One month to the day before the 2024 presidential election, The New York Times reported on a new analysis of how Americans spend their time. More and more of the average American’s day is being spent at home: one hour and 39 minutes more in 2022 than in 2003. For each extra hour at home, a bit of it was spent with family—7.4 minutes. More of it, 21 minutes, was spent alone.

Obviously, because of the coronavirus pandemic, time at home spiked in 2020. Some of this homebody impulse may well be the stubborn persistence of habits formed during the isolating early days of lockdown. But this trend is more than just a pandemic hangover. For years before COVID-19 hit, time spent alone had been increasing as time spent socializing had been decreasing. Though solitude and loneliness are not the same, this downturn in social connection happened alongside a rise in loneliness so pronounced that the surgeon general called it an epidemic.

And now this: the reelection to the nation’s highest office of Donald Trump, a man who has attacked the very idea of a communal, democratic form of government, and who has indicated that he aspires to move the United States toward autocracy—auto, of course, meaning “self,” and autocracy being the concentration of power for and within the self. Self over others is one of Trump’s defining principles. In his first term as president, he used an office intended for public service to enrich himself. He has vowed to use it this time to take revenge on his enemies and—“within two seconds” of taking office—to fire the special counsel overseeing criminal cases against him.

Yet self over others, or at the very least self before others, has long been a prominent aspect of American culture—not always to Trumpian levels, certainly, but individualism for better and worse shapes both the structure of society and our personal lives. And it will surely shape Americans’ responses to the election: for the winners, perhaps, self-congratulation; for the losers, the risk of allowing despair to pull them into a deeper, more dangerous seclusion. On Election Day, the Times published an article on voters’ plans to manage stress. Two separate people in that story said they were deliberately avoiding social settings. To extend that strategy into the next four years would be a mistake.

[Read: Don’t give up on America]

In 1831, the French aristocrat Alexis de Tocqueville traveled to the United States. He observed and analyzed its people and culture, and published his thoughts in a massive two-volume report called Democracy in America. Alongside his praise for the country’s professed value of equality—which he wrote “possesses all the characteristics of a divine decree”—he warned of the individualism he saw as baked into American society and the isolation it could cause. “Each man is forever thrown back on himself alone,” he wrote, “and there is danger that he may be shut up in the solitude of his own heart.”

More than a century and a half later, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life, a sociological book by five scholars, followed explicitly in Tocqueville’s footsteps, examining how individualism affects institutions and personal relationships in the United States. Published in 1985, it reads today as wildly prescient. The authors feared that the danger Tocqueville described had already come to pass. “It seems to us,” they wrote, “that it is individualism, and not equality, as Tocqueville thought, that has marched inexorably through our history. We are concerned that this individualism may have grown cancerous … that it may be threatening the survival of freedom itself.”

Tempering American individualism, in Tocqueville’s view, was Americans’ propensity to form associations and participate in civic life. “These he saw as moderating the isolating tendencies of private ambition on one hand and limiting the despotic proclivities of government on the other,” the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote. But American associational life began hollowing out starting in the 1960s and ’70s, as people became less and less likely to attend any kind of club, league, church, or other community organization (a shift that Robert Putnam documented in his 2000 book, Bowling Alone). Since the late ’70s, faith in large-scale institutions such as organized religion, organized labor, the media, and the U.S. government has also been dwindling; in 2023, Gallup declared it “historically low.”

A few months ago I spoke with Ann Swidler, one of the authors of Habits of the Heart. “We obviously did not succeed in having things go the direction we might have hoped,” she told me. “I would say that every horrible thing we worried about has gotten worse.” Americans are spending measurably more time shut up in the solitude of their homes, and perhaps in the solitude of their own hearts as well.

It might be difficult to imagine the renaissance of many civic associations—the kind that could be good for both democracy and our relationships—given that a majority of Americans just voted for a man who has little interest in or respect for institutions beyond what they can do for him. If autocracy is indeed where the country is headed, Tocqueville’s prediction regarding our relationships is not a positive one. As he wrote in The Old Regime and the Revolution, his book on the French revolution:

Despotism does not combat this tendency [toward individualism]; on the contrary, it renders it irresistible, for it deprives citizens of all common passions, mutual necessities, need of a common understanding, opportunity for combined action: it ripens them, so to speak, in private life. They had a tendency to hold themselves aloof from each other: it isolates them. They looked coldly on each other: it freezes their souls.

