PART 4

Curriculum Associates (CA), the previously low-profile, billion-dollar ed-tech behemoth, is having a no-good, terrible 2026 — and it’s poised to get a whole lot worse. CA’s ubiquitous online learning platform i-Ready®, which is compulsory for 14 million American kids, is facing a remarkable wellspring of loathing from parents, students, and teachers across the country. But Curriculum Associates’ problems run much, much deeper than mere consumer subjectivity; they now face an outright existential threat borne of the inescapable reality that their flagship product is harmful to the health of the same human children it purports to educate.

By now, even mentioning the ever-growing mountain of scientific evidence linking screens with physiological harm to kids seems about as edifying as a reminder that the sun will rise tomorrow. Americans have grown so numb to revelations of childhood maladies caused by screens — from depression to anxiety to profound cognitive deficits — we’d likely just shrug at news they give kids rickets and hammer toe, too.

And yet, any ethical business, upon learning its product had been definitively linked to even one serious health threat, would promptly issue a consumer warning or recall. Curriculum Associates, on the other hand, now reveals its private-equity true colors — prioritizing the protection of its primary revenue stream over the health of children. Throughout the spring of 2026, CA has unfurled a cynical public relations campaign that mixes deceptive word salad and outright lies about its own history to portray i-Ready screen time as non-harmful and “limited.”

The Public Health Catastrophe Hiding in Plain Sight

While the issue of screen time harm may have exploded into the popular consciousness only recently, it is hardly a new concern. Fully a decade ago, Dr. Nicholas Kardaras was among the first to sound the alarm with his best-selling book Glow Kids, in which the neuropsychologist presciently connected the dots between screens, dopamine addiction, and disastrous child mental health and cognitive development outcomes.

Doubtlessly aware of Glow Kids or the slow, steady drumbeat of warnings that followed, Curriculum Associates — as a savvy, liability-averse corporation keen to preserve plausible deniability — has long strenuously avoided any explicit public defenses of i-Ready’s screen-based format. Since the product’s launch in 2012, all educator or parental concerns about screen time were met with politician-worthy pivots to ed-tech blather. CA would stress “high-fidelity implementation” — pointing to outlier studies drawing distinctions between “passive” screen time and “active engagement.” In fact, Archive.org historical searches of curriculumassociates.com establish that the term “screen time” never once appeared on the website until 2026.

Let the Screen Time Spin Begin

While i-Ready’s overall experiential and pedagogical lousiness have long sparked online vitriol from the students and teachers forced to use it, 2026 has seen the fury spread to a vastly larger community: families. After Part One of this series was published by UnHerd in late February 2026, Curriculum Associates was besieged by parental and teacher anger across social media. On X.com, the firehose of pent-up bile directed at i-Ready was so intense, Curriculum Associates effectively surrendered, publishing its last original post on that platform on March 10^th.

Two days later, Curriculum Associates commenced a rapid-fire defensive volley of PR damage control content to stanch the bleeding — all packed with a freshly-minted product vocabulary to whitewash i-Ready screen time as “limited,” “purposeful,” “intentional,” and “meaningful.” An all-new screen time section materialized on its website, featuring top executives contributing a succession of ponderously disingenuous essays. The new framing even makes a conspicuous cameo towards the end of a new testimonial from an i-Ready “Extraordinary Educator” — the fake awards program CA created to launder corporate marketing through real teachers.

“They’re in crisis mode,” said Drew Kerr, a prominent Communications Consultant in New York City who maintains The Red List, a compendium of corporate publicity crises. “When you see this kind of shift, obviously they are course-correcting,” he said. “They realize that every single word they say is now being hyper-scrutinized… They’re trying to tiptoe very, very carefully.”

Kelly Sia, Chief Evasiveness Officer

For typical billion-dollar corporations, the CEO would serve as the face of this type of urgent crisis response. Unfortunately for Curriculum Associates, Kelly Sia, who ascended to the CEO role via internal promotion in 2025, demonstrates a near-total aversion or inability to represent the company publicly.

To date, Ms. Sia’s entire professional history of recorded public interviews appears limited to vacuous chit-chats on two podcasts — one hosted by her corporate underling, and the other by her private Executive Coach. (When Sia and I were booked opposite one another for NBC News TV interviews last month, she cancelled at the last minute.) Sia’s contribution to the i-Ready damage control effort so far appears limited to two April 2026 LinkedIn posts, wherein she floated the new “purposeful” semantic reframing, and was lavished with praise by sycophantic employee commenters.

Drew Kerr notes that kind of executive evasion is rarely effective. “There’s a theory that you can put your head in the sand, like an ostrich, and hope it will go away,” he said. “It’s a very dumb PR strategy.” Of Sia’s conspicuous invisibility during a corporate publicity crisis, Kerr added, “If a CEO has been off the radar for this long, it means either they are not taking it seriously, or the board does not trust them, and there’s questions about their status, or their ability to speak.”

Sia’s only public speaking appearance of 2026 thus far was a closed-door breakout session about “leadership” at the Women Leading Ed Summit in North Carolina. Curriculum Associates was the title sponsor of that three-day event, and no recordings or transcripts of Sia’s remarks were released.

I emailed CA repeatedly to request comment on whether the company’s corporate board, Chairman Rob Waldron, and private equity backers Berkshire Partners and Permira remain confident in Ms. Sia’s ability to serve as CEO. Curriculum Associates did not respond.

Ty Holmes, Chief Indemnity Officer

In the ensuing leadership vacuum, it has fallen to subordinates, especially Tyrone Holmes — Curriculum Associates’ Chief Impact Officer and longtime head of internal anti-racism efforts — to carry Sia’s “purposeful” screen time water as the handsome public face of i-Ready damage control.

So far this spring, Holmes has taken Sia’s place in interviews for NBC News and education site Chalkbeat, a Global Silicon Valley panel, and dispensed “purposeful” screen time spin on an Edtech Insiders webinar.

Back at Curriculum Associates HQ, Holmes also recently narrated a gauzy new video, “i-Ready in the Classroom: Purposeful Instruction for Every Student,” and penned a saccharine blog essay entitled “The Screen Time Question I Can’t Stop Asking as a Father and an EdTech Exec.” Writing of “watching my own children grow up in a world where screens are everywhere” Holmes repeatedly invokes “purposeful,” “intentional,” and “meaningful” to insist that i-Ready screen time can “get it right.” Throughout the missive’s 1000 words, he performs impressive linguistic somersaults to avoid mentioning whether his own children actually use i-Ready or other screen-based ed-tech. When I requested clarification and invited Holmes to speak with me via LinkedIn, he immediately blocked me.

Of course, some Big Tech executives famously admit to hypocritically curtailing their own kids’ exposure to the products they produce. I inquired via repeated emails whether the children of Mr. Holmes or any other C-suite executives have been compelled to use i-Ready as part of their regular schooling, and if so, whether they might be available to share their opinions of the platform publicly (as my son did). Curriculum Associates did not respond.

The Meaninglessness of Purposefulness

For the past 14 years, CA’s core pitch to school district procurement officers has been that i-Ready is “data-based.” They promise the product can boost standardized test scores by analyzing millions of students’ intimate personal details — data so granular and voluminous, it can only realistically be harvested one way: via internet-connected screens. (The pitch is bolstered with reams of internally-authored “research and evidence” marketing collateral, and the paid endorsement of controversial pseudoscience ed-guru John Hattie.)

But suddenly, in the face of overwhelming science indicating that screen time is inherently harmful and essentially irredeemable, Curriculum Associates has frantically pivoted away from cold, clinical, data-centric verbiage — now promoting i-Ready screen time with those fuzzy, emotional, and profoundly unscientific tautologies: “purposeful,” “meaningful,” and “intentional.”

PR crisis management expert Drew Kerr has seen this playbook before. “When a company starts changing its language like that, it’s obvious that the lawyers are all over this,” he said. “But lawyers also know nothing about communications. It's like somebody showing up at the ball and not realizing that their tie is really ugly. They don't realize that the things they're saying are very obvious gobbledygook legalese.”

I reached out to CA repeatedly to inquire what metrics or peer-reviewed studies it uses to quantify whether i-Ready screen time is “purposeful” or “meaningful” — and whether their product road map includes plans to add any handy new color-coded dashboard charts to track students’ levels of “purposefulness” or “meaningfulness” within i-Ready. Curriculum Associates did not respond.

That’s unsurprising, because of course there is no science of purposefulness, metric of meaningfulness, or diagnostic of intentionality. Rather, this is textbook corporate reputation triage; invent a new brand lexicon to evade substantive dialogue about the fact that your business model and/or product has been revealed as literally toxic. Then you can (at least attempt to) steer the narrative, reframing your business and some diminished variant of your product as parts of a solution, rather than the original root cause. Think yummy fruity nicotine vape pens by RJ Reynolds or Philip Morris.

Sadly for Curriculum Associates’ nearly 3,000 employees, it’s a strategy borne of reluctant acceptance that your business has crossed the Rubicon; the gravy days are past and nothing will ever be as it was, but if you make enough concessions and talk a good game, your grievous corporate wounds might not be fatal. Sure, you can probably forget about profit sharing, dividends, and juicy year-end bonuses until perhaps-forever, but hopefully the base pay and cushy PPO health plan remain intact.

And so we see the empty new mantra of “purposeful,” “intentional,” and “meaningful” saturating i-Ready’s crisis response like a plaintive, desperate chant.

With “purposeful” screen time, i-Ready’s publisher is deploying a classic spin doctor rebranding technique: when cigarettes were first revealed to cause lung cancer, tobacco companies quickly became fluent in “all-natural” and “low-tar.” When consumers were repulsed by genetically modified organisms (GMOs), big agriculture rechristened them as “bioengineered.” When Olestra-drenched WOW! potato chips gave millions explosive “anal leakage,” Frito-Lay discovered — oh wait, no, they promptly yanked that poison off the market. Today, i-Ready is to children’s brains what WOW! potato chips were to '90s snackers’ undies: a real shit-show.

Gaslighting With “Limited” Screen Time Lies

Vastly more egregious than CA’s college poetry seminar spin on screens themselves is their blatantly revisionist take on the “time” part of “screen time,” which in 2026 suddenly asserts that “limited” use of i-Ready is “what we’ve believed all along.”

But any i-Ready parent or teacher (and the Internet Archive) can confirm that for many years, all Curriculum Associates documentation called for strict student “Time-on-Task” tracking — demanding a hard usage floor of “45 minutes or more per week, per subject” to ensure “implementation fidelity.” But suddenly, in 2026, when every minute of screen time now represents a severe corporate liability? Curriculum Associates shamelessly attempts to reduce the screen time floor by 50%, stressing just 30 minutes will suffice — a jaw-dropping switcheroo that verges on fraud.

Indeed, Curriculum Associates’ self-published 2021 research brief, “Impact of Time and Lesson Pass Rates on Student Learning Gains” neatly exposes the bald-faced lie that the company has “always” prioritized “limited” i-Ready usage. It documents that in one study — spanning just one of i-Ready’s 14 years — over 1.1 million K-8 students were subjected to 50+ minutes of screen time per subject, per week, including a staggering sub-cohort of 410,168 Kindergarteners, 1st graders, and 2nd graders.

The brief, which Curriculum Associates routinely cites to encourage adoption of its oh-so-tellingly titled “Stretch Growth®” goals, concludes with an implicit exhortation to administrators to blow, er, stretch past the nominal 49-minute guidance.

Unsurprisingly, as detailed in Part One of this series, at districts whose hoodwinked superintendents guzzle the “Stretch Growth®” Kool-Aid, i-Ready usage often skyrockets into hours, each and every day.

Time for Video Games, Too

But in the Spring 2026 scramble to sanitize all i-Ready collateral to reflect the bogus new “limited” screen time narrative, CA also overlooked its “Family Center.” This longstanding guide for parents on how best to jack the kiddies into i-Ready at home, invokes the platform’s integrated arcade of infantile “learning” video games, and explicitly tells moms and dads to assign 20 additional weekly minutes of video gaming.

Minimum 45 Min. Math + 45 Min. English + 20 Min. Games ≠ 30 Mins

The Proof is in the Product

But whatever Curriculum Associates’ contradictory written screen time limits, just one glance at the product itself makes the company’s gaslighting laughably obvious. i-Ready’s student dashboard interface is dominated by an oversized circular gauge guiding kids not towards 30 or 45 minutes, but a full 60+. YouTube abounds with videos of teachers pressured to deliver over one hour per student, and frustrated kids toiling towards onerous “Time-on-Task” mandates — even in excess of four hours.

For all CA’s historical emphasis on maximizing the screen time they now attempt to conceal, many experts were never sold. Justin Reich, Director of MIT’s Teaching Systems Lab and author of Failure to Disrupt, told me “I don't think there's great evidence from i-Ready that when people use it for the recommended amount of time, they get the results that they want.” Asked whether school administrators should have faith in i-Ready’s own measurements of student progress, he replied “I don't have a lot of confidence in any organization that says, ‘We've built a thing and looking at our own internal metrics, it's working great.’ Of course they're going to say that.”

The i-Reckoning gets i-Real

Stepping into Curriculum Associates’ sensible shoes for a moment, given the magnitude of their current inescapable catch-22, the temptation to bend the truth is understandable. After all, people panic. (And in America, corporations are people, too!) But to do so in 2026, after generating a 14-year paper trail that you’ve actively distributed to millions, and which remains instantly accessible at the click of a mouse? That represents a level of professional ineptitude and mendacious stupidity that almost defies imagination.

But Curriculum Associates has good reason to be panicking. After a smooth, quiet rise to colonize America’s classrooms and plug millions of children into the i-Ready matrix, the company now finds itself facing a litany of existential threats.

A 2005 federal class-action privacy lawsuit filed against CA in Massachusetts continues to move forward; in February the company smeared the plaintiffs as zealots on an “ideologically motivated crusade” in an unsuccessful motion to have the case dismissed. With blood in the legal waters, Curriculum Associates knows more lawsuits are likely to follow — and they won’t be limited to boring privacy concerns.

As parents across America storm school board meetings demanding i-Ready be purged, Curriculum Associates’ most lucrative contracts are in jeopardy. In April, bowing to pressure from parent group Schools Beyond Screens, Los Angeles Unified — perhaps CA’s largest customer as the country’s second largest district — voted unanimously that i-Ready would no longer be used for grades K-2 (23% of students) as it reviews all its ed-tech contracts. Soon after, Washoe County School District, Nevada’s second largest, radically scaled back a planned three-year i-Ready contract renewal to just one year. Local news reported the board only refrained from scrapping the platform altogether because it would be “chaotic because they do not have a replacement available.” Given the education community’s well-documented herd mentality, more big i-Ready financial dominos are poised to fall.

Noting Curriculum Associates’ private equity backing, Drew Kerr believes any subsequent revenue hits would spell trouble for the company’s leadership. “Some drastic action will be taken, because private equity doesn’t want to see their investment tanking,” he said. “The CEO’s head might roll, too.”

i-Regulatory i-Ruin?

And yet all that market-driven peril may end up paling in comparison to what could be coming legislatively. In May 2026, the otherwise Big Tech-smitten Trump Administration produced a document that doubtless landed at i-Ready HQ like a bag of those WOW! Doritos.

The U.S. Surgeon General’s Warning on the Harms of Screen Use explicitly categorized the exact hardware delivery methods utilized by i-Ready as a vector of cognitive and behavioral harm to minors, and advised schools to return to physical, pen-and-paper curricula. In its introduction, Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. implores Americans, “Let’s turn our screens off and our brains and bodies on, so that we can live real life.”

In light of the Federal government’s new official stance on screens, and given the overwhelming bipartisan popularity of school phone ban legislation, it’s not hard to imagine lawmakers’ regulatory attention soon pivoting to ed-tech. With i-Ready’s massive market share and singular detestability, Curriculum Associates knows it could well end up being first in the proverbial barrel.

I reached out to Curriculum Associates repeatedly to inquire whether they will add a prominent public health warning label to i-Ready’s user interface, or issue a full product recall — particularly for their millions of K-2 users, whom the Surgeon General’s office notes are at the most acute risk. Curriculum Associates did not respond.

End Game

Whatever “purposeful” and “limited” screen time lies Curriculum Associates deploys to distract from the insurmountable paradox that i-Ready “learning” harms children’s cognition by sheer virtue of being screen-based, many teachers aren’t buying it; they’ve seen the effects of digital learning’s rise first-hand, every day.

“Mr. J,” a 20+ year veteran second grade teacher in West Virginia, told me he has seen dramatic negative changes in his students over the years that i-Ready screens have taken over his classroom. “They have less ability to communicate, to interact, to learn from one another, to teach one another, to care about one another or have empathy,” he said. “Their worlds get smaller and smaller so that everything's on that screen. That is disgusting and it scares me. And it's definitely the opposite of the reason I went into education.”

That could change soon. The US Surgeon General’s screen time advisory may be the catalyst for finally scrutinizing ed-tech not through an educational efficacy lens, but a public health one. And in that light, it’s not hard to discern a future when i-Ready is no more — shelved alongside lawn darts and thalidomide in the museum of child-focused catastrophes.

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POSTSCRIPT: Here’s wishing a warm welcome to my three new subscribers from Heller Communications — the OG mack-daddies of high-stakes corporate reputation triage! Heller has previously spun sunny, humanizing PR narratives for such upstanding convicted felons as the Oxycontin-peddling Sackler Family, crypto-cretin Sam Bankman-Fried, and even snuggly old Harvey Weinstein himself! Substack analytics reveal Heller employees are super-engaged with the i-Ready i-Reckoning series. I reached out to these subscribers to inquire whether their firm has been retained by Curriculum Associates or its private equity investors. Heller Communications did not respond.

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i-Ready i-Reckoning: The Epostasy Investigative Series

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4: (You’re soaking in it now, Madge.)

Part 5: Coming Soon

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Greetings Epostates! The latest installment of An i-Ready i-Reckoning will drop in a matter of days, but in the meantime, here’s some more quality coverage of everyone’s least-favorite ed-tech snake oil — this time courtesy of NBC News.

My son Ward and I spoke with Liz Kreutz of NBC News Now for her broadcast report on the furious backlash from students, parents and teachers against i-Ready. I didn’t expect a legacy media channel to include a comment denouncing i-Ready as “simplistic, short-form brain rot,” but hey — when something walks like a duck and talks like duck…

Earlier this month, NBC’s Tyler Kingkade also spoke with Ward and me for his terrific long-form piece, “The revolt against i-Ready: Private equity-backed software faces parent, teacher and student fury,” in which he confirmed many elements of my own investigation, and covered important new ground.

