Category: Torg Stories podcast

Ted Lasso Season 4 and College Road Trip to University of Utah

Ted Lasso Season 4 Episode 2 titled “Curiouser and Curiouser!” inspires conversation about feminism, inequality in men’s and women’s sports, and we cover a road trip to take Izzy to college that spanned from Boone, NC to Salt Lake City, Utah.

Ted Lasso Season 4 Episode 2 and Road Trip to University of Utah

What would you say was the “big news” of this episode?

  1. Beard is back! Also, Beard was looking like Big Foot and something happened with him and Jane. What do you think? Chicago’s “You’re the Meaning in My Life Scene.” 
Close-up portrait of a man with long, curly hair and a full beard, wearing a maroon baseball cap with the text 'KC Sines' Original'.
Coach Beard appears to have let himself go in Ted’s absence
  • Beard refers to himself as Mr. Gladstone as a movie reference to the 1967 classic film The Graduate, where it is the fake name used by Benjamin Braddock (played by Dustin Hoffman) for clandestine hotel meetings.
  1. Ted meets the players. I was pleasantly surprised! 
  2. The women got a new locker room! 
  3. Chilton decides to stay. Why do you think so?
  4. What was Ted’s gift to her? Do you think we’ll ever find out? 

Best line/s: 

  1. For a sport that asks you to be light on your feet, women’s football sure does seem to have a lot of weight around it.
  2. On couples on the team: Ted: You don’t get a lot of that in men’s football. Chilton: Not that you know of. 
  3. I think keeping people apart who belong together is bad for everybody. -Keeley about Beard to Roy 
  4. What’s the point in life if you’re not feeling? – the goalie who didn’t wear gloves, who doesn’t take novocaine at the dentist 
  5. You can polish a turd but all you are left with is a rag that smells like dookie. 

What are themes you see this season dealing with? 

  1. Feminism 
  • Do you fault Rebecca for not interviewing any women for the head coaching position? 
  • bell hooks work introduced 
  • Chilton challenges Rebecca 
  • Rebecca’s mom hopes she isn’t a feminist 
  • Title IX: Title IX states “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance[.]” All federal agencies that provide grants of financial assistance are required to enforce Title IX’s nondiscrimination mandate.
  1. Stigma from men to other men about coaching girls 
  2. Analytics with origin stories 
  3. ACL injuries: 
  • Females injure ACL about 3.5 times more than males in basketball. In hs girls soccer, there are 13.3 tears per 100,000 athletes vs. 4.9 in boys. 
  • Athletes who suffer an ACL injury are 15x more likely to tear one of them again as athletes who have never torn one. 
  • In my 6 years at Watauga I can remember four players who tore ACLs and two of those tore theirs 2x. 

As the episode wrapped, what questions do you have about what is coming up? What has you interested? 

What new characters stood out to you? 

  1. Caroline Seaward the physiologist 
  2. Tanya Reynolds as Coach Alice Chilton
  • From the LA Times: A week after sending in the tape, “Ted Lasso” co-creator and star Jason Sudeikis asked Reynolds to hop on a Zoom call. “I assumed it was part of the audition process,” she says. “We had a chat and then at the end he was like, ‘Well, we’d love you to do it if you want.’ I went away and watched all three seasons, and I loved it. It’s the kind of telly I seek — light and soft and heartwarming and optimistic.”
  • Sudeikis wouldn’t give her any scripts. He did tell her the character arc and he said he hadn’t done that before. 
  • Standing up to Hannah Waddington / Rebecca: “I remember filming that scene and trying to be intimidating to Hannah Waddingham,” Reynolds says. “I was looking up at her and trying to square my shoulders and feeling like a worm in a tracksuit. I was trying so hard to be tough and to be a bulldog. And Alice is trying to be tough and taken seriously, but actually she’s wobbly, like I was.”
  • Click here for the LA Times article on Tanya Reynolds. 
  1. Goalie who doesn’t wear gloves

Craft Observations: 

  1. We hear an episode before we see it. This time we heard an Elton John song. 
  2. Rhetorical device of “This Morning” television show. (think it’s a real show) 

bell hooks quotes: 

