Lit vs. AI and Social Media’s Barbarism

By Robin Bates | Published: July 15, 2026
Medieval monk copying a manuscript

 Thursday

I write today about a well-researched and very disturbing Atlantic article by Rose Horowitz that provocatively announces, “The End of Reading Is here: Optimists once believed that universal literacy was inevitable. Now it seems that the age of reading might be a short anomaly in human history.”

To be sure, the article itself has to qualify this claim in one important way, observing that, what with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions, Americans are actually reading “more words than ever before.” The worry is that this “explosion of literary fragments” comes 

at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.

What follows is a litany of instances of how the decline in long reading has led to decreased thinking capability, just as the advent of AI is eroding writing skills. Skill levels that were once increasing are now on the wane. And although people are still buying books and new bookstores are opening, Horowitz said that those number mask the extent of the crisis:

[O]ptimists overlook a crucial thread in the data: Text is thriving among a dwindling proportion of the population. Just 20 percent of adults accounted for more than 80 percent of all books read last year. “It’s becoming a kind of niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids,” Leah Price, a historian of reading at Rutgers University, told me. Readers spend more time reading each day than they did two decades ago. They appear to be even more passionate about print than their predecessors. But the people devoted to text, who derive cultural understanding and intellectual connection from the written word, are now part of a subculture. 

Observing that books “used to be an essential source of knowledge, memory, wisdom, and morality” that passed from one generation to the next, now information “moves horizontally, from young person to young person.” The decline of reading, she writes, “didn’t turn the world upside down. It turned the world sideways.”

There are occasional signs of hope in this otherwise depressing article. Reporting that two dozen states have banned cellphones during the school day, Horotwitz says that, following such a ban, last year a Dallas school district 

saw 200,000 more library books checked out compared with the year before, a nearly 25 percent increase. Rex Ovalle, a high-school English teacher in the Chicago suburbs and a member of the National Council of Teachers of English, told me he’s seen pushback against excerpts; some teachers are adding whole books back into their curriculum. Felton Thomas Jr., the executive director of the Cleveland Public Library, said that its youngest patrons have joined senior citizens in preferring print books to digital copies. 

“If these acts of defiance against a postliterate culture seem futile,” Horowitz writes, “the holdouts lose nothing by trying.”

Horowitz sees herself as someone with a foot in both camps, having been raised in a reading family but having a cellphone and an Instagram account by the time she was in seventh grade. Because I’m a sucker for reading stories, here’s the one that she shares. Her father, like mine, read to her up through seventh grade, and she loved reading The Boxcar Children with her siblings. (It was Narnia and Tolkien for me.) Then, when she reached high school, 

I got it in my head that I should read the classics. My teachers kept recommending their favorite books. I wanted to share in their knowledge and understand their references. I slogged through Jane Eyre and fell for Anna Karenina. Although I was alone while reading, I didn’t feel that way. These books contained the wisdom of generations. As James Baldwin said (in a 1963 Life profile, just a week after he appeared on the cover of Time): “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been alive.” I felt like I was part of an unbroken chain of knowledge and culture. 

Horowitz acknowledges that the habit slipped in the years that followed—”I became busier. I started scrolling on my phone before bed instead of reading. My attention began to wander every few pages”—and it’s true that reading is a muscle that must be maintained. I recently recommended reading “like a Victorian,” a few pages every night, as a way to keep that muscle fit.

But before we surrender to Horowitz’s doomsday scenario, it good to remember the literature gets a say in the matter. In a world where we are fed continuously with lies, literature is a no bullshit zone that puts us in connection with truth. Or as Salman Rushdie puts it, the job of contemporary writers is “rebuilding our readers’ belief in reality.”

While Horowitz is right to focus on the various setbacks that reading, writing, and literature are experiencing at the moment, the enduring power of truth to stand against the “explosion of reading fragments” cannot be discounted. The various reversals that Horowitz mentions, from declining IQ and test scores to lower tolerance for mental exertion to fewer humanities majors are indeed unfortunate, but if we are currently experiencing some backsliding, it’s good to remember that Enlightenment progress has never progressed in a straight upward line. In the end, people have always returned to literature because nothing else speaks as well to our deepest needs. As I write in my book’s conclusion, people

intuitively recognize that masterworks, whether old classics or new arrivals, have the power to point us towards the individual and social transformation we crave. These works can turn us upside down and inside out as no other form of writing can….The thinkers we have surveyed in this book know literature is more powerful and challenging than … simplistic ways of thinking, as do good literature teachers, librarians and other of literature’s advocates. They know—and you do as well—that a rich life opens before us the moment we pick up a book and immerse ourselves in its words.