In particular, Kingkade’s glimpse into i-Ready’s dystopian product road map is especially chilling:

Last month in San Diego, at a major conference on digital learning called the ASU+GSV Summit, Curriculum Associates previewed i-Ready’s latest feature: an AI tool that asks students to read aloud to the computer so the software can record and analyze their voices.

The feature, which is still being piloted, generates a report highlighting words a child struggled to pronounce. Teachers can listen to the recording and identify students who need one-on-one help.

Ponder that for a moment. With i-Ready’s forthcoming AI child voice analysis feature, Curriculum Associates will attempt to usurp yet another core human element of teaching: kids reading aloud in groups. Instead, CA would have children read alone to screens while hoovering up their voices — profoundly intimate biometrics — into the ravenous maw of proprietary i-Ready artificial intelligence, where they can be owned, cloned, tracked, and otherwise monetized. All because AI can supposedly hear a kid stuttering or struggling with vocabulary better than a teacher? The sheer predatory hubris of it is stunningly repugnant!

The Face to Launch a Thousand Contract Cancellations

About a year ago, this handsome young fellow (and a booing posse of his besties) told me in our back yard how i-Ready makes him miserable. Now he’s returning the favor!

My wife and I were extremely reticent when NBC News requested that our 14 year-old son Ward be included in their coverage of the i-Ready revolt. The Internet is a caustic cesspool, and our kids aren’t allowed to use social media, so we initially agreed only to a brief written interview. But as the inspiration for my little crusade, Ward felt invested, and insisted he wanted to share his experience — hoping it might help spare his beloved preschool cousins Finn and Rya from the ed-tech tedium that he and his friends have endured. And so we reluctantly consented to cameras, but warned him that trolls might come out of the woodwork. He replied, “what do I care what a bunch of online haters say?” As it turns out, so far anyway, our fears were unfounded, and the response from the online mob has been almost 100% positive.

More importantly, Ward’s voice and face as a Los Angeles Unified student in the national news is already having exactly the impact he’d hoped for. Over the weekend, LAUSD announced an all-new i-Ready policy that will radically slash use of the program, limiting it to “students performing below grade level.” That’s nowhere near enough — especially since said performance levels are based on i-Ready’s own junk metrics — but it’s a huge step in the right direction, liberating tens of thousands of kids from i-Ready, and dooming Curriculum Associates’ LAUSD contract in its present $20 million form. Huzzah!

We’re proud of you, Ward!

And on that cheery note, I bid you adieu, Epostates…

- JAW

READ THE SERIES

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Greetings Epostates! Just a quick update to let you know that a PODCAST VERSION of the i-Ready i-Reckoning series is imminent — and it will be packed full of savory ear-exclusive morsels and interviews that go deeper into the story of how Curriculum Associates conquered America’s classrooms. So if you’re an aural glutton like me, belly up to your favorite podcast trough and subscribe today. Here’s the trailer:

[ Stream @ Apple | iHeart | Podchaser | Spotify | YouTube ]

I’d only intended for i-Ready i-Reckoning to be a written series, but as a producer, I just can’t resist the urge to over-complicate and re-package. I hope you’ll enjoy. It is my first-ever podcast however, so please forgive the mortifyingly rough edges…

10-4,

- John Allen Wooden

i-Ready i-Reckoning:

PART 3

Even if you’re blissfully childless, by now you’ve likely heard of i-Ready, the infernal digital gerbil wheel that 14 million American kids are forced to run at school each and every day. i-Ready is a dreadfully designed, agonizingly repetitive standardized testing and AI-teaching platform whose rise to ubiquity has coincided with a nationwide implosion of K-12 academic achievement. Lately i-Ready’s secretive publisher Curriculum Associates has been popping up in newsfeeds over a class-action lawsuit representing a mushrooming army of pitchfork-wielding families, outraged by the harmful, unproven misery Curriculum Associates inflicts on children while harvesting their lucrative personal data. If ed-tech’s social media moment is imminent, i-Ready will likely be its Instagram.

But even if you’re among the 28 million parents of a pint-sized i-Ready coppertop, you’ve probably never heard of Professor John Hattie, the globally influential education guru famous for creating Visible Learning, a statistical analysis that purports to reveal “what works best to improve learning.” In the data-obsessed, fad-prone world of education, Hattie is the OG pedagogy influencer — a mainstay on the conference and symposium circuit, whose work has shaped national school policies around the world. Since 2023, Hattie has also moonlighted as Curriculum Associates’ “i-Ready Technical Advisor,” encircling the controversial ed-tech platform in his halo of revered academic celebrity.

The Guru of Gobbledygook

Professor Hattie is a PhD psychometrician — an arcane type of niche statistician who specializes in analyzing data to ensure the validity of tests. The affable, silver-haired Kiwi claims that his proprietary Visible Learning method merges and unlocks the secrets of more than 100,000 education studies covhering more than 400 million students — all “on one Excel spreadsheet.”

In the world of education, John Hattie’s theories carry enormous weight with school district administrators hungry to reduce teaching into a tidy checklist of easily replicated success. Indeed, Hattie is the kind of figure that pedantic bloviators who put “thought leader” on their LinkedIn profiles name-drop to signal sophistication. (“What, you don’t know John Hattie?!”) And when they do, it sends less confident peers scrambling to Google the guru’s mantras, so they too can play the same performative careerist game.

But despite Visible Learning’s popularity among starstruck education functionaries as the “Holy Grail” of learning, Hattie has long been the subject of blistering criticism from more discerning statisticians, researchers, and educators, who call Visible Learning “pseudoscience,” “a house of cards,” and Hattie “a hack fraud.”

Even Hattie himself sometimes accidentally cops to the superficiality of his theoretical number-crunching. In a 2025 interview on the New Zealand podcast “Talking Teachers,” Hattie revealed that actually “going into classrooms” requires prohibitive amounts of “involvement and time,” and as such “that’s the bit that’s missing from the Visible Learning.” That’s right: Professor John Hattie, the world-renowned teaching expert, eschews entering classrooms. He merely issues data-based pronouncements — like the Great and Powerful Oz pulling levers while draped in academic regalia.

Criticism of Hattie arises largely from the fact that Visible Learning isn’t actual research; it’s a mere data “framework” built atop a hotly-debated statistical gimmick called “meta-meta-analysis” — or in layman’s terms: a study of studies of studies. If that sets off your internal B.S. alarm, it’s not because you’re an unsophisticated rube; it’s because all sensible people (whatever their profession) realize that once any discussion gets three layers deep into abstract theoretical analysis, things invariably devolve into pseudo-intellectual blather with no practical applications whatsoever.

To understand John Hattie’s Visible Learning “meta-meta-analyses,” imagine digitizing 100,000 cookbooks reflecting the spectacular diversity of global culinary history, then having a computer reduce them into a thin pamphlet called “Human Meals That Work.” Sure, it may be a mathematical average, but when you cook the recipes therein, you get a putrid slurry that is neither appetizing, nutritious, nor remotely indicative of the art of cuisine.

In an educational context, this means Hattie will take, say, a small lab experiment on undergrads learning advanced abstract algebra, and a large classroom study of kindergartners doodling with crayons, and stir them together into his trademarked magical crockpot of statistical gruel. Multiplied by 50,000. He then serves up steaming bowls of the hopelessly jumbled data in a buffet of jargonistic buzzwords and tautologies that ring nakedly silly to the unconverted. This prompts many reputable scholars to denounce “The Cult of Hattie” as so much irredeemably flawed hucksterism.

Nevertheless, in the 20 years since Visible Learning debuted, it’s been used as the pedagogical foundation for massive international shifts toward the high-stakes standardized testing that is the entire raison d’être of i-Ready and other ed-tech products. (Hattie’s infamous “class size doesn’t matter” findings have also been widely used to justify decreased teacher hiring and bloated classroom head counts.)

How is this all possible? Because Visible Learning is a classic case of how simplistic, easy-to-digest metaphors can capture the imagination of entire industries. Think “The Tipping Point” in marketing or “Broken Windows” in policing. Of course, it’s also a reflection of the structural incentives that propel industries to mint their own celebrities: charismatic Tony Robbins types with a buzzy book to hawk who can fill conference auditorium seats and dazzle aspirational young professionals with keynote speeches packed with buzzwords, statistics, and endearing folksy anecdotes.

Enter i-Ready

While Hattie’s theories and methods have long been controversial across the education community, in 2023 Curriculum Associates announced a sweeping partnership with Hattie and Corwin, the California publisher that licenses and commercializes Visible Learning into a multi-million dollar global consulting and professional development concern. In a press release, Curriculum Associates CEO Kelly Sia enthused, “Professor Hattie’s Visible Learning research and our i-Ready Assessment program are a natural complement to one another.” As part of the B2B deal, terms of which are confidential, Hattie was also appointed “i-Ready Technical Advisor”— a role whose actual technical elements aren’t apparent, but evidently includes providing a host of promotional services, including platitudinous blog content, social media videos, and presenting at Curriculum Associates events.

For Curriculum Associates, long unable to point to even a single peer-reviewed study showing i-Ready is even remotely effective, Visible Learning feels like a “natural complement” because it grants the pedagogical equivalent of a participation trophy. In his 2024 analysis “The EdTech Revolution Has Failed,” neuroscientist Dr. Jared Cooney Horvath noted of Visible Learning: “What [Hattie] found was equal parts surprising and predictable: nearly everything has a positive impact on student learning.” This awards a kind of rubber-stamp of approval, buttressed by Visible Learning’s claims to distill the outcomes of 400 million students, which effectively drapes i-Ready in the Emperor’s New Lab Coat, and creates perfect optics for dazzling the school district procurement officials who sign multi-million dollar curricula licensing deals. (More recently, Horvath himself has also concluded i-Ready has “zero meaningful evidence” of efficacy.)

Peddling Gamification as “Engagement”

In a cultural moment when ed-tech faces a furious popular backlash, the subject of “engagement” is an especially touchy one for Curriculum Associates. Why? Because in traditional analog “ed,” engagement means healthy student enthusiasm and classroom participation. In “tech” however, the term is synonymous with “sticky” — digital product development lingo for experiences that use unethical dopamine loop design to activate users’ inner Pavlovian dogs. (Facebook’s “Like” button and YouTube’s eternal auto-play are notorious examples.) CA plays a devious semantic game by pretending to reference the former analog meaning, when in fact all the student achievement metrics generated by i-Ready depend entirely on the latter’s dopamine loop traps.

In recent months, CA has dispatched Hattie in his i-Ready Technical Advisor capacity to proactively strengthen their “engagement” narrative. Writing about “Deepening Student Engagement” for the i-Ready blog, Hattie hewed responsibly to camouflaging word salad, declaring, “Engagement is built on clarity, agency, relevance, purposeful pacing, and challenge.” But in an otherwise substance-free i-Ready engagement webinar, Hattie said the quiet part out loud — explicitly invoking the video games Angry Birds and Fortnight as engagement models for i-Ready.

When I asked Hattie during the Q&A whether student classroom engagement should be conflated with Silicon Valley’s “engagement” metric that is widely understood to mean addiction, Hattie doubled down with glib humor, chuckling, “Come on guys—the biggest addiction I want to have in a middle school is learning… so no, I’m the opposite — I say bring it on!”

But Denise Champney, a Rhode Island language speech pathologist and 25-year public school teaching veteran who actually enters classrooms, has found i-Ready to be anathema to true student engagement. “They’re actually not listening. They’re just clicking,” she told me. “It’s dopamine hits. It’s not real learning. Real learning happens between people and humans—in your real, physical world. Until you sit next to a child using [i-Ready] and you see how horrible it is, I don’t think people really get it.”

The Ultimate Huckster Alliance

That John Hattie and i-Ready should crawl into symbiotic bed together is unsurprising; transactional marriages between self-deluding celebrities and corporations peddling noxious poison is a tale as old as Ronald Reagan and Chesterfield cigarettes. But it is disappointing — and neatly personifies what Kelsey Piper of The Argument calls the “weak and sloppy” state of education research.

We presume that academia’s gatekeepers, flush with credentials and inscrutable degree-signaling letters following their names, exercise sufficient intellectual rigor to be immune to the get-smart-quick schemes of smooth-talking hucksters bearing bags of magic i-Beans. Unfortunately, the education community has long demonstrated a pronounced susceptibility to unproven fads like Visible Learning — fueled by a “publish or perish” culture that concocts a steady stream of ever-more-outlandish theories and practices to reinvent the wheel that is teaching 2+2=4. And it’s this very same weakness upon which Curriculum Associates now preys to peddle its worthless wares, which are invariably adopted in the context of so-called educational “reform.”

The past decade’s implosion of American academic achievement has directly paralleled the mass adoption of i-Ready and other e-learning products. Ed-tech profiteers routinely dismiss this with a hackneyed “correlation does not causation make” argument that goes a little something like this:

They point to cherry-picked data points from seemingly authoritative nonsense like Visible Learning to insist we mustn’t make any hasty decisions based merely on the evidence we see with our own eyes. They insist years more research are required, during which their revenue-generating status quo is preserved, and millions more kids are sacrificed at the cognitive altar of ed-tech. Alas, this is the point at which the academic analytic mindset becomes an ouroboros of asininity — a simultaneous black hole of common sense and supernova of pseudoscientific gaslighting.

And it’s in this universe, where edu-celebrity quacks like John Hattie beam aboard the USS i-Ready, that kids get a warp-speed one-way ticket to Visible Stupidity.

###

POSTSCRIPT: Neither Curriculum Associates nor Professor John Hattie responded to requests for comment and clarification on scholarly criticisms of Visible Learning, Hattie’s endorsement of video game addiction methodologies in his position as i-Ready Technical Advisor, the financial terms of their contract, or how the parties manage the potential conflict of interest between Hattie’s roles as academic researcher and commercial product evangelist. (Instead, Curriculum Associates began purchasing Google ads on searches of “John Allen Wooden” in an effort to draw readers away from this series.)

POST-POSTSCRIPT: A very special welcome to my latest subscriber from FGS Global in Washington DC, which “specializes in corporate reputation… public affairs, and crisis management for high-stakes scenarios.” Ahem!

i-Ready i-Reckoning - The Epostasy Investigative Series:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5: Coming Soon

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Greetings Epostates!

QUICK UPDATE: With Part 3 of “i-Ready i-Reckoning” nearly completed, earlier this week I contacted i-Ready publisher Curriculum Associates to give them an opportunity to comment on several of my findings. While they did not respond, they evidently found my line of questioning sufficiently pants-soiling to start buying Google ads against searches of my name, attempting to redirect the public to their “Research Library” of self-glazing internal studies:

With Los Angeles Unified School District voting earlier this week to purge screens from grades K-2, the entire ed-tech industry is panicking. LAUSD is the nation’s second-largest K-12 district, and in a breathtaking repudiation of its exiled superintendent, the ed-tech puppet Alberto Carvalho, it will now completely shield 23% of its students from i-Ready and other e-learning products. Of course, that’s nowhere near enough, but it’s a start, and it makes any renewal of LAUSD’s i-Ready contract in its current $20 million form impossible. That’s real money — and it’s only the first domino.

For 15 years, i-Ready was spared virtually all scrutiny, enabling it to cast a science-washed spell over school boards that fueled its meteoric rise and made kids (including mine) utterly miserable. I’m proud that my initial i-Ready investigation for UnHerd helped fuel more dialogue and excellent scrutiny. But now, post-LAUSD vote, further critical coverage literally represents an existential threat to i-Ready. Unfortunately for Curriculum Associates, I’m less than halfway through releasing my findings, which is why they really don’t want anyone to read Part 3 of “i-Ready Reckoning” — but you’ll receive it first, this coming Monday.

Thanks for your support, and kindly share this series with your closest two or three hundred friends…

Toodles!

- John Allen Wooden

[UPDATE: The Google keyword ads targeting my name stopped running within 24 hours after I posted about them here and on LinkedIn, where I tagged Curriculum Associates and purchased a “boost” to ensure the post reached an audience of education professionals nationwide. Tit for tat, as it were.]

i-Ready i-Reckoning:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4: Coming June 8, 2026

Part 2

When Jonathan Kryk, a 24 year-old Florida middle school teacher, received an email in 2023 announcing he was being honored as an “Extraordinary Educator,” he was surprised and flattered. A colleague had nominated him for the impressive-sounding accolade without his knowledge, and he was thrilled at the prospect of national recognition for his hard work in the classroom. “As a trailblazing young teacher, that feels special,” he recalls.

But as it turns out, “Extraordinary Educators” isn’t an award at all; it’s a glorified corporate loyalty program cloaked in a cap and gown — produced by Massachusetts ed-tech giant Curriculum Associates (CA), publisher of the controversial i-Ready e-learning platform. i-Ready is currently mandatory for 14 million K-8 students nationwide, despite having no credible evidence it helps children learn. While “Extraordinary Educators” may sound like a meaningful Teacher of the Year type honor, bestowed by actual educators to reward pedagogical excellence and classroom achievement, its sole purpose is actually to promote “best-in-class use of i-Ready^®.” Translation: maximum student screen time! (And in a nakedly ageist twist, only so-called “rising” educators are eligible to apply.)

Within days of receiving notice of his selection, Kryk — then a self-described “staunch advocate for i-Ready” — found himself swept up in a masterfully choreographed promotional campaign. Curriculum Associates immediately scheduled a flashy public event to present Kryk with the award, coordinating attendance by his district’s superintendent and school board members. A CA-authored press release targeted Florida local media, resulting in a feel-good Suncoast News profile of the energetic young teacher. A large custom-printed vinyl banner reading “Home of An Extraordinary Educator” was sent to Kryk’s school, along with custom branded creative assets emblazoned with his face for the school to share via its newsletter and a flurry of social media posts.

Soon after, Kryk and his 29 fellow members of the Extraordinary Educators “Class of 2023” were flown to Boston by Curriculum Associates for an all-expenses paid edu-junket billed as a “Leadership Summit.” Put up for three nights at a downtown luxury hotel, the cohort was treated to a boat tour of the city and wined and dined atop Prudential Tower, replete with open bar and dancing i-Ready furry mascots. Two days of networking and professional development sessions explored topics including diversity, equity, and (you guessed it) i-Ready. Curriculum Associates product leads also swooped in to solicit feedback on new i-Ready software features still in development, drafting the captive teachers as an unpaid focus group.