  • It is obvious that many women have appropriated feminism to serve their own ends, especially those white women who have been at the forefront of the movement; but rather than resigning myself to this appropriation I choose to re-appropriate the term ‘feminism’, to focus on the fact that to be ‘feminist’ in any authentic sense of the term is to want for all people, female and male, liberation from sexist role patterns, domination, and oppression. – Ain’t I A Woman: Black Women and Feminism, 1981 
  • All our silences in the face of racist assault are acts of complicity. – Killing Rage: Ending Racism, 1995
  • The function of art is to do more than tell it like it is – it’s to imagine what is possible.  – Outlaw Culture: Resisting Representations, 2012

Road Trip to Salt Lake City to take My Daughter Izzy to College 

University of Utah, Salt Lake City, Road Trip, Vedauwoo, Lake Marie, 130, Mirror Lake, dorms
from Boone, NC to Salt Lake City, UT

On Izzy’s leaving: 

  1. 18 years. Every minute of 5 days and then she’s gone. 
  2. Most of what made Izzy’s room hers is not in there. It looks empty an plain. 
  3. That room, in that building, on that campus, in that city is a really exciting and fun moment for her. 
  4. Very proud of who she has become that she wants to go away on this adventure by herself. 

Impressions of University of Utah: 

  1. Modern lodge feel to the campus. 1400 people in her residence hall. Has a food court, recreation areas, a computer lab, sophisticated Amazon delivery, and lots of meeting spaces. 
  2. Izzy is within a mile of her classrooms, library, pool, arena, and football stadium. 
  3. The amount of money that goes into keeping the campus looking like that. 
  4. Light rail right outside the residence hall that goes downtown and one train change to the airport. 
  5. Clean and safe city. 
  6. Mountains surround the whole campus. 

Some of the most memorable sights: 

  1. The University of Missouri felt like IU, UNC, and UK to me. 
  2. Bleakness of Western Nebraska. Sandy flat ground with scrub brush. 
  3. Vedauwoo climbing area 30 minutes west of Cheyenne. 
  4. Snowy Range Scenic Byway / 130 West of Cheyenne: Mirror Lake and Lake Marie (I think winner of most beautiful spot I saw on the trip) 
  5. Snowbird 
  6. Terrain went from super light brown sandy mountains, to Grand Canyon Looking, to Red Rocks, to the Rocky Mountains of Glennsprings and Vail. 
  7. Glennsprings, casual fun, huge mineral pools, ride to the top of the mountain to amusement park to activities on the river. 
  8. Vail’s closed alpine looking streets. 

I have some complaints: 

  • Poison ivy, midnight bedtimes and 6 am wake ups, driving most of the day, sleeping in strange beds, 6 out of 7 days packing and then unpacking my suitcase each day 

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Ted Lasso Season 4 and Widow’s Bay: Home, Role Models, and The Jobs We’re Born to Do

In this post, Anne and I discuss what makes home home, role models, and if we have a responsibility to use our talents in our profession. These topics were sparked by the Ted Lasso season four premiere and the entire season of Widow’s Bay. We’re going to start with life updates, and we’d love for you to put your yours in the comment section of this post or on social media where we share the link.

Discussion Questions: (we’d love to hear your responses for some or all of what’s below in the comments section of this post)

  1. Ted’s question at the BBQ place: 30 seconds or less. What’s been going on in life? No work news. 
  2. Rebecca tells Ted sometimes home is a state of mind. Where is home to you? Why? Is it hard to make a choice? 
  3. Coach Lasso runs into a former player who tells him he is the greatest role model of his life. Did you have any role models? Or, who helped you become who you could be? 
  • Mike Miller and Kevin Zupin showed belief in me in different ways. Joe Bentz. Judy Whitis. Lil Brannon. Sam Watson. Marty Lammon. Dan Bauer. Allen Gee. In some cases, these are people who believed in me. In other cases, they spent a lot of time teaching me. 

4. How does your job make you feel? (there’s something Ted can do that he’s not doing)

My life update: (no work) 

  • Part of a tree bigger than some of the trees on our property fell and just missed our heating/cooling units and the side of the house. 
  • No bites on the sale of our house. 
  • Moved Charlotte’s stuff into her residence hall at Lees McRae and departing Tuesday morning to take Izzy to Utah. 
  • Good response from the excerpt I shared about driving home from Winamac after dad’s funeral. The day he broke his hip is coming up this week.