If individualism is, as the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote, “the first language in which Americans tend to think about their lives,” it makes sense that people would reach for their mother tongue in times of upheaval. In the days after the 2016 election, for example, searches for the term self-care spiked. Caring for yourself takes different forms, of course, though in mainstream culture, self-care is commonly used to mean treating yourself, by yourself. Self-soothing, alone. (One can see in this echoes of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay “Self-Reliance”: “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.”)

But caring for yourself doesn’t always have to breed isolation. Among activists and in the helping professions, self-care is often talked about as a way to restore people so that they don’t burn out and can continue their altruistic work. Some in these circles critique a focus on self-care as distracting from the need for institutional support. But the overall conception at least shows an understanding of the two types of care as having a symbiotic relationship: Care for the self so that you can show up for others.

[Read: Focus on the things that matter]

What’s more, caring for others is a form of self-care. Research shows that doing things for other people leads to greater well-being than trying to make yourself happy or indulging yourself. This is not to say there is no place for self-soothing or solitude, or for buying yourself a little treat. But it is to challenge the cultural message that turtling up alone is the most appropriate response to difficult feelings.

Under an administration for which (to paraphrase my colleague Adam Serwer) cruelty, not care, is the point, it falls to people to care for one another on scales small and large. This task is made harder not just by the cultural pressure for Americans to rely only on themselves but also by the slow, steady atrophying of the muscles of togetherness. “American individualism resists more adult virtues, such as care and generativity, let alone wisdom,” the authors of Habits of the Heart wrote. The inverse, I hope, is true too: that care and generativity—working to make contributions to a collective future—are the path to resisting hyper-individualism and isolation.

Even if turning inward is a big-picture trend, it is, of course, not the only development happening. As isolating as the pandemic lockdown was, those years saw the rise of mutual-aid groups determined to care for the vulnerable whether the government did or not. During the first Trump administration, mass protests broke out; people fought for women’s rights and an end to racist police brutality. People are always showing up for one another in quiet, everyday ways too. Building networks of support and commitment could provide some small buffer against the effects of a self-serving president-elect’s policies while keeping people from drifting further apart.

Americans’ skills of connection and care are not lost. But they are rusty. And all of us will need those skills if we are to find a way to turn toward one another instead of inward. I’m not even talking about overcoming political polarization or reaching out to build bridges with strangers who voted differently than you did. Those are tasks that people won’t be equipped to tackle if they’re struggling to show up for the loved ones already in their life. For now, it is enough of a challenge to attempt to reverse the isolationist inertia of decades. It is enough of a challenge to resist what has become a cultural tendency to withdraw, while also processing the stress of an election that has left many people exhausted and deeply afraid for the future. How do we proceed over the next four years? Not alone. How do we proceed over the next week, hour, minute? Not alone.

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Over the past several years, courageous Americans have risked their careers and perhaps even their liberty in an effort to stop Donald Trump’s return to power. Our collective failure to avoid that result now gives Trump an opportunity to exact revenge on them. President Joe Biden, in the remaining two months of his term in office, can and must prevent this by using one of the most powerful tools available to the president: the pardon power.

The risk of retribution is very real. One hallmark of Trump’s recently completed campaign was his regular calls for vengeance against his enemies. Over the past few months, he has said, for example, that Liz Cheney was a traitor. He’s also said that she is a “war hawk.” “Let’s put her with a rifle standing there with nine barrels shooting at her,” he said. Likewise, Trump has floated the idea of executing General Mark Milley, calling him treasonous. Meanwhile, Trump has identified his political opponents and the press as “enemies of the people” and has threatened his perceived enemies with prosecution or punishment more than 100 times. There can be little doubt that Trump has an enemies list, and the people on it are in danger—most likely legal, though I shudder to think of other possibilities.

Biden has the unfettered power to issue pardons, and he should use it liberally. He should offer pardons, in addition to Cheney and Milley, to all of Trump’s most prominent opponents: Republican critics, such as Adam Kinzinger, who put country before party to tell the truth about January 6; their Democratic colleagues from the House special committee; military leaders such as Jim Mattis, H. R. McMaster, and William McRaven; witnesses to Trump’s conduct who worked for him and have since condemned him, including Miles Taylor, Olivia Troye, Alyssa Farah Griffin, Cassidy Hutchinson, and Sarah Matthews; political opponents such as Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff; and others who have been vocal in their negative views, such as George Conway and Bill Kristol.  