In short, while we should take seriously the threats posed to literacy by social media and AI, we shouldn’t overlook the power of literature to push back, which it has been doing for as long as there has been literature. An image that comes to mind when I say this is resurrected Aslan in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe. While the Witch appears to triumph in the short run, she doesn’t reckon with what Aslan calls “the deeper magic from before the dawn of time.”

If the forces of barbarism couldn’t wipe out the classics over the centuries, there’s no reason to think that Tik-Tok, Instagram, youtube, video games, streaming services, and all those other electronic distractions will be any more successful. Despite Horowitz’s fears that we are entering a postliterate age, literature itself is far from dead.

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Pratchett on Paperwork and Accountability

By Robin Bates | Published: July 14, 2026

Wednesday

I began writing today’s post in the hospital where Julia is undergoing carpal tunnel surgery. She was first visited by the surgeon, a grandfatherly sort with a great sense of humor who walked her through the forms she needed to sign. At one point he joked that the paperwork was more complex than the surgery itself.

His remarks resonated as we have been listening to one of Terry Pratchett’s Commander Vimes novels, where police grumbling about paperwork is a running joke. Julia and I didn’t mind because we understand that we live in a litigious society where responsibilities need to be laid out, and the doctor was very clear about where his own accountability lay. “If nerve damage results,” he said at one point, “that’s on me and I’ll come back and work to fix it.”

This was in stark contrast to what we had just heard on a Rachel Maddow report on ICE killings and beatings. (Along with Pratchett, we had been listening to the podcast of Monday night’s show.) Although Maine’s governor and two senators have been calling for a complete and thorough independent investigation of an ICE killing in Biddeford, Maine—a resident with a legal work permit is the victim—the site is not being treated as a crime scene. As a result, independent citizens have been taking it upon themselves to photograph the pools of blood. Meanwhile, after months of delay Minnesota investigators are finally gaining access of the evidence surrounding the killings of Rene Goode and Alex Pretti. ICE has been doing all it can to evade accountable paper work.

In Pratchett’s Fifth Elephant, Commander of the Watch Sam Vines has been called out of the city to conduct a diplomatic mission, and Captain Carrot, his ultra-competent second-in-command, has resigned to go in search of his fellow officer Angua, who is his love interest. This leaves in charge the incompetent Sergeant Colon, who has a vexed relationship to paperwork. We learn this early from a conversation he has with Corporal Nobby Nobbs:

“I can see this is going to get on top of me,” said Colon, as they walked away. “There’s paperwork, too. You know me and paper work, Nobby.”

“You’re a very thorough reader, that’s all, Fred,” said Nobby. “I’ve seen you take ages over just one page. Digesting it magisterially, I thought.”

Colon brightened a little. “Yes, that’s what I do,” he said.

“Even if it’s only the menu down at the Klatchian take-out. I’ve seen you staring at one line for a minute at a time.”

“Well, obviously you can’t let people put one over on you, said Colon, sticking out his chest, or at least sticking it further up.

Despite his supposed thoroughness, Colon is overwhelmed by paperwork when he becomes acting commander. It occurs to him

that maybe Vimes and Carrot between them had developed a way of keeping just ahead of the piles, by knowing what was important and what wasn’t. To Colon, it was all gut-wrenchingly mysterious. There were complaints, and memos, and invitations, and letters requesting “a few minutes of your time” and forms to fill in, and reports to read, and sentences containing words like “iniquitous” and “immediate action” and they tottered in his mind like a great big wave, poised to fall on him.

Pratchett observes that Colon is so far out of his depth that “the fish had lights on their noses.” The author explains,

It wasn’t that he was illiterate, but Fred Colon did need a bit of think and a run-up to tackle anything much longer than a list and he tended to get lost in any word that had more than three syllables. He was, in fact, functionally literate. That is, he thought of reading and writing like he thought about boots—you needed them, but they weren’t supposed to be fun, and you got suspicious about people who got a kick out of them.

Colon is finally able solve his paperwork problem by making a simple connection:

He turned, and his eye caught the huge accusing heap of paperwork in the corner.

