I have realized that I don’t read books anymore. Is it age related? I am 79. I used to read a great deal, bought a lot of books. Might it also be because books are so expensive? No, I will not use a Kindle, I want a book in my hand.
Two things for Monday morning:
1) Does anyone have a source for the actual numbers for the No Kings protests? My leftist minions say 7 to 10 million!!!, Yay!!. News sources like CNN show these aerial photos that, to me, seem AI generated as it’s hard to actually see people out of the myriad color dots. Actual photos from the minions who were at the protests show, like in June, what appears to be a retirement home outing; low numbers and much gray hair. Right wing sources say nothing or down play the numbers.
2) Interesting article on increasing acceptance of violence against political opponents from Democrats. I’ve seen such sentiments from the minions, and its increasing. Not good.
In my case it is definitely vision related. Without kindle and decent sized fonts I’d probably read a lot less. I also tend to read books in streaks, couple of weeks reading, couple of weeks off.
I wonder how those who learn to read a very early ages do it? Gauss said that he could not remember a time when he couldn’t read and figure, and he was keeping his father’s accounts at age three.
Does anyone have a source for the actual numbers for the No Kings protests?
I haven’t seen any, but I’m pretty sure the 7-10 million number is inflated. It probably doesn’t matter much, since the big numbers were in Democrat strongholds where they could be better organized. It was a very small group locally, but this is a mid-sized town in Utah. Late deer season also started Oct 18, so there was that 🙂 I think it will be forgotten in a week because not much actually happened.
Re: Antifa
I’ve been reading this ex–con/gang-shot-caller turned podcaster/recovery-coach, JD Delay. Lately he’s been in Portland covering the Antifa anti-ICE riots in Portland. JD is a huge guy, completely tatted-up, very bright and verbal. He’s seen some kind of light and is trying to pay it forward.
Here JD is interviewing an ex-Antifa member, Ty King, who has gone public on his experiences within Antifa. I haven’t seen anything like it elsewhere. I watched this video three times. I watched it a fourth time to summarize/paraphrase it.
I don’t vouch for everything, but I believe Ty is sincere, brave fellow. I’ve broken it into two parts. The first about Anitfa, the second about himself.
__________________________________
It’s a white boy jihad and it’s going to get fucked-up.
* [Antifa is an organization] — 100,000% true. Don’t let anyone fool you otherwise.
* I categorize the members of Antifa as Devotees and Wannabes. The Devotees were people like me, in it for the civil war. The trans kids were the Wannabes, the furries, the ones in the dinosaur suits to make the protests look fluffy, while people like me used the Wannabes in the front as human shields. Then the rubber bullets would come and the Wannabes would be taken out first.
* Yeah, [Anitfa] is a domestic terror organization. Yeah, this is bad. It’s a white boy jihad and it’s going to get fucked-up.
* [Antifa] is a cult, but it’s a cult with cults, which is even worse.
* Many people in Antifa are making money as drug dealers and sex workers.
* Chinese cartel syndicates are in control of Portland. CCP agents are calling a lot of the shots in the Portland riots. It’s a cover for child trafficking, weapons trade, and drug trade.
* A lot of Oregon bars, businesses, local charities and NGOs are in bed with Antifa. They pride themselves on the idea of revolution, on apocalyptic narratives. You go around these places and there is Satanic imagery everywhere.
* The National Guard is great, but if you really want to get these motherfuckers, sic the IRS on them. AUDIT EVERYBODY.
* Antifa is 100% edging towards civil war. And they play with the same language that gets played in the Middle East. You see “Antifada,” as in Intifada, spray-painted everywhere around Oregon campuses.
* A lot of what is going in the Middle East is the same as what’s going on here. We’re in the early stages of stone-throwing which led to public optics of “Oh no, the kids are being shot at, they’re being attacked. How horrible. How horrible.” Meanwhile the footage of them punching a police officer gets blocked out.
* This is a globalist movement. This is all nations. This is in the UK. This is in Ireland. This is in Africa. This is in Japan.
On Ty’s personal journey
* The short answer for my getting out: Doing everything they told me not to do. Listening to people and music they told me not to. Watching movies they told me not to watch. Reading books they told me not to read. Talking to people they told me not to.
* Which is a major cult aspect of that. They encourage you to sever ties with your family. And I did that. I didn’t even get to see my grandmother on her death bed because she was a white supremacist.
* I lost so much of my life to these motherfuckers. That’s why I’m so passionate about this.
* They don’t go after Nazis. I was studying Nazis. I was very confused why no one in Antifa wanted to know about actual Nazis.
* What’s a threat to Antifa is people like Charlie Kirk. That’s who they hate because they threaten the cult.
* You’ve got to remember that you’ve never seen a sober Antifa in your life. So there’s a lot of disassociation.
* What disgusted me over time was realizing how much I lost, how many friendships I severed, how stupid I was, how much I destroyed myself with the drugs.