[Mark Leibovich: In praise of clarity]

The power to pardon is grounded in Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, which gives a nearly unlimited power to the president. It says the president “shall have Power to grant Reprieves and Pardons for Offences against the United States, except in Cases of Impeachment.” That’s it. A president’s authority to pardon is pretty much without limitation as to reason, subject, scope, or timing.  

Historically, for example, Gerald Ford gave Richard Nixon a “full, free, and absolute pardon” for any offense that he “has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974.” If Biden were willing, he could issue a set of pardons similar in scope and form to Trump’s critics, and they would be enforced by the courts as a protection against retaliation.

There are, naturally, reasons to be skeptical of this approach. First, one might argue that pardons are unnecessary. After all, the argument would go, none of the people whom Trump might target have actually done anything wrong. They are innocent of anything except opposing Trump, and the judicial system will protect them.

This argument is almost certainly correct; the likelihood of a jury convicting Liz Cheney of a criminal offense is laughably close to zero. But a verdict of innocence does not negate the harm that can be done. In a narrow, personal sense, Cheney would be exonerated. But along the way she would no doubt suffer—the reputational harm of indictment, the financial harm of having to defend herself, and the psychic harm of having to bear the pressure of an investigation and charges.

In the criminal-justice system, prosecutors and investigators have a cynical but accurate way of describing this: “You can beat the rap, but you can’t beat the ride.” By this they mean that even the costs of ultimate victory tend to be very high. Biden owes it to Trump’s most prominent critics to save them from that burden.

More abstractly, the inevitable societal impact of politicized prosecutions will be to deter criticism. Not everyone has the strength of will to forge ahead in the face of potential criminal charges, and Trump’s threats have the implicit purpose of silencing his opposition. Preventing these prosecutions would blunt those threats. The benefit is real, but limited—a retrospective pardon cannot, after all, protect future dissent, but as a symbol it may still have significant value.

A second reason for skepticism involves whether a federal pardon is enough protection. Even a pardon cannot prevent state-based investigations. Nothing is going to stop Trump from pressuring his state-level supporters, such as Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, to use their offices for his revenge. And they, quite surely, will be accommodating.

But finding state charges will be much more difficult, if only because most of the putative defendants may never have visited a particular state. More important, even if there is some doubt about the efficaciousness of federal pardons, that is no reason to eschew the step. Make Trump’s abuse of power more difficult in every way you can.

The third and final objection is, to my mind at least, the most substantial and meritorious—that a president pardoning his political allies is illegitimate and a transgression of American political norms.   

Although that is, formally, an accurate description of what Biden would be doing, to me any potential Biden pardons are distinct from what has come before. When Trump pardoned his own political allies, such as Steve Bannon, the move was widely (and rightly) regarded as a significant divergence from the rule of law, because it protected them from criminal prosecutions that involved genuine underlying criminality. By contrast, a Biden pardon would short-circuit bad-faith efforts by Trump to punish his opponents with frivolous claims of wrongdoing.

[Daniel Block: The Democrats’ Senate nightmare is only beginning]

Still, pardons from Biden would be another step down the unfortunate road of politicizing the rule of law. It is reasonable to argue that Democrats should forgo that step, that one cannot defend norms of behavior by breaking norms of behavior.

Perhaps that once was true, but no longer. For the past eight years, while Democrats have held their fire and acted responsibly, Trump has destroyed almost every vestige of behavioral limits on his exercises of power. It has become painfully self-evident that Democratic self-restraint is a form of unilateral disarmament that neither persuades Trump to refrain from bad behavior nor wins points among the undecided. It is time—well past time—for responsible Democrats to use every tool in their tool kit.

What cannot be debated is that Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris owe a debt not just of gratitude but of loyalty to those who are now in Trump’s investigative sights. They have a moral and ethical obligation to do what they can to protect those who have taken a great risk trying to stop Trump. If that means a further diminution of legal norms, that is unfortunate, but it is not Biden’s fault; the cause is Trump’s odious plans and those who support them.

The Donald Trump who campaigned in 2024 would not have won in 2016. It’s not just that his rhetoric is more serrated now than it was then; it’s that he has a record of illicit behavior today that he didn’t have then.

