Five For Friday, October 11, 2025
Atlantic Dirty, Doom Scrolling, Asheville, VT/NH, ICYMI
Busy week with work and family. We’re staying close to home this weekend to recover. This morning, it’s a quick Five for Friday.
The Atlantic Dirty Story
In a viral substack article, Carrie M. Santo-Thomas writes that “the Atlantic did me dirty.” Over the summer, Santo-Thomas, a high school teacher, was interviewed by Rose Horowitch as part of an article about the book-adverse college students. She felt that Horowitch cherry picked quotes from their lengthy interviews, which did not reflect her true views on the subject.
Full disclosure: I wrote regularly for the Atlantic between 2012 and 2020. That comes with a certain amount of baggage, which I shan’t discuss in a public forum.
All magazine writers cherry-pick, in that they can’t publish every thought that an interviewee tells them. Often, a one-hour conversation will lead to one-sentence quote. Authors, who are constrained by practical issues like word counts, interview a dozen people for each article. Their job is to tell a compelling story by weaving together multiple viewpoints and positions, with the hope that their aging readers have a longer attention span the average college student. Santo-Thomas’s thoughts were just one of a mix of people.
But I wish I had heard more about Santo-Thomas in the Atlantic, because she’s entertainingly woke. She says that college professors might be upset that students won’t read Les Miserables, but that’s their problem.
…while professors at elite universities sound the alarm over Gen Z undergrads not finishing Les Miserables because they are uninterested in reading a pompous French man drone on for chapters about the Paris sewer system, my colleagues and I have developed professional toolboxes with endless other ways to inspire our students to read about justice, compassion, and redemption.
She’s given up teaching books by pompous men, because Gen Z and Gen Alpha “don’t cow to authority for authority’s sake.” She’s annoyed that Atlantic writers and college professors are imposing their expectations on the high school classroom. Kids aren’t reading the big books, but that’s just fine with her. Although she wishes that she could have said all that in the Atlantic, she will settle for Substack.
Midnight Doom Scrolling
Insomnia kicked in this week, so that meant midnight doom scrolling on X. Whew! There are just too many crazy people on the Internet these days. Including Elon Musk.
As I scrolled through my X feed, I saw videos of environmental justice kooks and anti-semitic protests on college campuses. There’s were people who thought that the hurricanes were geo-engineered by the government to kill Republicans. And there’s a bunch of people who hated the New York Times and other traditional publications.
I’m an extreme free speech advocate, but sometimes I wish that the crazy people didn’t have such a huge soap box. They are making it very difficult to fall asleep.
Asheville
Asheville, North Carolina is a special place. We’ve visited the city several times over the years. Here are some pictures of places that might no longer exist.
Vermont and New Hampshire
This weekend, we drove up to Vermont to make some decisions about Ian’s autism college. We spent the night in Manchester, New Hampshire. In the morning, we went to Concord, so I could get a selfie outside the state capital. That makes state capital number seven on a mission to see all 50 state capitals. Next month, we’ll be in Raleigh, which will be number eight.
From there, we drove north to Lake Winnipesaukee and had a nice lunch by the water. Now, I really want a house on an island in a lake surrounded by mountains. So lovely.
