Sold a Story - ‘Dyslexia and the Reading Wars’: Emily Hanford's Conversation with The New Yorker’s David Owen

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

The New Yorker staff writer David Owen opened a recent piece with a personal story: To hide that she couldn’t read, his niece turned pages when her classmates did. Owen joined Sold a Story host Emily Hanford for a live conversation about his December 2025 article “Dyslexia and the Reading Wars.” The event was part of the Eyes on Reading series at Planet Word, a museum in Washington, D.C., dedicated to words and language. Read: Transcript of this episodeWatch: All Eyes on Reading videosConnect: Sold a Story discussion guidesSupport: Donate to APM Reports Email us: [e-mail]  Call us: [phone]More: soldastory.org Dive deeper into Sold a Story with a multi-part email series from host Emily Hanford. We’ll also keep you up to date on new episodes. Sign up at soldastory.org/extracredit.

Hi, it's Emily. This is a special episode of Solda Story. We're working on Season 2 right now, and I'm really excited for you to hear it. It's a whole new story about how learning works. I couldn't believe what I was seeing. The kids were excited, and I was excited, and I thought, this is the future. If I had had that type of teaching throughout my life, I don't know where it would have taken me. I just thought something's happened here that's new that we haven't seen before

and should find out whether it can be replicated. And why research about learning often doesn't make it into classrooms. One educator is called the approach totalitarian, another horrible. There was a terrific backlash against the program. I find no evidence in the entire evaluation that they have anything special. or worthy of wide distribution. It was like a baseball bat to the head. Solda Story Season 2 is coming in September.

But today, we have something else I think you'll like. Good evening. Welcome to Planet Word. Planet Word is a museum all about words and language in Washington, D.C. I host a series of live conversations there about reading. You might have heard our last episode with teacher Margaret Goldberg and reading researcher Reed Lion. I was back at Planet Word recently

for a fascinating conversation with David Owen. He's a staff writer at The New Yorker, and in December he wrote a story called dyslexia and the reading wars. Here's our conversation. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about being a writer first, so in becoming a writer. So why are you a writer?

Or like when and how did you become one? Where does it begin? I think I pretty much always always, wanted to be a writer. After I for a while I wanted to be a secret agent. I wanted to build a mini sub. I wanted to be a soldier. I wanted to do various things. Then when I was in sixth grade, I decided I wanted to be a poet. And then also sort of also wanted to be a journalist editing school newspapers and things like that. And when I got a little older, I realized that I was sort of concerned to see that all the contemporary poets that I admire seem to be mentally ill.

And I thought, I could solve myself, I think, well, maybe I'll become mentally ill at a later date. But eventually, it seemed it's almost like a part of the job description. But then I sort of drifted entirely into journalism and got interested in that, decided I didn't want to teach. I had one experience of teaching and I was a terrible teacher. I didn't really know how to grade, grade people, and I had my grade list. I thought, oh, there are too many Bs in a row, and so I would add a plus and add a minus.

But it was just a, it was. Those are bad grades now, too. I know, I know. I know. They were okay then. But so I don't, but, but right, journalism has let me write, and I've been able to, I know a little bit

about a lot of things. I've written about a lot of different things, as you know. The, and, um, I always thought that the ideal college major for me would have been to take the introductory course in every in every department. And because I love, the first year, I loved in economics and philosophy. And then I would take the next one. And it's a, this is terrible.

This is nothing like what 101 was. So I ended up as an English major. But you knew in sixth grade that you wanted to be a writer. Yeah. But why? Why do you know that? I just felt like like, like, I was. just something that I really had to do, you know, to poetry in those things.

But then anything. And I think I would be, I would be happy writing angry letters to the editor as, you know. Well, you can retire and do that. Right, right, exactly. If there are letters to the editor anymore. Well, here's, here's you. This is your, what is it, what are we looking at? This is high school newspaper.

That's me over on that over there. Oh, see, I was going to, I guess that was you actually. No, that's a classmate. Okay. Back when there were typewriters, Emmanuel typewriters. All right. Yeah, and then we have this one. What's this?

This is in college. I went to two colleges. I started at Colorado College. I'm in the striped sweater. And nobody wanted to be the editor of the paper. So I ended up as the editor of the paper the second semester of my freshman year. And my roommate, by the end of the year,

was the head of the president of the student body. So we must have really been unpleasant to be around. And he's now a Trump-appointed federal judge in Tennessee, so. Interesting. Yeah, I always felt like my own, I also, I didn't know that I wanted to be a writer, but when I look back now, I'm like, oh, well, you wanted to be a writer? Because we used to play newspaper. Well, we used to play newspaper and school.

Those are the two. And I was the teacher and I was the newspaper editor. I was also the oldest. Right. I was also the bus driver when we played bus. I didn't end up as a bus driver. But I always thought the real journalists were the people who worked on their high school and college newspapers, which I didn't, because I didn't know that I really wanted to be a journalist.

And I always felt when I was a journalist, I was like, I'm surrounded by all these people who worked on their college newspapers. And I didn't. And I loved it. It was a great extracurricular activity, except that it wasn't really extracurricular activity, because I didn't do anything in any of my classes. All I wanted to do was be on the paper. and literary magazines too. And it was really fun.