Trump wasn’t a felon eight years ago; he is now. He wasn’t an adjudicated sexual abuser then; he is now. He hadn’t yet encouraged civic violence to overturn an election or encouraged a mob to hang his vice president. He hadn’t yet called people who stormed the Capitol “great patriots” or closed his campaign talking about the penis size of Arnold Palmer. He hadn’t extorted an ally to dig up dirt on his political opponent or been labeled a “fascist to the core” by his former top military adviser.

But America is different now than it was at the dawn of the Trump era. Trump isn’t only winning politically; he is winning culturally in shaping America’s manners and mores. More than any other person in the country, Trump—who won more than 75 million votes—can purport to embody the American ethic. He’s right to have claimed a mandate on the night of his victory; he has one, at least for now. He can also count on his supporters to excuse anything he does in the future, just as they have excused everything he has done in the past.

It’s little surprise, then, that many critics of Trump are weary and despondent. On Sunday, my wife and I spoke with a woman whose ex-husband abused her; as we talked, she broke into tears, wounded and stunned that Americans had voted for a man who was himself a well-known abuser. The day before, I had received a text from a friend who works as a family therapist. She had spent the past few evenings, she wrote, “with female victims of sexual abuse by powerful and wealthy men. Hearing their heartbreak and re-traumatizing because we just elected a president who bragged about assaulting women because he can, and then found guilty by a jury of his peers for doing just that. And then they see their family and neighbors celebrate a victory.”

The preliminary data show that Trump won the support of about 80 percent of white evangelicals. “How can I ever walk into an evangelical church again?” one person who has long been a part of the evangelical world asked me a few days ago.

[McKay Coppins: Triumph of the cynics]

I’ve heard from friends who feel as though their life’s work is shattering before their eyes. Others who have been critical of Trump are considering leaving the public arena. They are asking themselves why they should continue to speak out against Trump’s moral transgressions for the next four years when it didn’t make any difference the past four (or eight) years. It’s not worth the hassle, they’ve concluded: the unrelenting attacks, the death threats, or the significant financial costs.

So much of MAGA world thrives on conflict, on feeling aggrieved, on seeking vengeance. Most of the rest of us do not. Why continue to fight against what he stands for? If Trump is the man Americans chose to be their president, if his values and his conduct are ones they’re willing to tolerate or even embrace, so be it.

And even those who resolve to stay in the public arena will be tempted to mute themselves when Trump acts maliciously. We tried that for years, they’ll tell themselves, and it was like shooting BBs against a brick wall. It’s time to do something else.

I understand that impulse. For those who have borne the brunt of hate, withdrawing from the fight and moving on to other things is an understandable choice. For everything there is a season. Yet I cannot help but fear, too, that Trump will ultimately win by wearing down his opposition, as his brutal ethic slowly becomes normalized.

So how should those who oppose Trump, especially those of us who have been fierce critics of Trump—and I was among the earliest and the most relentless—think about this moment?

First, we must remind ourselves of the importance of truth telling, of bearing moral witness, of calling out lies. Countless people, famous and unknown, have told the truth in circumstances far more arduous and dangerous than ours. One of them is the Russian author and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. “To stand up for truth is nothing,” he wrote. “For truth, you must sit in jail. You can resolve to live your life with integrity. Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me.” The simple step a courageous individual must take is to decline to take part in the lie, he said. “One word of truth outweighs the world.” A word of truth can sustain others by encouraging them, by reminding them that they’re not alone and that honor is always better than dishonor.

Second, we need to guard our souls. The challenge for Trump critics is to call Trump out when he acts cruelly and unjustly without becoming embittered, cynical, or fatalistic ourselves. People will need time to process what it means that Americans elected a man of borderless corruption and sociopathic tendencies. But we shouldn’t add to the ranks of those who seem purposeless without an enemy to target, without a culture war to fight. We should acknowledge when Trump does the right thing, or when he rises above his past. And even if he doesn’t, unsparing and warranted condemnation of Trump and MAGA world shouldn’t descend into hate. There’s quite enough of that already.

In his book Civility, the Yale professor Stephen L. Carter wrote, “The true genius of Martin Luther King, Jr. was not in his ability to articulate the pain of an oppressed people—many other preachers did so, with as much passion and as much power—but in his ability to inspire those very people to be loving and civil in their dissent.”

Third, the Democratic Party, which for the time being is the only alternative to the Trump-led, authoritarian-leaning GOP, needs to learn from its loss. The intraparty recriminations among Democrats, stunned at the results of the election, are ferocious.   