* Probably the only reason I’m talking like this is the part of my brain which tells me not to is fried. [He is at risk from Antifa.]
It actually started before the 60s. Whole language was going when I went to school in the 50s, and it ticked off my teacher because my grandmother taught me to “sound it out” before then. I truly don’t understand the intense hostility to phonics at this late date.
So far as cell phones are concerned, well, I hate them and don’t own one. My wife has one she rarely uses, and I will take it if I’m going out of town.
As I age, I do read more slowly.
I’m listening to a lot of audiobooks in the last year. It’s on the way to supplanting podcasts. I’m on both Spotify and Audible.
I know it’s not the same, but at least I experience the plot and the artistic talent of the author. I just listened to Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling’s pseudonym), and I think she’s a master of the English language. I’m also almost through The Art of the Deal, by Donald Trump. I bought the paper book from Amazon, read half, loaned it to my mother, and now I’m going through it via Spotify.
It’s because I can do other things while listening to the book. And since I’m in my 50s, I can claim my bona fides of having read many books the old fashioned way. like Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, The Stand, and whole series, like Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason mysteries, the Spenser novels, the 87th Precinct by Ed McBain, and dozens of Star Trek novels when I was younger.
But things are different, and the internet is fascinating. I prefer audiobooks now.
The college and university dept’s of education are not only a joke, but they are a prime culprit in the destruction of the education system.
It was they who gave “educators” the new math and it was they that determined that phonics did not work well.
The result being kids cannot read at grade level and they could not do math.
What’s amazing about all of this is these education “professors,” more than likely, never set foot in an actual classroom.
Not only should the federal Dept of Education be abolished, the federal govt should not provide one penny of support to any college / university dept of education and not provide any college loan to any student who majors in education.
Further, school districts should not be allowed to hire school teachers whose major is education.
Teachers need to have real majors, be it math, a science, history , political science, a foreign language , etc.
I’ve said this before, but when I was teaching college in the 2010s I had college seniors who could not read their textbooks. I know this because sometimes I or other instructors would have them read something aloud.
Unless the sentence was subject-verb-object they weren’t going to understand it, and if a word had more than eight letters they were going to guess at what word it was, and get it wrong much of the time.
They never thought they had a problem though, they would always say that the sentence was “poorly worded”.
It was not a selective university but the students were generally in the top half of ACT scores.
Not reading, reading is voices from the past.
These people (Antifa for an example) are
not interested in the past period.
And a most enchanting post on…
Fundamental Metamorphosis….
Thanks, huxley. I hope that guy will be all right.
My early primary education was in Arizona in the 1950s. Definitely phonics, and flash cards and memorization for basic arithmetic. My husband’s primary education was in progressive Wisconsin in the same years. No phonics. He still struggles with unknown words. He’s an engineer and extremely good with numbers so it’s okay, but after all these years the disadvantages of the whole-language method are clear.
There have been lots of articles recently on which state is doing the best job for low-income (read, “black and Hispanic”) students. Mississippi! They teach phonics, offer extra tutors and state-funded reading summer schools, and they won’t promote students who don’t meet reading goals after third grade (might be fourth grade). Result: the kids can read much better than students in most other states.
To follow up on JohnTyler’s comment:
I know from personal experience the the education department at the college i worked at was taken over by marxists. It happened about the same time as the English department went down the tubes. Time frame circa 2005. They then revamped their curriculum with the stated purpose of turning out teacher/activists, not educators. It was happening all over the country in most Ed Departments. Bill Ayers would be proud.
I’m listening to a lot of audiobooks…
… I know it’s not the same.
I think that depends a lot on how good the narrator is. I read a lot in general and many of my favorite books I’ve both listened to and read. Some narrators can be so damn good that they enhance the experience. If anyone has been thinking about reading The Brothers Karamazov or The Magic Mountain for example, both can be found on Audible narrated by David Rintoul. That guy is a genius. Best narrator I’ve come across. Highly recommend.
I just retired. Before retirement my book reading was almost exclusively business trips or vacation, so maybe 6 books a year (I read Gerard’s book on my Christmas trip last year). Now in retirement I am reading 2-3 hours every day, so call it 1-2 books a week.
One thing that kept me from reading much is that almost everything written in the last few years is hopelessly woke, hopelessly preachy. So I a sticking to books written before 2015 or so, and one thing I am actually finding AI useful for is “find me non-woke books that I might like, and here are some examples of my tastes”. After a few more prompts I get a list of recommendations, and can download Kindle samples then decide what to buy (I personally like “real” books better, but the ease of sampling and buying electronically have me going 95% on Kindle).
I am also reading more non-fiction, which is not something I did when working, but now that I have time I am finding a lot of topics I find interesting.
I MUCH prefer reading to listening, so I hope my vision holds up. If it goes, I’ll switch to audio.