And I met my wife. We worked on a college humor magazine. And so it's like, it was like vocational training, basically, all those things. Okay. So then how does your journalism career begin? I was a fact checker at New York Magazine for six months and couldn't stand it. Because it was during the big newspaper strike in New York City in the late 70s and so New York magazine was as thick as vogue it was like this because all the

newspapers were none of them were printing and there were only three of us checking the facts and there were very there were the it was just it was agony and we were paid nothing it was $160 a week and no overtime or anything like that so I quit and wanted I just sort of tried to be a freelance writer and I did some I did some little projects I wrote the text for book about cats and then I had this idea that I would go back to I would pretend to be a high school student and go back to high school and it'll infiltrate a high school and I did it so I just went I just went to my to the reunion of this class I I so what we're looking at is the cover of your first book called high

school undercover with the class of 80 yep That was I went for four months. It was much, now you'd be arrested for it, and you should. I mean, no one should, no one should do this. But my agent posed as my mother. She was 38, I think. My actual mother was, was, I could tell, she was jealous of her. And I made a, I made a false birth certificate, and I had to get false, I had to get a transcript from the high school I'd actually attended in Kansas City.

I printed up fake stationery and a fake transcript and a fake envelope and I sent it to my mother and asked her to mail it from Kansas City. And I also, I knew the registrar at the school that I, high school I'd gone to. And my mother asked her when they got the request from the high school for my transcript just to throw it away. So she did that. And then mine came. And nobody's really looking for kids trying to drop into high school.

school and I was nervous at first but then I I went for I went for a semester and I took a I took my wife to a to a dance and it almost ended our marriage we I was commuting from New York to Stratford Connecticut which is where this high school was it was like an hour and 40 minutes so you were every day you were driving no taking the train I would get up I would take the subway to take the train to bridge or to bridge park I guess maybe it went to Stratford to Stratford and it was very it was nice I read on the train but anyway I took her to a dance and for her it was like walking she didn't have a lot of great memories of high school and walking into a gym where a dance was going I was like just like having a drug flashback and just it all her whole

adolescence just hit her and so I had to pretend to be a high school senior as well yeah she did but she she thought it was going to be fun but immediately wasn't I tried to put my arm around She didn't want to dance. I tried to put my arm around. I hit her in the... So anyway, so then we left, and then we had to wait for the train, and then we had this long train ride back to New York. And it was touch and go.

Were you actually married yet? Yeah, we were married. Oh, okay. We were married. I was a married high school senior. Wow. And so, and did anyone come close to, like, finding you out? No, no, nobody suspected me, and they didn't find out.

later after the book came out like a year later takes a long time for a book to come out there was a kid who was working in a local bookstore and he was reading it and he thought he recognized something I changed everything but he recognized something and he showed it to his journalism teacher who had been my journalism teacher and she recognized the picture on the back of the jacket so then the then I was found out and then the principal was angry at first but then the superintendent of schools that the book was it was not meant to be a critique of the school but it just because it accurately described it it's it was and anyway he said you your book says things that i've been saying for years so he took my wife and me out to lunch in new york at like 11 o'clock in the morning at the magic pan which is like exactly where a superintendent of schools would take you to take you to lunch he was incredibly kind and then he invited us to we we saw a production of a fellow at the Stratford, Connecticut Shakespeare Theater.

And it was famous people. Now I can't remember I'd have to go back and look. But it was a real production. And I just went to the reunion. And about the expected number of members of the class are dead. You know, the guy who was the super athlete and the heart throbbed, he died like 10 years ago. But I didn't recognize anybody.

They were more likely to remember me. Because when the book came out, I was disliked. discovered, I was still, people could still remember me, but I hadn't seen any of them since then. Barry Manilow optioned the film and music rights to the book. And then luckily, luckily never did it. Was he going to play you? I think he was. I think it was going to be a musical.

Wow. High school, the musical? Nothing, nothing ever. Doesn't that exist? Nothing ever happened. Okay, so now I want to start getting, so, okay, so do you remember anything when you were pretending to be a senior in high school? Did you notice anything about kids who are really struggling?

Were you paying attention to that part of it? Well, it was, I tried to struggle myself. I didn't want to. No, give it away. I didn't want to stand out. I tried to make Cs, and it was sometimes it was hard. I suddenly understood algebra, which I had not. Oh.

But, you know, it was, it was not, it was a pretty working class high school, and there were not a lot of kids who were interested in that into high school, and the teachers were not that good. So, but no, you know, it was. But what I do. You know, from working on this, I think back to my own high school. I think, oh, you know, I think about kids just, it's what everyone knows. Oh, that kid that everybody thought was dumb.

He had trouble reading. Right. Yeah. What do you remember about learning how to read as a child? We had, in first grade, my teacher was, she said, she had, we called her Mrs. Polar Bear. She had glasses that said, look. It said, L, O, her eyes were the O's. And it was very look say

She had flashcards with words on him And there was a like a Here are the books Oh yeah Alice and Jerry Yeah these are the Alice and Jerry books So here here's one of the pages from the books Which is kind of like books say on steroids

Right Says look mother see the little And there's just a picture of a lamb sheep Something Yeah a donkey A little donkey Don't know what it is You see look at the picture

That's how you're supposed to read There it is of course donkey Right See the little cart wagon? Could be either. Yep. And the little... Here comes the little guy.

And I think this is the covers on the previous slide. Those are the books that we had when I was in first grade in 1961. Because I remember that I thought, oh, that's so cool, that adhesive tape down the edge. I think the page inside is from the original edition, which is like for the 1930s. So it's a little more, but it was the same thing. It was like Dick and Jane, lots of repetition, and they helped with, the first ones helped with the words that you didn't know yet. Yeah, yeah.

But learning to read was not difficult for you. I don't remember it as having been difficult. Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was part of it for me, and then I've talked about that before, that I just took it for granted and my own experience learning to read. I barely remember it, and my kids pretty easy. This is exactly what Margaret and. And what Margaret Goldberg said, the wonderful person that you connected me with, who was also here on stage with us recently.

