About

Hi, I’m Neeraja Deshpande. If you follow me on Twitter (@neerajadeshp) or follow American politics, you’ll mostly see my writing on K-12 education policy. Here, though, I’m choosing to focus on literature, a subject which both is and isn’t an outgrowth of my day job: I was inspired to start this blog upon hearing the utterly appalling news that a third of eighth graders in our nation can’t read.

While so much of our literacy crisis has to do with bad pedagogy and bad policy, even more of it, I’d wager, has to do with the simple reality that our culture is dumbed down and our brains are fried. In other words: our children can’t read because they don’t see anyone reading. I don’t claim to have the solutions to these societal problems on any large scale, but, I figure, I can do my own small part in redirecting my own attention, at least some of the time, from day-to-day politics and policy to more timeless things—literature chief among them.

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