I also starting using Audible almost 2 years ago. In that time I’ve probably consumed something like 120 novels, a rate I never achieved when I was just reading dead trees. I used to read something like 10 books a year. Now I consume the equivalent of 10 books in less than 2 months.
Nothing done by the thugs currently in power in the UK should come as any surprise…in fact, dollars to donuts, the Starmer regime is all in favour of the latest No Kings / No Tyrants fetish-fest.
“…UK police stopped a woman from walking her dog, saying it could offend the local Muslim population — and ordered her off her own street.”— https://instapundit.com/751884/
Re: Phonics vs “Whole Language”
Me too. Phonics is the way I learned to read.
English is a tough language. It’s not perfectly phonetic, but regular enough that learning the sounds of letters and letter groups gives one measurable leverage in learning to read.
Phonics was replaced by the “Whole Language” or “Look-Say” method, in which students learn to read by recognizing whole words as spoken words. Which sounded insane to me when I learned about it.
I know from personal experience the the education department at the college i worked at was taken over by marxists. It happened about the same time as the English department went down the tubes. Time frame circa 2005. They then revamped their curriculum with the stated purpose of turning out teacher/activists, not educators. It was happening all over the country in most Ed Departments. Bill Ayers would be proud.
==
You also know from personal experience that the board of your employer was asleep at the wheel, like 98% of college trustees. It’s not as if the content of the har-de-har teacher training program were anything of importance like the basketball team.
New post: a collection of links about manufacturing and geopolitics
Americans should keep in mind something that William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to a southern friend, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War:
“Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make.”
A Chinese general in 2025 might express similar thoughts regarding the United States.
Mike Plaiss: no question. The narrator is extremely important. The best in the business is Scott Brick, who has narrated more than a thousand books in every genre. I’ve even selected books based on the narrator.
Nonapod: me, too. Audible gives you one free book a month, plus all the free ones you can listen too, and there are many. I thoroughly informed myself about World War One this year, and I’ve listened to many books I would never have read, like Unbroken and The Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles.
I listened to Scott Brick when he appeared on a podcast with Megan Kelly’s husband. Brick said even grown-ups like to be read to, something that happens to most of us when we’re children. He said our mind remembers what that was like and is glad to return to it. I think I agree with him.
Interesting video. I was reflecting on my own youthful experiences with reading. At a young age I was reading trashy short novels pitched to kids as well as some decent non-fiction, but because my parents and older siblings had bought many paperbacks, there were a several full bookshelves in the house. As the youngest child, my parents were definitely not helicopter parenting me either.
So when I stumbled across Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Crime And Punishment at a young age, I had exposure to both trashy thrills and good literature. I made a point to pour through classic literature at that point. Unfortunately, it was only much later that I realized that even back then, the “experts” in literature, whose lists I was following, had already become somewhat politically correct. Not too badly then, though.
The last quarter of the video mentions the impact of modern media, devices, and distractions on our inclination to read whole books. I have definitely noticed that, but my own life’s journey got complicated too.
I tend to think that growing up in a community of low population density farmland, rather than a dense urban environment had something to do with a propensity to read books, as well.
Compared to what’s “trash” today, it reads like “The Bobbsey Twins Have Sex”.
When I was much younger and read it I didn’t understand why there was so much controversy, but when I got older and understood how slippery slopes work, I figured it out.
I wanted so badly to read as a kid. I was mad that I couldn’t teach myself. I approached reading like Jim Ryun approached the four-minute mile. I was always pushing myself to read the next harder book.
It paid off.
Not surprisingly, that how I’m learning French.
It reads like “The Bobbsey Twins Have (Anal) Sex”. Lawrence tried, he really did, but in the end he was just Lawrence.
One thing I forgot to mention. Yesterday, on Ace’s Book Thread, I read of – brace yourself – a “modern translation” of Pride and Prejudice. Really.
That means we are officially hopeless. Any native English speaker should have zero trouble with anyone since Dryden, and little with Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Hell, I found that, with Chaucer, I worked from the original with a good glossary, and while I struggled with the Prologue and the Knight, by the Miller’s Tale, it was pretty easy.
I wanted so badly to read as a kid
Not me. I remember checking out the books for second grade and none of them were interesting. By the fourth grade I had forgotten how to read. Then my Dad started reading a science fiction story to me, it was about a trip to Mars on a nuclear powered rocket. I struggled to finish it — I was actually proud to recognize the word “the”, but after that I would read half a dozen books a week, Mark Twain and Jules Verne among others. I recall The Mysterious Island as being somewhat difficult to understand, but loved the recipe for manufacturing nitroglycerin 🙂
Speaking of reading….I found a copy of the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine from circa 1880, and also found that some issues are available online. The firemen were the guys who shoveled the coal into the boiler furnaces, working on a swaying platform in a cab that was definitely not climate-controlled. The job required more brainwork than one might think but still, this was not one of the more intellectual jobs on the railroad. I doubt if there were many if any college graduates among the readership of this magazine, I’d guess that no more than half had gone all the way through high school.