I believe it. But she was great. And she said she had some trouble learning to read herself. But she said when she talks to teachers, she asked them how they learned to read. And they answer, well, it was incredibly easy for me. And she thinks that I'm sure it's true. And I know it was easy for my kids, especially for my daughter. and if she had been the only person

that I, my only sample of people learning to read, I would have thought all you have to do is take your kids to the library, get lots of books, get them in a bag, and then one day they can just, they'll be able to read. Here, we have a book, this is a book, will tell us what this is. I don't know if anybody, if anybody reads these still,

it was Miriam Conn, these are wonderful series of books about first graders, about a class of first graders, and there's, there, each one has his or her own personality, but this is called, when will I, read. And I thought, packed to this, I thought, you know, I went and looked it up again. And it's what she says, you know, it will happen, the teacher smiled. Then she went to get the snacks. There's, there's nothing. There's, by the end of, by the end of the book, Jim suddenly knows how to

read. There's never any suggestion in the book that you have to teach anybody to read. You will read when you were ready. There's no instruction. She's written some words on signs. And this is, I think this is the problem, basically. Well, and look at the little boy in the picture. And it's, and the books are wonderful, but this is so much. And she, in the acknowledgments right in the front, or the dedication, it's dedicated to two people who I assume are, you know, professors of education. It's doctor somebody and something. So it's meant to reflect the best thinking in 1977 about how you teach people to read.

And when you think, 1977 is 22 years after why Johnny can't read. It's amazing that this was, in 1977, anybody was still thinking this way about teaching kids to read. But they were. These are, so, okay, what do we see here? These are two of my grandchildren. We're going for a walk. They would agree to go only if they could take books with him. See, and you see that this like runs in families, you know?

It's just, it's whatever. There's a genetic element and there's something there's something there and the and I remember when my daughter started to read and I think she had a little her little brother was he was only two and I think we've just invented perpetual emotion she can read to him and so like we'd be in the car and she would be reading he was like we're done we don't have to do anything anymore so when did you first encounter a different take on it all like when did you first realize oh it's not that easy for a lot of people. It's my brother. My brother has two children. He's seven years younger than I am,

and he has younger children. And the older of his two daughters, I didn't realize until later, has dyslexia. And the first thing I remember is when she was born. I took my kids to, they live about an hour away from us. And my son and daughter and I went to visit her. and we held the, my daughter loved holding the baby and everything, and we had a good visit, and we went out to the car, and right before we got in the car, my daughter threw up. Right. She was incredibly sick.

I thought, do I even tell my brother that this? And we decided not to. But that little baby, she, she just got her PhD in gravitational physics. She's into black holes. But she didn't, she could not read. But at the end of second grade, she was reading at a pre-kindergarten level, if that. And it was a hard, it was a long time before anybody put the word dyslexia on it. It was, she was in a school where the teachers were saying, you'll read when you're ready, you know.

And I think kids often fool teachers because they're smart, you know, they're good at stuff. She's bright and twinkly. She was involved in projects. She was clever at hiding that she couldn't read. She said a page looked like a pulsing mass to her. So when the teacher would say, okay, everybody go take a book and sit and read, she said she would just watch the other kids and see when they turn pages, and that's when she would turn a page.

When they did group writing projects, she would volunteer to draw the pictures. She was good at visualizing things and so forth. But she couldn't read. And she ended up at this expensive school in New York windward and was there for three years and it was it was miraculous. I mean it made a huge a huge it changed her life. She still struggles as I mean dyslexia is a lifelong thing and she's a slow

she reads slowly and it's tiring and but she loves to read and she's a good she's a good writer and then she's then she does this whatever this is so this is from like her dissertation Defense. Yeah, I watched her dissertation defense on Zoom. And the minute she was through introducing herself, I was completely lost. And an interesting thing, this is, I stick this in, referring to Mark Seidenberg, who I believe has also been on this. Yes, he has. On this stage. I asked, I asked Caroline, I said, you know, you, this is your niece, Caroline. This is my niece, I'm sorry, yes, my niece,

Caroline. I said, when you look, I mean, you look at all these symbols here, are they as challenging, challenging to you as words are. And she said, no, mostly not. And she said some of them make sense only as one, it's clear what they make sense only as one thing. She said sometime in math, it doesn't matter of which order you multiply numbers in. She said, and then, but I asked Mark Seidenberg about it too.

And Mark Seidenberg, I mean, does everybody know? Cognitive scientist. cognitive scientist. And I said she didn't have the same trouble with the mathematical symbols as she does with the alphabet and with words. I said, what do you think of that? And he said, he said, it's really interesting, isn't it? He said, he didn't know. And he said he thinks that one possibility maybe that they just go to different parts of the brain, that there's a different part of the brain that interprets what are clearly mathematical symbols and another part that interprets them. Who knows? Anyway, he was stumped, so I can't claim to know. But it's interesting to me. I think it's also, it is true that math follows rules. It's very logical, and the English language isn't so much. That's not the only reason, but that is something to do with it.

Yes, right, exactly. And she said, you know, I mean, I don't even, I can't even spot, she said in calculus, there's certain order, a certain group of symbols that only make sense as one thing. But I never took to calculus. I can't even know. I don't even remember what she said. So, okay, so when, so you knew that your niece had dyslexia when she was a little girl? Not until she was probably, not until she started Winward.

And I didn't really even know what it was. I wasn't sure that even then exactly what, I think like most people, I thought, if you ask people, what's just, if they don't have it or have no experience, what is it? Oh, it's, you know, putting letters backwards. Yeah. And I didn't realize, really, I didn't realize until I began working on this article, the first thing I did was interview her. I didn't realize how traumatic had been in her life. She said she basically never slept through the night until she started at Windward. She was full of anxiety.

