Dyslexia and the Reading Wars

"In 2024, my niece Caroline received a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics. Her research interests include "the impact of model inaccuracies on biases in parameters recovered from gravitational wave data" and "Petrov type, principal null directions, and Killing tensors of slowly rotating black holes in quadratic gravity." I watched a little of her dissertation defense, on Zoom, and was lost as soon as she'd finished introducing herself. She and her husband now live in Italy, where she has a postdoctoral appointment."

"Caroline's academic achievements seem especially impressive if you know that until third grade she could barely read: to her, words on a page looked like a pulsing mass. She attended a private school in Connecticut, and there was a set time every day when students selected books to read on their own. "I can't remember how long that lasted, but it felt endless," she told me."

"Fluent readers sometimes think of dyslexia as a tendency to put letters in the wrong order or facing the wrong direction, but it's more complicated than that. People with dyslexia have varying degrees of difficulty not only with reading and writing but also with pronouncing new words, recalling known words, recognizing rhymes, dividing words into syllables, and comprehending written material. Dyslexia frequently has a genetic component, and it exists even in speakers of languages that don't have alphabets, such as Chinese."

Caroline earned a Ph.D. in gravitational-wave physics and now holds a postdoctoral appointment in Italy. Her early education included severe reading difficulties: until third grade she could barely read and described words as a pulsing mass, and a psychologist later identified dyslexia. Dyslexia impairs phonological processing, word retrieval, rhyme recognition, syllable division, and comprehension; it often has a genetic basis and appears across different writing systems. Proven instructional methods for struggling readers have existed for decades, yet those methods are often not widely adopted because of training, policy, resource, and implementation gaps.

Read at The New Yorker