So what kind of reading material was designed for them?
huxley I wanted so badly to read as a kid. I was mad that I couldn’t teach myself.
I don’t recall any such strong desire on my part. Before I started first grade, my parents read a lot to me. After I learned to read in first grade, I read a lot on my own. My sister recently said that by third or fourth grade she was reading 2-3 years above her grade level, which also describes me.
Decades later a classmate, of working class origin but as bright as me, said that she noticed all the books in a classmate’s household, in contrast to her working class, book-free (or nearly book-free) household. The classmate, like me, was the offspring of professionals. The working class father may not have had books in his household, but he did take his daughter to the library. She read a lot, and caught up.
Decades later, she expressed some resentment that I and our other classmate—offspring of professionals—had learned to read before starting first grade, while her working-class parents had had not taught her to read before first grade. Except I didn’t learn to read until first grade. Decades later I asked my mother why we were not taught to read before school. My mother replied that she had read that it would have been pressuring children to have them read before first grade.
I don’t think that not learning to read before first grade set me back. By third grade I was reading more than the classmate who had learned to read before first grade. I doubt our bright classmate of working class origin was set back, either. She read a lot, and got a degree.
Chuck: Without kindle and decent sized fonts I’d probably read a lot less.
Ditto. But I haven’t yet got rid of my shelves of books, though almost all my reading for over a decade has been from ebooks .
(Nook,Kobo,Kindle..)
Re Antifa, I recomment Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.
Re listening to books: I read Spanish language books while listening to them on my Fire HD. Good automated Spanish accent.
huxley on October 20, 2025 at 3:22 pm:
“English is a tough language. It’s not perfectly phonetic, but regular enough that learning the sounds of letters and letter groups gives one measurable leverage in learning to read.”
And I was doing pretty well until about 8, when I came across the word “epitome”!. Fortunately my first public expression of that word was to my mother, who explained it had a different sound. And from that one instance, I realized a lot of words derived from Greek would have similar (not fully English) phonetics.
“The Chinese don’t have a choice. We do.”
I wonder if the more complicated pictographic nature of Chinese characters has contributed to the result on IQ distributions that Asians are shown as a few % higher than Caucasians/Westerners.
Or do you learn to examine and read a pictograph in pieces/parts to fully recognize it? Similar to adding the letters in sequence to complete a full word. I gather that our alphabet is derived from much earlier pictograms, so that after a while we do end up with a version of “whole word language”.
@David Foster
I was struck by “Watchmakers & cabinetmakers taught themselves Greek and Latin”, because my grandfather (born 1870) also taught himself Greek and Latin. He did finish high school, worked for an undertaker to support himself while attending, and learned calculus among other things. His motivation was religious, he wanted to read the relevant texts in the original.
physicsguy asks about No Kings protest turnout?
In Utah at the State Capital builfing, State Police rrported 200.
But news RV footage suggests around 300.
In Southern Utah, in St George (which is somewhat close to Las Vegas), two dozen mostly old folks showed.
Probably not a good idea to get sick in Britain (or any other “Western” country for that matter….):
Speaking of reading, or rather mis-reading—make that “extraordinary stupidity”—J.R.R. Tolkien would no doubt be getting a chuckle out of this oh-so-earnest imbecile….
R2L, in Chinese, each ideogram or pictogram is a whole syllable, so I guess we could say it’s “whole-syllable” rather than “whole-word”. There are certain foundational symbols that are referred to as radicals in the dictionaries, and there are a couple of ways that the larger characters are built onto those, in that the radical serves as a guide to either sound or meaning. I think in traditional Chinese writing, these connections are more clear, since modern Chinese as used in the PRC tends to simplify some of the characters to a point at which some of the radicals actually get a little difficult to recognize.
Korean, on the other hand, is much more alphabetic in nature and is a snap to read in comparison to Chinese. It’s not without its little tricks, though.
Philip Sells on October 21, 2025 at 12:28 pm
Thank you, Philip, for that clarification.
The breadth and depth of The New Neo commentariat never ceases to amaze me.
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I have realized that I don’t read books anymore. Is it age related? I am 79. I used to read a great deal, bought a lot of books. Might it also be because books are so expensive? No, I will not use a Kindle, I want a book in my hand.
Two things for Monday morning:
1) Does anyone have a source for the actual numbers for the No Kings protests? My leftist minions say 7 to 10 million!!!, Yay!!. News sources like CNN show these aerial photos that, to me, seem AI generated as it’s hard to actually see people out of the myriad color dots. Actual photos from the minions who were at the protests show, like in June, what appears to be a retirement home outing; low numbers and much gray hair. Right wing sources say nothing or down play the numbers.