There were parts of her house that she was scared to go into. She would wake up. She was worried that she would stop breathing if she closed her eyes. she would wake up her parents repeatedly during the night. And they finally said, you can come into our room at night, but you can't wake us up. And they put a sleeping bag at the foot of their bed, and that's where she would be. And this is now, this is anxiety she attributes to her reading. Yes, when she went to Windward, as soon as she started Windward, it all went away.

All this stuff just disappeared. So you do you start this article that you wrote for the New Yorker in December with the story about your niece? So when did you decide, what's the origin story of this article? When did you decide to write this? It was just from talking to her, I asked her about it, and I thought, this is interesting. Dyslexia is really interesting. And once I, as you mentioned in your introduction,

when I started talking to people, I talked to people in groups of four because I play a lot of golf. So anytime I would, any time I would, anytime I would say, what are you working on, I say, oh, I'm working on a piece about dyslexia. They go, oh, I've got this. At least one person always either had it.

They had a kid who had it. They had some experience with reading-related learning disability invariably. I mean, usually two, always at least one. And, you know, and you can, I'm sure you've seen it too. You test it. You know, everybody knows something about it. And nobody had, nobody in my generation had a good experience with it. And so one of the things that's delightful about your writing is so much of a

does come from little things in your own life, things you encounter, things from your past. So here you've got the story, you've got this niece. When did you sort of decide, like, I'm really going to dig in and write an article about this. This is worth an article. I have something to say here. I think very, I've worked on it sort of, I'm in my 70s now, so I kind of slowing down. I worked on it over. I didn't spend a whole year on it, but I took a whole year on it. Plus playing some golf. Plus doing some other things. But it was talking to my niece. And I said, I asked her about it was when she, you know, what I thought about was when she got her PhD and I thought, this is amazing that she did it.

And I asked her about it and I talked about it and I pitched it to the New Yorker. And it was just seeing what she could do now, what her life was like now, and how horrible it would have been if she hadn't. And I took her parents and her sister out to dinner and we talked about it. Oh, I see. So you took them out to dinner sort of to talk about this. Oh, absolutely. Absolutely. Absolutely. Oh, okay. And I could have talked, but my most recent book is about hearing and hearing loss.

And it was hard to hear. It was a restaurant. It was like the worst place. It was a loud restaurant, too. Especially now. Restaurants are, they're all concrete and steel. Yeah, right. They look good, but you can't hear a word. She led to people. I mean, so I've read the Shaywitz's. I found you, you led me to a number of people that there are plenty of people to talk to. Right. And then it happens in New York. There are two, there are now as a three, years ago, first was three years ago, there are two schools in the public system in New York

that are specifically for kids with reading-related learning disabilities. One's in the South Bronx and one's in Brooklyn, one's in, you know, Crown Heights. I mean, they're in real, they're in tough neighborhoods. And the thing that the principal of the Brooklyn School, told me was of the South Bronx school she told me that when they started she said there were there were 10,000 kids in the South Bronx who could have been in the second grade in that school they have room for like 60 and the other thing that the the principals of both those schools and at winward also said is the openings that they have in the schools tend to be in the early grade in second grade not in sixth grade because kids, it's like, you know, you'll, you know, it'll happen, you'll learn to read. Kids get pushed. Nobody gets, nobody freaks out

until at least second grade. So by then the anxiety is really bad. Oh yeah, the anxiety. And as a result, you see, it's why schools will often treat reading disabilities as a discipline problem. It's like, you're not trying. And an example is my niece's uncle, she has an uncle, who, who clearly has dyslexia, was never, was never identified or diagnosed or anything. It was always treated as a behavior problem. He was, he dropped out of schools.

He was always in trouble. He was, he did well in, when computers came around, he loved computers. He did really well with him. He wanted to take those courses, and he was prevented by the school. When you do better in English, then we'll let you take this math and science course,

this math and computer courses that you want to take. rather than letting him do the thing that he could do, and then he ended up becoming a multimillionaire doing, but instead of letting him do that, they treated him as, you know. That's a very common story. Was it a hard sell to the New Yorker? Like, were they interested in this article?

It's interesting. They were, and it was a matter of how to make it, one thing the editor of the New Yorker doesn't like is stories that are just all about something. So from my point of view, it was lucky that, I mean, it was a good focus that there were these two schools in the New York public system.

Wait, wait, the editor of the New Yorker doesn't like it when things are what? Just like an all about, let's just do a story all about. I see. It has to have like a, there's a whole reason. It's a good, it's good. Yeah.

Yeah, all about you could be writing for a long time. Yeah, right. So it had a, there was not only, there's not only this very highly regarded private school that's in New York City, there was also these two public schools. And there was also, at that time, the mayor of New York had openly talked about his dyslexia

and had what was really responsible in many ways for making sure that the first of these schools got started. And as all the, it was the people who really made it happen was a small group of women who had kids who with dyslexia or other reading related disabilities who had just never been you know they'd just been screwed repeatedly by the new york public school system and there and what's was true of these women and many women i know who advocate for dyslexia is that they're the the time the window had passed

for their own kids for any of these right they were doing on on behalf of the other people's children exactly uh it was true for all of them now some of them some some of their kids ended up at windward, but the schools, the public schools came along after their kids were too old to benefit from it. So when did you start to realize, I know you weren't going to do an All About article, but this is such a controversial, such a complicated topic. When did you start to think like, oh, what did I get myself into? Well, it's a lucky thing about writing about knowing only a little bit about lots of things. I didn't realize how it's much, I think in a way, it's just the, I think, it's often easier to write about a complicated topic if you don't know a lot about it to start with.