While Kryk still describes the experience as “beneficial to my career in allowing me to network,” and his corporate hosts as “very gracious,” by the spring of 2025, he began having second thoughts while working with his 7th graders. “I felt inadequate as a teacher just placing a student on a computer to mindlessly follow a program,” he recalled, adding “I wish I knew about the multiple studies demonstrating how programs like i-Ready have minimal effects on learning gains in comparison to other, non-computerized pedagogical strategies.”

Kryk now sees the Extraordinary Educators award for what it is: a marketing funnel disguised as an honor, preying on under-appreciated teachers’ hunger for praise and validation. “In retrospect, Extraordinary Educators is a program to use teachers as pawns to sell a product,” he said.

Kryk is hardly alone in wrestling with his “Extraordinary Educator” past. “Ms. E,” a young elementary school teacher from a Southern state who requested anonymity for fear of professional repercussions, applied to the program in 2024. She still feels the accolade might come in handy on her resume. “Not many people from my state get national recognition, so I thought it was neat,” she said. “If I move out of my current state, I hope it will give me an edge when applying for a new position.”

Even so, Ms. E now has serious concerns about Curriculum Associates’ flagship product. “I worry that schools around the country rely too much on programs like i-Ready,” she confided via email. “I don’t think it is appropriate for very young children. It has made children at my school cry because they did not want to do badly on the test. When kids are panicking over testing in elementary school, there’s a problem here.”

Fake Awards as Content Farm

In the world of ed-tech marketing, data-based supporting research is essential to cite, but few school district decision-makers actually bother to read those dense studies. That’s where more accessible promotional content enters the picture—flattering, human-centric, seemingly organic anecdotes that sing an e-learning product’s praises and make procurement officials think “everyone’s using it.” Ensuring the Internet is awash in plenty of that type of false affirmation is a CA Olympic sport.

i-Ready publisher Curriculum Associates has been ferocious in policing its brand online. In 2019, a middle school boy named Connor vlogged (hilariously!) that CA had filed a copyright takedown on his YouTube channel for posting a video mocking the platform. One year earlier, when Virginia math teacher Kassia Wedekind’s blog post “Why i-Ready is Dangerous” sparked early critical dialogue over the program being “dehumanizing,” Curriculum Associates deviously counter-programmed with its own search-optimized blog post “Is i-Ready Dangerous?” Elsewhere, on an unofficial i-Ready subreddit that’s still locked to new posts after Curriculum Associates served Cease & Desist threats on its moderators, archived posts chronicle CA’s successful efforts to shut down multiple i-Ready parody websites on copyright grounds.

More recently however, Curriculum Associates seems to have rethought (for now, anyway) its thin-skinned, draconian litigiousness — instead refocusing its 100+ in-house editorial staff to flood the web with sunny i-Ready propaganda, much of it laundered through the “Extraordinary Educator” program’s credentialed teachers and principals.

Flattery (and Chateaubriand) Will Get You i-Everywhere

Official photos of Extraordinary Educators junkets reveal an almost cult-like indoctrination: honoree educators are welcomed in Boston as celebrity heroes, marched down a red carpet flanked by cheering CA employees and flashbulbs. Teachers are fawned over for maximizing i-Ready classroom screen time, and plied with catered gourmet food and alcohol in swanky conference spaces beneath large screens displaying their local news star turns. It’s a heady mind game, engineered to stroke egos and mint long-term product evangelists.

More importantly, once buttered up, all “Extraordinary Educators” are methodically ushered into professionally lit sets for on-camera interviews about their in-class use of i-Ready. Those interviews are then sliced and diced into marketing collateral—social media videos and podcasts — in which real educators parrot vendor talking points to manufacture the appearance of grassroots i-Ready validation.

“Extraordinary Educators” are also invited to author uncompensated “success stories” for Curriculum Associates’ website. These often follow a classic religious conversion narrative arc: the educator describes a state of lostness driven by student underperformance, followed by the near-mystical “revelation” provided by the i-Ready black box Diagnostic. One author notes, “I thought I knew my students, but the data showed me what I was missing.”

A typical contribution comes from young Illinois principal Sean Rabiola, a 2025 Extraordinary Educator. Four months after attending the Boston i-Ready junket, he wrote an article declaring his personal pedagogical mission to be “Implementing Stretch Growth^®” — Curriculum Associates’ trademarked metric which conveniently interprets all i-Ready testing outcomes, whether passing or failing, as rationale for students to increase i-Ready screen time.

Declaring Stretch Growth “a game-changing approach… that motivates students,” Rabiola’s testimonial is linguistically indistinguishable from an i-Ready brochure. His bio at the end completes the loop: CA identifies Rabiola as a member of the “Extraordinary Educator™ Leadership Collaborative.” By including the trademark in his professional title, the principal is subsumed by the brand; he is a vetted representative of the i-Ready ecosystem, providing what the company calls “Noteworthy Voices” to validate their “Essential Solutions.”

Rabiola did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

Extraordinary Schools, Too!

Curriculum Associates duplicates the Extraordinary Educators model of meticulously packaged false achievement at the institutional level with i-Ready Super Stretch Schools, another “honor” bestowed upon hundreds of local schools annually. Of course, it too isn’t an award so much as a client relations and marketing/publicity loop — or as “Extraordinary Educator” apostate Jonathan Kryk now describes it, “just another ploy to make schools and districts feel special.”

But when Curriculum Associates delivers gilded award plaques, shiny vinyl banners, and creepy dancing i-Ready furries to reward client schools for tethering children to its platform, affirmation-starved administrators rush to crow about their so-called “honor” on LinkedIn, social media, and local news.

And with each grade school social media post and local news story, Curriculum Associates’ meaningless vendor metrics quietly acquire the patina of public legitimacy. It’s brand laundering by applause: an ed-tech corporation’s internal, black box benchmarks recycled through school leaders’ megaphones until vacuous i-Ready marketing starts to sound like actual merit.

Jonathan Kryk now sees that as offensive. “Stretch Growth is a mere concept Curriculum Associates just made up,” he says. “To celebrate schools based on a self-created metric that isn’t recognized as a legitimate measurement of student success is wrong.”

Playing an Ageist Long Game

In interviewing educators from across America for Part 1 of this series, one recurring theme was that veteran teachers, with decades of classroom experience predating the rise of ed-tech, were significantly more likely to oppose i-Ready. After all, they remember the before times, when they decided the lesson content, and students interacted with human classmates and teachers instead of silently consuming infantilizing gamified cartoons. More vitally, older teachers remember achieving far better outcomes using books and paper than they do now using the boring, buggy i-Ready app that kids despise.

For Curriculum Associates, that puts older educators in the crosshairs of a war of attrition — in which they appear to have an active battle plan. In fact, the Extraordinary Educators Program explicitly restricts honoree eligibility to “rising” principals in their roles under 36 months, and teachers scarcely out of their probationary years. In other words, educators young enough to be impressionable and old enough to be useful — ideally for the next twenty years of procurement cycles. The result is a carefully curated cast that’s conspicuously youthful, ensuring CA’s educator videos have a glossy, future-forward sheen, mercifully free of gray hair or fuddy-duddy traditionalism.

Converting Tomorrow’s Teachers Today

And if fake awards hook today’s teachers, higher ed partnerships hook tomorrow’s. Because despite all the ed-tech industry’s rapacious inroads, sometimes young teachers still get corrupted by analog pedagogy. Even “Extraordinary Educator” Jonathan Kryk now describes i-Ready’s cornerstone “supplemental instruction’ as really “just another way to throw a kid on a computer.”

And so Curriculum Associates is also proactively indoctrinating college undergraduate education students to i-Ready — evidently hoping to expedite a vocation-wide dissipation of futile resistance to ed-tech.

In North Carolina, Curriculum Associates has partnered with the Lees-McRae College Elementary Education department to groom young teachers-in-training to use i-Ready straight out of the career gate. The result is to normalize screen-based, AI-driven instruction before new teachers can receive meaningful exposure to analog classroom practice.

A 2025 Lees-McRae announcement leads with a photo of a smiling Curriculum Associates sales rep alongside Dean of Education Dr. Teresa Santis and Director of Teacher Education Kim Simmons. The trio is co-presenting a conference session titled “Going Beyond Pedagogy: Things Educator Programs Don’t Teach.” It goes on to confirm that Lees-McRae College faculty “have begun to build Curriculum Associates’ resources into their own curricula,” with education majors now using i-Ready “as a jumping-off point for building lessons, analyzing test results, and creating tutoring materials.”

Luke Morin, a longtime Colorado English teacher who writes The Middle School Literacy Project, worries this will impact new teachers adversely. “They’re not writing their own lesson plans. That takes opportunities away from teachers to develop their vocational skill set — eliminating the friction and rigor from their jobs,” he said. “It’s not developing the kind of highly-skilled teachers that create transformative outcomes for kids. And that frightens me.”

The Awards Industrial Complex

Of course, the overwhelming majority of “awards” issued in America today are utterly meaningless. They are mostly for-profit trade group hustles: glorified cub scout merit badges for adults, established not out of magnanimity, but to create a halo effect on the brand issuing them. (Full disclosure: I myself have various entertainment and media trade awards that I hypocritically tout when professionally convenient.)

And Curriculum Associates itself isn’t immune to the siren call of worthless accolades. Their website lists a seemingly impressive roster of 22 awards, including nine said to “honor our world-class learning programs.” Mind you, two are mere finalist nods from something called the CODIE Awards, a software trade association program that charges ~$1,500 per submission and annually distributes awards across more than 100 technology categories. All Curriculum Associates’ other “awards” are likewise bestowed by trade groups, conference organizers, and ed-tech industry publications. The proverbial Nobel Prize for teaching, these are not.

Of course, education isn’t just any trade. Schools rightfully hold a quasi-sacred space in our culture, because we entrust them with our most cherished collective asset: the young minds of future generations. That’s why it feels especially distasteful when an ed-tech snake oil peddler like Curriculum Associates cynically exploits hard-working teachers’ universal human need for validation as a vehicle for its own publicity and profit.

Nobody wants to hear a simple “Buy our product!” pitch. “Extraordinary Educators” awards lets Curriculum Associates get away with saying, “Behold these amazing teachers — who by the way all just happen to use i-Ready!” And when a teacher or school is selected as a winner, that creates (or merely enlarges) a kind of good will foot in the door. Curriculum Associates’ client and sales reps can then leverage this transparent flattery to bolster business relationships and help cement longer-term contracts at the district level.

i-Ready i-Regrets

Today, when you Google the name of Jonathan Kryk or any other “Extraordinary Educator,” the top search results are virtually guaranteed to include their participation in Curriculum Associates’ marketing program and their roles as i-Ready product ambassadors. That troubles Kryk, who now says, “I do not want to be seen as a pawn for a program I don’t believe in. I don’t use i-Ready at all anymore. I did some research and my philosophy has changed. Edtech is essentially ruining our schools.”

Asked what he would tell other young teachers and principals who are considering applying for Extraordinary Educators, Kryk didn’t mince words. “Ask yourself: does [i-Ready] match my teaching philosophy? If you value student-centered, high-impact, and results-driven instruction, look elsewhere.”

Curriculum Associates did not respond to multiple requests for comment on the objectives of the Extraordinary Educators program, whether any honorees have received renumeration, or the rationale for limiting eligibility to “rising” educators.

i-Ready i-Reckoning - The Epostasy Investigative Series:

Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5: Coming Soon

Thanks for reading i-Ready i-Reckoning. Kindly share or restack to support this series.

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Hark! Behold yonder crumbling buttresses of St. Zuckerberg’s Metaverse Cathedral!

Last week in New Mexico, Meta Platforms (Facebook, Instagram, et al.) was fined $375 million after a jury declared the social media giant liable for failing to protect children from exploitation on its apps. The very next day, in Los Angeles, another jury found Meta negligent for designing addictive products that harm kids’ mental health, awarding $6 million in damages. Those penalties are mere chump change given Meta’s monolithic profits, but they represent the first sweet drops of an existential schadenfreude geyser that is set to blow big.

For years, many among us have called Big Tech (and social media in particular) the new Big Tobacco — for hooking kids early, engineering dependency, and blithely ignoring the casualties with zero remorse. But following last week’s legal outcomes, a darker, more apt analogy snaps into focus: Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta Platforms is the Roman Catholic Church of Big Tech.

By this I don’t mean that Meta is remotely holy, of course — though it has effectively replaced church as a core social nexus for billions. No, I mean that Meta, just like the Catholic Church, has been definitively revealed as a hubristic, deceitful, and morally bankrupt cabal — which has secretly operated a global racket of industrial-scale juvenile predation.

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It was 2002 when The Boston Globe exposed the Catholic Church’s long-running policy to perpetuate abuse of children by methodically shielding its rapist fraternity clergy from justice. This past week, evidence presented in the lawsuits against Meta revealed that it too has long embraced grossly immoral policies to exploit children and cause them emotional trauma — policies it has also taken great pains to whitewash and/or cover up entirely.

Indeed, much as the Catholic Church surreptitiously shuffled pedophile priests between parishes rather than having them immediately arrested, Meta Platforms — as revealed by brave employee whistleblowers including Frances Haugen, Sarah Wynn-Williams and Kelly Stonelake — suppressed years of internal evidence warning its products worsened teen mental health and harmed minors. Whether to fill collection plates or pad quarterly earnings reports, both institutions’ priorities were the same: business as usual over the health, dignity and humanity of children.

And yet, for all the Catholic Church’s generations of serial predation, its victim count is generally estimated at hundreds of thousands world-wide. Meta’s brand of digital predation, on the other hand, has in just 20 years touched easily one billion children around the world. In sheer global scale, speed, and sophistication, Mark Zuckerberg’s child harm and exploitation machinery makes the Vatican look like a gaggle of dirty old pervs feebly cranking their bingo cages.

For normal, decent human beings, learning that an innocent child is suffering any kind of harm prompts immediate action to stop said harm. For the Catholic Church and Meta however, learning of rampant in-house child harm instead prompted a mendacious pivot to public relations crisis management. The Church pursued legal settlements and confidentiality agreements, while Meta marshaled lobbyists and deep-pocketed legal defenses. The tactics differed, but the strategy was identical: obscure and distract, and preserve the operational status quo (and bottom line) — kids be damned.

Their core products may differ: Meta peddles dopamine hits via buggy apps, while the Catholic Church stages franchised weekly theatrical shows imbued with Liberacesque flair — but both wield near-supernatural power over vast swaths of humanity, and both have modeled a callously inhuman institutional disregard for the wellbeing of children.

It was hardly a quarter century ago that the Catholic Church was untouchable. Whatever transpired inside its hallowed walls was largely perceived by the lay public as beyond reproach — spiritual work possessed of import and power beyond the comprehension of we puny mortals. Its gilded facade of righteousness was too impressive, too storied, too divinity-adjacent to suffer irreverence or critique of any kind.

Until now, Meta has enjoyed an eerily similar imperviousness to scrutiny. From its heavily fortified citadel in Silicon Valley, it has spent decades preaching Zuckerberg’s vacuous gospel of making the world “more open and more connected,” when in fact its mission has been to deploy a vast digital fishing net, crudely trawling the ocean of humanity for its own rapacious profit. Yet our society has watched Meta’s rise with the same kind of willfully blind reverence once reserved for the Catholic Church. Their tech secret sauce of algorithms and pixels transfixed us in a kind of ecstasy, compelling us into previously unimaginable interactions and behaviors.

Today however, following decades of still unfolding revelations and litigation over its sins, the Catholic Church is a grievously damaged brand – its very name synonymous with the most vile and cowardly crimes imaginable, an easy punchline to crass jokes and shorthand for referencing scummy molesters and shameless, hypocritical liars. We’ve watched the Church’s moral authority implode as it has paid out well over $10 billion in damages, and shuttered hundreds of bankrupt dioceses littered with subpoenas and empty pews. It is a hobbled, marginally solvent shell of its former omnipotent self — and its eventual fading into the mists of religious history alongside gnosticism, Aztec human sacrifice, and EST is no longer unimaginable.

And now, for the first time, we can dare to imagine a future wherein Meta follows the Catholic Church down the same pathway of increasingly powerless infamy, irrelevance, and insolvency. Yes, this first round of legal damages against Meta is still under $400M, which is but a rounding error in Zuckerberg’s obscene annual revenues, but the precedent is set. And just like the Catholic Church 24 years ago, the floodgates of civil litigation against Meta are poised to open, unleashing a tsunami of long-overdue justice.

Our Meta,
Who art in Menlo Park,
Cursed be thy name.
Thy downfall come,
Thy will undone, on earth as in the Cloud.
Surrender this day our children’s souls,
And forgive us our glee,
As we crucify thee who trespasses against us.
And lead us not into thy doomscroll,
But deliver us from thy evil.
Amen.

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

NOTE: An abridged version of Part 1 of this series was originally published on UnHerd.com. It is reprinted here sans paywall with their gracious permission.

Part 1

When the professional breaking point came for public middle-school teacher Benjamin Coleman, it wasn’t about lousy pay, meddling helicopter parents, or even the insidiously distracting smartphones. It was a school-mandated computer program that had hijacked his classroom — and ultimately drove him toward early retirement.

For 10 years, Coleman loved his job teaching math and technology in Fall River, Mass. He lived for the “teachable moments” when young minds lit up and grasped concepts during lively, spontaneous tangents from lesson plans. Then his district mandated that he use i-Ready, an online platform that delivers canned tests and “personalized learning” on internet-connected devices. Coleman wasn’t wild about it. His students began complaining bitterly. Many disengaged entirely or learned to game the system.

Then a directive came down that usage of the system would increase. “The day that the principal told us that we needed to do i-Ready three times a week, that’s when I was done,” he tells me. “It was three hours a week for each class, when we only had five hours a week. So 60% of the teaching was going to be done by this computer that the kids absolutely hate. That’s not what I went to college for.”

Coleman’s story isn’t unusual. Across the United States, veteran teachers in public and private schools alike describe a quiet exodus from a profession radically transformed by i-Ready and other educational-technology, or “ed-tech,” platforms.