Golden Lines from Ted Lasso Season Four, Episode 1 titled “Home”

  1. Coaches and dads have conflicting jobs. 
  2. If you don’t care about your job, why should I? 
  3. Sometimes home is just a state of mind.

Widow’s Bay on Apple TV

Anne, what were the strengths of Widow’s Bay? Any negatives? 

  1. Funny 
  2. Great characters who are very specific  (specific examples????) 
  3. Takes the scares seriously and also draws on horror tropes and iconic horror characters/scenes

Widow’s Bay Worked Great: 

  1. Diverse characters I enjoyed following around 
  2. Funny, especially about horror tropes: the super slow Jason type killer. 
  3. All the villains: Sea Hag, Clown Killer, the Boogeyman, the tentacled sea monster, whatever happened with the possession when the lady red the book 
  4. Beautifully shot get to visit the Massachusetts Coast 
  5. Often didn’t know what was going to happen. Who is the last descendant? The kind of twist where early you wonder if it’s someone on the island or if it’s really supernatural powers. 

Widow’s Bay additional Discussion: 

  1. Matthew Rhys, who plays Mayor Tom Loftis, was also in Beast in Me. That was really good too. I didn’t know him before that. 
  2. Stephen Root was the ultimate nerdy guy in Office Space who I think burned down the office. They kept moving his desk. I wasn’t close to recognizing him. 
  3. Richard Warren was the original town founder who made the deal with the devil or demons. Is he as bad as he first seemed? 

Anne’s read or watched here: 

  1. “The King of Diamonds” by Rena Pederson The King of Diamonds
  2. “Children of Time” by AdrianTchaikovsky Children of Time

Bill Started Reading: 

  • Lorne: The Man Who Invented Saturday Night Live by Susan Morrison. (started listening to Good Hang podcast hosted by Amy Poehler. 

Thank you so much for checking out this Torg Stories Post. We try to ask you questions, and we’d love to hear what you have to say in the comments section of this post!

Ted Lasso Season 4 is Coming, When to Retire, Women and Kalshi, and Information Sickness with David Shields

Ted Lasso Season 4 is coming, when do we think we’ll retire, women and the Kalshi prediction markets, and Information Sickness with David Shields are the texts we’re using to generate conversation this week.

Click on the player above to listen to the episode. Some of the questions we discuss are below.

Questions for the Reader:

  1. When do you plan to retire?
  2. Are you a spender or a saver?
  3. What did you read or watch this week?
  4. When do you plan to retire?
  5. Will you watch Ted Lasso Season 4?
  6. What subscriptions do you pay for?
  7. Do you gamble? Do you play Kalshi?
  8. We’d love for you respond to some of the above prompts in the comments of this post or on social media. Take these questions for your own writing and link us to the results.

Stories Bill Read or Watched the Week of July 27, 2026

“Information Sickness” by David Shields 

  • First published in June 1993 Issue of Harper’s 
  • I wonder if I should subscribe to Harper’s? Would I like it more than The Atlantic? From their website: Harper’s Magazine, the oldest general-interest monthly in America, explores the issues that drive our national conversation, through long-form narrative journalism and essays, and such celebrated features as the iconic Harper’s Index.
  • First issue June of 1850 
  • Writer David Shields is 70. He’s from LA with an MFA degree from Iowa. Written 25 books. I like his book title of The Thing About Life is That One Day You’ll Be Dead. 
  • I have been accused of being very into lists. (High Fidelity is a big on list novel). Numerous people have commented on the lists I cross off. We can talk about what work we do first and save for last. Here is from the opening paragraph: love all forms of taxonomy: lists, categories, compartments, containers, boundaries. When I went to the famous Amsterdam sex shops, I was struck mainly by the arrangement of movies and magazines into exceedingly minute subdivisions of pleasure and pain. I love doing errands, and what I especially love about doing errands is crossing things off my errand list. When making phone calls, running errands, or performing ablutions, I always begin with what seems to me the least personal item and conclude with what seems to me the most personal item.
  • This is about what he/we like to have on tv / music etc: The moment I walk into a hotel room, I turn on my laptop and the TV (the latter as wallpaper), which I turn off when I go to sleep. The worst drunk I know—twelve-ounce tumblers of scotch at eight in the morning—leaves CNN on all night downstairs as a sort of lifeline in his sleep. (He’s always talking about “black”: black air is considered the ultimate sin; he can’t tolerate black; “they went to black”; the famous six minutes of black—he’s obsessed with black, afraid of it, secretly thrilled by its suggestion of depth.)
  • What do you tend to do when you’re nervous? I rub my head, I do breathing exercises, I used to chew massive amounts of gum but am trying to stop. I pick my nails. From the piece: When I’m nervous and need to calm down, I chew blank three-by-five cards like a woodchuck.
  • I don’t remember ever being even a little bit bummed about moving out of a house, but I think I am now. I loved teaching at St. John’s but I felt like for my family and financially I needed to leave. From the piece: I have a persistent yearning that I don’t have to live, exactly, anywhere.
  • I tried to think about what I think about constantly. Maybe it’s, “What should I be working on now? What is the next thing coming up I could be working on?” I also have a lot of imaginary scenarios I talk through: How will I open the next podcast? If I ran into Obama or Bill Simmons, what would I say to them first? If Caitlin Clark ask me to work her out, what could we do that might be a little bit interesting? Here is what David Shields said: Two questions constantly occur to me: What would this look like filmed? What would the soundtrack be?

