The point is not to choose between them: This is a lawful publication staffed by chaotic readers. In that way, it resembles a great many English departments, bookstores, households and classrooms. Here, the crisis never ends. Or rather, it will end when we stop reading. Which is why we can’t.

Chaotic reading is something else. It isn’t bad so much as unjustified, useless, unreasonable, ungoverned. Defenses of this kind of reading, which are sometimes the memoirs of a certain kind of reader, favor words like promiscuous, voracious, indiscriminate and compulsive. Those terms, shadowed by connotations of pathology and vice, answer a vocabulary of belittlement — bookworm, bookish, book-smart — with assertions of danger. Bibliophilia is lawful. Bibliomania is chaotic.

Lawful reading rests on the certainty that reading is good for us, and that it will make us better people. We read to see ourselves represented, to learn about others, to find comfort and enjoyment and instruction. Reading is fun! It’s good and good for you.

There is no way to limit a student’s reading to just-right books, or to ensure that she reads them in just the right way. The right way might be the wrong way: the way of terror, discontent.

A school, however benevolently conceived and humanely administered, is a place of authority, where the energies of the young are regulated, their imaginations pruned and trained into conformity. As such, it will inevitably provoke resistance, rebellion and outright refusal on the part of its wards. Schools exist to stifle freedom, and also to inculcate it, a dialectic that is the essence of true education. Reading, more than any other discipline, is the engine of this process, precisely because it escapes the control of those in charge.

Efforts to protect children — or citizens, for that matter — from the terror of freedom, to cocoon their reading within safe boundaries of vocabulary and representation, will always fail. Reading, like democracy or sexual desire, is an unmanageable, inherently destabilizing force in human life. Many of the revolutionary governments of the 20th century began with programs to promote mass literacy and then, as soon as those succeeded, set about banning books, imprisoning writers and replacing literature with propaganda. School curriculums enact milder, less overtly repressive versions of the same impulse.

Douglass’s literary genius resides in the way he uses close attention to his own situation to arrive at the essence of things — to crack the moral nut of slavery and, in this case, to peel back the epistemological husk of freedom. Some of his pain, as predicted by Mandeville and Master Hugh, comes from the discrepancy between his thinking and his circumstances. He has freed his mind, but the rest has not followed. In time it would, but freedom itself brings him uncertainty and terror, an understanding of his own humanity that is embattled and incomplete.

“Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave” — the first of Douglass’s memoirs, published in 1845, when millions of Americans were still in bondage — is partly a heroic origin story, the account of how a young man endured horrific adversity to emerge as one of the leading orators and intellectuals of his time. It is also a carefully argued treatise on the nature of freedom, one that rescues that sparkling and elusive idea from abstraction, grounding it in the ethics and psychology of lived experience.

Nowadays parents and other concerned adults worry that young people don’t read or love reading enough. Their counterparts in the 18th and 19th centuries were apt to fret that the young loved reading too much. As a middle class gained strength in Europe, claiming leisure as one of its defining features, books were among the goods most closely identified with that leisure, especially for women.

Reading is a chronicle of progress, the almost mythic tale of a latent superpower unlocked for the benefit of mankind.

Reading is, fundamentally, both a tool and a toy. It’s essential to social progress, democratic citizenship, good government and general enlightenment. It’s also the most fantastically, sublimely, prodigiously useless pastime ever invented. Teachers, politicians, literary critics and other vested authorities labor mightily to separate the edifying wheat from the distracting chaff, to control, police, correct and corral the transgressive energies that propel the turning of pages. The crisis is what happens either when those efforts succeed or when they fail. Everyone likes reading, and everyone is afraid of it.

Reading is something else: an activity whose value, while broadly proclaimed, is hard to specify. Is any other common human undertaking so riddled with contradiction? Reading is supposed to teach us who we are and help us forget ourselves, to enchant and disenchant, to make us more worldly, more introspective, more empathetic and more intelligent. It’s a private, even intimate act, swathed in silence and solitude, and at the same time a social undertaking. It’s democratic and elitist, soothing and challenging, something we do for its own sake and as a means to various cultural, material and moral ends.

And the bad news is hardly new. Tyrants, philistines, religious zealots and hysterical parents have been banning books for as long as anyone can remember. The current battle between advocates of the science of reading and their pedagogical rivals is the latest skirmish in a series of “reading wars” that have convulsed American education for most of the past century, most memorably after the publication of Rudolf Flesch’s best-selling “Why Johnny Can’t Read” in 1955. Movies, radio and television lured earlier generations of kids away from the joy of books. On university campuses, the study of literature has been embattled and beleaguered for so long that chronicling the controversies has become a flourishing academic subfield in its own right.