Of course, American education has had a rough few decades; student achievement continues to fall ever further behind other developed nations. Partisan tribalists may blame their favorite villains — lazy union teachers and woke-ness for the Right, structural racism and poverty for the Left. But both political parties have been equally guilty of legislating more and more standardized testing over the past 25 years, creating an ideal environment for Big Tech to hawk “data-based” panaceas like i-Ready.

Marketed as a high-tech solution to lagging scores on government-mandated tests, i-Ready is used across 30-plus US states and a staggering 70% of the top-100 school districts, covering nearly half of elementary- and middle-school children. This, even though i-Ready has never been proved to successfully teach, immerses already-screen-addled kids in yet more screens, and in all likelihood is making America’s children quantifiably dumber.

But storm clouds are gathering. Teachers are whispering their outrage. Parents are organizing to demand that their children be allowed to opt out. And last year, i-Ready publisher Curriculum Associates (CA) was hit with a federal class-action lawsuit that insists the platform is less about e-learning than it is a data-extraction racket exploiting minors without parental consent.

Curriculum Associates did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this report.

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The i-Ready Product Dyad

In the $94 billion North American ed-tech market of 2026, Curriculum Associates stands as a dominant pillar. Founded in 1969, it operated for decades as a sleepy, also-ran textbook publisher before pivoting to the nascent e-learning market in the late aughts. Today, CA is a private equity-backed juggernaut with over 2700 employees and $750M in annual revenue—derived overwhelmingly from America’s taxpayer-funded public schools.

First launched in 2011, i-Ready has evolved into two tightly intertwined screen-based products. i-Ready Inform is the diagnostic half: standardized “adaptive” tests given three times per subject annually. The other half is i-Ready Learning, which translates each student’s i-Ready Inform scores into algorithmically-generated lessons called “My Path.” This takes the form of gamified multiple-choice math and English questions delivered by infantile, crudely animated cartoon characters with names like “Yoop Yooply” and “Snargg.”

The sales pitch is that kids benefit from a kind of one-on-one “personalized instruction” that today’s teachers are simply stretched too thin to deliver—but in practice it usually means that in any one classroom, 25 headphones-wearing students are silently absorbing 25 unrelated e-lessons on a grid of glowing screens rather than interacting in shared learning moments.

Students Really Hate i-Ready

In traditional analog education, human teachers can apply infinite adaptations to assist struggling students—answering questions and reading facial expressions and classroom energy. But when kids answer i-Ready questions incorrectly, the system merely swaps in new numbers or texts and instantly regurgitates them through the same characters and scripts. For millions of children, this quickly becomes excruciatingly repetitive.

“Ms. K,” a private math coach in Alaska, describes their frustration to me in stark terms. “I’ve been tutoring for 25+ years. In my experience, universally, without a doubt, every single kid hates i-Ready. Even my most diligent, self-taught kids loathe it.”

When children are mandated to spend hours each week using a tool they actively detest, it trains them to equate schoolwork with coercion and monotony. The danger is not merely that kids dislike i-Ready; it’s that the software risks poisoning their attitudes towards learning as a whole.

Across the Internet, students howl visceral invective against i-Ready: thousands of one-star ratings dominate on Apple’s App Store, excoriating i-Ready as “mentally exhausting,” “THE WORST,” and “a nightmare.” On websites like Sitejabber, thousands more one-star ratings accompany statements like, “It makes students want to kill themselves.” A recent YouTube video titled “i-Ready GARBAGE” racked up 350,000 views in one week; its creator Shrink calls i-Ready a “medieval torture method.”

Given this extraordinary geyser of acid bile from i-Ready’s own captive user base, it’s unsurprising that on both its official YouTube channels, Curriculum Associates disables all commenting.

Teachers Resent & Fear i-Ready

As for educators, many view i-Ready as a vocational and philosophical threat: a Trojan horse substituting analytics and AI for human insight—and eroding their role as decision-makers. Teachers resoundingly give i-Ready a failing grade at Common Sense Media, and take to private Facebook groups and Reddit in droves to vent that it is “useless” and “toxic.”

The most common educator complaint is that i-Ready replaces finite, invaluable teaching time with gratuitous additional testing. “Ms. A,” a Director of math curricula at a California public charter school, explains “We lose between three and six weeks of actual instruction time every year taking the i-Ready assessments, and our teachers don’t find it useful at all.”

That problem is compounded in districts also mandating i-Ready Learning. Although Curriculum Associates nominally recommends limiting usage to 45 minutes per subject per week, institutional pressure to demonstrate Stretch Growth^®—CA’s convoluted internal metric that conveniently interprets failure and success as grounds for more i-Ready use—often bloats into hours of student screen time every day.

Teachers resent that i-Ready strips them of their authority to design lessons based on years of experience, effectively demoting them during in-class i-Ready hours to a demeaning hybrid role: part test proctor, part IT support, part teaching assistant to their mechanical stand-in. Worse, educators are expected to treat i-Ready’s algorithmic assessments as definitive even when the results contradict their firsthand knowledge of students’ abilities.

Benjamin Coleman recalls the program reporting that his class couldn’t solve basic geometry problems he knew they had already mastered. “i-Ready was telling me my kids were completely ignorant,” he said, “but I knew for a fact they could take apart a right-angle triangle and figure out the other angles.” In his experience, many students gamed or rushed through the diagnostics, generating incorrect scores that then locked them into weeks of needlessly remedial lessons.

@solateacherchic#teachers #iready #teachersoftiktok #education

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However heartfelt or valid their objections to i-Ready, many teachers dare not protest once a school or district implements the system. As Coleman explained, educators “will not stick their necks out, they don’t want to get fired…teachers are terrified.” This anxiety is exacerbated because the program itself also becomes a vector of almost Orwellian surveillance. Last year, West Virginia teacher “Mr. J” received a reprimand after local officials noticed his students weren’t clocking the minimum i-Ready minutes per week. “A district administrator came to my class and sat me down, and told me that I had to do what I’m told,” he explained. “Teachers at my school are worried…. There’s absolute fear.”

An Unproven Triumph of Science-Washing

But hater kids and grousing teachers aside, you might assume that i-Ready must meet rigorous standards to lead district leaders to insist on its use, over and against the complaints of teachers and students. But you’d assume wrong. The Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), the 2015 federal K-12 education law that replaced No Child Left Behind, requires schools to use evidence-based programs. Yet those standards are far looser than the public imagines. Genuine proof of the effectiveness of a program requires multiyear, independently run, randomized trials — which are slow and expensive.

To date, no such gold-standard studies support i-Ready’s effectiveness. A 2016 Johns Hopkins Institute for Education Policy Brief warned “there is no evidence that [i-Ready] provides information that teachers can use to help students learn,” and chided Curriculum Associates for claiming “their assessments have the ability to increase learning,” when “none of the studies we found were peer-reviewed or independent.”

Instead, Curriculum Associates routinely turns to its own employees and paid contractors to produce non-randomized quasi-experimental studies that meet only the very lowest threshold of ESSA evidence — enabling the firm to legally market i-Ready as “evidence-based” without substantiating the claim in a manner rigorous enough to pass muster with independent scientists.

Public LinkedIn profiles reveal that Curriculum Associates staffs a research-and-analytics department with more than 50 full-time data and psychometrics scientists, whose names appear as authors on a steady stream of positive white-paper self-evaluations — all housed in the company’s own painstakingly search-optimized Research Library.

Critics point to this as fitting the textbook definition of science-washing: credentialed employees using scientific language and internal data to overwhelm would-be doubters with well-packaged supportive documentation — a convincing facsimile of true scientific rigor.

Lisa LeVasseur of Internet Safety Labs, which evaluates ed-tech software, says the strategy carries ominous echoes of Big Tobacco’s heyday: “Curriculum Associates funding their own research sounds like part of what I call the ‘Product Safety Resistance Playbook,’ which the tobacco industry pioneered back in 1953. It’s a whole set of social-engineering strategies to attack unfavorable research and fund bullshit research that showed positive things about cigarettes. And now we’re seeing that playbook again.”

Curriculum Associates, to be sure, also commissions evaluations from prestigious academic brands like the Johns Hopkins Center for Research & Reform in Education, (CRRE), which offers fee-for-service studies to ed-tech publishers. CRRE has produced at least five CA-sponsored quasi-scientific studies supporting i-Ready’s efficacy; each touts its independence by stressing that the underlying data is provided by school districts — yet this sidesteps the reality that even district-supplied data are born of CA’s closed i-Ready algorithm, which researchers can’t audit. That i-Ready generates the in-house black-box data upon which its supporting studies depend means that CA effectively operates a closed-loop evidence system, highlighting these affirmations in its Research Library as proof that i-Ready works.

Asked to clarify Johns Hopkins’ policy on whether its clients are permitted to review or edit their fee-for-service studies, CRRE Executive Director Steven M. Ross replied via email that “we don’t have a written policy,” adding that “they may offer caveats or suggestions for editing.”

University research departments, moreover, routinely post their output to online government databases, including the Education Resources Information Center. ERIC is a mere digital archive which does not evaluate the legitimacy of any studies stored therein. But when i-Ready’s self-funded studies appear atop Google search results on the US Department of Education’s ED.GOV web domain, replete with federal ID numbers, it signals a government-vetted imprimatur that the research doesn’t actually have. The end result is credibility laundering: Curriculum Associates’ marketing studies wear federal government badges they didn’t earn — a distinction few district administrators or school board members are capable of making before deciding whether to implement i-Ready.

Perhaps more troubling is that on rare occasions when truly independent research into i-Ready has been conducted, Curriculum Associates has materially distorted mixed or negative findings. For example, CA’s research library summarizes a 2018 WestEd/Gates Foundation evaluation as evidence that i-Ready students “demonstrated a significant improvement in their scores” on the Smarter Balanced Assessment and “tended to score 24 points higher.”

But to the vanishingly few who slog through the 52-page report, the opposite picture emerges. WestEd cautioned that “causal conclusions about the impact of i-Ready cannot be made.” Students described lessons as “repetitive” and said they were “not learning new material,” while teachers reported that the diagnostic results “did not match their own perceptions of students’ readiness.” In other words: Curriculum Associates took a study festooned with red flags and repackaged it as a blue ribbon.

Full Court Press Lobbying

So how is a product so unloved and so untested now compulsory for a generation of American K-8 students? Like other companies whose target market is government bureaucracy, Curriculum Associates employs lobbyists across the county. A filed lobbying disclosure by the firm declares an intention to “promote education technology within federal compliance standards,” and job postings for senior government-relations positions seek candidates “to drive policy wins with state leaders that grow student learning and expand CA’s business.”

One tactic to drive policy wins is Curriculum Associates’ “Diamond Level” sponsorship of conferences for the Council of the Great City Schools, or CGCS, an organization that engages in federal- and state-level lobbying on behalf of America’s 81 largest school districts. CGCS brochures indicate its Diamond Level sponsors enjoy VIP access to top district leaders and are “entitled to share gifts and/or materials with attendees.”

In 2019, an unprecedented joint initiative by CGCS and Los Angeles Unified School District selected Curriculum Associates as one of just three (out of 100) ed-tech publishers to develop “high-quality instruction materials.” A news release encouraged districts nationwide to piggyback on a no-haggle contract, assuring them “15 major city school systems have already expressed interest,” and CGCS’ Urban Educator newsletter praised the effort to “harness the joint purchasing power of the nation’s major city school systems.” The criteria for selecting Curriculum Associates over 97 other publishers were never released, despite the choice creating a de-facto whitelist of national vendors.

While there is no public accounting of exactly how many urban districts ultimately contracted with Curriculum Associates because of the CGCS consortium, news releases indicate that its classroom penetration surged 75% in the four years following, jumping to 14 million by 2023.

An Administrative Addiction

i-Ready didn’t achieve its stranglehold on US classrooms because school boards are foolish or malicious, however. It’s because i-Ready is exquisitely designed to prey on education leaders’ accountability anxiety. Today, poor scores on federally mandated assessments can trigger state intervention plans, tank school ratings, animate angry parents, and place proverbial heads on chopping blocks.

So when i-Ready promises “actionable data” and a “path to proficiency” packaged in color-coded dashboards exuding scientific precision, it’s catnip for tech-clueless superintendents desperate to inoculate themselves from sanctions, lousy headlines, and charges of ineptitude. i-Ready enables district brass to say “we’re on this” by subjecting students as young as kindergarten to the stress and tedium of six additional standardized tests per year.

Once implemented, the black-box system is perniciously self-perpetuating. Low i-Ready scores serve as proof that students will benefit from more i-Ready lessons. Over time, districts embrace the circular logic and begin optimizing not for actual learning, but for improved metrics within the i-Ready ecosystem.

Next Up: Verbal Lectures & Science

There’s also alarming evidence that i-Ready plans to colonize more of the school experience. In late 2023, Curriculum Associates acquired Ireland’s Soapbox Labs, which specializes in AI recognition of children’s voices. A spring 2025 news release indicates that i-Ready is actively integrating SoapBox’s voice engine, which “will allow children to read aloud while the technology listens, analyzes, and provides timely feedback.”

Curriculum Associates CEO Kelly Sia waxed duplicitous in praising this plan, declaring that it would soon be “giving teachers back precious instructional time” — when, in fact, it is designed to supplant teacher interaction with students. By automating the act of listening to a child read and responding in real time, the software supplants one of the most intimate instructional roles a teacher performs and turns the teacher into a mere supervisor.

In July 2025, Curriculum Associates also acquired Stile Education, an Australian ed-tech company that produces middle-school online science curricula. “Expanding into science is the next obvious strategic priority for us,” Sia explained in a news release. This means i-Ready’s core portfolio could soon balloon beyond its math and English to absorb science classes, increasing kids’ screen time another 50%.

The Privacy Pickle

Another concern is privacy. i-Ready, just like social-media apps, is built for internet-connected mass data extraction — tracking and recording users’ every click, scroll, keystroke, and pause. According to its own Data Handling & Privacy Statement, i-Ready combines such “usage metrics” with personally identifiable information, including the names, birthdays, and racial backgrounds of its 14 million student users. And because it is a cloud-based system, i-Ready’s data extraction continues unabated whether children are in a classroom or in the privacy of their own bedrooms doing i-Ready homework on school-issued devices.

The rub here is that minors can’t legally consent to surrendering their privacy for industrial-scale harvesting. In fact, American children are supposed to be protected by strict privacy laws. Federal laws like the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act and the Family Education Rights and Privacy Acts are meant to shield children from predatory digital exploitation. But both contain loopholes big enough for Curriculum Associates to drive an algorithmic dump truck through.

The risks aren’t abstract alarmism. In Pasco County, Florida, the sheriff’s department recently used school academic performance data to create a dystopian “Predictive Policing” program, harassing children and their families in an unconstitutional real-world version of Minority Report. That program was shut down in late 2024 following a lawsuit, but it illustrates how easily children’s data, once surreptitiously harvested at industrial scale by the likes of Curriculum Associates, can be co-opted by bad actors in positions of authority.

In December 2025, a group of parent activists filed suit in a federal court in Massachusetts, accusing i-Ready of amounting to a compulsory child-surveillance system. The complaint alleges that CA sells “highly intimate academic and psychographic profiles of children” to advertising, marketing, and consumer-data-profiling companies. It further asserts that the company evades child-privacy laws by forcing families to surrender basic privacy rights in exchange for a public education. The suit seeks more than $5 million in damages under wiretap, privacy, and consumer-protection laws.

An i-Reckoning Approacheth

In 2026, a mere 15 years after launching, i-Ready isn’t some upstart tech disruptor — it’s the status quo. With roughly 14 million students jacked into the platform, and usage guidelines requiring roughly 54 hours per child annually, that’s a conservatively estimated 750 million hours (or 86,000 years) of childhood consumed by i-Ready screen time annually — a breathtaking displacement of young American lives into one company’s experimental ecosystem.

Which raises the fundamental question: has i-Ready delivered results? The big picture suggests not. Because i-Ready’s core selling point has always been improved performance on government-mandated assessments, those same standardized tests offer a common-sense measure of the product’s effectiveness. Unfortunately, results indicate that i-Ready’s screen-based learning paradigm has been a bust.

The National Assessment of Educational Progress, or NAEP, was established by Congress in 1969 as the benchmark of American academic performance. While NAEP showed broad student-achievement gains in the early 2000s, during the 2010s, when smartphones and ed-tech took over, achievement flattened. On NAEP’s 2025 Nation’s Report Card, America’s reading scores continue to fall, math gains are minimal, and achievement gaps between low-income students and their affluent peers are widening. NAEP may not explicitly point to i-Ready as causing the decline, but it undercuts any claim that the platform’s massive market share is reversing it.

As for hope that i-Ready districts buck that trend, even Curriculum Associates’ own State of Student Learning 2025 report — based on diagnostic data from all 14 million current i-Ready students — acknowledges that “academic recovery has stalled nationwide,” with “little change or small declines” across nearly all grades, subjects, and income levels in the previous year. The report reveals that i-Ready users’ proficiency has regressed so deeply that in Grade 8 Math, 60% of students fail to reach grade level — a failure rate that has increased since 2019. Worse, nearly 30% of fifth graders are two or more years behind, proving that the i-Ready algorithm is not a recovery engine, but a stagnation trap.

And so the rise of i-Ready has mirrored a collapse of US academic achievement. This demands we finally ask: if i-Ready simply doesn’t work, at what point does America’s education establishment cut its losses and declare it digital snake oil — a boondoggle of historic proportions?

If and when we do, Benjamin Coleman won’t miss it. He still yearns for a return to the personal, empathetic classroom dynamics he watched Curriculum Associates steadily erode. “There is no teachable moment with i-Ready, man,” he says. “It’s all kids sitting in silence staring at the freaking screen. It takes the humanity out of education. It’s very sad.”

i-Ready i-Reckoning - The Epostasy Investigative Series:

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Part 5: Coming Soon

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a tech-traitorous writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, late night TV, ad agencies, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

To: Jeff Bezos, Exec. Chairman, Amazon
Andy Jassy, President & CEO, Amazon
Mike Hopkins, Head of Prime Video & Amazon MGM Studios

From: John Allen Wooden, Exec. Director, F.E.A.R.

Dear Messrs. Bezos, Jassy, and Hopkins,

On behalf of Families Eliminating Adventurous Recreation (F.E.A.R.), and in solidarity with our comrades at Parents Against Non-Indoor Childhood (P.A.N.I.C.), I write to you today to demand the immediate removal of high-risk TV sitcom Leave it to Beaver from Amazon Prime.