My view aligns with that of my Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch, who told me that “this election mainly reaffirms voters’ anti-incumbent sentiment—not only in the U.S. but also abroad (Japan/Germany). In 2020, Biden and the Democrats were the vehicle to punish the incumbent party; in 2016 and again in 2024, Trump and the Republicans were the vehicle. Wash, rinse, repeat.” But that doesn’t mean that a party defeated in two of the previous three presidential elections by Trump, one of the most unpopular and broadly reviled figures to ever win the presidency, doesn’t have to make significant changes.

There is precedent—in the Democratic Party, which suffered titanic defeats in 1972, 1980, 1984, and 1988, and in the British Labour Party, which was decimated in the 1980s and the early ’90s. In both cases, the parties engaged in the hard work of ideological renovation and produced candidates, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair, who put in place a new intellectual framework that connected their parties to a public they had alienated. They confronted old attitudes, changed the way their parties thought, and found ways to signal that change to the public. Both won dominant victories. The situation today is, of course, different from the one Clinton and Blair faced; the point is that the Democratic Party has to be open to change, willing to reject the most radical voices within its coalition, and able to find ways to better connect to non-elites. The will to change needs to precede an agenda of change.

Fourth, Trump critics need to keep this moment in context. The former and future president is sui generis; he is, as the Pulitzer Prize–winning historian Jon Meacham put it, “a unique threat to constitutional government.” He is also bent on revenge. But America has survived horrific moments, such as the Civil War, and endured periods of horrific injustice, including the eras of slavery, Redemption, and segregation. The American story is an uneven one.

I anticipate that Trump’s victory will inflict consequential harm on our country, and some of it may be irreparable. But it’s also possible that the concerns I have had about Trump, which were realized in his first term, don’t come to pass in his second term. And even if they do, America will emerge significantly weakened but not broken. Low moments need not be permanent moments.

[Rogé Karma: The two Donald Trumps]

The Trump era will eventually end. Opportunities will arise, including unexpected ones, and maybe even a few favorable inflection points. It’s important to have infrastructure and ideas in place when they do. As Yuval Levin of the American Enterprise Institute told me, “We have to think about America’s challenges and opportunities in ways that reach beyond that point. Engagement in public life and public policy has to be about those challenges and opportunities, about the country we love, more than any particular politician, good or bad.”  

It's important, too, that we draw boundaries where we can. We shouldn’t ignore Trump, but neither should we obsess over him. We must do what we can to keep him from invading sacred spaces. Intense feelings about politics in general, and Trump in particular, have divided families and split churches. We need to find ways to heal divisions without giving up on what the theologian Thomas Merton described as cutting through “great tangled knots of lies.” It’s a difficult balance to achieve.

Fifth, all of us need to cultivate hope, rightly understood. The great Czech playwright (and later president of the Czech Republic) Václav Havel, in Disturbing the Peace, wrote that hope isn’t detached from circumstances, but neither is it prisoner to circumstances. The kind of hope he had in mind is experienced “above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.” It is a dimension of soul, he said, “an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, according to Havel; it is “the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Hope properly understood keeps us above water; it urges us to do good works, even in hard times.

In June 1966, Robert F. Kennedy undertook a five-day trip to South Africa during the worst years of apartheid. In the course of his trip, he delivered one of his most memorable speeches, at the University of Cape Town.

During his address, he spoke about the need to “recognize the full human equality of all of our people—before God, before the law, and in the councils of government.” He acknowledged the “wide and tragic gaps” between great ideals and reality, including in America, with our ideals constantly recalling us to our duties. Speaking to young people in particular, he warned about “the danger of futility; the belief there is nothing one man or one woman can do against the enormous array of the world’s ills—against misery, against ignorance, or injustice and violence.” Kennedy urged people to have the moral courage to enter the conflict, to fight for their ideals. And using words that would later be engraved on his gravestone at Arlington National Cemetery, he said this:

Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.  

No figure of Kennedy’s stature had ever visited South Africa to make the case against institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination. The trip had an electric effect, especially on Black South Africans, giving them hope that they were not alone, that the outside world knew and cared about their struggle for equality. “He made us feel, more than ever, that it was worthwhile, despite our great difficulties, for us to fight for the things we believed in,” one Black journalist wrote of Kennedy; “that justice, freedom and equality for all men are things we should strive for so that our children should have a better life.”

