Lawrence Wright is a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine. He is a prolific writer who has turned his journalist’s gaze on a variety of subjects including Scientology, terrorism and in his 1993 book Remembering Satan, the Satanic panic which swept America in the 1980s.

Paul and Sandy Ingram were raising their family of four (two sons and to daughters) in Olympia, Washington. Paul was the chief civil deputy for the sheriff’s office and an active member of both the Republican party and the Church of Living Water, a Protestant fundamentalist church. On November 28, 1988, Paul was called into his boss’s office and asked if he was aware that his daughters, Erika, 22, and Julie, 18 had filed against him. They allege that their father had sexually molested them over a period of several years. Paul’s strange response was “I can’t see myself doing this.”

This is the beginning of a long, complicated investigation that makes zero sense from the outside looking in…especially for anyone reading this book now in 2024 and who has watched hours of crime dramas on television. The girls’ stories get increasingly more convoluted. Pretty soon, it wasn’t just their father, but their older brother, their mother and the police officers who often played poker with their father in the family home. And why were all these people involved? Because they were part of some sort of satanic cult. There is not a single shred of physical evidence, though, despite the girls’ claims that they were tortured, covered in scars, and that there were the bodies of dozens of babies buried on the Ingram property.

Satanic panic originated in 1980 with the publication of the book Michelle Remembers. “Michelle Remembers, written by Canadians Michelle Smith and her husband, psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder, was published in 1980. Now discredited, the book was written in the form of an autobiography, presenting the first modern claim that child abuse was linked to Satanic rituals. According to the “memoir”, at the age of five Michelle was tortured by her mother for days in “elaborate satanic rituals”. As the torture reached a climax, a portal to hell opened and Satan himself appeared, only to be driven away by the Virgin Mary and the archangel Michael. Explanations for a lack of any evidence of abuse on Michelle’s body were that it had been miraculously removed by St. Mary. Not explained was testimony from Michelle’s father and two sisters, contradicting the memoir, as well as a 1955/56 St. Margaret’s School yearbook. The yearbook includes a photo taken in November 1955 showing Michelle attending school and appearing healthy, when according to Pazder’s book Michelle spent that month imprisoned in a basement. (Wiki)

Over the next decade, there were -according to Wikipedia – over 12,000 cases of unsubstantiated abuse in America. It is fascinating watching how this seemingly normal family (or at least, not Satanists) got caught up in this conspiracy and how the investigators, against their better judgement and expertise, came to believe the girls despite the numerous red flags and inconsistencies in their statements.

It’s a fascinating story.

There’s lots of Maryanne Wolf’s book Reader, Come Home, that I did not understand. Y’know, science-y stuff. I read this book, written as a series of letters addressed to readers, with my highlighter in hand and I found it extremely compelling. Wolf is a scientist with a particular interest in how the human brain learns to read and how digital media is impacting our reading lives, in particular, the lives of young readers. As a person who spends a fair amount of time on line, but does the bulk of my reading the old fashioned way, I found her research and observations fascinating. And, of course, as a teacher who is very committed to getting my students to read for pleasure, I found her insights alarming.

Instead of ‘reviewing’ this book, I will just share a few of the many things Wolf offered that either reinforced my own feelings or provided food for thought. Although I didn’t understand a lot of the brain science stuff, Reader, Come Home was accessible and easy to read and I think should be required reading for literacy teachers and anyone else who is at all concerned by the way people consume digital media. That said, Wolf isn’t anti-digital. I think we can all agree that there’s no turning back the clock on the way digital media has taken over our lives. She offers a thoughtful compromise that takes into account our dependence on our smart phones and tablets, and while she isn’t an alarmist necessarily, her research definitely reveals some alarming insights.

Here are just a handful of things Wolf says that gave me pause:

There would be many things that would be lost if we slowly lose the cognitive patience to immerse ourselves in the worlds created by books and the lives and feelings of the “friends” who inhabit them.

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Without sufficient background knowledge, the rest of the deep-reading proccesses will be deployed less often, leading to a situation in which many people will never move outside the boundaries of what they already know.

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…the average person consumes about 34 gigabytes across varied devices each day. Basically, that’s the equivalent of close to 100, 000 words a day.

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…”skimming” is the new normal in our digital reading.

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…consider the increasing unease of many English professors in universities and in high schools that growing numbers of their students no longer have the “patience” to read literature from the nineteenth century and early half of the twentieth century.

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I have begun to question the cognitive loss of not being willing, or perhaps in the future, even able to navigate the demands of the complex concepts in denser prose.

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…student writing is deteriorating [and] we must ask whether current students’ diminishing familiarity with conceptually demanding prose and the daily truncating of their writing on social media is affecting their writing in more negative ways than in the past.

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In a 2015 RAND report, the average amount of time spent by three-to five-year-old children on digital devices was four hours a day. […] These issues become more intensified for older children, as the hours spent in front of screens double and triple to twelve-plus hours a day among many adolescents.

If you are even remotely interested in the impact of reading in the digital age, Reader, Come Home offers much food for thought. As a reader, I found it both horrifying and reassuring.