2) Interesting article on increasing acceptance of violence against political opponents from Democrats. I’ve seen such sentiments from the minions, and its increasing. Not good.
https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2025/10/charlie_kirk_s_assassination_reveals_the_growing_threat_of_democrats_violence.html
Is it age related?
In my case it is definitely vision related. Without kindle and decent sized fonts I’d probably read a lot less. I also tend to read books in streaks, couple of weeks reading, couple of weeks off.
I wonder how those who learn to read a very early ages do it? Gauss said that he could not remember a time when he couldn’t read and figure, and he was keeping his father’s accounts at age three.
Does anyone have a source for the actual numbers for the No Kings protests?
I haven’t seen any, but I’m pretty sure the 7-10 million number is inflated. It probably doesn’t matter much, since the big numbers were in Democrat strongholds where they could be better organized. It was a very small group locally, but this is a mid-sized town in Utah. Late deer season also started Oct 18, so there was that 🙂 I think it will be forgotten in a week because not much actually happened.
Re: Antifa
I’ve been reading this ex–con/gang-shot-caller turned podcaster/recovery-coach, JD Delay. Lately he’s been in Portland covering the Antifa anti-ICE riots in Portland. JD is a huge guy, completely tatted-up, very bright and verbal. He’s seen some kind of light and is trying to pay it forward.
Here JD is interviewing an ex-Antifa member, Ty King, who has gone public on his experiences within Antifa. I haven’t seen anything like it elsewhere. I watched this video three times. I watched it a fourth time to summarize/paraphrase it.
I don’t vouch for everything, but I believe Ty is sincere, brave fellow. I’ve broken it into two parts. The first about Anitfa, the second about himself.
__________________________________
It’s a white boy jihad and it’s going to get fucked-up.
–JD Delay, Ty King, “EX ANTIFA MEMBER EXPOSES THE DOMESTIC TERROR ORGANIZATION”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mo5ezfuUTac
Ty King on Anita:
* [Antifa is an organization] — 100,000% true. Don’t let anyone fool you otherwise.
* I categorize the members of Antifa as Devotees and Wannabes. The Devotees were people like me, in it for the civil war. The trans kids were the Wannabes, the furries, the ones in the dinosaur suits to make the protests look fluffy, while people like me used the Wannabes in the front as human shields. Then the rubber bullets would come and the Wannabes would be taken out first.
* Yeah, [Anitfa] is a domestic terror organization. Yeah, this is bad. It’s a white boy jihad and it’s going to get fucked-up.
* [Antifa] is a cult, but it’s a cult with cults, which is even worse.
* Many people in Antifa are making money as drug dealers and sex workers.
* Chinese cartel syndicates are in control of Portland. CCP agents are calling a lot of the shots in the Portland riots. It’s a cover for child trafficking, weapons trade, and drug trade.
* A lot of Oregon bars, businesses, local charities and NGOs are in bed with Antifa. They pride themselves on the idea of revolution, on apocalyptic narratives. You go around these places and there is Satanic imagery everywhere.
* The National Guard is great, but if you really want to get these motherfuckers, sic the IRS on them. AUDIT EVERYBODY.
* Antifa is 100% edging towards civil war. And they play with the same language that gets played in the Middle East. You see “Antifada,” as in Intifada, spray-painted everywhere around Oregon campuses.
* A lot of what is going in the Middle East is the same as what’s going on here. We’re in the early stages of stone-throwing which led to public optics of “Oh no, the kids are being shot at, they’re being attacked. How horrible. How horrible.” Meanwhile the footage of them punching a police officer gets blocked out.
* This is a globalist movement. This is all nations. This is in the UK. This is in Ireland. This is in Africa. This is in Japan.
On Ty’s personal journey
* The short answer for my getting out: Doing everything they told me not to do. Listening to people and music they told me not to. Watching movies they told me not to watch. Reading books they told me not to read. Talking to people they told me not to.
* Which is a major cult aspect of that. They encourage you to sever ties with your family. And I did that. I didn’t even get to see my grandmother on her death bed because she was a white supremacist.
* I lost so much of my life to these motherfuckers. That’s why I’m so passionate about this.
* They don’t go after Nazis. I was studying Nazis. I was very confused why no one in Antifa wanted to know about actual Nazis.
* What’s a threat to Antifa is people like Charlie Kirk. That’s who they hate because they threaten the cult.
* You’ve got to remember that you’ve never seen a sober Antifa in your life. So there’s a lot of disassociation.
* What disgusted me over time was realizing how much I lost, how many friendships I severed, how stupid I was, how much I destroyed myself with the drugs.
* Probably the only reason I’m talking like this is the part of my brain which tells me not to is fried. [He is at risk from Antifa.]
It actually started before the 60s. Whole language was going when I went to school in the 50s, and it ticked off my teacher because my grandmother taught me to “sound it out” before then. I truly don’t understand the intense hostility to phonics at this late date.
So far as cell phones are concerned, well, I hate them and don’t own one. My wife has one she rarely uses, and I will take it if I’m going out of town.