If the difficulty with experts writing for normal people is that they've lost touch with whatever it was that made them interested in the field in the first place. Now they're off. That stuff doesn't interest them anymore. And every time you mention an area or an issue or something like this, they can think of 10 million ramifications. Oh, you know, no, it's. more complicated than that. We don't really, so I think in a lot of ways it's helpful not to know too much. You have to know enough. Yeah. And but you in order to be interested in the parts, in order to explain something to people who know nothing about it, it hurts to know too much about it. Yeah. But with this one, I guess as someone who's now been obsessed with it for 10 years and has

decided it's not, you know, I don't know enough yet. But it's, that was one of the reasons why I didn't like being a general sort of assignment writer because I felt like I never got to be an expert in anything and I always felt that it is sort of easier to write when you don't know about it but when you don't know about it then every sentence is like is is this right like you know like it's intimidating to write about slang you don't know much about no and the it helps the New Yorkers fact checkers yeah help you know that you have a backstop don't you yeah and then also it's an odd an interesting thing in this. The fact checkers never just take a story

and show it to the people that it's about. That they really never do that. And you get in trouble if you do that. But the week before, toward the end of the story, the editor of the New Yorker called me up. David Remnick. He has a daughter who has very serious,

very serious issues. Autism. And he said, I know from the autism world that there's just, there's like a million different things. He said, is there someone you can think of who would read this who's an expert and go beyond the fact checker and just read it? Make sure we got this right. See if there's anything that's a flag. And it was actually somebody you led me to.

Now I can't remember who it is, who it was who did it. I think it was Tim. Tim Shanahan. It was incredibly nice. And he did it very quickly. And I'm not sure I satisfied every comment he made. But it was. And you'd never had that experience.

of the showing the whole article. That's so interesting. So that tells you something about the complexity of this topic. Or maybe what David Remnick himself knew about it. Right. Or about what he viewed as it felt was a parallel topic where here's it's incredibly complicated. It's not one thing. It's a lot of different things.

And people, you know, shoot each other over it. Yeah. Was there anything that you did learn about the research that really surprised you that was like What were your aha moments along the way? I was amazed to look back and see how, for how many decades, not really almost a century, really, that it's been clear that there's a better way to teach people how to read, maybe more than a century. And yet this incredible persistence of the wrong way to do it. And one thing that struck me was, you and I've talked about this, the scientists, the scientists who study, reading, will say, you know, the teachers, they need to cross the campus and come talk to us. But really, you know, it needs to go both ways.

There's just one of the difficulties with, you know, research, super high-level research, they're not necessarily thinking about practical implementation of what, you know, Sidenberg's an example, he's super interested in this. very complicated stuff, but it would be interesting to see him in a classroom of first graders. Yes, yes. Just because you can think about it doesn't mean you can do it. But we don't need people to be able, you know, we don't need the people who can think about it to be able to do it. No, but we do need better communication between the two. That was the whole reason Margaret was here to talk about that.

One interesting thing, I talked to a woman at the Bush Institute. In the Bush family, there's also genetic. reading difficulties that they don't necessarily talk about. But they've been involved in it. Now I'm not going to have forgotten what I was going to say. You probably talked to Anne. I did talk to Ann. Ann Wick's.

Anyway, and she said very interesting things. She said very interesting things. Gosh, somewhere in his notes. Yeah, somewhere. Oh, no, I know what she said. She said it's often states, the states that have had the best luck with implementing better reading programs are ones where they're super centralized. There's a reason it's Mississippi

And so there's not a lot of teachers unions And you can make a decision at the top That covers all the way down If you look at the fighting in New York And I don't know what it's like in D.C. But in New York City there's every possible level of government And it just changed. You know, now there's a new mayor

Who doesn't have dyslexia And I think he's super supportive But you never know And every two years I get changed And then even if no matter what the mayor does It can be different at the state, different with the unions, different from principle to principle to principle. Well, I think this is a lot of the reason why the good practices don't get a chance to get institutionalized.

And for whatever reason, and I'm still interested in understanding the answer to this question, the things that it takes for the good practices aren't the things that sort of a lot of people are naturally inclined to sort of want to do or think is the right thing to do for kids. So it's sort of like the less effective ways. feel more natural and feel more right. The more effective ways, not as much. So those are the ones that need to be in. And we institutionalize it.

We live in a system that actually doesn't do a good job institutionalizing things, except what we kind of think is right. No, we think it's like infringing on our liberty. And this is what the, it was interesting, the faculty at Windward trained the faculty for these new public schools in New York. And when they brought the teachers in,

the head of the school at Windward, the fancy, expensive, super, super expensive private school for kids with dyslexia said, when the teachers came in, they were all, this is going to be so boring. You know, teaching in this, following this system, this will be terrible. But then when they had kids over the summer,

there was kids that they knew. They were from the Bronx. They were from the schools that they were going to be teaching in. And they saw this transformation where now they're paying attention. they're not, you know, they're not fighting, they're not throwing stuff around.

The amazing one at the school in the South Bronx, the principal told me it was a girl who she had what she described. She couldn't read at all when she came to the school. She would, in class, she would put her head down on the desk and go to sleep. She said it was, you know, anxiety-induced narcolepsy. Yeah. But now she can read. And she said, the principal said she remembered.

remember the day when the first day she read she read aloud she was so excited she was shaking yeah i know those stories what kind of reaction did you get after the piece was published you know this the nobody writes nobody writes letters anymore the most uh mail i've ever gotten a piece was in it's 1982 a piece i wrote for harpers called the secret lives of dentists and i think i i got it i got a letter from every dentist in the united states and uh some one of them sent me a book of poetry. They sent me, I mean, I mean, really, it was like piles of stuff like this. The second most I've ever gotten was from this story by emails. And one of them was from somebody, Amory Lovens, who's a, he's an environmental guy. He and I have, we've, I've called it, I've basically called him a fraud a couple

of times. Anyway, he wrote, he wrote me a long letter, you know, and it was sort of Amory Lovensish in that he was made me wanted to talk about what a good reader he had been in school. But he was, anyway, it was that kind of thing. I heard from lots of people that I heard from people that I didn't know had had difficulties. Right, right. People come out of the wood where it's a secret. And then just people talk about what, you know,

how hard this had been. I have a lawyer, if he's a retired lawyer, he was a big, you know, one of these big fancy lawyers, a big law firm in New York. His, the boilerplate message on, at the bottom of his work emails, used to say, that if every word in his email was spelled correctly, throw it out, it was written by somebody else.

