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 Statistics 

BookTok: The Dark Horse of the Economy

Can Reading Make You Happier?

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 

Share of TikTok users reading more books because of #BookTok in the United States as of May 2023, by state 

School Summer Reading Lists: A Brief and Nerdy History 

Sold a Story

Soldiers Literacy Training Collection 

The History of Summer Reading 

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 Nation's Report Card 

The Rise and Fall of Vibes-Based Literacy 

The Subversive Joy of BookTok 

This is how much the global literacy rate grew over 200 years 

Why I Won’t Quit BookTok