As I age, I do read more slowly.
I’m listening to a lot of audiobooks in the last year. It’s on the way to supplanting podcasts. I’m on both Spotify and Audible.
I know it’s not the same, but at least I experience the plot and the artistic talent of the author. I just listened to Cuckoo’s Calling by Robert Galbraith (JK Rowling’s pseudonym), and I think she’s a master of the English language. I’m also almost through The Art of the Deal, by Donald Trump. I bought the paper book from Amazon, read half, loaned it to my mother, and now I’m going through it via Spotify.
It’s because I can do other things while listening to the book. And since I’m in my 50s, I can claim my bona fides of having read many books the old fashioned way. like Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead, The Stand, and whole series, like Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason mysteries, the Spenser novels, the 87th Precinct by Ed McBain, and dozens of Star Trek novels when I was younger.
But things are different, and the internet is fascinating. I prefer audiobooks now.
The college and university dept’s of education are not only a joke, but they are a prime culprit in the destruction of the education system.
It was they who gave “educators” the new math and it was they that determined that phonics did not work well.
The result being kids cannot read at grade level and they could not do math.
What’s amazing about all of this is these education “professors,” more than likely, never set foot in an actual classroom.
Not only should the federal Dept of Education be abolished, the federal govt should not provide one penny of support to any college / university dept of education and not provide any college loan to any student who majors in education.
Further, school districts should not be allowed to hire school teachers whose major is education.
Teachers need to have real majors, be it math, a science, history , political science, a foreign language , etc.
I’ve said this before, but when I was teaching college in the 2010s I had college seniors who could not read their textbooks. I know this because sometimes I or other instructors would have them read something aloud.
Unless the sentence was subject-verb-object they weren’t going to understand it, and if a word had more than eight letters they were going to guess at what word it was, and get it wrong much of the time.
They never thought they had a problem though, they would always say that the sentence was “poorly worded”.
It was not a selective university but the students were generally in the top half of ACT scores.
Not reading, reading is voices from the past.
These people (Antifa for an example) are
not interested in the past period.
And a most enchanting post on…
Fundamental Metamorphosis….
“CHANGE THIS”—
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2025/10/change-this-3.php
Thanks, huxley. I hope that guy will be all right.
My early primary education was in Arizona in the 1950s. Definitely phonics, and flash cards and memorization for basic arithmetic. My husband’s primary education was in progressive Wisconsin in the same years. No phonics. He still struggles with unknown words. He’s an engineer and extremely good with numbers so it’s okay, but after all these years the disadvantages of the whole-language method are clear.
There have been lots of articles recently on which state is doing the best job for low-income (read, “black and Hispanic”) students. Mississippi! They teach phonics, offer extra tutors and state-funded reading summer schools, and they won’t promote students who don’t meet reading goals after third grade (might be fourth grade). Result: the kids can read much better than students in most other states.
To follow up on JohnTyler’s comment:
I know from personal experience the the education department at the college i worked at was taken over by marxists. It happened about the same time as the English department went down the tubes. Time frame circa 2005. They then revamped their curriculum with the stated purpose of turning out teacher/activists, not educators. It was happening all over the country in most Ed Departments. Bill Ayers would be proud.
I’m listening to a lot of audiobooks…
… I know it’s not the same.
I think that depends a lot on how good the narrator is. I read a lot in general and many of my favorite books I’ve both listened to and read. Some narrators can be so damn good that they enhance the experience. If anyone has been thinking about reading The Brothers Karamazov or The Magic Mountain for example, both can be found on Audible narrated by David Rintoul. That guy is a genius. Best narrator I’ve come across. Highly recommend.
I just retired. Before retirement my book reading was almost exclusively business trips or vacation, so maybe 6 books a year (I read Gerard’s book on my Christmas trip last year). Now in retirement I am reading 2-3 hours every day, so call it 1-2 books a week.
One thing that kept me from reading much is that almost everything written in the last few years is hopelessly woke, hopelessly preachy. So I a sticking to books written before 2015 or so, and one thing I am actually finding AI useful for is “find me non-woke books that I might like, and here are some examples of my tastes”. After a few more prompts I get a list of recommendations, and can download Kindle samples then decide what to buy (I personally like “real” books better, but the ease of sampling and buying electronically have me going 95% on Kindle).
I am also reading more non-fiction, which is not something I did when working, but now that I have time I am finding a lot of topics I find interesting.
I MUCH prefer reading to listening, so I hope my vision holds up. If it goes, I’ll switch to audio.
I also starting using Audible almost 2 years ago. In that time I’ve probably consumed something like 120 novels, a rate I never achieved when I was just reading dead trees. I used to read something like 10 books a year. Now I consume the equivalent of 10 books in less than 2 months.
Nothing done by the thugs currently in power in the UK should come as any surprise…in fact, dollars to donuts, the Starmer regime is all in favour of the latest No Kings / No Tyrants fetish-fest.