He struggled with dyslexia his whole life, not as severe as my nieces, but. When you first reached out to me about interviewing me for your piece, I think it was over the summer when I was on vacation, and like a couple of days later, I got this email from a guy in Australia named Nicholas, and he wrote to me and said that he was, he's 58 years old, and he recently went to see a reading specialist for the first time.

He was working as a scientist doing research on a research team doing like deep research about things that live in the deep sea. And he talked about words were always this huge struggle. And I sent him along to you. He sent me this email because he was so proud. This is a list of the words that he now can spell that he couldn't spell before.

So 58 years old, a successful guy, but he had hidden it for his whole life. Here's some of those words. He's spelled a little differently because in Australia. hours to get these all in there. Is that what he said? Well, you ended up talking to him. I did. I talked to him for a long time. And in my, an early draft of my piece, I quoted, but I had too much. Your bad editor killed it. My bad at my, my, yeah, we hate those editors who kill our favorite things. Especially now that they're, look like eighth graders, they're so young.

But anyway, he took him out. But he was, he was super interesting. And he had, I mean, he, he couldn't read it all. And he said, the, the big breakthrough for him. in adulthood was that someone explained to him that letters represent sounds and no one had no one had ever made that clear tone no one people are just like someone just explained that to me that was such a profound right it's like the alphabetic principle is profound and it's not everyone gets it unless you explain it to them it's true uh and he said he it was uh when he was the way he got to his career he was just describing all these ways he did it i mean one there were all these accidents that made it possible. One of them was that he, a test that he took, he just, he didn't,

it was, he did terrible on it. He knew it. But then the whole test got thrown out for some completely unrelated reason. It didn't count. It didn't matter. And he had to climb into a building through, climb up the side of a building, going through a window to do something. He would work. And one of the breakthroughs for him with reading was a girl that he met that he was really interested in American exchange student in Australia. when he was, they sat on the beach together and read the Lord of the Rings. You know, she took him through it, word by word. But the real breakthroughs, I think, came later.

And he works with somebody now. Yeah. Yeah. He's amazing. This was how he signed his email to me. Thanks once again, Nicholas, N-I-C-O-L-A-S. He says, I've been reclaiming my own name. I used to sign Nick instead because his teachers would insist that there was a

an age in his name. And he didn't have an age in his name. But like this is the kind, this is how profound and how deep to identity. Like he didn't use his real name because he was accused of not. And it's, it's heartbreaking to think so many people how different his life would have been. Yeah. How much, you know, as with my niece, how much less anxiety. You know, sure, she's got a PhD now, but just how much easier it would have been to get to third grade. Yeah. If some, if, if somebody had noticed something earlier. Right, and your niece and Nicholas, there's all kinds of stories that don't end as well as they're still. Exactly. And there's, I think maybe you told me about, or no, one of the women from the collective in New York said,

about the damage done by the stories about people who have dyslexia and do great. And she quoted a kid saying, you know, I can't even, I can't even be a good dyslexic, you know. I can't even do dyslexia, right? Yeah. But it's an impediment. It's not a strength. And there's so many fraudulent, phony, manipulative, exploitative, non-treatments for.

Yes. Yeah. Okay, so we're going to turn to some questions. Does anyone have a question? There are two women in the audience with microphones. So just raise your hand. I'll ask a question of myself. Okay.

I always want to tell a story. Okay. This is what it's like from hardly anybody here is from as far back in time as I am. But when my wife was in first grade in 1962, her teacher called her mother in for a conference and asked her to discourage my wife from reading outside of class because she was worried that she'd gotten too far ahead of the other kids. And she suggested that she'd take up spool knitting instead. This is spool knitting. Like, get her, get the books out of her hands and get her making these endless ropes of yarn.

And there I think there's another kind of problem of teaching, whereas the teachers, the teacher's goal was to get everybody sort of moving at the same speed. At the same middle, yeah. So she had to knock off the kids who could read and then just do something, get rid of the kids at the bottom. And to schools, it can seem like a problem that solves itself because, you know, the, you know, the kids with the worst problems eventually drop out. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Yeah.

Questions or comments from the audience? You're obviously an incredible journalist who can get people's attention with having understood problems that resonate with so many of your readers or open their eyes to problems they may not have known existed. I come from that weird world called academia, and I've thought about your comment a couple of minutes ago that there are the specialists who don't seem to know how to sort through, boil down, extract from what they know, to be able to have an impact on readers. So the question is, are we miseducating people? So let's go back to the first part of your conversation about becoming a journalist and maybe

adding in the question of, what should people learn to be able to communicate? communicate information and stories, because stories matter, combined with information, so that you can take the people who, in principle, know a lot because they spent your studying it, and add in the skills that you have so that one can get the message through to people to change their minds about such things as pedagogy for kids learning to read. Yeah, that's a really tough question. And I once got hired to do a workshop, a writing workshop for academic writers, who was basically this question. And what they said, we can't do anything, any stuff that you do.