“Jason Sudeikis addresses ‘very difficult’ phone calls to former Ted Lasso actors ahead of new season” by Carsen Holaday in Independent. 

  • Click here for article. Click here for author profile page. 
  • An official logline for season four, out August 5, reads: “Ted returns to Richmond, taking on his biggest challenge yet: coaching a second division women’s football team.
  • Anne, are you up for watching the premiere this week and discussing next Sunday? 
  • What do you remember from the end of season 3? 
  • Do you remember any questions you have? 

“Ted Lasso was finished. Then Jason Sudeikis had an Epiphany” by Lacey Rose on The Hollywood Reporter” 

  • Click here for article. Click here for @laceyvrose on X. 
  • From the article: “We were just kind of kicking the tires on it — or, as we were saying at the time, checking the viability of the soil,” says Brendan Hunt, a co-creator who plays Coach Beard on the show. They all liked the idea of a women’s soccer team as Coach Lasso’s new purview — an idea that was teased in the season three finale — but where, how and who else would be involved was still up for debate. “It all seems easy now, but it was hard because it’s not a spinoff,” notes Goldstein, another writer who also plays Roy. “You’re like, it’s not Frasier; Cheers still exists — it’s more like you’re adding a room to the bar.”
  • When it came to doing more, Sudeikis had been the only holdout. Having worked on nothing but Lasso for the better part of five years, writing or rewriting every script in addition to starring as the team’s relentlessly positive coach, he was thoroughly exhausted. In that time, he’d also gone through a very public, very nasty split with Olivia Wilde, his longtime partner and the mother of his two children, now 12 and 9.

Rapid fire what else I read or watched: 

  • Rebel Ridge on Netflix with Don Johnson and Aaron Pierre 
  • Testosterone episode on this American Life 

Good to see you Anne. 

Thanks for listening everyone! 

Thanks for checking out the Torg Stories website! 

Stories Anne Read or Watched the Week of July 27, 2026

“She Retired at 35. The Only Problem? It’s Lonely” by Charlotte Cowles, the cut

  • She retired at 35
  • FIRE community (Extreme frugality in service of saving and investing as much money as possible)
  • When do you want to retire?
  • Are you a saver or spender?
  • She felt unsafe in her childhood home so believes this comes from wanting to be in position of power. She also has a lot of anger – anger at having had student loans, anger at having to please people to earn money.
  • Her savings goal at 39 between her husband and herself is $2M – that doesn’t seem enough to me

“Women Aren’t Immune to Kalshi” by Bindu Bansinath, the Cut

  • Women Aren’t Immune to Kalshi
  • Women are gambling w/Kalshi more than traditional sports betting. Oscars, Love Island, all sorts of things you can bet on.
  • Women are a ⅓ of sports betters already, but less likely to become addicted.
  • Would you be interested? I do not think I would, the things they are betting on seem more open to tampering.

Thanks for checking out this post. Don’t forget to post your comments below. We love hearing from you!