“…UK police stopped a woman from walking her dog, saying it could offend the local Muslim population — and ordered her off her own street.”—
https://instapundit.com/751884/
Re: Phonics vs “Whole Language”
Me too. Phonics is the way I learned to read.
English is a tough language. It’s not perfectly phonetic, but regular enough that learning the sounds of letters and letter groups gives one measurable leverage in learning to read.
Phonics was replaced by the “Whole Language” or “Look-Say” method, in which students learn to read by recognizing whole words as spoken words. Which sounded insane to me when I learned about it.
The Chinese don’t have a choice. We do.
Turns out research has shown Phonics is superior to Look-Say. Forty states now require teachers to teach by the Science of Reading standard, which is a mélange of checkboxes, but the red meat on that menu is Phonics.
IOW … Phonics is back, baby!
I know from personal experience the the education department at the college i worked at was taken over by marxists. It happened about the same time as the English department went down the tubes. Time frame circa 2005. They then revamped their curriculum with the stated purpose of turning out teacher/activists, not educators. It was happening all over the country in most Ed Departments. Bill Ayers would be proud.
==
You also know from personal experience that the board of your employer was asleep at the wheel, like 98% of college trustees. It’s not as if the content of the har-de-har teacher training program were anything of importance like the basketball team.
New post: a collection of links about manufacturing and geopolitics
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/75256.html
Americans should keep in mind something that William Tecumseh Sherman wrote to a southern friend, shortly before the outbreak of the American Civil War:
“Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make.”
A Chinese general in 2025 might express similar thoughts regarding the United States.
Mike Plaiss: no question. The narrator is extremely important. The best in the business is Scott Brick, who has narrated more than a thousand books in every genre. I’ve even selected books based on the narrator.
Nonapod: me, too. Audible gives you one free book a month, plus all the free ones you can listen too, and there are many. I thoroughly informed myself about World War One this year, and I’ve listened to many books I would never have read, like Unbroken and The Rules of Civility, by Amor Towles.
I listened to Scott Brick when he appeared on a podcast with Megan Kelly’s husband. Brick said even grown-ups like to be read to, something that happens to most of us when we’re children. He said our mind remembers what that was like and is glad to return to it. I think I agree with him.
Interesting video. I was reflecting on my own youthful experiences with reading. At a young age I was reading trashy short novels pitched to kids as well as some decent non-fiction, but because my parents and older siblings had bought many paperbacks, there were a several full bookshelves in the house. As the youngest child, my parents were definitely not helicopter parenting me either.
So when I stumbled across Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Crime And Punishment at a young age, I had exposure to both trashy thrills and good literature. I made a point to pour through classic literature at that point. Unfortunately, it was only much later that I realized that even back then, the “experts” in literature, whose lists I was following, had already become somewhat politically correct. Not too badly then, though.
The last quarter of the video mentions the impact of modern media, devices, and distractions on our inclination to read whole books. I have definitely noticed that, but my own life’s journey got complicated too.
I tend to think that growing up in a community of low population density farmland, rather than a dense urban environment had something to do with a propensity to read books, as well.
@TommyJay:Lady Chatterley’s Lover… trashy thrills
Compared to what’s “trash” today, it reads like “The Bobbsey Twins Have Sex”.
When I was much younger and read it I didn’t understand why there was so much controversy, but when I got older and understood how slippery slopes work, I figured it out.
I wanted so badly to read as a kid. I was mad that I couldn’t teach myself. I approached reading like Jim Ryun approached the four-minute mile. I was always pushing myself to read the next harder book.
It paid off.
Not surprisingly, that how I’m learning French.
It reads like “The Bobbsey Twins Have (Anal) Sex”. Lawrence tried, he really did, but in the end he was just Lawrence.
One thing I forgot to mention. Yesterday, on Ace’s Book Thread, I read of – brace yourself – a “modern translation” of Pride and Prejudice. Really.
https://www.amazon.com/Prejudice-English-Version-Translated-Annotated-ebook/dp/B0BYV72BLX/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&sr=1-3
That means we are officially hopeless. Any native English speaker should have zero trouble with anyone since Dryden, and little with Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Hell, I found that, with Chaucer, I worked from the original with a good glossary, and while I struggled with the Prologue and the Knight, by the Miller’s Tale, it was pretty easy.
I wanted so badly to read as a kid
Not me. I remember checking out the books for second grade and none of them were interesting. By the fourth grade I had forgotten how to read. Then my Dad started reading a science fiction story to me, it was about a trip to Mars on a nuclear powered rocket. I struggled to finish it — I was actually proud to recognize the word “the”, but after that I would read half a dozen books a week, Mark Twain and Jules Verne among others. I recall The Mysterious Island as being somewhat difficult to understand, but loved the recipe for manufacturing nitroglycerin 🙂
Speaking of reading….I found a copy of the Locomotive Firemen’s Magazine from circa 1880, and also found that some issues are available online. The firemen were the guys who shoveled the coal into the boiler furnaces, working on a swaying platform in a cab that was definitely not climate-controlled. The job required more brainwork than one might think but still, this was not one of the more intellectual jobs on the railroad. I doubt if there were many if any college graduates among the readership of this magazine, I’d guess that no more than half had gone all the way through high school.