I mean, you can't, like when you do a scholarly paper, it can't be based on anecdote. I'm all about anecdote. And I think anecdotes are powerful. And you can't be, abuse it. I mean, it's, but if you tell us, it's hard to tell a story in a paper, in a peer-reviewed paper, I would guess. And I don't know, I don't know that there's any,

any, I don't know what the answer to that is. Well, one thing that, but I would say is that how, even how super powerful a podcast is, especially yours coming, now everybody has a podcast. I mean, everybody here probably does a podcast. But, But the power of sold a story, the impact of sold a story was beyond anything that any

that any article or book that I know of about on this topic could have. I mean, it was just the right, just exactly the right medium for it. And that's a hard thing, even harder thing probably to do in academic topics. So, yeah. Well, I have a thought on that and then we can follow on that. But, well, I have a thought on your question, which is, you know, I get asked this question a lot, too, and brought in to talk to people about how academics and scientists and other kinds of experts can communicate better about their work. And I think that's all very important. But I actually would say

this is a good argument for why journalism is important. That's exactly what journalists do, especially those of us who are lucky enough to be able to go in depth on things and write long things, is we do and go try to talk to experts and then communicate that. So just, I don't think it's everyone's role to do everything. So just the good scientists don't all have to be good communicators. But we do have to support journalism and good journalists who can report on things like science. That's a good answer. Because I've always felt stumped when I get that question. Like, I don't know what advice to give.

I think that's my job. Yeah, I think that is good. I think it helps to have a short attention span. So if you probably don't have a, your attention span is not as short as mine is. And I was super interested in this topic. And I would be surprised if I write about it again. And I've been interviewed about things before to say we'd like to have you come on a radio show and talk about this topic that you've written about so interesting that you're interested in the other things that you know about it. I said, you don't understand.

That's all I know. That article contains more than everything I know about it. Exactly. Yes. So that's why my own career has changed a little bit in being able to do the same thing for 10 years because now I finally feel like, oh, I do know. Yeah, it's very different to have a beat. It's very important to have, in journalism, to have beat reporters, but it's also limiting because you get, you know, you get connected to people. True.

You have to watch out yourself for that curse of the expert thing. And I actually feel very grateful that the medium that I have to write in as a podcast, because I actually think that question of how you take a topic and you keep its complexity, but you make it simple, you make it so that the general audience can understand. And in podcast writing, even more than in something like The New Yorker, we have to be so careful about never, ever having that urge that I do all the time in The New Yorker, which is I'm reading something, you lose your train of thought or whatever, and then you go back and look, you know, you skip up to you can't do that. As soon as someone goes back in a podcast, you're usually losing them. Right.

So we have to just like keep you every, hold your hand every single step of the way. It's a very, you're asking me before about the process of writing a podcast script. And it's, and you were asking, I thought this. was delightful. Like, do you actually, like, write every word? Or do you just kind of wing it? Oh, we write every single word. Are you kidding? We argue about Ann's, butts, oars, and all of those things, just like you do. But you have to keep people with you all along the way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Any other questions or comments? We've got a few more minutes. It looks like there's now a few people. Okay.

Hi. Thank you so much. I'm one of those moms who has a dyslexic daughter and then became one of the advocacy in DC. And so a lot of these stories resonate for me. My question is, if you, after you read the article, if you heard much from policymakers or people who have kind of seen her article and then have an aha moment and they're trying to apply it in school systems. I don't think I've heard from any policymakers.

You probably have. I've heard a lot, yeah. Yeah. Mostly the ones that were personal stories, people with some personal connection to it, I'm trying to think. And from, no, I'm sure Emily would have much more of that. Yeah, I think that I've probably heard from the policymakers

just because of the accumulation over the years and because it ended up getting a lot of particular attention by policymakers that sort of take away, you know, there was a policymaker takeaway, I guess, in it. So it makes more sense that you would get the sort of anecdotal personal stories. But much more of the personal stories. I mean, I'm not like hearing from like tons of legislators.

Don't get me wrong. I'm hearing a lot more from people who have personal stories. Those are the people who are compelled to write. And in a few cases, the policymakers I've heard of have a personal story. And that's what, that's why they wrote. But I think also being in the position you're now, you know, it's easier to be an activist now. I mean, there's enough support. Other people have done it.

There are other people doing it. There's sold a story. There's, there's just not, it's not as. weird a topic as it was when I was a kid in school. And I think we had when my wife and I, my parents sent us some some furniture when they moved out of the house and it came in a moving van and a partial shipment of a moving van. And a couple of pieces got broken and the moving, I had to make a claim to the van company and the guy who drove the truck, wrote down, he was Smilmiltzstan.

And we always thought that was so funny, small metal stand. And I only realized when I was working on this, he couldn't. That was as close as he could come. And he, that seemed really heartbreaking. Yeah, you do see like little details that you get a new lens on it. Now I see. Now I understand.

Now I understand. Another question. I'm a reading teacher, reading interventionist for D.C. public schools. I want to first admit that I'm here. So I know that I have a particular enthusiasm for learning more and implementing best practices. But by and large, the teachers I work with are now aware of the research, much thanks to you, Emily,

and your work to communicate that. I'm wondering if you guys could talk a little bit more about your conversations with other stakeholders, like the people that make curriculum decisions. In my experience, and from my perspective, teachers are mostly just using what they're given, because teaching's a really complex job. Of course, it involves making evidence-based instructional decisions.

But in a lot of ways, it also involves a lot of other like personal care for children that can take the time that's needed to make careful instructional decisions away from teachers. And I think there are people that are tasked with doing that. And I'm just wondering if you could talk about teacher preparation programs, the role of districts. I think there's a lot other stakeholders could be doing. And I agree. I know. I'm a realist. I know who I work with by and large. And there are people that want to do better and there are people that are doing what they've always done, but I just think there might be room to invite other stakeholders into the conversation as we make these shifts.