LeBron to Sixers, Thoughts on Middle Age, Writing Advice, and The Odyssey

LeBron James to the 76ers, Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, Writing Advice from John McPhee. Matt Damon, Zendaya, Tom Holland, Travis Scott, Anne Hathaway, Charlize Theron

This week, we’re looking at LeBron James to the Philadelphia 76ers, the idea of being middle aged, Anne’s review of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey, and writing advice from John McPhee. 

Thanks to you all for supporting the Torg Stories Podcast! In the last 30 days, views at TheTorg.com are up 43%, visitors are up 55%, and there’s been 10 sales of my novel Love on the Big Screen! (note: we are an Amazon Affiliate) 

Stories Bill Read or Watched the Week of July 20, 2026

“LeBron picks 76ers as ‘Last Decision,’ to sign 2-year, $8M deal” by Dave McMenamin on ESPN

  • Click here for article. 
  • James is 41, born December 30th, 1984. 2003 was his first year in the league. This will be his 24th year in the league. 
  • “James, 41, is signing a two-year, $8 million contract with a player option, Klutch Sports Group CEO Rich Paul told ESPN’s Shams Charania. James made nearly $53 million with the Los Angeles Lakers last season.” -from the article 
  • This choice lifts LeBron a couple of notches for me. 
  • Why not LA for the veteran minimum? 
  • Were you thinking about maybe where before the deal? I was thinking maybe Cleveland because Mobley would be helpful on defense. Thought Golden State was fun. Would probably play the “3” in those scenarios which wasn’t good. 
  • The value of reflection. Season is over vs. right now? I have recharged for Watauga basketball now that we’re ending July. 
  • “Meanwhile, a trio of Sixers players — Tyrese Maxey, Joel Embiid and the newly acquired Jaylen Brown, another surprising addition for Philadelphia this offseason — worked on James directly, sources told ESPN. That effort was led by Maxey, a fellow Klutch client who has referred to James as a “big brother” in the past.”
  • Does this make Philly the favorite in the East? Knicks, Sixers, Celtics, Pistons, Raptors
  • I bet the Pacers +600 to make the Eastern Conference Finals. 

“When Middle Age Actually Starts” by Julie Beck from The Atlantic. 

  • Click here to connect to The Atlantic story. 
  • When does middle age start and end? I think I’d go 48-55, even though I’m expecting to get to 100. 
  • When does old age start? 
  • From the article: The average life expectancy in the United States is 79. So if you cut that in half, 39.5 is the precise statistical midpoint of the average American life. But that doesn’t reveal much—middle age isn’t just a point in time but a phase of life. How long does that phase last? When does it start? When does it end? How can you tell when you’re in it? These, it turns out, are very fraught questions.
  • I frequently say I’m old and I’m not kidding. 
  • From the article: I am 35. Is a 35-year-old middle-aged? If you ask my friends, they’d be quick to say I’m “still young,” but the word still carries a note of reassurance that I find troubling. Is a 66-year-old retiree middle-aged? Maybe, maybe not—but they sure don’t want to be called “old.” Is a 29-year-old middle aged? Surely not, yet The Wall Street Journal ran a story a couple of years ago about 20-somethings who claimed they felt middle-aged.
  • Crisis definitely popped into my thoughts. From the article: “The No. 1 word attached to midlife is crisis,” Chip Conley—the founder of the Modern Elder Academy, an organization that offers workshops for making the most of midlife, and the author of Learning to Love Midlife—told me. (This association persists despite evidence showing the midlife crisis is mostly a myth.)
  • From the article: Being middle-aged, to her, means truly being in the middle—having people both younger and older than you looking to you for help and guidance. That might mean you’re in the sandwich generation: caring for children and starting to support aging parents. Or it might mean you’re a leader in your workplace, mentoring younger colleagues and relied on by older ones.

