4.8 • 2.4K Ratings
🗓️ 9 July 2025
⏱️ 99 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
This week, the girlies are armed with their No. 2 pencils to ask: what’s the current state of literacy, how did we get here, and are the kids okay??? They unpack how we went from clay tablets to BookTok fairy smut and trace how phonics, poverty, and the policy failures of the Bush administration shaped how we learn to read. Digressions include Zohran Mamdani socialist prom, the power of drawing portals, and empathy for Travis Kelce.
This episode was produced by Julia Hava and Eliza McLamb and edited by Allison Hagan. Research assistance from Kylie Finnigan.
We’re going on tour!!!! Find tickets at https://linktr.ee/binchtopia
SOURCES:
A Brief History of Summer Reading
A Chapter a Day – Association of Book Reading with Longevity
A History of Reading by Alberto Manguel
American Children’s Reading Skills Reach New Lows
America’s literacy crisis isn’t what you think
Ancient customer-feedback technology lasts millennia
Are men’s reading habits truly a national crisis?
BookTok: A new era in the history of reading
BookTok: The Dark Horse of the Economy
Children and young people's reading in 2025
Exploring BookTok’s impact on literature
How BookTok is Reviving the Era of Physical Bookselling
How is the popularity of BookTok impacting the publishing industry?
How Literacy Became a Powerful Weapon in the Fight to End Slavery
How One Woman Became the Scapegoat for America’s Reading Crisis
How the Second World War Made America Literate
How TikTok Became a Best-Seller Machine
Introduction to the Original Edition Literacy and History
Illiteracy: “Another form of slavery”
Literacy Rate in the US 2025: Top Picks
National Reading Panel - Teaching Children to Read
No Child Left Behind Act of 2001
No Child Left Behind: An Overview
Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed at Fifty
PEDAGOGY of the OPPRESSED by Paolo Freire
Report finds ‘shocking and dispiriting’ fall in children reading for pleasure
School Summer Reading Lists: A Brief and Nerdy History
Soldiers Literacy Training Collection
The Influence of BookTok on Literary Criticisms and Diversity
The Invention of Summer Reading and the Birth of the Beach Read
The Literacy Crisis in the U.S. is Deeply Concerning—and Totally Preventable
The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy
This is how much the global literacy rate grew over 200 years
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0:00.0 | Welcome to Binchotopia. |
0:05.0 | We hope you enjoy your stay. |
0:13.0 | Hi everybody, welcome back to Binchotopia. |
0:17.0 | Hello and welcome back. |
0:18.0 | I'm Julia Hava. |
0:19.0 | I'm Eliza McClam. |
0:20.0 | If you would like to support us on |
0:21.5 | Patreon, you can go to patreon.com slash Binchotopia where you can get access to our bonus episodes, |
0:26.5 | our monthly zooms, and our media sods. And we have a sister episode to this one featuring famous |
0:32.5 | Rainfisher Kwan. Famous Rainfisher Kwan. It's about about reading book talk, the state of literature these days. It'll be |
0:39.5 | coming out next week. So make sure to subscribe if you want to hear that because it's a good one. |
0:43.4 | Totally. Yeah. If you want the more like discoursey aspect of this whole conversation, that's going to be |
0:49.3 | over there on the Patreon with the internet princess herself. We are also going on a sleepover tour this summer. |
0:55.1 | If you don't know, you must know. |
0:57.1 | We just did a really fun sleepover simulator episode also that's on Patreon where we do |
1:02.1 | kind of a sleepover vibe. |
1:03.3 | We talk about the journey of sleepovers in adolescence, other things related to that time |
1:08.6 | of life, including bat mitzvahs and just general awkwardness. |
1:12.3 | A lot of our more embarrassing stories from our childhood years live behind the paywall. |
1:17.1 | And there are still tickets to our shows in D.C., Philadelphia, and New York. |
1:21.7 | So check those out. |
1:23.4 | Check those out. |
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