And the empty fireplace, too.

That was what officering was all about, wasn’t it? Making decisions!

Unfortunately, the decision that results in a clean desk also leads him to burn the wages chitty, which means that no one gets paid and everyone leaves the force. Railing against paper work is like railing against government regulations: while they can seem onerous, often they serve a function

Pratchett’s novel has a lot more to say about the impulse to abuse power and about the responsibility of police to resist going over to the dark side. But I’ve been up since 5:30 this morning so I’ll save that for another day.

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World Cup Semi: All for One, One for All

By Robin Bates | Published: July 13, 2026

Tuesday

An ESPN commentator has cited the most famous line from Alexander Dumas’s Three Musketeers in excited anticipation of tomorrow’s match between France and Spain, held (of all days!) on France’s national holiday. Although Graham Hunter, who was embedded in the Spanish team, is predicting a Spanish victory, he sees the French as formidable:

Tuesday’s World Cup semifinal, on Bastille Day, will carry the narrative that France’s four musketeers (Michael Olise, Ousmane Dembélé, Desiré Doué, Kylian Mbappé) make coach Didier Deschamps’ team stick-on winners.

Excited by the comradely “vibes” he witnessed in the Spanish camp, however, Hunter then appropriates the Musketeer motto for La Roja:

Their opponents have their own powerful “all for one” mentality that can push them on to New Jersey, and their second World Cup final.

When the motto appears in the novel, D’Artagnan is still an apprentice musketeer, which makes the application all the more appropriate as the French could be seen as having 3+1 Musketeers, given that Doué has been sharing the fourth position with Bradley Barcola. In any event, the four in the novel are about to embark on their most dangerous mission yet.

They have become involved in a high stakes political battle involving the king, the queen, the queen’s British lover, the powerful Cardinal Richelieu, the evil Milady de Winter, and the queen’s handmaid, who has been kidnapped. D’Artagnan has just pulled off a bit of trickery comparable to a Lamine Yamal juke or an Olise pass, following which comes the line everyone knows:

“And now, gentlemen,” said D’Artagnan, without stopping to explain his conduct to Porthos, “All for one, one for all—that is our motto, is it not?”

“And yet—” said Porthos.

“Hold out your hand and swear!” cried Athos and Aramis at once.

Overcome by example, grumbling to himself, nevertheless, Porthos stretched out his hand, and the four friends repeated with one voice the formula dictated by D’Artagnan:

“All for one, one for all.”

“That’s well! Now let us everyone retire to his own home,” said D’Artagnan, as if he had done nothing but command all his life; “and attention! For from this moment we are at feud with the cardinal.”

For all the fellowship that Hunter finds on the Spanish side, it appears that France similarly sees itself as a team rather than as a group of talented individuals. Fears that France would get in its own way or implode like the 2002 team have been unfounded. Rather than Mbappé’s ego disrupting the team, it appears that he has instead embraced the collective. 

The French team’s collectivity has further been strengthened by the racist attacks on its “Black-Blanc-Beur [North African]” makeup, first from a Paraguayan legislator and then from a former Spanish prime minister. (The current Spanish prime minister criticized the comments.) Finally, the team has rallied around coach Didier Deschamps, who lost his mother during the group stages and who has announced he is stepping down at the end of the tournament.

With the blue of the Musketeer doublets vs. the red tabards of the Cardinal’s guards, the novel even anticipates the colors of the semi-finalists. Let what many are calling “the final before the final” begin.

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The Lost Honor of Lindsey Graham

By Robin Bates | Published: July 12, 2026
Trump and Graham

Monday

traFew politicians have more openly sold their souls than Lindsey Graham, the one-time maverick senator from South Carolina who became one of Donald Trump’s chief sycophants and who died suddenly yesterday at 71. Yet perhaps to prevent himself from losing his moral bearings altogether, he did remain true to one higher cause, prompting Atlantic columnist Anne Applebaum to invoke Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in yesterday’s reflection on the man.

Let’s look first at the betrayal. Although Graham once allied himself with John McCain as one who put principles over partisanship, Apppelbaum writes that

like many other Republicans—and, more important, like many other people who have lived under political occupation or experience radical regime change—he made the decision to abandon his previous ideals, to bury the patriotism that was once so important to him, and to become, instead, a loud, opportunistic collaborator.