You could argue that these disparate concerns don’t add up to a single crisis. You could point out that not all the news is bad. Sales of printed books, after dropping in the early e-book era, have crept upward over the past decade. This newspaper has reported that some young people in Brooklyn are abandoning their smartphones for “Crime and Punishment.”

A quintessentially human activity is being outsourced to machines that don’t care about phonics or politics or beauty or truth. A precious domain of imaginative and intellectual freedom is menaced by crude authoritarian politics. Exposure to the wrong words is corrupting our children, who aren’t even learning how to decipher the right ones. Our attention spans have been chopped up and commodified, sold off piecemeal to platforms and algorithms. We’re too busy, too lazy, too preoccupied to lose ourselves in books.

Beyond the educational sphere lie technological perils familiar and new: engines of distraction like streaming (what we used to call TV) and TikTok; the post-literate alphabets of emojis and acronyms; the dark enchantments of generative A.I. While we binge and scroll and D.M., the robots, who are doing more and more of our writing, may also be taking over our reading.

According to reports in The New Yorker and elsewhere, fewer and fewer students are majoring in English, and many of those who do (along with their teachers) have turned away from canonical works of literature toward contemporary writing and pop culture.

David Banks, the chancellor of New York City’s public schools, for many years a stronghold of “whole language” instruction, announced a sharp pivot toward phonics, a major victory for the “science of reading” movement and a blow to devotees of entrenched “balanced literacy” methods.

But maybe the real problem is that children aren’t being taught to read at all. As test scores have slumped — a trend exacerbated by the disruptions of Covid — a long-smoldering conflict over teaching methods has flared anew. Parents, teachers and administrators have rebelled against widely used progressive approaches and demanded more emphasis on phonics.

PEN has also joined the chorus of voices condemning censorious piety on social media and college campuses, where books deemed problematic become lightning rods for scolding and suppression. While right and left are hardly equivalent in their stated motivations, they share the assumption that it’s important to protect vulnerable readers from reading the wrong things. Including, in one Utah county, the Bible, which was taken from schoolroom shelves, like so many other books, as a result of a parental complaint — one apparently intended to expose the absurdity of such bans in the first place.

Across the country, Republican politicians and conservative activists are removing books from classroom and library shelves, ostensibly to protect children from “indoctrination” in supposedly left-wing ideas about race, gender, sexuality and history. These bans have raised widespread alarm among civil libertarians and provoked a lawsuit against a school board in Florida, brought by PEN America and the largest American publisher, Penguin Random House.

Surely, in the midst of our many quarrels, we can agree that people should learn to read, should learn to enjoy it and should do a lot of it. But bubbling underneath this bland, upbeat consensus is a simmer of individual anxiety and collective panic. We are in the throes of a reading crisis.

Large accounts like KarenClips, which has more than 393,000 followers on X (formerly Twitter), and Super Krazy Karens on TikTok, take a curatorial approach to such content, posting videos with captions such as “Karen at Starbucks Strikes Again!” and “Karen taking Ls!” In so doing, they capitalize on the current cultural appetite both for righteous outrage and, in some cases, for retribution, with many commenters working diligently to try to identify the Karens in the videos for public shaming purposes.

Welcome to the world of Fake Karens, an emerging subgenre of content that is taking the internet by storm. The Karen is a reliable stock character in viral videos, whose smugness, entitlement, and outrage-inducing behavior is likely to garner hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of views.

Vu Squad, a Las Vegas-based group with more than 900,000 followers on TikTok that makes videos staging various, sure-to-go-viral scenarios, such as airplane altercations or pregnancy reveals. The account is seemingly working with a fairly limited budget, as videos frequently recycle actors, sets, and even costumes; the woman who plays the Karen in the restaurant clip, for instance, appears in a number of other Vu Squad videos, such as one where she can be seen berating a fellow airline passenger. Rolling Stone was able to identify her as a Las Vegas-based actor who has Paul Vu, the head of a company called Paul Vu Media, tagged in her Instagram bio.

Vaguely discerning internet connoiseurs, however, will be able to suss out the slight deviations: for starters, that the setting is oddly quiet for a restaurant, or that there are only two people clearly visible in the video, unusual for a busy bar. Add to that that the Karen’s line delivery is about on par with that of a cuckolded spouse in a gay porn video, and there is reason to be suspicious of its origins.

video had more than 2.9 million views and thousands of comments, most of which were sympathetic toward the waiter in the video and appropriately irate at the Karen. “Find her,” said one. “GIVE THIS GUY A RAISE,” said another.

At first blush, the clip has all the hallmarks of a viral video featuring a Karen, the term used to describe a demanding middle-class white woman raging at someone in a position of less power to get her own way. It also has the metrics of a viral Karen video, which has become one of the most dependably high-performing subgenres of viral content on the internet