Pressure from both within and outside South Africa eventually resulted in the end of apartheid. In 1994, Nelson Mandela, who had been imprisoned at Robben Island during Kennedy’s visit because of his anti-apartheid efforts, was elected the first Black president of South Africa.

There is a timelessness to what Kennedy said in Cape Town three generations ago. Striking out against injustice is always right; it always matters. That was true in South Africa in the 1960s. It is true in America today.

Photographs by Jeff Brown

Until 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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A note from Tom:

As we were about to publish this newsletter, Donald Trump announced that he has asked the Fox News personality Pete Hegseth, a military veteran who has no experience in leading large organizations and no serious background as a senior leader in national-security affairs, to be his secretary of defense. This is exactly the kind of unqualified nomination that I was warning could be looming after this first group of nominees were announced—and it explains why Trump is determined to bypass the U.S. Senate to get some of his nominees confirmed. I will have more to say about Hegseth soon.

So far, the new Trump administration has a chief of staff, a “border czar,” and a national security adviser; all three are White House positions controlled by the president. Donald Trump has also reportedly named six people to senior positions that require Senate confirmation: secretary of state, United Nations ambassador, secretary of homeland security, secretary of defense, CIA director, and administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. (He has also chosen an ambassador to Israel.) His first picks are neither very surprising nor very impressive, but this is only the beginning.

His co–campaign manager Susie Wiles will make White House history by becoming the first female chief of staff. People around Trump seem relieved at this appointment, but she’ll likely be saddled with Stephen Miller as a deputy, which could get interesting because Miller apparently has a tendency to get out of his lane. (According to a book by the New York Times reporter Michael Bender, Miller attended a tense meeting that included Trump, Attorney General Bill Barr, and General Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during the Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. As the nation’s leaders debated what to do, Miller interjected and said that America’s major cities had been turned into war zones. General Milley, Bender writes, turned to Miller, pointed at him, and said: “Shut the fuck up, Stephen.”)

The rest of the appointments are unsurprising, given the limited pool of Republicans willing to serve in another Trump administration. (Some Trump loyalists such as Senator Tom Cotton have reportedly declined a role in the administration, likely protecting their future for the 2028 GOP race to succeed Trump.) Marco Rubio, who sits on the Foreign Relations and Intelligence Committees in the Senate, was a reasonable choice among the Trump coterie to become America’s top diplomat as secretary of state.

Likewise, Representative Mike Waltz of Florida is a reasonable choice for national security adviser—but again, that’s in the context of the now-smaller universe of national-security conservatives in politics or academia willing to work for Trump at this point. He is a veteran, and like Rubio, he has served on relevant committees in Congress, including Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. Waltz may be a credible voice on national security, but he was also a 2020 election denier. He pledged to oppose certifying Joe Biden’s 2020 win and signed on to an amicus brief supporting a Texas lawsuit to overturn the election. He changed his mind—but only after the events of January 6.

Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, meanwhile, was bound to be rewarded for her loyalty. Although Vice President–elect J. D. Vance took the gold in the race to replace the disowned Mike Pence, Stefanik was a comer even by the standards of the sycophantic circle around Trump, and so she’ll head to the United Nations, a low-priority post for Trump and a GOP that has little use for the institution. A former member of Congress from New York, Lee Zeldin (who was defeated in the 2022 New York governor’s race) will head up the EPA, another institution hated by MAGA Republicans, thus making Zeldin’s weak—or strong, depending on your view—legislative record on environmental issues a good fit for this administration.

This afternoon, Trump announced that John Ratcliffe will serve as CIA director. Ratcliffe previously served as director of national intelligence and will now be in a post that is functionally subordinate to his old job. Ratcliffe is a reliable partisan but an unreliable intelligence chief. The most baffling move Trump has made so far is the appointment of South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem to lead the Department of Homeland Security. Noem served four terms in Congress and is in her second as governor. She has very little relevant experience, especially as a government executive. (South Dakota might be a big place, but it’s a small state; DHS has more than 260,000 employees, making it a bit more than a quarter the size of the entire population of Noem’s home state.) DHS is a giant glob of a department—one I have long argued should never have existed in the first place and should be abolished—that has seeped across the jurisdictional lines of multiple institutions and, unlike some other Cabinet posts, requires someone with serious leadership chops.