Appelbaum first compared Graham to collaborators living under autocratic regimes in a 2020 piece where she conducted an in-depth exploration of the phenomenon. In addition to looking at those who resisted communist dictatorships in Eastern Europe and those who didn’t, she examined Republicans who broke with Trump after his January 6 coup attempt (Mitt Romney) and those who joined him (Graham). As she reported at the time,

A friend who regularly runs into Lindsey Graham in Washington told me that each time they meet, “he brags about having just met with Trump” while exhibiting “high school” levels of excitement, as if “a popular quarterback has just bestowed some attention on a nerdy debate-club leader—the powerful big kid likes me! ” That kind of intense pleasure is hard to relinquish and even harder to live without.

In that article Appelbaum turned to Czesław Miłosz, the dissident and Nobel-winning Polish poet who defected to the west after observing close up how writers and intellectuals justified collaborating with authoritarian rule. In “The Captive Mind” Milosz noted that careerism could not provide a complete explanation for their capitulation:

To be part of a mass movement was for many a chance to end their alienation, to feel close to the “masses,” to be united in a single community with workers and shopkeepers. For tormented intellectuals, collaboration also offered a kind of relief, almost a sense of peace: It meant that they were no longer constantly at war with the state, no longer in turmoil. Once the intellectual has accepted that there is no other way, Miłosz wrote, “he eats with relish, his movements take on vigor, his color returns. He sits down and writes a ‘positive’ article, marveling at the ease with which he writes it.” 

George Orwell sums up this sense of peace in the concluding paragraph of 1984: 

He gazed up at the enormous face. Forty years it had taken him to learn what kind of smile was hidden beneath the dark mustache. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.

In the article that appeared yesterday, after noting the many ways that Graham telegraphed his love of Trump, Appelbaum cites the one exception: he supported Urkaine, even though he well knew that Trump sought to curry favor with Vladimir Putin. Appelbaum reports that Graham

made 10 trips to Ukraine; he returned from the last one the day before he died. He repeatedly proposed legislation to sanction Russia, doing so with such frequency that his bill became a kind of joke, the Waiting for Godot of Congress, always proposed and never accepted by a president who did not want to make trouble for his Russian friends. 

In Beckett’s absurdist play, Vladimir and Estragon wait fruitlessly for the appearance of one Godot, who may be God or meaning or even just something different. Occasionally they are given glimmers of hope, as when a messenger boy shows up and informs them, “Mr. Godot told me to tell you he won’t come this evening but surely tomorrow.” At the end of the play, however, they are once again fruitlessly waiting.

Appelbaum reflects that, absurd though Graham’s hopes were, he may have remained loyal to Ukraine’s struggle because he knew, at some deep level, that “he had betrayed the moral code that he grew up with.” Without this one unbroken commitment (and here I borrow a line from another existentialist parable, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) life would “have been too dark—too dark altogether.”

I suppose this struggle differentiated Graham from those around Trump who, like T.S. Eliot’s hollow men, bend with the wind. It made him slightly more complicated and slightly more interesting.

Yet, for all that, he was a lost soul.

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The Bible in English Classes? Good Idea

By Robin Bates | Published: July 11, 2026
Caravaggio, St. Jerome Writing

Sunday

Although a non-believer, Greg Olear, my favorite blogger, has unexpectedly endorsed the Texas Board of Education’s recent decision requiring high school students to read selected Biblical passages.

To be sure, he qualifies his endorsement, observing that there are 

plenty of reasons not to like the BOE decision. Is the Board trying to foist Christianity upon unsuspecting students in Texas? That may well be an ulterior motive. Is this a power grab, a brazen attempt to weld Church and State together? This being Texas, probably yes. Is it fair to mandate passages from the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament, but not the Quran, or other religious texts? I’ll let Annie Laurie Gaylor, president of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, take that question: “Texas is telling millions of children that one religion deserves the government’s seal of approval, while everyone else is an afterthought,” she told the Houston Chronicle. “That’s government-sponsored religious favoritism—and the First Amendment strictly forbids it.”

Olear responds that these are “arguments about politics, not about education—and certainly not about literature.” In a good English course, he writes,

what you’re supposed to do is read texts and then discuss them. It isn’t about right and wrong, per se; it’s about nuance and interpretation and, above all, the development of critical thinking…

Olear points out the rich complexities that can be found in the required Biblical excerpts, which consist of the Garden of Eden story, the Book of Job, and the passage from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians that is often read at weddings. The nature of sin, the meaning of unmerited suffering, and the foundational importance of love are great things for high school students to be discussing.