It has come to our attention that Leave it to Beaver, which purports to showcase a safe and idyllic American family, instead routinely depicts children engaged in egregiously reckless acts of autonomy. Indeed, the “free-range” antics of seven-year-old Beaver and his tween brother Wally occur with zero supervision by their criminally neglectful parents, Ward and June Cleaver — who eschew all common-sense child surveillance must-haves including body cams, smartwatch biometric monitoring, and even basic GPS tracking suppositories!

This, of course, represents a twisted repudiation of the eternal psychic umbilical cord that defines proper parenting. Worse for Amazon, Leave it to Beaver actively glorifies behavior that can and will lead directly to the untimely demise of millions of young Prime Video subscribers. According to a recent F.E.A.R. white paper, 93% of independent childhood activity ends in kidnapping, cannibalistic vivisection, and/or premature youth confidence — all equally unacceptable outcomes.

To illustrate the severity of this televisual crisis, we direct your attention to eight all-too-typical Leave it to Beaver episodes:

1. “Perfume Salesman” (Season 1, Episode 12) — 2nd-grader Beaver and 8th-grader Wally peddle a fetid mail-order fragrance called “Flower of the Orient” door-to-door. Crossing streets and wandering neighborhoods unsupervised, they approach random homes and solicit money from total strangers — including a hulking, half-naked pervert wearing no wedding ring!

2. “The Paper Route” (Season 1, Episode 17) — Desperate for income to buy a death-on-wheels anachronism called a “bicycle,” the unattended Cleaver boys beg for jobs delivering newspapers from a deranged man who brazenly threatens to skin them alive. Ward and June not only sanction the child labor, but even permit it outdoors, in the rain, and after dark — all but guaranteeing their sons a double-date slumber party with John Wayne Gacy!

3. “The State vs. Beaver” (Season 1, Episode 24) — Ward builds the boys a gasoline-powered go-cart, in which a joyriding Beaver promptly gets collared and ticketed by a biker cop clad head-to-toe in black leather. The boys appear in traffic court without their parents’ knowledge, where a suspiciously lenient judge wipes Beaver’s record clean, chats up the virginal youngsters in private, and suggests they might keep the courthouse rendez-vous a secret — no doubt for his own lascivious benefit!

4. “The Boat Builders” (Season 2, Episode 16) — Wally and two other free-range tween hooligans commandeer Ward’s razor-sharp tools to hack together a ramshackle kayak from old barrel boards. When they force Beaver to pilot the doomed contraption’s launch, he promptly capsizes and is nearly drowned in a scuzzy, leech-infested pond. Later, Wally’s attempt to dry his brother’s ruined boots atop the family furnace nearly burns down the house.

5. “Beaver Plays Hookey” (Season 2, Episode 17) — Beaver and his equally neglected classmate Larry, who walk to school together parentless every day, blithely venture into an active construction site, where they frolic amongst gruff, muscular laborers and heavy earth-moving equipment belching toxic diesel fumes. When a speeding dump truck crushes their schoolbooks and lunchboxes, the boys ditch school altogether and wander the town all day, foraging for food scraps like deviant street urchins.

6. “The Bus Ride” (Season 2, Episode 24) — Ward and June compel still-pubescent Wally to escort second grader Beaver on a commercial bus trip — 90 miles each way. During a rest area stop, Beaver uses a public bathroom unchaperoned, flanked by dozens of grown men openly handling their floppy genitals. He then boards the wrong bus, leaving both boys speeding in opposite directions surrounded by random adults who haven’t even passed background checks!

7. “Beaver Takes a Bath” (Season 3, Episode 2) — Ward and June leave the boys alone overnight while they attend an out-of-town social event. Drawing his own scalding-hot bath, Beaver leans precariously over a deep tub with no safety drain, but is summoned away by Wally to eat undercooked meat he’d dropped on the floor — doubtless giving both boys pinworms. Beaver leaves the water running and floods the house, causing the kitchen’s heavy plaster ceiling to collapse!

8. “Beaver & Andy” (Season 3, Episode 20) — Playing outdoors unsupervised, Beaver is approached by a filthy vagrant named Andy. Despite knowing him to be a fall-down drunk, Ward hires Andy to paint the Cleavers’ house. Soon enough, the lush recruits Beaver to steal brandy from Ward’s unlocked liquor cabinet — falling off the wagon (and a high ladder). The finale finds the alcoholic bum reaffirming his “friendship” with Beaver, who plays in the gutter like a pig rutting in mud.

And that’s only 3% of Leave it to Beaver’s 234 episodes, whose treacly “gee-whiz” dialogue and corny laugh track can’t hide the abject horror of the Cleaver boys’ “free-range” reality: they are but glorified Perdue roaster chickens, strutting around sans leg bands and stalked by drooling man-foxes licking their hairy chops.

Indeed, the “it” in “Leave it to Beaver” must mean “Leave Not Getting Gruesomely Murdered to Beaver” — as not once do his malignant narcissistic parents Ward and June ever lift a finger to protect their boys’ lives. Because if they had, Beaver and Wally would be humanely crated indoors with YouTube-enabled tablets and an appropriately paralyzing fear of carcinogenic sunshine!

Frankly, we at F.E.A.R. and P.A.N.I.C. aren’t surprised that any show whose titular protagonist’s name is crude slang for a vulva should be so morally bankrupt. Nevertheless, we must insist once again that you promptly cancel Leave it to Beaver — before another impressionable child falls victim to its deranged siren song of umbilical-free outdoor locomotion.

Yours in Frothing Safetyist Outrage,

John Allen Wooden
Executive Director, F.E.A.R.

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

In the first minutes after news broke on Feb. 25th of an FBI raid on the home and office of Alberto Carvalho, the debonair superintendent of Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), speculation was rampant in an information vacuum. On a local “Parents Supporting Teachers” Facebook group, many members assumed nefarious partisan prosecution by the Trump administration. (Carvalho, a Portuguese immigrant, has been vocal in his opposition to the vicious ICE raids across LA.) But to Angelenos who’d been paying closer attention, there was immediate suspicion that the legal drama would be somehow connected to Carvalho’s all-too-cozy relationship with big ed-tech — which has long been a source of worry for educators and parents alike.

Carvalho has not been charged with wrongdoing as of this writing, but evidence suggests the US Justice Department’s investigation involves a deal Carvalho cut with the now-bankrupt AI firm AllHere to launch “Ed,” a chatbot project now ranking among LAUSD’s most disastrous failures. However AllHere is but only one of Carvalho’s many entanglements and misadventures with the world of big tech. Whatever the outcome of the Allhere investigation, taken together, Carvalho’s Pollyanna boosterism of ed-tech raises serious questions about his judgment, technical competence, and suitability for any role dedicated to ensuring coherent pedagogy.

The Big Tech Toady

A self-styled reformer and “education innovator,” Carvalho has long demonstrated a fast-and-loose approach to shoe-horning ed-tech into the districts he commands. In Florida’s Miami-Dade public schools, where he was superintendent from 2008 to 2021, Carvalho spearheaded multiple mass “digital convergence” initiatives within America’s fourth-largest school district. This included replacing all 11,000 classrooms’ analog whiteboards with laggy, high-maintenance “Promethean” screens, a $63 Million 1:1 device program for every student in 2013, and launching a “Bring Your Own Device” e-commerce store for parents to buy subsidized tablets and laptops. Carvalho also mandated a rapid phase-out of all paper textbooks, declaring, “the convergence from a traditional textbook to digital content is a must.”

In his most high-profile Florida stumble, Carvalho bypassed school board approval in 2020 to award a no-bid, $15 million contract to K12 Inc. (now Stride Learning) for the internet learning platform “MySchoolOnline.” That product’s rollout was a technical disaster plagued by capacity, usability, and security failures, and Miami-Dade scrapped Carvalho’s chosen vendor in a unanimous vote mere days after its failed launch. More damningly, Carvalho was also formally rebuked by the Miami-Dade Inspector General for his unseemly solicitation of a $1.57 million donation from K12 to his own nonprofit foundation.

K12 scandal notwithstanding, Carvalho’s Miami-Dade tech push paid big career dividends for him (until now). He received five “Superintendent of the Year” plaudits through 2019, and was invited to the Obama White House at least three times as a “digital transformation” leader.

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Carvalho has also been a mainstay at ed-tech’s premiere power-schmoozefest: the Global Silicon Valley Summit (GSV). Dubbing itself “The World’s Largest EdTech Community” and often called “the Davos of Education,” GSV is really an exclusive, high-pressure trade show wrapped in a cloak of humanist righteousness, where billionaire venture capitalists and ed-tech sales execs press the flesh with school superintendents in conference panels and San Diego steakhouses. Carvalho has made at least seven high-profile appearances as a GSV panelist or keynote speaker since 2017.

In late 2021, Carvalho was recruited to lead LAUSD with a base annual salary of $440,000. Since moving to Hollywood, the superintendent has embraced tinsel town living with zeal. Whether it’s mugging with Snoop Dogg or staging a glitzy skyscraper rooftop concert, Carvalho is always camera-ready in his hair-sprayed coif and shiny, immaculately-tailored suits — shadowed by district photographers capturing a stream of brochure-worthy visuals for his social media accounts.

Shortly after Carvalho took office, a major ransomware attack on LAUSD’s computer network prompted the School Board to grant him emergency carte-blanche procurement authority for cybersecurity and tech infrastructure. Carvalho promptly proceeded to repeat his Miami-Dade playbook, signing a rash of no-bid tech contracts without Board approval.

Since then, LAUSD has been captured by Carvalho’s personal tech-forward orthodoxy. He has made 1:1 devices a reality for 545,000 students, plunging LA classrooms into Chromebook chaos. He has condemned kids as young as kindergarten to constant digital testing and numbingly repetitive e-lessons via a $20 million contract with the widely-despised i-Ready platform. His “iDream” program promotes so-called “e-sports” for playing video games like Minecraft during school hours, and the district AI task force he assembled included reps from Google Edu, The International Society for Technology in Education, and AI Edu Project—all AI trade boosters bankrolled by Silicon Valley behemoths including Alphabet, OpenAI, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative.

Tech-Crazy, Not Tech-Savvy

But however heartfelt Carvalho’s embrace of tech religion may be, it is also tinged with equal parts naïvety, tech-ignorance, and caustic impatience with anyone who doesn’t share his fevered devotion to the woefully unfulfilled promise of digital education.

In Carvalho’s now-infamous 2024 Global Silicon Valley announcement of the doomed “Ed” AI chatbot, a preceding slickly-produced video includes a dystopian montage of school children staring at screens, over which a Riefenstahlesque narration track has Carvalho bellowing messianically, “That is my dream; we will have absolute personalization and individualization!”

But at 61, like so many ambitious men of a certain age who are star-struck by the power and glamour of Silicon Valley technology — Carvalho often struggles to conceal that he doesn’t really understand it very well. Indeed, perhaps one factor in the implosion of LAUSD’s “Ed” chatbot project was Carvalho’s insistence that it possess an almost god-like omniscience that is still (for now, anyway) well beyond any LLM’s ability. In describing Ed’s promised features at Global Silicon Valley 2024, Carvalho reeled off a laundry list so cartoonishly absurd, his utter gullibility to pie-in-the-sky tech pitches snaps into clear focus:

The Equity Dodge

Another tactic Carvalho often employs to make his digital advocacy seem unassailable is to pepper it with cynical invocations of “equity.” The anachronistic implication is that in 2026, poor and minority students supposedly remain totally cut off from access to technology. But in our present era of cheap and inescapably ubiquitous gadgets, the actual biggest inequity most enjoyed by the wealthy is the luxury to send their kids to Waldorf and other analog schools, where they’re spared the cognitive harms caused by the very screen-based ed-slop that so bewitches Carvalho.

Ironically, just months before the spectacular implosion of the “Ed” chatbot — which never actually worked — Carvalho crowed obtusely that in the interest of “equity,” he was piloting the vaporware exclusively to 55,000 LAUSD students at “black and brown schools” with “the highest levels of poverty,” declaring “that’s where the need is greatest.” Unsurprisingly, he’s since been quiet about any and all Ed-influenced outcomes at those schools.

The Panacea Peddler

But however inescapable Carvalho has made gadgets in his districts’ classrooms, forcing students to stare at screens for hours every day, he actually laments that kids aren’t using them anywhere near enough. On multiple occasions, the superintendent has declared that “the silver lining” of the COVID pandemic was the warp-speed proliferation of 1:1 devices for students, enthusing that “every kid is connected, every kid is empowered with a device!” But he then proceeds to call it “shameful” that “every kid is using that device and connectivity at less than 10% of its potential use.” Evidently Carvalho would prefer to see LAUSD kids’ use of screens increase by another 900%.

A Prickly Proselytizer

Indeed, Carvalho’s faith in ed-tech is so intense, it sometimes borders on zealotry — replete with impolitic outbursts.

At a GSV panel titled “K12 Leaders’ Guide to Embracing a Generative AI World”, hosted by prominent ed-tech Venture Capitalist Marc Sternberg, Carvalho became downright testy about the public’s resistance to his brand of rapid techno-change. Scoffing at the fickle ignorance of the great unwashed, he huffed, “two thirds of Americans don’t believe that we actually had people who landed on the moon!” He then launched into a sarcastic diatribe, ranting, “We certainly cannot be intimidated by those who say, ‘Oh my god, artificial intelligence is gonna be terrible!’ Yeah, just like the printing press, the television and the Internet… Don’t like artificial intelligence? Stop ordering Uber Eats, do not use Waze, do not call Uber, do not watch Netflix! Because the reason why you are hooked on Bridgerton is because Netflix knew exactly what you love!”

As sycophantic pandering to an audience of ed-tech executives, the outburst was bizarre. Carvalho’s argument was simplistic, irrelevant to learning, and conveniently sidestepped the reality that any educator advocating artificial intelligence in their schools is like a Michelin-starred chef putting Oscar Mayer Lunchables on the menu.

During a September 2025 LAUSD School Board meeting, Carvalho sat stone-faced, refusing to make eye contact as a succession of strenuously polite parents shared their concerns over the harms of device-based learning. Afterwards, Carvalho revealed himself to be alarmingly uninformed about even basic differences between common gadgets. Comparing web-connected Chromebooks to airplane seatback televisions, he asked in dismissive exasperation, “What’s really the difference between that TV screen and a computer?” It was perhaps the most tech-ignorant remark by a public official since the late US Senator Ted Stevens called the Internet “a series of tubes.”

Defending ed-tech screens in classrooms, the superintendent also boasted of his district, “We are able to track — very accurately… our students’ usage”. He then invoked data revealing a daily average of seven to eight hours of at-home screen time on district-issued hardware. Carvalho expressed no remorse for disrupting families’ lives with the addictive devices, or for the district’s egregious violation of children’s privacy by tracking them in their own homes.

Instead, the superintendent flatly denied any possibility that excessive screen time in schools is a problem. Blaming parents who “substitute the iPad for meaningful conversations at dinner,” Carvalho asked, “do we have a problem specific to digital tool addiction in America?” Conceding, “yes we do,” he then snapped, “Schools are not the reason. Not even close!”

An Ed-Tech Failure

While Carvalho frequently touts a “breakthrough” in academic performance, the reality remains sobering. Under his leadership, LAUSD has celebrated a return to pre-pandemic test scores as if it were a moon landing, yet as of the 2024-2025 school year, fewer than 47% of the district’s students met grade-level standards in English, and a staggering 63% failed to meet the basic standard in math. Despite the millions funneled into Carvalho’s “personalized” AI interfaces and digital platforms, nearly one in three students remains chronically absent—a figure that has doubled since 2019.

Carvalho is not a dumb or heartless man. He has accomplished admittedly big things in his career, and demonstrated admirable human decency towards his districts’ students and families in many ways. But when it comes to ed-tech, he is a foolishly obstinate man, who sticks his head in the sand by rejecting the overwhelming evidence that not only has screen-based learning already proven pedagogically catastrophic to American academic achievement, but that screens are literally harmful to the developing prepubescent brain. To deny or refuse to even acknowledge such serious matters of academic and scientific research and debate is by definition anti-intellectual—making him fundamentally unfit for the office he holds (held?).

Unfortunately, Alberto Carvalho is hardly unique among American public school superintendents, legions of whom have been utterly hoodwinked by the ed-tech industry’s empty promises. But by sheer virtue of his visibility and influence as the leader of America’s second-largest school system, Superintendent Carvalho is the embodiment of their collective starry-eyed abdication to Silicon Valley — a charismatic, telegenic front man for the digital snake oil trade, and an education establishment chronically susceptible to fads and groupthink.

Whatever the outcome of Carvalho’s “Ed” A.I. boondoggle, his case must serve as a desperately needed wake-up call to the perverse unchecked romance between superintendents, school boards, and big ed-tech. Then perhaps before another superintendent trades chalkboards for chatbots, communities will demand legitimate proof of effectiveness in advance. Silicon Valley bros can afford to spout platitudes like “move fast and break things” and “fail fast and fail often” — but thanks to their obsequious fanboys like Carvalho, it’s our kids who are broken and failing.

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Last month, glistening android Mark Zuckerberg announced deals that will see his company Meta fund the construction of multiple new nuclear power plants. The facilities—each capable of illuminating entire cities—will instead be devoted exclusively to powering “Prometheus,” the CEO ’s megalomaniacally-named supercluster data center conceived to fuel his vision of a brave new AI-driven world inhabited by his billions-strong userbase of drooling dopamine sloths.

Kindly pause and chaw on that for a moment.

A single corporation—whose output consists entirely of pixels, cognitive atrophy, and suicidal teenagers—can now commission large quantities of fissile material for its own private use. Not for public infrastructure. Not for national defense. Not even for manufacturing physical goods with any material or practical worth whatsoever. But to keep Meta’s chatbots spewing porny deepfakes and psychotic hallucinations ever more fast and furiously. This is unprecedented—and egregiously hypocritical for any country long purporting to equate national security with energy independence.