Yeah, well, you know, I think it's true that the sort of making this, making these kinds of changes and doing it well is very complex. There's a lot of things involved, and teachers just knowing about this isn't enough. There's lots of questions about what they're given and how they're trained, how they're trained before they got to the job, how they're being trained on the job. what are the best ways to teach reading? How do teachers know about it, learn about it? But then how do you actually make it work in a very, very complex system where there are a lot of things going on?

Like there's a lot of teacher turnover. There's a lot of student turnover. There's a lot of superintendent and principal turnover. There's a lot of, like in New York where this is what we're focusing on and now two years later someone news in charge and now we're focusing on something else. This is a, you know, we live in a teachers teach, in a very, very complex system and have very difficult jobs that go way beyond getting some information from an article or podcast and saying, well, I'm going to do it that way now.

It doesn't work that way. And those of us who can come in and tell these stories to clarify things for people, and I think things like this can help to clarify the problem. But we don't know the solution, partly because that's not what we do or it's not our job, and because that is a very, it's a very complex answer. So Soul Story Season 2 is coming out in the fall, and it will go into some of that. It probably won't provide, it cannot provide all of the answers.

That is, I mean, I think that's getting even to sort of what a journalist does. Like, as I've gotten more to know more about this topic, this is something that I now am thinking about a lot. Like, I realize that a lot of people sort of want answers, sort of like want answers. from me sometimes. And I'm like, well, I, that's not exactly what I do. What I do better is, like, explain things about the research, show people problems that they either knew about and are like, look, see, I've been telling you about this problem or see a problem, you know, for the first time,

or see something in a new way. Like what I was saying when I identified, when I introduced David, which is, like, I think what a writer can do is put words to experiences and things that are happening that allow people to see them as they are. or in a different way that they thought they were. But I don't, maybe it's the lamest answer ever, but I don't think a journalist can ever give you the answer. Well, doesn't it also, people that I talk to you too say it takes, it has to be top down. There has to be support from above in order for,

it's not enough, you can be a teacher and know the perfect way to do it, but if you don't have support from a principal, from a department, from colleagues, from the whole system that works together. And you see it even where the two new schools in New York, where they have lots of support from sort of mayor, at the time, chancellor, principal, they are saddled with a lot of responsibilities

that just get in the way. They have to do standardized testing that makes no sense for the kids that they do. Those are state requirements and city requirements. They have all this stuff that takes away instructional time. So even in what's sort of a perfect environment in terms of support all the way up and down, they still have these obstacles.

And then if you get into a school, where if the principal's not on it, if the other, if colleagues are skeptical, if the, you know, if the school board doesn't, so it all has to work together. And I think it's also always a delicate balance between bottom, top down and bottom up. So there was a lot of bottom up, the advocates in the room.

Now there's, we're in a moment with a lot of top down, but that can become too much, not the right direction, right? There's unintended consequences. There's always got to be sort of both. I think that's true of policymaking of any kind, especially true in schools. I think it's time for us to wrap up. I have one last little slide, which is this.

What is this? That's my computer keyboard. I think the other reason that I wanted to become a writer is that I really like to type. But that is not, that's your computer keyboard. What is it? I've never seen a keyboard like that. It looks like it could be the Millennium Falcon.

It's like making. Well, it's sort of, keyboards, split keyboards are better because if you just drop your hands on the desk, they're more like this. So a split keyboard lets you put your hands where they

naturally would fall. The keys are sculpted. And it's not in English. Oh, it's in Elvish. It's for Lord of the Rings keyboard. That's why I was getting at. And I've actually always wanted to ask someone who writes for the New Yorker.

Why do you spell focused with two S's and traveler with two L's like Brits? And used the umlats. Yeah, right. Why do you do that? I don't know. They've always done it. Some of those things are slipping away.

We used to always spell out every number and now there's less, less so. Well, I did look it up online and that you guys apparently resisted the, you know, the like modern American English and Noah Webster's changes to our spelling system and just stayed with the Brits a long time ago and you're not going back. And it's interesting, well, it's interesting too. The New York always says, you know, got. I have got. I had got it or something like, you know, he had got it, which is the Brit, the way the Brits say it,

but the gotten would say, I had gotten it. That's actually older. It was when English, English came to this continent, people said gotten, and then they lost it in the UK. So the way gotten is actually sort of, if you're trying to be British, we should say gotten, we should say gotten in the New Yorker, but it's always got. Interesting. See, this is why English is such a fascinating, confusing, maddening language. Anyway, thank you so much for coming. Please give David a round of applause. Thanks for your questions. There's more to come on Solda Story. As I mentioned, we're working on Season 2 right now. It goes beyond reading and touches on a lot of things we discussed in this episode. Keep following Solda Story in your podcast app so you don't miss it.

This episode was recorded live at Planet Word, a museum. in Washington, D.C. It's part of the Eyes on Reading series. There are a bunch of other events in this series, and there are videos available on the Planet Word YouTube channel. You can also find links at soldastory.org. This episode was produced by Chris Julin and edited by Curtis Gilbert and Sasha Aslanian.

Our digital editor is Andy Cruz. Final mastering by Maurizio DiRico. Our theme music is by Wonderly. Our executive editor is Zahler. Jane Helmke. Special thanks to David Owen, the Biscuit Factory, and the staff at Planet Word, including Caitlin Miller, Britt Oates, and CEO Anne Friedman. I'm Emily Hanford. Leadership support for Sold to Story comes from Holly Hawk Foundation and Oak Foundation. Support also comes from Ibus Group, Esther A. and Joseph Klingenstein Fund, Kenneth Raynan Foundation, Wendy and Stephen

Gull, and the listeners of American Public Media.