It’s worth noting what the Board of Education leaves out, which is anything from Matthew, Mark, Luke or John. Was it worried that the Sermon on the Mount or the Parable of the Good Samaritan or the impossibility of a rich man entering the kingdom of heaven make Jesus sound like a leftwing radical? Given the rightwing’s assault on social welfare programs, I’d love to see a class dive into the Prodigal Son story. Jesus, like the best teachers, challenges even the most entrenched of assumptions.

Olear makes the point that the literature we encounter in English classes is much richer if we know our Bible, and this has certainly been my experience. To cite one example that startled me, when I was teaching Beowulf, I was amazed that many of my students didn’t know the story of Cain, who the poet tells us is the ancestor of Grendel and his mother. So yes, I’m all for students being introduced to the Bible.

That is, as long as it does not shape their science, history, or political science classes. A biology teacher at my kids’ public high school refused to teach evolution because of her literal reading of Genesis, a shallow interpretation that robs the story of its richness. There will be language arts teachers who use the Biblical readings to proselytize. But most teachers I have encountered respect the works they teach, refusing to subordinate them to narrow political agendas. In any event, Olear appears to believe that the material is so substantive that it will frustrate such efforts.

Incidentally, the list of required readings is quite good. It includes Hamlet, Julius Caesar, Pride and Prejudice, The Scarlet Letter, The Inferno, and Fahrenheit 451, along with some great poems (“Prufrock,” “If,” “The Raven,” “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Paul Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask”); short stories (Trollope’s “The Parson’s Daughter of Oxney Coine” (!), Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”); and some essays, including Thucydides’s account of Pericles’s funeral oration and Martin Luther King’s “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” (whose title itself is a Biblical allusion).

The only real lightweights on the list are Ayn Rand’s “What Is Capitalism?” and Margaret Thatcher’s eulogy for Ronald Reagan, but maybe they were included to give the Board political cover for including King.

The Bible readings, of course, are getting all the publicity. But as it appears that many Christians these days are not really reading their Bible but just imagining that it confirms their own reactionary agendas, maybe it’s good that students will have a chance to examine it closely.

Further note: I remember how, in my first job, my teaching of Genesis as part of Morehouse College’s Humanities sequence startled one of my students, an 18-year-old preacher. I pointed out that there are two accounts of creation, not one. Those who compiled the Torah had the wisdom or the humility to include both rather than choose one. Amazing revelations await those who engage in close reading.

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A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball

By Robin Bates | Published: July 10, 2026
Lamine Yamal

Friday

As one who is rooting for France to win the World Cup, I am terrified of Spain’s Lamine Yamal, who barely seems an adult—in fact, he looks like my youngest grandson, who sees the resemblance and is a fan—yet can do things with the ball that few men can do. While he hasn’t scored in this World Cup, he is drawing multiple defenders, thereby opening up spaces for teammates.

Having beaten Belgium, the next foe is France, which Spain will play on Bastille Day. “I think that if France has anyone to fear, it’s us,” Yamal said after Spain’s recent victory. The Christopher Merrill poem below has me thinking of how Yamal’s attraction lies in part in the almost boyish joy he radiates while playing with the ball.

It also takes me back to one of my own childhood memories. We were living in the Hotel des Nations,, which is close to the city’s Roman arena. I visited it one day around noon and saw six French school boys combining lunch with practice. Five of them were lined up, baguette sandwiches in hand, taking turns juggling a ball. Every once in a while, the boy with the ball would flick it towards the entryway, where a goalie stood. He would field the ball and roll it back to the group, whereupon another boy would begin juggling. Always, as I said, with sandwich in hand.

This was in 1963 and France wasn’t the soccer powerhouse that it has since become. Nor was Paris yet the incubator of many of the world’s greatest players. Of the 1,248 players at this year’s World Cup, apparently 56 (4.3%) were born in Paris, including Kylian Mbappé. (In all, 99 were born in France, with many choosing to play for other nations, including Morocco and the Côte d’Ivoire.) To be sure, the Parisian players don’t come from the Latin Quarter, where the arena is to be found, but from the working class immigrant suburbs. Still, my love of French soccer dates from this early encounter.