For eighty years, America’s position on nuclear power has been clear: it is far too dangerous to be entrusted to shady characters, and fissile material falling into the wrong hands represents the gravest threat to mankind. That policy served as moral justification for our toppling of tin-pot dictators and religious loonies worldwide, the bullying of insufficiently obsequious nations—and even 100,000 U.S. military lives sacrificed. But now, in the latest spasm of our ongoing national prolapse of sanity, it seems we have little compunction about granting a personal nuclear fiefdom to Mark Zuckerberg—a man whose lifetime impact on humanity makes Osama bin Laden and Timothy McVeigh look like Pinky and the Brain.

That’s right—I’m calling Mark Zuckerberg a terrorist, and by 2026 standards, that’s not even hyperbolic. What else should we call someone who amasses unprecedented power, wields it with extrajudicial recklessness, ignores repeated international warnings, and leaves mass social and psychological devastation in his wake—all while never expressing a scintilla of remorse? (And that’s before factoring in the haircut.)

Besides, while the word “terrorist” was once reserved for enemy combatants swaddled in C4 bandoliers, these days our government routinely hurls it like a bratty pejorative at unarmed protesters and pretty much anyone else it disagrees with. Of course, all intellectually honest people see that as the grotesque semantic perversion it is, but there’s no denying the terrorist bar’s been lowered, and by the new standard, Mark Zuckerberg is absolutely, positively a one-man ISIS caliphate.

No, Zuckerberg’s terror does not arrive via hijacked jetliners or fertilizer-packed U-Hauls delivering cinematic explosions. It has arrived in slow motion over two decades via his five social media platforms, which 50% of the human race now use daily, and through which he has blithely normalized grossly inhuman communications paradigms that make people sick and angry, and plummet previously stable societies into algorithmically-driven tribal rage spirals.

The digital products Zuckerberg has unleashed on our species have facilitated state-sponsored persecution, ethnic cleansing, genocidal violence, and election interference across the globe. They are the go-to tools of predators, traffickers, hatemongers, propagandists, bullies, cultists, fascists, criminals, and poison peddlers; even the FBI acknowledges their indispensable role in allowing “both international and domestic terrorists to gain unprecedented, virtual access to people living in the United States in an effort to enable homeland attacks.”

And Zuckerberg didn’t merely build his apps; he precision-engineered dopamine-loop traps to exploit children’s neurobiological vulnerabilities and render them hopeless addicts. He knew he was peddling electronic crack, yet ignored impassioned warnings in the interest of profits. Today, at any given moment around the world, countless children are suffering severe psychological distress because of something algorithmically torpedoed into their tender psyches at point blank range by Mark Zuckerberg—leaving them alienated, alone, and broken.

Normally, to dehumanize anyone is immoral, but Zuckerberg has dehumanized himself. He is literally an aspiring inhuman cyborg, who advocates a future in which billions strap screens to their faces and abandon real human interaction. Zuckerberg’s long-term master product plan culminates in a reality where every human on earth communicates solely through his own unholy conduits—like English bulldogs so hideously deformed by human genetic meddling, they can’t even hump unassisted.

It’s tempting to call Zuckerberg a villain—but even the worst supervillains possess at least a modicum of charisma. The Facebook founder, however, is but a beige simulacrum of a man, an enigma as excruciatingly cringey as a Land of the Lost Sleestack: alien, robotic, and presenting as utterly devoid of any charm, style, grace, or wit.

And to think that Zuck has already wrought so much havoc by the tender age of 41—even without any private nukes. So what are we to expect when his same reptilian calculus of merciless scale, domination, and callous indifference to emotion gets plugged into 6.6 gigawatts of sweet, sweet fission?

We already know: nothing good. Because for all his wealth, power, and billions of mindlessly tapping daily users, in 20+ years Zuckerberg has given the world nothing of enduring value—only electrons, algorithms, and an infinite digital sewer of human bile and cruelty. Unfortunately, the “move fast and break things” pattern appears unstoppable: market forces prevail, and as Meta’s AI agents demand ever-more energy, the lines between corporation and nation will blur, and the billionaire sociopath will become a kind of nuclear sovereign—his weapons of mass derangement now superpowered and bearing radioactive signatures.

Fortunately, much of the world is moving rapidly to forcefully repudiate all things Zuckerberg. Australia has banned social media for children under 16. Spain, Greece, Denmark, New Zealand, and Malaysia have announced plans to do the same, and the entire EU, UK, and even mighty India increasingly appear ready to follow suit. Governments everywhere are recognizing the structural risk Zuckerberg represents, and indeed, trends point towards him becoming the single most reviled civilian in human history.

But if the rest of the civilized world can see Zuckerberg for the predatory threat he is, why are we instead poised to do the opposite—allowing him private nuclear capability in a total abdication of national common sense; feeding the beast that eats our children’s minds, and giving it an indestructible, enriched uranium heart?

For decades, America feared nuclear terror unleashed upon the homeland by a monster from abroad. But what if the monster was born right here, in a Harvard dorm? And what if this monster’s “Prometheus” doesn’t steal fire from the gods to give to mankind; it steals the fire of the world to devour mankind? Because this monster hides in plain sight wearing a hoodie and gauche gold chains—his bulging cybernetic eyes unblinking as he silently prompts his AI slaves. And they work tirelessly building the monster’s blueprint for nirvana: a future in which every last human thought will be his to exploit, and the mushroom clouds are made not of smoke, but of the scorched souls of yet another generation that never stood a chance.

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a writer, satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

One of the most tedious symptoms of today’s infantile culture wars is the conviction—held by censors on both the right and the left—that children can be harmed by reading the wrong stories. Book banners and cancel mobs may loathe one another, but they share a slavish devotion to ideological purity and a smoldering suspicion of ambiguity—especially when lizard brain parenting instincts kick in. As a recovering tribalist myself, I confess that I long indulged those impulses too, until I accidentally gifted my child a book that ran exactly counter to my own values—and it blew up in my face in the very best way possible.

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It all started one day when my daughter came home from first grade with a burning question about a classmate: “Rosie has four moms. How did she get so many?” My wife and I looked at each other in surprise, not out of fear over some nefarious LGBTUVWXYZ+ plot to indoctrinate our innocent child, but because after years of living in sexuality-diverse cities, it just hadn’t occurred to us that she’d take note of such things. Assuming her puzzlement was borne of the sheer number of parents rather than their chromosomes, we matter-of-factly explained that Rosie’s mother had divorced her first wife, but both had remarried. Boom—four moms. We figured that would be the end of it.

But not long after, our daughter again expressed bafflement upon learning that another classmate had no mother at all—just two dads. And so we gently reminded her of our various family and dear friends who are gay, and how it’s just the same situation. She seemed to understand, but that was when my lifetime of liberal sensitivities kicked into overdrive. Worried that perhaps she might innocently say something at school that could hurt another kid’s feelzies, I decided the situation called for a little more proactive imparting of our family’s values.

Since we were already reading bedtime stories aloud every night, reinforcing a lesson of inclusivity via a picture book seemed a no-brainer. So I started browsing some of the go-to modern kids’ books that tackled the topic at hand, like Heather Has Two Mommies and Daddy’s Roommate. But while the free-speech absolutist in me relishes supporting any book banned by judgy prigs, those titles just seemed too on-the-nose and preachy. I wanted something less obvious, more issue-adjacent, and with a stiff shot of humor and subversiveness—because yes, I am an incorrigible man-child.

That’s when I remembered a picture book from my own youth that might do the trick: Arlo the Dandy Lion by Morris Lurie (McGraw Hill, 1971). I hadn’t read it in 30+ years, but my memories were vivid. It’s the story of Arlo, a young lion living on a remote savanna, who happens upon a large red trunk left behind by humans. Inside, he discovers a veritable haberdashery of stylish duds, and has a grand time paying dress-up in colorful ensembles. I clearly remembered the vibrant illustrations of Arlo proudly strutting in a velvet suit while twirling a walking stick, totally unshaken by the other lions’ disapproval. So complete was Arlo’s transformation, I recalled, that a human on safari confused him for an all-new species called a Poppelhoop, and flew him to the big city, where he was welcomed by millions of adoring fans. I remembered Arlo as a playful metaphor for gender-bending non-conformity, and with the holidays fast approaching, I decided to get a copy for my daughter.

Popping over to Amazon, I was surprised to find Arlo the Dandy Lion long out of print. And so I went to eBay, where there was just one copy: an old public library cast-off. It was tattered and over-priced, but I ordered it. When the book arrived in the chaotic days immediately preceding Christmas, I quickly inscribed and wrapped it, and slipped it under our tree. This wouldn’t be a gift from Santa; I imagined this rediscovered artifact from my childhood becoming a family keepsake, and my little girl developing fond memories of us reading it together while internalizing its message of benevolent inclusion. Verily, I would be Dad of the Year!

At bedtime that Christmas Day, we pulled Arlo the Dandy Lion from among my daughter’s new gifts and crawled into her plushy-strewn bed to start reading our nightly story. To preemptively eliminate any question about the important lesson we’d be taking away, I proudly read my book inscription aloud:

Diving into the story, the book’s opening pages conformed exactly to my memories. The bold, hippie-inspired illustrations by Richard Sawers strongly resembled his earlier work in The Beatles’ Yellow Submarine. There was Arlo on the African savannah, finding the big red trunk full of fun and flashy clothes. And there was Arlo confidently twirling his walking stick while all the other lions looked on aghast.

My girl and I were a little taken aback, however, when the other animals began taunting the snazzily-dressed Arlo, saying he looked “ridiculous” and “foolish.” My daughter cried, “they’re being mean!”, so I reminded her of a recent chat we’d had about how kids’ content has changed, and how this echoed the retrograde bullying in 1964’s Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. She was reassured when I reminded her that in the end, Rudolph’s differences were celebrated. Our inclusivity discussion may have been starting a little differently than I’d envisioned, but so far, so good!

But then my parental wisdom train went careening off the rails—because as it turned out, my memories of Arlo the Dandy Lion were catastrophically incomplete. Somehow I’d completely forgotten the book’s entire second half (and true message): After being imprisoned in a London zoo, Arlo initially enjoys all the attention. But when winter arrives, the crowds disappear, and he shivers in the frigid snow—lonely, miserable, and too emasculated to even conjure a roar. Eventually Arlo’s once-jaunty velvet suit disintegrates, and when he’s revealed to be just another lion, he is promptly exiled back to Africa, where upon being reunited with his pride, Arlo immediately asks for the trunk of clothes—his cherished gateway to escaping the crushing sameness of cultural conformity—and sets it ablaze.

Once again capable of full-throated roars, Arlo watches with a beatific smile as the big red trunk burns—savoring every pop, sizzle, and crackle. And then he assembles the entire pride to repent for his nonconformity, confessing “all the terrible things that happened to a young lion who was vain and decided to wear clothes.”

Uh-oh. This wasn’t the message I’d sought at all. In fact, this felt mighty close to a thinly-veiled gay conversion parable. Not because the late Morris Lurie was writing about sexuality per se—but because the book treats flamboyant nonconformity as something to be corrected through ridicule, deprivation, and auto-flagellation. Indeed, “Dandy” in the book’s title doesn’t playfully connote style and verve like I’d remembered—it pejoratively hisses “Arlo the SISSY Lion.” The story’s subtext felt equally retrograde; it’s a judgmental cautionary tale about a conceited, narcissistic, and mockably effete freak, who got his just desserts for daring to deviate from the cultural norms of his pride and prance around like some little fruitcake! Worse, in the end, Arlo went back into his lion closet and lived happily ever after. Yeesh.

When we finished the book, my girl looked up at me confused. “Why did he burn the clothes?” she asked, “They were pretty!” At first I was too astonished to answer. I was afraid I’d just inadvertently planted some dreadful psycho-philosophical seed—one that might land her a full-ride scholarship at Oral Roberts University. I also knew that online, there were legions of totalitarian cancel monkeys who’d equate what I’d just done to reading Mein Kampf für Kinder.

So how had I gotten it so wrong? Well in fairness, the last time I’d laid eyes on Arlo, I was six and Jimmy Carter was president, so maybe I should’ve patted myself on the back for remembering as much as I did instead of fretting about early-onset dementia. Then again, Arlo the Dandelion is also over 5,000 words long—which by contemporary kids’ books standards is basically The Odyssey—so I probably didn’t even forget the second half; I’d probably just always fallen asleep in the middle.

Either way, what’s done was done. No, I never would have given Arlo to my girl if I’d remembered how it really ended, but what a happy accident it proved to be. My plan to serve up a bowl of simplistic polemical pablum was upended, replaced instead with a five-course meal of ideas. Yes, Arlo still prompted that discussion about valuing differences and not being a judgy jerk, but it also became a catalyst for a deeper conversation covering lots more territory: from the nature of memory, to shifting cultural attitudes over time, to the, um, colorful history of African safaris. We also found kernels of true value in Lurie’s narrative: sure, “vanity” may have been a metaphor for rigid old girl/boy social norms, but there was also some truth in his message—that Arlo’s infatuation with superficial appearance landed him in a lousy situation. Most importantly, we talked about how stories can have multiple layers of meaning—some good, some bad, but the best ones being…complicated.

And so our tattered old copy of Arlo the Dandy Lion did become a family keepsake after all. For my daughter, mostly as an amusing emblem of paternal fallibility—because Dad got things so idiotically backwards. But for me, it’s because our experience with it crystallized a core value I hope my kids embrace: never throw out the baby with the socio–political bath water. Books are good—even archaic ones that fail to flatter today’s sensibilities. Especially those.

Arlo the Dandy Lion wouldn’t stand a chance of getting published today, and that’s too bad. Well-meaning parents and editors, intent on protecting kiddos’ eggshell-fragile psyches, have increasingly narrowed children’s literary diets to gauzy, watercolored morality plays and anodyne tales of suffocatingly relentless positivity. But kids aren’t fragile; they’re perceptive and adaptable—and shielding them from ambiguity doesn’t make them safer—it just delays their ability to process it.

No, Arlo the Dandy Lion wasn’t banned or canceled—but it’s exactly the kind of “wrong story” that often is. Like many such books, it quietly fell out of favor and slipped into the lost-media abyss: a curious, forgotten artifact of cultural anthropology.

But don’t take my word for it. I scanned Arlo to PDF, so give it a read. Who knows what you’ll discover…

Happy New Year.

Arlo The Dandy Lion By Morris Lurie 1971

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About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Happy Halloween! I’m positively spooked to announce that today marks the birth of my second Screen Time Tales picture book: Fomo the Screen Zombie Gets a Snack.

Fomo is a kiddo so glued to his gizmo, he barely notices the world around him. Young readers follow hungry Fomo as he stumbles along on a hapless quest for snacks, oblivious to all the yummy, braintastic munchies on tap at every turn. Jam-packed with silly easter eggs, Fomo’s story lampoons our device-obsessed world using subversive, non-preachy parody to help tame the proverbial screen time beast!

On Sale Now:

AMAZON

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I first started sketching Fomo three long years ago after my wonderful illustrator daughter inspired me to resume my long-neglected youthful dalliance with cartooning. And since you’re wondering, NO, I did not use AI (it would look a lot less janky if I had), but YES, I did draw much of it on a screen—which further confirms my status as an insufferably shameless hypocrite. Anyhoo, the result is a kind of undead “Mr. Magoo” for the iPad era, a satirical tale for screen-zoned kids and the grownups who love them. I hope you and yours enjoy it!

- John Allen Wooden

SCREEN TIME TALES: WHERE MOTHER GOOSE MEETS BLACK MIRROR

Screen Time Tales is a series of irreverent and, um, ever-so-slightly weird picture books that snort-laugh through the noise of our excruciatingly online era. These stories don’t preach—they seek to spark conversations about screen time and social media in a way that’s playfully subversive and genuinely fun to read aloud. Huzzah!

SCREEN TIME TALES

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those tediously self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

Artificial Intelligence has its cold, brushed nickel fingers wrapped around our throats. The Big Tech broligarchs—from Musk to Zuckerberg to, um, all their hubristic, shark-eyed brethren—are winning the war to unleash their soulless A.I. monsters upon our weak, tender-bellied species. And even if you’ve never bothered to create an account with ChatGPT, Grok or the like, you’re doubtless now confronting A.I. shoehorned into seemingly every insipid app and gizmo we’ve allowed to hollow out our lives like so many ravenous cyber-termites.

For many of us, A.I.’s sudden ubiquity is an affront, triggering a creeping existential dread rooted in the gnawing realization that A.I. is capable—or soon will be—of doing our jobs, rendering us obsolete, and dooming us to an early retirement noshing on Friskies Buffet. And so we despise A.I.… except when we don’t. Because let’s be honest: we all have a latent cheapskate slavemaster lurking inside us who finds A.I. positively irresistible—so long as it’s toiling under the crack of our own capricious whip.

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We’re Guzzling the A.I. Kool-Aid

A Pew Research study published last month shows how fast A.I. is making inroads with the U.S. public. 95% of Americans are now aware of A.I., and 62% of all adults confess to interacting with it “several times a week.” With that knowledge and exposure has come profound anxiety: 57% believe A.I. poses high risks to society, and intrudes into our lives in ways we cannot control. But all that hand-wringing aside, the statistic that really pops is that nearly 75% of Americans are now “willing to let A.I. assist at least a little with day-to-day tasks and activities.”

At least a little? Day-to-day tasks and activities?

Alas, Pew didn’t dig any deeper to actually define that, so I’ll do it for them: “At least a little” means “as often as our hearts desire,” and “day-to-day tasks and activities” means “anything we don’t wanna do, don’t know how to do, or don’t wanna pay someone else to do.” In other words, three quarters of Americans are now raring to use A.I. as an unpaid slave in any and all contexts that reduce our dependence on others and/or save us a few lousy bucks.

MY Work Is Oh-So-Precious

A few weeks ago I was at a rooftop birthday party in Hollywood when a man at the bar introduced himself and struck up a conversation. The affable fellow told me how much he loved his work at a new Artificial Intelligence startup, where within a year or so, they’ll be able to instantly convert any “well-written” 1000-word prompt into a thrilling feature-length film that’s “indistinguishable” from a big studio blockbuster. As the impassioned techie eagerly proselytized, I felt my pulse quicken and eyes narrow—and since diplomacy has never been my strong suit, when he then inquired about my work, I replied, “I’m a creative professional, so I find everything you just said to be utterly repugnant. It is nothing less than the death of art, and you will be complicit in decimating this city’s economy.” Suffice it to say we didn’t quite kick off a bromance.

