The concerning literacy crisis affecting Americans' ability to make informed decisions

In a compelling New York Times opinion piece (Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime), David Brooks delves into a troubling trend: the decline of reasoning abilities among Americans. Citing alarming data, Brooks highlights that a significant portion of the population struggles with basic literacy, akin to that of a 10-year-old child.

He opens with: “You might have seen the various data points suggesting that Americans are losing their ability to reason.”

Here are some other salient points from the piece:

• Andreas Schleicher from the OECD supports this view, stating, "Every third person you meet may have difficulty reading simple texts." This literacy crisis underpins our ability to process information and make informed decisions, impacting everything from personal life choices to political stances.

• Brooks argues that the erosion of critical thinking skills leads to poor decision-making at both individual and governmental levels. He points to Donald Trump’s tariff policy as a prime example of policy-making disconnected from reason, evidence, and expert advice. Describing the policy as "jumble-headedness exemplified," Brooks criticizes Trump for his impulsiveness and disregard for coherent strategy, characteristics that have led to predictable chaos.

• Brooks reflects on historical shifts from oral to literate cultures, expressing concern that the emerging dominance of screen culture might be diminishing our depth of understanding and engagement with complex ideas. "Civilization was fun while it lasted," he concludes, suggesting a grim outlook if current trends continue.

• This piece underscores the vital role of education, not just in schools but throughout life, as a pillar of informed citizenship and effective governance. As we face complex global challenges, the need for critical literacy has never been more urgent.

• Lifelong out-of-school learning, is really valuable critical in making good choice in life, like who to vote for!

• “Back in Homer’s day, people lived within an oral culture, then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a screen culture. Civilization was fun while it lasted.”

Our Police State Has Arrived

M. Gessen, writing in the NYTimes, explains that unmarked vans, secret lists, and public denunciations are the hallmarks of a secret-police state:

“It’s the unmarked cars,” a friend who grew up under an Argentine dictatorship said. He had watched the video of the Columbia graduate student Mahmoud Khalil’s abduction. In the video, which Khalil’s wife recorded, she asks for the names of the men in plainclothes who handcuffed her husband.

“We don’t give our name,” one responds. “Can you please specify what agency is taking him?” she pleads. No response. We know now that Khalil was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, an agency of the Department of Homeland Security.

Those of us who have lived in countries terrorized by a secret police force can’t shake a feeling of dreadful familiarity. “I never realized until this moment how much fear I carried with me from my childhood in Communist Romania,” another friend, the literary scholar Marianne Hirsch, told me. “Arrests were arbitrary and every time the doorbell rang, I started to shiver.”

It’s the catastrophic interruption of daily life, as when a Tufts University graduate student, Rumeysa Ozturk, was grabbed on a suburban street by half a dozen plainclothes agents, most of them masked. The security camera video of that arrest shows Ozturk walking, looking at her phone, perhaps to check the address where she was supposed to meet her friends for dinner that night, when an agent appears in front of her. She says something — asks something — struggling to control her voice, and within seconds she is handcuffed and placed in an unmarked car.

She has seen how a police state acts, fleeing Russia twice, first as a teenager, then again as an adult.

M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk Award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.

Cryptocurrency and Corruption under Presidential Seal

As Robert Reich writes in hi Trump’s Crypto Inc. substack post, Trump and his family are reaping a fortune from his presidency—starting with cryptocurrencies.

Some of his significant points:

• Let me remind you [he writes], in addition, that cryptocurrencies serve no useful purpose other than the purchase of other crypto assets, money laundering, extortion, and scams. As economist Paul Krugman has said, their market value rests on nothing but “technobabble and libertarian derp.”

• They also use huge amounts of energy — especially for Bitcoin mining.

• On the eve of Trump’s inauguration, he and his wife, Melania Trump, each launched a meme coin — a type of cryptocurrency based on an online joke or mascot. The Trumps’ meme coins soared in value and then crashed — generating enormous profits for the Trumps and other insiders, but a cumulative $2 billion in losses for more than 800,000 other investors. The Trump family and its business partners earned nearly $100 million in trading fees alone on the coins.

• The Trump family is now negotiating a financial stake in the U.S. arm of crypto exchange Binance, according to people familiar with the matter. This would put Trump in business with the firm that pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering requirements.

• These crypto ventures have created some of the most overt conflicts of interest in the history of the American presidency.

• The biggest danger is that crypto infiltrates Wall Street, where it could cause a meltdown that would make the 2008 financial crisis look like child’s play.

• Never in history has the family of a president gotten the bribes now being pocketed by Trump’s. Trump once dismissed Bitcoin as a “scam.” Now, he’s seeking to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the planet.”