Here’s Merrill’s poem, which captures the love between boy and ball and reminds us that it all begins as a child’s game.

A Boy Juggling a Soccer Ball
Christopher Merrill

after practice: right foot
to left foot, stepping forward and back,
to right foot and left foot,
and left foot up to his thigh, holding
it on his thigh as he twists
around in a circle, until it rolls
down the inside of his leg,
like a tickle of sweat, not catching
and tapping on the soft
side of his foot, and juggling
once, twice, three times,
hopping on one foot like a jump-roper
in the gym, now trapping
and holding the ball in midair,
balancing it on the instep
of his weak left foot, stepping forward
and forward and back, then
lifting it overhead until it hangs there;
and squaring off his body,
he keeps the ball aloft with a nudge
of his neck, heading it
from side to side, softer and softer,
like a dying refrain,
until the ball, slowing, balances
itself on his hairline,
the hot sun and sweat filling his eyes
as he jiggles this way
and that, then flicking it up gently,
hunching his shoulders
and tilting his head back, he traps it
in the hollow of his neck,
and bending at the waist, sees his shadow,
his dangling T-shirt, the bent
blades of brown grass in summer heat;
and relaxing, the ball slipping
down his back…and missing his foot.

He wheels around, he marches
over the ball, as if it were a rock
he stumbled into, and pressing
his left foot against it, he pushes it
against the inside of his right
until it pops into the air, is heeled
over his head- the rainbow! –
and settles on his extended thigh before
rolling over his knee and down
his shin, so he can juggle it again
from his left foot to his right foot
– and right foot to left foot to thigh-
as he wanders, on the last day
of summer, around the empty field.

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Was Oedipus Deserving of a Red Card?

By Robin Bates | Published: July 8, 2026
David Beckham receives a red card in the 1998 World Cup

Thursday

I thought I could concentrate only on grandchildren and the World Cup this week, avoiding politics altogether, but then he who will not be named pressured FIFA to suspend the Folarin Balogun red card (see my post on the incident here, and, well, so much for that wish. At least the incident, and soccer refereeing in general, has yielded some great humor, including literary jokes from my English professor son. 

Driving home to Georgia after visiting us in Tennessee, he and the kids listened to a dramatized version of The Hobbit, leading to this Bluesky tweet (Tobias Wilson-Bates@phdhurtbrain@bsky.social) about soccer’s video review system:

The ref is coming back from the review station and it doesn’t look good. He’s shaking his head and I’m afraid it’s what we predicted. After VAR review “what have I got in my pocket?” is NOT a valid riddle and Bilbo is going to have to concede being eaten.

This was followed up with a Sophocles reference:

The ref is coming back from the sideline and, OH MY GOD, he’s telling Oedipus that Jocasta is his MOTHER! Goodness, VAR saves him from yet another bad call.

There were a couple of good responses, including this from one Antonio Barros:

Such a good VAR intervention! How come the ref Tiresias didn’t not see this? Is he blind? 

And this from johnw60.bsky.social:

Deus ex machinvar

After an England player picked up a red card for a studs-up tackle, Toby tweeted:

Really hope England splurged for the retractable red card insurance before the tournament 🤞🤞

The red cards made him think of the Cruciatus or torture curse (a.k.a. the Crucio) in Harry Potter:

Red cards are so wild. The closest thing in professional sports to a magical curse or hex.

Toby then elaborated:

You have crossed the football gods and must now be BANISHED from the land of foot

After commenting on the World Cup games, Toby then considered applying them to his teaching. For instance:

Going to start calling the last ten minutes of class “stoppage time” to get my students more invested in learning

To which Bluesky’s Eric Rauchway responded,

I’m gonna go further and tell them the class will be only forty minutes unless there are any fouls in which case it will be lengthened by stoppage time

Toby again:

Will occasionally drop to the ground grabbing my face for several minutes to keep them on their toes

There was also was this fantasy of a system for calling fouls on students for not paying attention: 

“Please refer to the syllabus” = Penalty 
“We covered this in class” = Yellow Card
“Per my last email” = Red Card

And then there’s this from one who has clearly attended many faculty meetings:

Much respect to Messi the middle aged king for knowing you only need to pay attention for the final 10 minutes of the meeting

Humor aside, Toby had the following thoughtful reflection on the tournament, in which chance often determines who wins:

Almost every World Cup the eventual winner needs to win at least one match along the way via penalties which means we’re less determining the best team than some alignment of the team w the best play, best draw, and best penalty luck.