DHS will also be central to some of Trump’s most abominable plans regarding undocumented immigrants—and, potentially, against others the president-elect views as “enemies from within.” (The “border czar” Trump has named, Tom Homan, once falsely implied that some California wildfires were worsened by an undocumented immigrant.) In that light, Noem is perfect: She is inexperienced but loyal, a political lightweight with no independent base of support or particularly long experience in Washington, and she can be counted on to do what she’s told. She will be no John Kelly or Kirstjen Nielsen, her confirmed predecessors at DHS, both of whom were on occasion willing to speak up, even if ineffectively.

This first passel of nominees should gain Senate confirmation easily, especially Rubio. (Sitting members of the chamber usually have an easier time, as do people who have close associations with the Senate.) And given Trump’s history and proclivity for mercurial and humiliating firings, few of them are likely to be very long in their post, and are probably better than the people who will later replace them.

But that in itself raises a troubling question. If Trump intends to nominate these kinds of fellow Republicans, why is he insistent that the new Senate allow him to make recess appointments?

For those of you who do not follow the arcana of American government, Article II of the Constitution includes a provision by which the president can make appointments on his own if the Senate is in recess and therefore unable to meet. The Founders didn’t think this was a controversial provision; sometimes, presidents need to keep the government running (by choosing, say, an ambassador) even when the Senate might not be around—a real problem in the days when convening the Senate could take weeks of travel. Such appointments last until the end of the next legislative session.

For obvious reasons, the Senate itself was never a big fan of a device—one that presidents routinely used—that circumvents constitutional authority to confirm executive appointments, especially once the practice got out of hand. (Bill Clinton made 139 recess appointments, George W. Bush made 171, and Barack Obama made 32.) The Senate’s response was basically to be wilier about not declaring itself in recess even when there’s no one around, and when President Obama tried to push through some of these appointments in 2012, the Supreme Court sided with the Senate.

Now Trump wants to bring back the practice. The obvious inference to draw here is that after some fairly uncontroversial nominations, he intends to nominate people who couldn’t be confirmed even in a supine and obedient Republican Senate. Perhaps this is too clever, but I am concerned that this first pass is a head fake, in which Trump nominates people he knows are controversial (such as Zeldin) but who are still confirmable, and then sends far worse candidates forward for even more important posts. Kash Patel—a man who is dangerous precisely because his only interest is serving Trump, as my colleague Elaina Plott Calabro has reported—keeps bubbling up for various intelligence posts.

“Ambassador Elise Stefanik” and “EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin” might not be great ideas, but they are not immediate threats to U.S. national security or American democracy. “CIA Director John Ratcliffe,” by contrast, is cause for serious concern. If Trump is serious about his authoritarian plans—the ones he announced at every campaign stop—then he’ll need the rest of the intelligence community, the Justice Department, and the Defense Department all under firm control.

Those are the next nominations to watch.

Related:

Trump signals that he’s serious about mass deportation. Stephen Miller is Trump’s right-hand troll. (From 2018)

Here are three new stories from The Atlantic:

The HR-ification of the Democratic Party Anne Applebaum: Putin isn’t fighting for land in Ukraine. Genetic discrimination is coming for us all.

Today’s News

The judge in Trump’s hush-money criminal case delayed his decision on whether Trump’s conviction on 34 felonies should be overturned after his reelection. A federal judge temporarily blocked a new Louisiana law that would have required the display of the Ten Commandments in all public classrooms, calling the legislation “unconstitutional on its face.” Louisiana’s attorney general said that she will appeal the ruling. The Archbishop of Canterbury announced his resignation. An independent review found that he failed to sufficiently report the late barrister John Smyth, who ran Christian summer camps and abused more than 100 boys and young men, according to the review.

Evening Read

Illustration by Mark Pernice

AI Can Save Humanity—Or End It

By Henry A. Kissinger, Eric Schmidt and Craig Mundie

The world’s strongest nation might no longer be the one with the most Albert Einsteins and J. Robert Oppenheimers. Instead, the world’s strongest nations will be those that can bring AI to its fullest potential.

But with that potential comes tremendous danger. No existing innovation can come close to what AI might soon achieve: intelligence that is greater than that of any human on the planet. Might the last polymathic invention—namely computing, which amplified the power of the human mind in a way fundamentally different from any previous machine—be remembered for replacing its own inventors?

Read the full article.

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Culture Break

The Atlantic; Getty; HBO Max

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Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.

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