So what kind of reading material was designed for them?
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/73340.html
huxley
I wanted so badly to read as a kid. I was mad that I couldn’t teach myself.
I don’t recall any such strong desire on my part. Before I started first grade, my parents read a lot to me. After I learned to read in first grade, I read a lot on my own. My sister recently said that by third or fourth grade she was reading 2-3 years above her grade level, which also describes me.
Decades later a classmate, of working class origin but as bright as me, said that she noticed all the books in a classmate’s household, in contrast to her working class, book-free (or nearly book-free) household. The classmate, like me, was the offspring of professionals. The working class father may not have had books in his household, but he did take his daughter to the library. She read a lot, and caught up.
Decades later, she expressed some resentment that I and our other classmate—offspring of professionals—had learned to read before starting first grade, while her working-class parents had had not taught her to read before first grade. Except I didn’t learn to read until first grade. Decades later I asked my mother why we were not taught to read before school. My mother replied that she had read that it would have been pressuring children to have them read before first grade.
I don’t think that not learning to read before first grade set me back. By third grade I was reading more than the classmate who had learned to read before first grade. I doubt our bright classmate of working class origin was set back, either. She read a lot, and got a degree.
Chuck:
Without kindle and decent sized fonts I’d probably read a lot less.
Ditto. But I haven’t yet got rid of my shelves of books, though almost all my reading for over a decade has been from ebooks .
(Nook,Kobo,Kindle..)
Re Antifa, I recomment Andy Ngo’s book Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.
Re listening to books: I read Spanish language books while listening to them on my Fire HD. Good automated Spanish accent.
huxley on October 20, 2025 at 3:22 pm:
“English is a tough language. It’s not perfectly phonetic, but regular enough that learning the sounds of letters and letter groups gives one measurable leverage in learning to read.”
And I was doing pretty well until about 8, when I came across the word “epitome”!. Fortunately my first public expression of that word was to my mother, who explained it had a different sound. And from that one instance, I realized a lot of words derived from Greek would have similar (not fully English) phonetics.
“The Chinese don’t have a choice. We do.”
I wonder if the more complicated pictographic nature of Chinese characters has contributed to the result on IQ distributions that Asians are shown as a few % higher than Caucasians/Westerners.
Or do you learn to examine and read a pictograph in pieces/parts to fully recognize it? Similar to adding the letters in sequence to complete a full word. I gather that our alphabet is derived from much earlier pictograms, so that after a while we do end up with a version of “whole word language”.
@David Foster
I was struck by “Watchmakers & cabinetmakers taught themselves Greek and Latin”, because my grandfather (born 1870) also taught himself Greek and Latin. He did finish high school, worked for an undertaker to support himself while attending, and learned calculus among other things. His motivation was religious, he wanted to read the relevant texts in the original.
physicsguy asks about No Kings protest turnout?
In Utah at the State Capital builfing, State Police rrported 200.
But news RV footage suggests around 300.
In Southern Utah, in St George (which is somewhat close to Las Vegas), two dozen mostly old folks showed.
Probably not a good idea to get sick in Britain (or any other “Western” country for that matter….):
“Anti-Semitism has infected the NHS”—
https://blazingcatfur.ca/2025/10/21/anti-semitism-has-infected-the-nhs/
Speaking of reading, or rather mis-reading—make that “extraordinary stupidity”—J.R.R. Tolkien would no doubt be getting a chuckle out of this oh-so-earnest imbecile….
“British Prof Accuses Tolkien of Colonial Imagery in Lord of the Rings”—
https://legalinsurrection.com/2025/10/british-prof-accuses-tolkien-of-colonial-imagery-in-lord-of-the-rings/
File under: Lord of the Morons
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R2L, in Chinese, each ideogram or pictogram is a whole syllable, so I guess we could say it’s “whole-syllable” rather than “whole-word”. There are certain foundational symbols that are referred to as radicals in the dictionaries, and there are a couple of ways that the larger characters are built onto those, in that the radical serves as a guide to either sound or meaning. I think in traditional Chinese writing, these connections are more clear, since modern Chinese as used in the PRC tends to simplify some of the characters to a point at which some of the radicals actually get a little difficult to recognize.
Korean, on the other hand, is much more alphabetic in nature and is a snap to read in comparison to Chinese. It’s not without its little tricks, though.
Philip Sells on October 21, 2025 at 12:28 pm
Thank you, Philip, for that clarification.
The breadth and depth of The New Neo commentariat never ceases to amaze me.