To me this is part of the beauty of the World Cup. It’s rarely a meditation on dominance, and much more often an extended experience of global equality and the randomness of joy and beauty.

Years ago I remember someone remarking that the occasional randomness and element of chance in soccer were one reason why it would never catch on in the United States, where we want to believe we have power over what happens to us. Other cultures are more fatalistic, resigned to the idea that sometimes unfair things happen. 

The most spectacular soccer example is Maradona’s “hand of God” goal in a 1986 quarter final victory, but there have been countless other bad or missed calls over the years. While people may never accept what has happened—ask any Brit who was around for the Maradona game—one of the lessons learned is that we can be victimized by things outside our control.

Hmm, now that’s something Sophocles understood.

With video review, it’s as though the world has tried to Americanize the game, letting technology replace human limitations. Now we are seeing goals negated because a player’s toe was offside, and France was awarded its game-winning penalty against Paraguay because VAR picked up a clear foul that the referee missed. FIFA has made it appear that it can remove uncertainty from the game.

But the Balogun red card, which may have been awarded because the foul looked worse in slow motion than it actually was, calls that into question. Rather than removing all doubt, now there are debates over whether the technology has been properly used, with Egypt especially arguing that its goal-of-the-tournament should not have been negated because of a VAR-detected foul at the other end of the field. Things get particularly murky when the technology is used to determine motive: was a player actually tripped in the penalty area or was he deliberately diving?

All of which argues for literature and the humanities, which teach us that that life, including the games we play, can never be reduced to technological engineering. That may frustrate some, but the endless debates that ensue can lead to social bonding as strangers have things to talk about. The great books teach us that human reality is never simple but always shifting, and we leave ourselves vulnerable when we forget that.

Other recent Toby literary tweets:

—Full respect to Brontë and Faulkner, but I’m reading a Wilkie Collins’ novel where FOUR characters have the same name so far and I don’t think he’s done yet

—Middlemarch, written 155 years ago, is in part about the unbearable cultural inertia that blocks simple affordable housing and healthcare reform.

—More things in life need to operate like the Pizza Hut Book-It challenge that used to give kids personal pizzas for reading books.

If I read Brothers Karamazov, I think that should pay my mortgage for the month is all I’m saying

Followed by:

—Since I’m a professor, in a sense it does fairly literally pay my mortgage 🤔 but I think everyone should have access to this option

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Children as Devouring Mice?!

By Robin Bates | Published: July 7, 2026
Longfellow’s daughters

Wednesday

I am updating a post I wrote six years ago to apply to a visit over the weekend from our four grandchildren. As we cavorted around in the lake by our house, I once again recalled Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “The Children’s Hour.” I’ve added some thoughts about devouring imagery in children’s literature.

The 1863 poem was one that, for decades, children were required to memorize. I encountered it first when my father read it to me as a child and later when I saw Don Martin’s Mad Magazine spoof of it. Martin, of course, took shots at its sentimentality.

But Mad wasn’t the first publication to question “The Children’s Hour.” Lillian Hellman in 1934 made ironic use of the poem by borrowing its title for her own play about a disaffected girl in a boarding school. In order to avoid being sent back to the school, she accuses two of her teachers of having a lesbian love affair, thereby destroying their lives. In other words, little girls are not as innocent as you think.

Sentimentalizing children doesn’t do justice to their full personhood. When one has rigid expectations of innocence, one doesn’t give children room to breathe. I use the analogy because of the images of devouring and imprisonment in the poem. If we trap children in angelic expectations, we have trouble handling those times when they are devils.

The Bishop of Bingen reference is to the folk tale of Bishop Hatto, who was eaten alive by the mice that invaded the tower where he was hoarding grain from the starving peasants. After feeling devoured by his children, Longfellow does his own version of devouring in return, imprisoning them in the fortress of his heart. Here’s the poem:

The Children’s Hour
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Between the dark and the daylight,
     When the night is beginning to lower,
Comes a pause in the day’s occupations,
     That is known as the Children’s Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me
     The patter of little feet,
The sound of a door that is opened,
     And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,
     Descending the broad hall stair,
Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,
     And Edith with golden hair.

