From executive producer Isaac Saul, this is Tangle.

Good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to the Tangle podcast, a place where you get views from across the political spectrum, some independent thinking, and a little bit of our take.

I'm your host for today, Associate Editor Audrey Moorhead, and today you're going to be hearing a lot of my take on a problem that I've been reading and thinking about for some time now, a few years even,

which is the modern literacy crisis and the efforts to reverse the trends. So without further ado,

let's dive right in. In the summer or fall of 2025, while idly scrolling through X,

I came across a rather interesting article from Natalie Wexler's substack, Minding the Gap.

Her article detailed the results of a small study of 85 English majors at two Kansas universities.

Researchers had students read the opening

paragraphs of Charles Dickens's Bleak House and tasked them with explaining the contents in plain

English to a facilitator. Because Bleak House is a nearly 200-year-old British novel, placing it firmly

in an unfamiliar cultural context for the average American reader, the students were given

a dictionary, reference materials, and permission to use their cell phones to look up unfamiliar

terms. Essentially, the students weren't being tested on any of their own prior knowledge, only

their reading comprehension. But even in this open book environment, only four of the 85 students demonstrated a comprehensive understanding of the text.

32 showed a competent understanding, but even they only understood half the text.

The rest of the students were identified as problematic readers, almost totally unable to comprehend the passage.

Natalie Wexler, a writer who specializes in education

and literacy, pointed out that the problematic reader's difficulties came from encountering words

and phrases that they were unfamiliar with. Even though they had access to research materials,

Wexler wrote, their unfamiliarity with Dickens' prose style and cultural world were so profound

that they simply gave up

trying to understand the text. The competent readers showed a similar unfamiliarity with these

...