me. Because I did take time for this reporter, despite my misgivings. I even went so far as to write my thoughts out for him, on the chance they might be clarifying or useful. “The first thing to say,” I told him, “is that Africana Studies at Bowdoin is less a singular pursuit than a suite of scholarly disciplines, condensed around a set of objects and questions.” And then, warming to the pedagogical project, I talked about anthropology, art and architecture, music, religion, the history of science, whole grand traditions of invention and resolve. I talk about James Weldon Johnson, and Gwendolyn Brooks, and Charles Chestnutt, and Nella Larsen, and Hortense Spillers, and a good deal else and I mean… would you listen to how pathetic that all sounds?
I read it over now with this kind of full-spectrum cringe of the spirit. It’s the rattle of a person going on and professorially on, quite as if the substance of a discipline, or its intellectual trajectory, or even just the nourishing joy of sustained and serious study, mattered at all to the person he was talking to, or to the majestic institution he represents. And honestly, what could be more feeble?
It’s not that those things don’t matter: they absolutely goddamn do, and will keep on mattering, and I wouldn’t go on with the whole tedious business of teaching if I thought otherwise. It’s just that they never mattered much to the Times and they are, to appearances, mattering less and less by the day. I should remember that, and so should you.
lol "bovine noises". I'm re-reading Sally Mann's memoir Hold Still right now, and she quotes Janet Malcolm's "wry assessment of the journalistic subject [from] her provocative book The Journalist and the Murderer: 'Like the young Aztec men and women selected for sacrifice, who lived in delightful ease and luxury until the appointed day when their hearts were to be carved from their chests, journalistic subjects know all too well what awaits them when the days of wine and roses -- the days of interviews -- are over. And still they say yes when a journalist calls, and still they are astonished when they see the flash of the knife.'" I'm glad this author had a sense of the glint, was spared deus ex schedule, AND shared their perspective afterward.
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