A whisper, and then a silence:
     Yet I know by their merry eyes
They are plotting and planning together
    To take me by surprise.

A sudden rush from the stairway,
     A sudden raid from the hall!
By three doors left unguarded
     They enter my castle wall!

They climb up into my turret
    O’er the arms and back of my chair;
If I try to escape, they surround me;
     They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses,
     Their arms about me entwine,
Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen
     In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,
     Because you have scaled the wall,
Such an old mustache as I am
     Is not a match for you all!

I have you fast in my fortress,
     And will not let you depart,
But put you down into the dungeon
     In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you forever,
     Yes, forever and a day,
Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,
     And molder in dust away!

Sentimental though the poem may be, I fully understand the emotions at play. My grandchildren and I hugged each other long and hard as they were leaving. I wanted to swallow them up in my love and for a few moments they basked in the feeling, even as I was attuned to the moment when they would want to wriggle free. Feelings of wanting to be loved and feelings of wanting to be independet toggled back and forth.

We see some of the same back and forth in the stories I read to my own children. In Maurice Sendak’s The Night Kitchen, Mickey is swallowed in the cake batter of the night cooks before breaking free to assert his independence: “I’m not the cake and the cake’s not me, I”m Mickey!” he crows before flying off in an airplane he has constructed out of the batter. 

In Helen Bannerman’s “Little Black Sambo,” the protagonist is threatened with devourment—“Little Black Sambo, I am going to eat you up,” threatens each of the tigers–only to have Sambo, somewhat like Anansi the Spider, use his wits to escape. In the end, through an unexpected plot twist, he devours them instead as they have churned themselves into butter, which his mother then uses for pancakes.

One other popular children’s book that includes includes emotional devouring is Margaret Wise Brown’s Runaway Bunny. No matter how much the bunny wants to break free of his mother’s loving embrace and establish his own identity, the mother assures him that she will always find him. The plot speaks both to the child’s desire for independence and the need  to be reminded that he or she always has emotional backup. That reassurance also come in Brown’s Goodnight, Moon. 

I saw the tension exhibited in each of my grandchildren over the weekend, with it working itself  differently for the teenager, the middle schooler, and the two in elementary school. It was a gift.

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U.S. Soccer and the Ancient Mariner’s Curse

By Robin Bates | Published: July 6, 2026
Balogun’s red card, later overturned following Trump’s intervention

Tuesday

Everything Trump touches turns to crap, and that goes for sports as well as for monuments, institutional norms, the rule of law, and Constitutional rights. His congratulations to the Olympic gold medal-winning men’s hockey team included denigration of the Olympic gold medal-winning women’s hockey team. He insisted on attending the New York Knicks game during their championship run, seeking to leech off the city’s joy and in the process ruining the traditional watch parties held outside the stadium. Then he went on to taint one of the feel good stories of the World Cup, the exciting U.S. men’s team (USMT). 

Fans from other nations who had been rooting for the U.S. turned against them after Trump  instructed persuaded the equally corrupt FIFA leadership to overturn a red card, something they never do. 

The ancient Greeks could have predicted what happened next. Even with the now unsuspended Folarin Balugon playing, the team lost in humiliating 4-1 fashion to Belgium. The goddess Nemesis, who punishes humans for their hubris, struck again.

For those fans who cared only to get Balugon back on the field and were fine with Trump’s intervention, I remind them of the fate of the crew in Rime of the Ancient Mariner. They are fine with the mariner killing the albatross when doing so appears to have cleared away the fog and mist but then outraged when all the breezes cease to blow and the ship is becalmed. At that point they hang the dead bird around the mariner’s neck, preferring to blame someone else rather than acknowledge that they have become complicit in the crime.

I don’t know whether the stain of Trump’s intervention hung around the necks of the USMT, but they didn’t appear to play with the same elan as in previous games. Of course, they were facing a Belgium team that was outraged at how the rules had been broken, which provided extra motivation. Whatever the cause of the U.S.’s lackluster performance, it felt like some kind of karmic justice had been served, even though the team and Balogun were themselves innocent.

And what about Trump? As usual, he pulled off his usual Tom and Daisy retreat:

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.

What next after messing with the World Cup and ruining the nation’s 250th anniversary? The 2028 Olympics will be held in Los Angeles during the final year of Trump’s presidency.

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