“Draft NO. 4” by John McPhee

  • Originally published in The New Yorker, this is a piece about writing and the writing life. It includes the advice to write “Dear Mother” at the top of a piece and just use her as an audience to get the story or information out just as you’d tell her. 
  • There’s a book: Draft No. 4: On the Writing Process. I downloaded the sample. Click here for book. (We are an Amazon Affiliate) 
  • He’s 95! That’s not middle aged! 
  • A paragraph from Wikipedia that I enjoyed: Reflecting his personal interests, McPhee’s subjects are highly eclectic. He has written pieces on lifting-body development (The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed), the psyche and experience of a nuclear physicist (The Curve of Binding Energy), a New Jersey wilderness area (The Pine Barrens), the United States Merchant Marine (Looking for a Ship), farmers’ markets (Giving Good Weight), the movement of coal across America (“Coal Train” in Uncommon Carriers), the shifting flow of the Mississippi River (“Atchafalaya” in The Control of Nature), geology (in several books), as well as a short book entirely about oranges. One of his most widely read books, Coming into the Country, is about the three faces of Alaska: the urban, the rural, and the Alaskan wilderness.
  • Advice from the McPhee piece: “Just stay at it; perseverance will change things.” “You’re so unhappy you sound authentic to me.” “You can’t make a fix unless you know what is broken.”
  • There’s a great story about an editor named Eleanor Gould who when she was 22 marked up a copy of an issue of The New Yorker and mailed it in. It doesn’t seem to be a true story but it had a funny ending of, “Hire the b—-!” 
  • One more thing on Gould from the piece: She doesn’t mind when friends call her the Pencil Lady. A blog she began on The New Yorker’s website, mostly about copyediting, evolved into the best-selling book Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (Norton, 2015). Click here for the book. (we are an Amazon Affiliate) 

The Hawk, season 1 on Netflix starring Will Ferrell, Fortune Feimster, Molly Shannon and Luke Wilson. 

  • Izzy and I watched all 10 episodes. I don’t know that we’ve ever watched a whole season of a show together. 
  • Izzy’s observations about the humor of Anchorman relative to the humor of The Hawk. 
  • Gets 28% on the Tomatometer and 65% on the popcorn score. 
  • I wrote my first Rotten Tomatoes Review! 

Stories Anne Read or Watched the Week of July 20, 2026

“LeBron’s Final Decision Is a Massive Plot Twist for the NBA” by Michael Pina in The Ringer

  • LeBron’s Final Decision
  • Surprised? The other possibilities did not excite me (GS, Miami, Cavs) I think this is fun. I think Denver would have been cool and the Pacers, but don’t think he ever really considered those 2, especially not Pacers
  • Embiid is big question, along with depth. Also how will will big 4 get along? Embiid, LeBron, Maxey, Brown? 
  • Writer says East is better than past seasons.My personal thoughts are that the Knicks will not repeat but they will have a good season. Pacers will have a pretty good season, I think Detroit will drop, Heat will not be any good, Cavs will drop and the Raptors will drop. I guess I am not as high on all of these teams as the writer is. Raptors hinge on Kawhi and if he goes there and IF he stays healthy. I think 76ers have a great chance. 76ers/Knicks/Pacers. Celtics will be good but I think same as this season, they won’t do it in the playoffs.
  • Writer doesn’t think it will have a big impact, I am going to disagree. I guess it is if all things go, then it will. If Embiid never plays, Brown clashes with team, then it won’t.

“Bring Me the Beauties: A Model Cult” directed by Chris Smith

  • Bring Me the Beauties
  • Model from the 80s Hoyt Richards centers the episodes that delve into a cult he was a part of. Believed some of members were Aliens
  • Frederick von Mierer’s Eternal Values cult, recommended precious gems they would buy, inflated cost, supported by members, communal living, berated. 
  • Chris Smith also did Tiger King
  • Where is Hoyt Richards now? EW article by Britt Hayes

“The Odyssey” directed by Christopher Nolan 

  • On the plane home, I rewatched Interstellar for the first time since it was released. I understood more this time. A good movie with a great score (my fav) but still not high up there for me in my fav movies. Nolan movies in general I find interesting and all are a must watch, but have not really loved one. We will see soon if I love the Odyssey. (Obviously wrote this pre-watch)
  • I give it an A-, but not one of my fav movies ever or anything. The last 40 minutes or so were really good. Loved the score, visually a nice look. All the actors were good, none were best actor material IMO, but I can see Hathaway getting a nod, probably Damon too, but no “wow” performances. I would say one thing is sometimes I think the casting is too many stars? I do not understand casting director Benny Safdie as Agamemnon, my only thought is that the armor was doing the work and maybe that’s the point. Anti-war, treat your neighbors well.

“The Silence of the Girls” by Pat Barker

  • I read this book based on a search for historical fiction in TikTok. It is a women’s point of view of the Trojan War. A great perspective. A King’s wife gets taken as Achille’s woman after her town is sacked by the greeks, gets taken to sack Troy.