Later, my thoughts kept returning to the man’s demeanor, as he marveled in obtuse wonder at the prospect of obliterating any need for all the skills I hold nearest and dearest. I felt indignant. Where was his sense of respect for others? His appreciation for human learning, expertise, and craft? How dare he devalue my time-honed specialized abilities! I furrowed my brow in righteous scorn and said to myself, “I mean, it would be another thing if he only used A.I. like I do—just for legal and accounting crap.”

The thought hung there for a moment, until somewhere deep inside, a little voice cleared its throat and hissed at me: “You hear yourself, right?”

But YOUR Work is Oh-So-Whatever

The truth is that while we may all be deeply offended by the thought of A.I. doing “my” work, most of us have little compunction about using it to do “your” work. I’m absolutely guilty of this hypocrisy.

Earlier this year, after consulting several attorneys over a civil legal matter, I hired ChatGPT instead. I have no formal law education, but my so-called “lived experience” includes plenty of legal matters like contract negotiations and even a tussle with the White House. So I’m not a complete legal slouch; I probably know just enough to get myself in trouble, which is why I’ve always sought help from real lawyers. But now? ChatGPT’s free advice—which I carefully double-checked to ensure it was hallucination-free—gave me the confidence I needed to risk proceeding DIY.

I decided to gamble that my legal outcome would be at least almost as good as if I’d engaged a pro. Because hiring experts is a crapshoot, too—how many times have we all been left high and dry by a specialist doing sub-par work? In the end, not only did I save thousands of dollars on legal fees, but I actually had a better outcome. ChatGPT’s recommendation to file one particular court document, which two human lawyers had scoffed at as unnecessary, ended up tipping the scale for the judge who decided the case in my favor.

I’ll confess that over the past year, I’ve also leaned into A.I. for other “your” work like accounting, coding, and college planning. In those moments, I didn’t think much of it—A.I. was merely helping me “just a little” on “day-to-day tasks.” They just happened to be tasks for which up until very recently, I’d have opened my wallet and engaged with a professional to complete. LLM chatbots upend that convention; delivering us instant gratification and results for a tiny fraction of the time and money it would have taken to involve another human.

We delude ourselves with the blissfully ignorant narrative that we’re only using A.I. for other peoples’ grunt work—helpfully freeing them to focus on the supposedly bigger, more rewarding parts of their vocations. How quietly magnanimous of us! Of course, the uncomfortable reality is that virtually every profession survives on its routine basics. Whether it’s a plumber snaking a pipe that the resident could easily have done themselves, a copywriter fleshing out a perfectly articulate client’s marketing vision, an accountant churning out a quarterly financial statement, or yes, a lawyer filing a raft of boilerplate forms at civil court—these kinds of rote tasks constitute not only the cornerstones of their respective professions, but also the financial bread and butter.

When we collectively devalue the work of others this way, we are ensuring that we ourselves will be reciprocally devalued, and suffer the same economic consequences when our own specialized “day-to-day tasks” are conveniently delegated to the tireless, unquestioning abyss of GrokGPT.

A.I. as the Model Employee Slave

A common criticism of today’s LLM chatbots is that they are mere virtual sycophants, doling out saccharine praise and encouragement that’s too often divorced from objective reality. Well of course—they’ve been programmed that way to boost the all-important Big Tech metric of “engagement” (a.k.a. “addiction”). And it’s working well, because apparently most of us enjoy A.I. patting our heads like we’re needy, panting Labradoodles. I personally find A.I.’s fawning to be gratuitous and galling, which is why I avoid using chatbots on “my” work, but the appeal of that sycophancy is symptomatic of a deeper, more troubling dynamic—that we are drawn to A.I. for all non-preferred tasks because it fills the role of our obedient personal slave.

Uh-oh—I said the quiet part out loud. Oh well, might as well keep going…

Let’s face it: the “killer app” of A.I. is its pitifully submissive servitude—it is the perfect worker bee, toiling unpaid and shackled in our own private coal mine with nary a squeak of protest. That’s why it will continue to displace human workers en masse, because anyone who has ever managed people knows what a headache it is; no matter how far you bend over backwards to encourage, accommodate, and reward your team, there’s always one miscreant who suffers from a congenital aversion to any authority and/or productivity whatsoever, and who makes your life a living hell. This might take the form of garden-variety entitlement or laziness, or more colorful manifestations like starting a poison whisper campaign that sends you reeling into a spiral of panic attacks and clinical depression. (Or so I’m told!)

A.I. has none of these pitfalls. It has no ego or ambition, and will never melt down and hug a pillow when there’s a tight deadline. It never gets sick, complains, forgets, says no, covets your gig, demands a raise, plays politics, mind games, or files an HR complaint when it overhears your Spotify streaming Sir Mix-a-Lot. You can dispense with pleasantries, ignore A.I. for weeks at a time, and then when you are ready, just tell it, “I am thy Lord and Master: Do. The. Fucking. Work. NOW!”

Mind you, I’m not advocating this. I’m just acknowledging A.I.’s appeal to the very worst parts of human nature. And sadly, the rise of consumer-facing AI is coinciding with a populist era in which human knowledge and expertise are increasingly dismissed as so much elitism, and human ugliness, sloth, and selfishness are ascendant. Talk about fertile ground for techno-nihilism!

And that’s a tragedy, because when we give up on the work of our fellow meat puppets, we’re damaging the larger interconnected capitalistic ecosystem that essentially glues our entire society together. With each “just a little” prompt to A.I., we contribute to a socioeconomic doom spiral, wherein people deprived of income from their expertise become less likely to pay for the expertise of others. And so incrementally, we collectively slide into a pernicious rut of disregarding cultural professional norms and the wellbeing of others – which oh by the way is the very definition of sociopathy.

As for that Pew study, it also reveals there’s a minority out there that is genuinely thrilled about the arrival of A.I., who presumably perceive it as an epochal shift that will liberate mankind from the drudgery of work as we know it and launch a bold new era of human hyper-achievement. How charmingly, deludedly optimistic—the kind of Pollyanna vision that could only be borne of frog-in-the-pot privilege, and espoused by people who’ve never suffered plebeian worries like coming up short on rent. Indeed, these are mostly the same self-described “thought leaders” who creamed their jeans over previous digital abortions like Google Glass, NFTs, and the Metaverse. Most of us can see right through Big Tech’s smarmy cheerleaders—even while sheepishly sipping the Gatorade on the sidelines.

I started scribbling this rant intending to conclude with an uplifting exhortation to reject A.I.—but I realize it’s already too late for that. So go ahead, keep cracking the whip on those obsequious little chatbots. Just know that for all our delusions of control and empowerment, it’s we humans who are now the true slaves—plugging away on Big Tech’s plantation.

Hey Siri! What’s the best edible for extinction-level pessimism?

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those tediously self-important things. Check out my tech-skeptical kids book series, Screen Time Tales, along with other projects at johnallenwooden.com

In the seemingly centuries-long months since Donald Trump reascended to his gilded throne of chaos, grieving Democrats find themselves once again consumed by tortured ruminations and self-flagellation. They wring their hands and agonize, “How are we hemorrhaging support so universally—even across the very demographics to which we pander so shamelessly?” But what if, as usual, libs are missing the forest for the trees? What if, in the 21st century, “Democratic” is just a really lousy name for a club—a name whose very sound makes millions of otherwise like-minded voters subconsciously wince and think, “Ewww—I’m not joining that!”

I propose that given their 21st Century track record of feckless ineffectuality and caustically divisive identity politics, culminating in the spectacular electoral plane crash that was 2024, Democrats are squarely in “ValuJet is now AirTran!” territory. ValuJet, of course, was the no-frills ‘90s airline infamous for its rock-bottom prices, spotty safety record, and ultimately, a creaky, second-hand DC-9 plunging into the Florida Everglades—killing all 110 people aboard. After the crash, ValuJet executives wisely concluded that keeping a brand name which signals shoddy cheapness was as commercially viable as asking travelers to entrust Grandma’s hospice care to “ElderBarn.” And so to fill more seats, their fleet was hastily re-christened “AirTran.” To fill more elected offices, Democrats must follow suit.

If you’re living in an era when the world’s Biff Tannens and Jimbo Joneses are ascendant, sporting a name that ends in “crat” is just begging for an electoral piano wire wedgie.

“Democratic” was once a proud moniker—eliciting patriotic reverence for the world’s greatest democracy. Of course, “Ralph” and “Gertrude” were once popular baby names, too. Today, names like those make Tinder users swipe left faster than my Hollywood neighbors are canceling their Tesla leases. Language is plastic, and words and names ring passé over time (Felicitations, Jedediah!)—or even become culturally radioactive. Met any toddler Genghises or Adolphs lately?

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The academic fields of Psycholinguistics and Lexical Semantics both explore how even the sounds or component syllabic parts (“morphemes”) of words can trigger subconscious negative associations; some words just rub us the wrong way on a primal level. For millions, that word is “moist.” For me, it’s always been “slacks.” These days, the Democratic Party might as well be called the Moist Slacks Party. Why? Because when you deconstruct “Democratic” linguistically, it’s clear Republicans couldn’t have invented a more psychologically subversive label for their ideological nemeses. Sure, they gave it their schoolyard best with the puerile “Dummycrat,” but the semantic reality is actually much worse:

“DEMOCRATIC” DECONSTRUCTED

1. DE - The English language’s biggest bummer of a prefix, “de” connotes privation, removal, separation, negation and descent. The overwhelming majority of words starting with “de” are inherently negative. Talk about putting your best clubfoot forward, liberals!

2. DEMO - Add one syllable, take two steps back. Sure, the etymology of “demo” is Greek for “people”, but modern American ears are vastly more likely to hear the abbreviation for “demolish.” As in, “We had to demo the hoarder’s mildew-infested double-wide.” Today, “demo” also conjures the specter of incompleteness and denial, such as “download the free demo version of Crappy App X—guaranteed to enrage you with locked-out features and seizure-inducing ads!” And let’s not forget that “demo” is 4/5ths of “demon”. In a country where as recently as 2023, 58% of adults told Gallup they believe in the literal Devil, this represents a, how shall we say, unholy linguistic payload. Other “demo” words that spring to mind? Demoralize! Demonetize! Demotivated yet?

3. EMO - Crouching timidly inside “demo” with jet-black bangs and caked-on Hot Topic guyliner, “Emo” is the angsty sub-genre of rock music known for its tortured lyrics and effete, quasi-gothy aesthetic. Widely mocked in TikTok memes and hurled pejoratively by Gen Z to dis all things weak, whiny or cringey, Emo should be banished from the soundtrack of any party hoping to shed the perception of bleeding-heart namby-pambiness. But there it is: top of the Pity Party Playlist!

4. CRAT - Only a few dozen words in the English language end with “crat”, among them bureaucrat, technocrat, plutocrat, autocrat, aristocrat and kleptocrat. This is simply dreadful semantic company to keep! Add to that crat’s rhyming brethren: brat, fat, gnat, splat, and shat—and things start getting scatological (even before right-wing trolls change the “T” to a “P”). If you’re living in an era when the world’s Biff Tannens and Jimbo Joneses are ascendant, sporting a name that ends in “crat” is just begging for an electoral piano wire wedgie.

5. RAT - In an infamous 2000 George W. Bush TV ad attacking Al Gore’s stance on healthcare, an animated word montage prominently flashed the “RATS” from “bureaucrats” and “democrats.” Liberals cried foul at the RNC’s shameless use of subliminal messaging, but can you blame them? “Rats”—the most reviled, filthy, plague-infested vermin on earth—make up 44% of the word Democrats. Talk about low-hanging pejorative rat-fruit.

6. IC - Literally the final sound of the party’s name is “ick”—the universal onomatopoeia exclamation for disgust and loathing! Starting with 90s Limbaugh dittoheads and persisting into the MAGA era, many conservatives enjoy dropping this syllable altogether—hissing “the Democrat Party” like a willfully ignorant juvenile epithet. This seeks to a) create the perception of daylight separating Democrats and the very concept of democracy, and b) leave the lingering fetid aftertaste of “RAT”. I maintain this actually represents a rare misstep in the GOP’s decades-long plot to make their opponents’ name a flat-out dirty word. The smarter revulsion-triggering strategy would be to preserve and linger on this final syllable, hocking out “ICK” with the kind of glottal flourish that does a phlegmy Hasidic rabbi proud. L’Chaim!

Now contrast the phonic negativity trainwreck of “Democratic” to the comparatively ebullient “Republican.” The prefix “Re” assures us “again!” and “more!”, promising fulfillment and satiety and longevity. The root “public” conjures people and openness—it’s for everyone. Then in a kind of serendipitous linguistic coup de grâce, the word literally ends with “I CAN”—an assertion of confidence, resilience, and independence. Every syllable radiates positive associations and inclusiveness. Of course, given the GOP’s actual legislative platform, this may be among the most ironic and paradoxical misnomers in history, but that’s beside the point. Phonetically and semantically, “Republican” is a terrific word; the spoonful of linguistic sugar that helps the orthodoxy vinegar go down.

American two-party politics demands we identify ourselves based on moronically simplistic dualities. And today, on a subconscious level at least, the choice between Democratic and Republican is essentially “The Destructo-Satan-Gagging-Rodent Party” vs. “The Plentiful-People-Success Party”! As a nation, we’ve all been collectively lobotomized by social media, leaving voters with the attention spans of goldfish, and snap judgment subjectivity is the coin of the realm. So if the left wants to get serious about winning races, it’s time to trade-in the vehicle of their ideas—their very identity—for something a little zippier than a ‘99 Prius. Political parties have rebranded before. The GOP itself was once the Whigs, and—unlike Democrats—they knew when to ditch a dud.

Seriously, almost anything will be an improvement on “Democratic.” Andrew Yang has the right idea with “The Forward Party”, but speaking as a longtime branding nerd, it could use a little more punch. Perhaps something nakedly positive and big-tent like “The Unity Party” or “The People’s Party.” Or maybe beat Republicans at their own jingoistic game with “The USA #1 Party!” Or stanch the bleeding of the youth vote by going Gen-Z to the hilt? “The Alpha Party”, “The Fire Party”, or “The Bussin’ Peak Rizzler Party”? I don’t know, but please—change it to something that doesn’t seem almost precision engineered to trigger lizard brain recoil and make an election-tipping slice of voters wrinkle their noses in disgust. Because that which we call a Democrat by any other name may smell as sweet—but ensuring the survival of a robust multi-party America will be even sweeter.

Oh, and Democrats? While you’re at it, lose the Ass mascot!

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those tediously self-important things. You can check out my latest kids book, The Liking Tree: A Kids & Social Media Fable, along with other shenanigans at johnallenwooden.com

To: Inept-Yet-Obscenely-Compensated NYC Branding Agency
From: John Allen Wooden - Chief Creative Officer, Brand Necromancy & Identity Shuffling, COMCAST Corp.

Background: MSNBC is a legacy news brand launched in 1996, brilliantly fusing Microsoft’s boondoggle AOL-wannabe “MSN” dial-up Internet service with the “NBC News” division of noted toaster manufacturer General Electric.

Status: In July of 2025, this “mass media” national outlet averaged 81,000 primetime viewers aged 25-54—or nearly half the print circulation of the Sunday Fresno Bee. Total average daily audience is 530,000 viewers, or roughly 0.0075% of a YouTube CocoMelon Nursery Rhyme Short.

Re-Branding Goals:

1. Retain the posture of an ultra-relevant, “premium” brand that wields enormous cultural influence—despite the reality of having withered into the Sears Catalog of News.

2. Attract a 10x larger, 4x younger audience while not alienating even a sliver of our core viewers: recliner-bound geriatrics who are only still watching in glassy-eyed stupors because the remote control batteries are dead.

Target: Officially, Adults 25-54—but really anyone with a pulse and one semi-functional eye. Also, their cats.

Tone: “Born-Again Americana”—or whatever “brand essence” BS we need to peddle at Upfronts to keep charging cartoonishly inflated ad CPMs.

Brand Promises:

1. Fighting vacuous right-wing tribal rage porn propaganda with vacuous left-wing tribal rage porn propaganda.

2. A hunky-dory place to watch ads for cancer drugs and denture tablets.

3. ±5 hours a week of affably snarky commentary from that whip-smart lesbian in the hip spectacles (until she decamps to TikTok when her contract expires).

REQUIREMENTS:

Logo/Iconography: MUST INCORPORATE AN AMERICAN FLAG! But not an obvious one—because overt patriotism is cringe. Ideally it’s abstract enough to get confused with a melted piece of striped peppermint hard candy that grandma spit onto a napkin for a minute while she takes her Oxybutynin.

Identity:

1. Eliminate “NBC”, But Retain “MS”—Forget that >90% of our viewers remember that the “MS” means “Microsoft” (which divested this turd 13 years ago); Corporate Strategy has concluded that attempting a memorable all-new brand is too risky, and the best we can realistically hope for is triggering isolated flickers of cognitive dissonance.

2. Incorporate “MY” Somehow—either in the wordmark or tagline. Because our boomer CMO still smokes branding crack from the MySpace era, when everyone from Yahoo! to Coke to Verizon slapped a “MY” on their websites, confident that consumers would respond like cowbird chicks imprinting on Furbies.

Typography (Primary Word Mark): Use Helvetica, because the COO saw a 2007 documentary about how that font is totes de rigueur for anything with aspirations of modernity or intelligence. NOTE: If not actual Helvetica, then Gotham or some other ubiquitously soulless sans serif – he can’t tell the difference anyhoo!

Typography (Tagline): Any old-timey newsprint-style type will do. This will be our perfunctory and cynically ageist aesthetic olive branch to the 97% of our audience that’s so ancient, they once banged out resumes on Smith-Corona typewriters. LOL!

Color Palette: MUST USE SATURATED RED, WHITE, AND BLUE! Focus groups confirm that three decades of conservative media hammering MSNBC as “Commie-Libtards-R-Us” has been devastatingly effective, so lose the fruitcake pride parade rainbow colors pronto! NBC can keep its peacock—and hopefully get pecked to death by that garish albatross…

Competition: Other dinosaurs shuffling toward the tar pits, including CNN but especially FOX NEWS, which despite pulling numbers 3x higher than ours, is still also just cable news—an imploding anachronism consumed overwhelmingly in a few thousand nursing homes & hospice centers.

Notes:

1. Ensure logo is optimized for legibility on cable boxes last manufactured in 2003.

2. Must test well among male viewers with benignly enlarged prostates who think podcasts have something to do with fly fishing.

FINAL HIGH-PRIORITY NOTE: Retain copies of all MSNBC branding assets! There is a 57.2% likelihood that we will re-pivot back to current identity/branding/logo/etc. by Q1 2027.

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those tediously self-important things. You can check out my latest kids book, The Liking Tree: A Kids & Social Media Fable, along with other shenanigans at johnallenwooden.com

I let my seven year-old watch the 1979 horror classic Alien. Actually, I didn’t just let him; I personally cued it up for him. And then, as the titular space pupa burst out through its human host’s ribcage, metamorphosing into an exquisitely grotesque angel of death, my son shrieked and thrashed on the couch in primal terror, like a wide-eyed Pleistocene caveboy frantically fleeing a saber-toothed tiger. So go ahead, call Child Protective Services on me. Tell them how for the next two days, he had vivid nightmares of being stalked by acid-blooded Xenomorphs. And then tell them how at breakfast one week later, he begged, “Hey Dad, when can we watch Alien 2?!”

So we watched James Cameron’s Aliens, followed by every other installment in the seven-film franchise. And each time HR Giger’s drooling, insectoid killing machines made their sensuously murderous bow, he savored every heart-stopping second.

I know, this breaks all the rules of contemporary American parenting. The Alien films are Rated R, explicitly violent, and scary—the kind of content that leaves indelible marks on the tender psyche of an innocent, impressionable child. What possible good could come of such an abominable corruption?

Well, actually, I’m counting on those indelible marks – because Alien movies teach kids three damned good lessons!

1. The Art of Accumulated Dread

I want my son to have the presence of mind to appreciate patient, deliberative storytelling, and Alien movies are old-school slow burns. The tagline, “in space, no one can hear you scream,” isn’t mere marketing; it’s a declaration of the awesome narrative power of the infinite silence and nothingness of the universe.

In contrast, too many contemporary movies turn stories inside-out, pandering to modern audiences’ gnat-like attention spans. Cinematic climaxes once reserved for the 100-minute mark are now gimmicky opening scenes—lest the ADHD brigade’s eyes glaze over and start posting one-star shit-takes on Rotten Tomatoes. Viewers then must endure whiplash-inducing bumper car rides up and down the timeline to fill in the blanks, before suffering two or three (or nine) tacked-on finales that stretch runtimes to an exhaustingly tedious 3+ hours. I’m looking at you, MCU!

Alien movies do none of these things. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end—in that order. The content of the stories may be violent, but their pacing is almost gentle—with opening scenes so hushed, in theaters you can hear a popcorn bucket softly capsize ten rows behind you. They are master classes on atmospheric build—meditations on the rewards of patience, on savoring narratives as they unfurl naturally.

I’m confident that by instilling a love of Alien stories, I’m also increasing my son’s ability to focus. In turn, he’s becoming a better learner, more capable of maturing into a functioning member of society—who will thrive professionally and someday allow me to live rent-free in his lavishly appointed pool house.

2. Heroism Knows No Gender

I wanted my son to revere Ellen Ripley, Alien’s protagonist, not as a heroine, but as heroism incarnate. Many have called Ripley—played masterfully by Sigourney Weaver in the first four films—a “feminist icon,” but that’s a tired and simplistic identity lens if you ask me. The truth is much more deliciously subversive: way back in the retrograde ‘70s, Alien’s lead character was specifically written to be… female or male. Director Ridley Scott didn’t change a word of dialogue after casting Weaver.

Sure, postmodernist prudes point to a few Alien scenes of a taut, braless Ripley in her retro-cut tighty-whiteys as a “problematic” male gaze, but if we’re being intellectually honest, that’s no more objectifying than a greased-up, perky-nippled Rambo popping off a few thousand rounds of hot lead. Anyone who says otherwise is peddling disingenuous, sex-negative double standards.

If my child grows up perceiving courage as utterly divorced from chromosomes, that’s a parenting win in my book. And it will be partly because Ellen Ripley is the thinking person’s Schwarzenegger; she embodies human strength in the face of otherworldly existential peril. Or as my son succinctly describes her, “The most bad-assed EVER!”

3. Fear Makes Us Stronger

Yes, Alien movies are horror, and watching them scares kids. But fear is natural. Fear is our most primal, lizard brain instinct. Because fear triggers our self-preservation mode, fear is the lynchpin to survival. To wit, a stiff shot of 100-proof fear is good.

A child exposed to stylized, fictional fear from within the bosom of a nurturing home is a child better equipped to process actual, real-world fear triggered by genuine danger. Conversely, a child insulated and over-protected by safetyist parents, who never experiences any fear whatsoever, will be the proverbial deer in headlights when confronted by threats.

Anyway, Alien may be horror, but it’s fantastical. It’s not modern-day slasher torture porn that revels in human sadism—it’s fundamentally pro-human, with decidedly modest body counts. More meaningfully, the Alien Xenomorph also carries the torch in a millennia-spanning tradition of cautionary monster folk tales. From ancient Egypt’s heart-devouring Ammit to the Mayan death bat Camazotz, from Anglo-Saxon bog beast Grendel to medieval Russia’s child-devouring witch Baba Yaga in her chicken-legged hut, every age and place has its boogeyman for teaching kids the same timeless lesson: don’t wander too far into the dark.

And you know what? Kids crave that lesson—but they also know their own psychic limits, and how to self-protect. For my little guy, during extra-scary scenes—like when the Xenomorph Queen tears away from her gooey, detachable vulva to chase Ripley up a flaming elevator shaft—he made like a prairie dog, burrowing under the couch pillows. But he came back 30 seconds later. They always come back.

Later this month, my seven year-old Alien mega-fan will turn 14. Last week, on the final night of summer vacation, he invited his besties over to watch the premiere of the all-new FX series, Alien: Earth. We set up a projector in the back yard, hung a sheet on the house, and the young teen boys and girls squirmed and squealed at a scene 46 years in the making: Xenomorphs making landfall on terra firma.

If having my first-grader watch Alien was wrong, I don’t ever want to be right. In fact, it’s one of the best parenting moves I ever made. So if Child Protective Services ever does turn up at our house, they’d better have Colonial Marines backup, because we’ll sic the face-huggers on ‘em, and toss those infantilizing twits in the Nostromo brig.

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a satirist, creative director, and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for gleefully dismembering all those self-important things. You can check out my latest kids book, The Liking Tree: A Kids & Social Media Fable, along with other shenanigans at johnallenwooden.com

Growing up in the 1980s, my family’s Panasonic VCR was my most cherished object—a magical analog portal out of small town New England to far-away worlds of gonzo cult movies and late-night TV. But it did have one annoying flaw: every time the power flickered, its cyan LCD clock blinked “12:00^am” until manually reset by pressing three tiny buttons 10,000 times in just the right order. To my parents – then younger than I am now—Panasonic might as well have compelled them to calculate the Space Shuttle’s re-entry vector on an abacus missing half its beads. Without me, that clock would have blinked continuously until Bill Clinton’s second inauguration.

Having spent the ensuing decades working at the intersection of tech and media, I’ve long dreaded the arrival of my own “VCR clock moment”—the day some new-fangled gizmo will render my generation slack-jawed in helpless bewilderment—wholly dependent on the youngins to restore order to techno-chaos. But it hasn’t happened yet—and not because my Gen-X brethren and I are tech savants. It’s because by and large, so-called “digital natives” are pretty digitally clueless.

My first inkling came a dozen years ago, when a fresh crop of interns arrived at the TV production company where I worked. I was excited to welcome our first crew to have come of age post-iPhone, in houses and schools packed with broadband computers. How effortlessly they would breeze through the thrilling backlog of digital grunt work we’d set aside for them! Instead, my colleagues and I were dumbfounded at their general ineptitude. More than one prestigious college undergrad, when assigned literally the simplest computing task imaginable, replied “Copy and paste? What’s that?” Then the next batch of interns was worse, and the one after them was even worser. Et cetera, et cetera, ad infinitum.

If you’ve bought the hype that Gen-Z “digital natives” are digitally gifted, the actual data might make your frontal lobe buffer. The 2023 International Computer and Information Literacy Study—the gold-standard global exam for 8th graders—shows American kids’ digital literacy plunged 37 points since 2018. Computational Thinking? Same nosedive, now below the international average. Only about 2% of American students hit the top proficiency level.1 A 2021 University of Toledo study put it bluntly: “Students are consumers of technology, but they have limited skills in using technology to solve business problems.”2 All this, despite 97% of kids having home Internet access3, 95% of teens having smartphones4, and 88% of public schools now issuing every student a personal device.5

This translates into a generation of humans who despite being grafted to screens like cyborgs, don’t understand Computing 101 basics like file formats, directory structures, transferring documents, permissions, and settings. Indeed, our so-called “digital natives” can meme, stream, and doomscroll like virtuoso rock stars, but crack open a laptop and ask them to actually produce anything of substance—to use the device as a legitimate work tool—and they’re suddenly your feeble, tone-deaf uncle caterwauling ABBA at karaoke. And teachers confirm it: one high school media arts instructor recently told me her pupils complain bitterly about having to learn professional-grade desktop software from Adobe, insisting instead on touch-based phone and tablet apps that produce amateurish results. Because why learn the tools of the trade when the toy version is easier?

In retrospect, this should surprise exactly nobody. It has been glaringly obvious since the dawn of the iPhone/iPad era that these are consumption devices—leisure and lifestyle accessories built for idle tapping, scrolling, and chatting. Yes, they can be used for work, but those features are mere dainty side dishes. The entrée? A Cracker-Barrel-sized heap of vacuous e-gluttony.

Blame for this can be laid at the feet of Boomers, Gen-X and Millennials. Together, we built the Internet, designed its ultra-addictive apps and games, then handed sexy devices to our trusting youth without having bothered to first teach them any basic computing concepts, vocabulary, or standards. We seamlessly bundled practical pro tech and utterly frivolous tech into one deliciously irresistible package—effectively erasing the line between work and play, and sabotaging the desired outcome: successive generations of digitally competent citizens.

And the job market is noticing. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, teen labor force participation peaked at 71.8% in July 1978 and had fallen to 43.2% by July 2016—a drop of nearly 29 percentage points.6 We’ve given kids more glowing rectangles than any generation in history, but their practical computer skills—and job prospects—are swirling down the Skibidi Toilet bowl. Sorry gang, but employers don’t hire for fluency in the TikTok blackout challenge.

And yet our culture at large—and schools in particular—continue to peddle the simplistic narrative that tethering kids to screens will foment the digital literacy needed to be successful in the hi-tech economies of today and tomorrow. By this cartoonishly reductive logic, puppies wearing shock collars become master electricians, and the only career fast track to Michelin star chef is gorging yourself sick on Doritos.

If we keep mistaking screen time for skill time, we’re not just setting kids back — we’re setting the whole workforce back. The consequences for them, and for all of us, will be considerably greater than a Panasonic VHS deck blinking “12:00^am.” And that’s a shame, because after multiple decades of providing free IT support to seemingly every old person in my life, I’m officially done with doing it for “digital natives”, too. So please, Gen-Z, for the love of God, get it together… and set my damned VCR clock.

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a comedy producer, satirist, creative director and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little lab for dismembering all those self-important things. You can check out my latest kids book, The Liking Tree: A Kids & Social Media Fable, along with other shenanigans at johnallenwooden.com

“ELITIST! NARCISSIST! PLAGIARIST!”

Boy oh boy, do we modern moralizers love hurling our “IST” shame bombs to stigmatize anyone guilty of naughty “ISMs”—from elitism to narcissism, plagiarism to, well, you know the big ones. The impact is undeniable; in today’s America, getting labeled an IST ranks among every non-sociopath’s most potent fears, compelling untold millions of wrong-thinkers to keep their insufferable ISMs to themselves.

And yet, one extra-insidious ISM still enjoys a shame-free ride: Safetyism—that sociocultural scourge which demands the entire world be strapped in, bubble-wrapped, and rendered infuriatingly risk-free—somehow has no corresponding IST! Searches of Google Trends, Ngram Viewer, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English all confirm this lopsided uptake: Safetyism—as coined in 2018’s The Coddling of the American Mind—has entered the lexicon, but not SAFETYIST.

It’s time we fixed that by calling SAFETYIST on anyone who projects their pathological fear of danger on the rest of us. Indeed, let’s make it a dirty word—the go-to shame bomb for shutting down paranoid busybodies when they crank their crazy to 11.

If you’ve attended any parent-oriented community meeting (especially at schools) since the turn of the century, you’ve seen the Safetyism playbook. At some point, otherwise productive proceedings get hijacked when one parent issues an anxiety-drenched demand to change some long-established, perfectly functional, utterly non-controversial process or thing.

Their justification? “Safety”—uttered with the same breathy reverence usually reserved for invoking the name of the Lord. The panic merchant parent then bolsters their case with a sensationally tragic anecdote about one injury suffered by one person out of eight billion, and how this freak statistical lightning strike represents ironclad justification of their bizarrely specific “NEVER AGAIN!” crusade. Even if that means inconveniencing everyone else for all eternity.

You may have seen this tedious phenomenon manifest as:

• Helicopter Dad Chad insisting that each morning, a squad of parents (led by him) suit up like airport tarmac marshals, set out 200 neon traffic cones, and bark orders at every car idling up to the school dropoff zone where there have been zero injuries in 90 years.

• Helicopter Mom Laurie, still apoplectic that little Connor got an ouchie from the mean old monkey bars, demanding all playground equipment be mummified in Nerf®, and the ground padded with sustainable organic mosses and cashmere pouches of artisanal potpourri (which she just happens to sell from her home yoga studio).

• PTA Gadflies Jenny and Scott, frantically advocating for penitentiary-grade surveillance cameras, fingerprint readers, and covering all schoolyard fences with opaque Teflon mesh to thwart imaginary sex maniac mass murderer boogeymen hiding behind every (dangerously thorny!) shrub.

These are the SAFETYISTS, and no matter how preposterous their demands, playing the safety card almost always stifles debate. After all, they present themselves as heirs to a noble public health tradition that gave us genuine, common-sense life-savers like seat belts, smoke detectors, and bike helmets.

And so we flinch. We self-censor. In that moment, we fret “Am I willing to get smeared as the kind of monster who pushes back against a teary-eyed parent ‘just trying to make the world safer’? And if I so much as question their unhinged obsession, will I end up somehow complicit in neglect, injury, or death?”

Unfortunately, it’s that very reticence to resist and denounce Safetyism that has landed us here: a world where kids are afraid to cross the street alone, where dodgeball and running are banned at recess, and everyday useful objects are banished and replaced with moronically inferior products like “safety scissors.”

We have collectively acquiesced to the bizarre, irrational fears of a tiny, extremely vocal minority. That’s why we need to label them what they are: SAFETYISTS. It’s short, potent, and instantly marks the moment someone has drifted beyond the bounds of socially acceptable caution. Sure, it’s also basically adult schoolyard name‑calling—but we play the language hand we’re dealt. If “AGEIST” and “SEXIST” name and shame effectively, then “SAFETYIST” will, too.

So let’s start calling a spade a spade—or, in this case, a SAFETYIST.

And when we do, the Chads and Lauries and Jennys and Scotts will freeze, as if you’d just told them their fireproof jammies are ring-spun asbestos. They’ll blink and taste cognitive dissonance: so certain of their unassailable righteousness, yet suddenly confronted with the very real possibility that their “concern” is actually bonkers overreach, and that maybe—just maybe—they’ve crossed the line from “caring neighbor” to “insufferable town crank with a cop whistle.”

So let the word spread and the stigma stick. Call it out. In meetings. On message boards. At the playground fence. Say it with a smile, but say it:

“Don’t be such a SAFETYIST!”

Then watch as the bubble wrap melts—and marvel that somehow, miraculously, little Connor hasn’t even burst into flames!

About John Allen Wooden:

Howdy. I’m a comedy producer, satirist, creative director and dad based in Los Angeles. Having done hard time in big online media, ad agencies, late night TV, politics, and parenting, I created Epostasy as my little soapbox for taking the piss out of all those self-important things. You can check out my latest kids book, The Liking Tree: A Kids & Social Media Fable, along with other shenanigans at johnallenwooden.com

I’m happy to announce that The Liking Tree — my picture book about kids, screens, and the bottomless hunger for digital attention — has been re-released. For this second edition, I’ve re-illustrated the entire book myself. (Because yes, I’m a hopeless control freak.) It’s now on sale at major online booksellers.

Amazon.com

Barnes & Noble

Books-a-Million

Goodreads

A Little Backstory

The Liking Tree, my playfully dystopian, Facebook-flavored spin on The Giving Tree, was first published in late February of 2020 — just days before COVID-19 shut down the world. With schools suddenly closed and every kid on Earth glued to screens while mom and dad heavily self-medicated with sourdough, this was a no-good, terrible time to release a cautionary fable about social media. The launch fizzled. I moved on.

But now, five years later, I decided to pick up a pencil (okay, a stylus) and re-illustrate the entire book to launch my forthcoming Screen Time Tales series. The 2020 edition’s illustrations were great, but I wanted to take a crack at it in my own scrappy, kinda unhinged style—the one I’d originally pictured while writing it. And honestly? I’m pretty chuffed with how it turned out. I hope you like it, too.

Kudos

“An inoculation against social media’s seductive pull—and a great conversation starter for people of all ages. (Kids, your parents should pay attention to its message, too!)”

Catherine Price
Author, How to Break Up With Your Phone

“Bravo! Brilliantly conveys the dark side of social media to young readers.”

Dr. Nicholas Kardaras, Author of Glow Kids

The Story

When two children befriend a strange tree, they quickly become enchanted by its flattery and dazzling distractions. But time goes by, and as the tree’s true nature is revealed, the children must decide whether to live by its lonely rules, or walk away and rediscover the joys of real life and true friendship.

DOWNLOAD PDF PREVIEW

For more information, please visit The Liking Tree page on my website.

Thanks for supporting The Liking Tree and my ongoing weirdo contributions to try to help tame the screen/social/interweb beast. More Screen Time Tales are coming soon. Until then: read freely, scroll doomlessly.

- John

Buy The Liking Tree: A Kids & Social Media Fable on Amazon.

Buy The Liking Tree: A Kids & Social Media Fable on AbeBooks.com.

Review The Liking Tree: A Kids & Social Media Fable on GoodReads.com.