Thanks for checking out Torg Stories! We appreciate you!

Is the End of Reading Here? GenAI and the Reading Writing Classroom

“The End of Reading is Here” from The Atlantic by Rose Horowitch

  • Click here to link to the article in The Atlantic.
  • For Rose Horowitch’s profile page on X, click here.

Quotes from the article for discussion are bolded below and in quotes.

Click player above to listen to the “End of Reading” podcast episode

“…fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022.”

This week my friend Dave Witzig texting me to ask what I’ve been reading…

Going to Huzzah Books in Boone to hear Zachary Vernon read from his book Eating on a Mountain at the End of the World

My wife and I are daily readers.

The resurgence of daughters, ages 18 and 20, reading.

I remember a faculty meeting around the year 2015 at St. John’s in Queens when I wondered aloud to my colleagues if reading was going to continue to be a primary way that people in their teens and 20’s learned. A few people thought it was a pretty funny joke. I wasn’t kidding.

“Americans also get much less of their news through reading than they once did. In 1975, about half of 20-somethings said they read the newspaper every day. Today less than 10 percent do. Most Americans now get the news on their phones and laptops, and 40 percent say they prefer to watch or listen to online news rather than read it.”

Where do my kids get their news? I think exclusively from TikTok and Instagram.

The news sites I check out regularly…

  • ESPN, The New York Times, Fox News, The Atlantic
  • The challenge of figuring out news about the diarrhea lettuce.

“And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information.”

What counts as reading? Does an audiobook count?

What counts as writing? The concepts we work with in composition applied to social media including YouTube.

Is counting overrated?

The stamina of attention span.

I use GenAI platforms. If you use them for everything, what might you miss?

  • Writing as a tool for knowing.
  • You still have to “know stuff” to use GenAI the same way you have to “know stuff” to use a Google or Library Database Search. For example, you might have to have read to know who Dean Oliver is as you pursue an effective way to use basketball analytics as a coach. Students might throw around the word “pedagogy” in a reflection because GenAI produced it for them. Students who copy and paste from GenAI don’t always see how their texts stand out in a negative way among all the other texts that students turn in.

“And unlike speech, it doesn’t disappear into the ether. Readers can return to a text and plumb it for new meaning and understanding. Because writing endures, individuals can temporarily forget what they’ve written but trust that it won’t be lost forever.”

One of the things I like about books: a person has taken the time to pull the text together. For me, a book doesn’t diappear into the ether the way an article is more likely to. Of course, there are exceptions!

“Faced with shrinking attention spans and declining comprehension, schools might have been expected to resist the impulse toward shorter passages and shallower reading. Instead, they spurred it on. A 2025 survey found that most middle- and high-school English teachers assigned zero to four books a year.”

  • I am least partially guilty while at the same time trying to draw the students I work with into reading.
  • Getting assigned 5 books in a week in graduate school (didn’t read it all) while at the same time showing up to a first class having read the whole text already.
  • Reading workshops. I’m doing my favorite thing right now except for that I’m doing it on my own.

The Last 5 Books I Read and Enjoyed:

  1. The Contemporary American Essay edited by Phillip Lopate
  2. Rapture by Nick Nurse with Michael Sokolove
  3. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story (about David Foster Wallace) by D.T. Max
  4. Heartland (about Larry Bird at Indiana State) by Keith O’Brien
  5. True and False Magic by Phil Stutz. (Three constants: Pain, Uncertainty, and The Need for Constant Work)

Did I read or watch any other stories this week?

  1. The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison. She acts like a patient for med students.
  2. Domestic Gulags by Laura Kipnis. A huge list of stuff like this: You can’t be a slob. You can’t do less than 50 percent around the house, even if the other person wants to do 100 to 200 percent more housecleaning than you find necessary or even reasonable.
  3. Ann; Death and The Maiden by David Lazar. About an old relationship in which the former partner takes their life.
  4. The Hawk tv series on Netflix starring Will Ferrell, Molly Shannon, and Luke Wilson. Crass and explicit. At times laugh out loud funny. Introduced me to Fortune Feimster who both of my kids new from social media.

Thanks for taking the time to visit Torg Stories!