Alexander Zemlianichenko/AP/File

Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin enter a hall for talks in the Kremlin in Moscow, June 5, 2019. The two leaders will hold a virtual summit this week amid tensions between Moscow and the West over the massing of Russian troops on its border with Ukraine.

President Joe Biden pledged an “America is back” foreign policy that would get the United States out of forever wars, renew U.S. moral authority through closer relations with allies and support for democracy, and revive economic leadership.

In many ways, it was a soft-power vision of foreign policy.

But over President Biden’s first year in office, China’s Xi Jinping and more recently Russia’s Vladimir Putin have been busy reminding the U.S. that the 21st-century world is one of big-power competition.

After a post-Cold War era of globalization, China’s ratcheted-up pressure on Taiwan and Russia’s moves against Ukraine and efforts to reconstitute in some form the security blanket of the Soviet Union are reviving 19th-century big-power notions like “spheres of influence” – once thought by some to have been relegated to history.

The questions now are whether Mr. Biden’s soft-power foreign policy can adapt to the realities of the world as it is, and whether the tools his administration has largely turned to so far for dealing with Russia and China – like sanctions – are the right ones.

“Big-power politics is back in a big way. It’s not a reality President Biden can wish away or ignore,” says Michael Desch, a professor of international relations at the University of Notre Dame and founding director of the university’s International Security Center. “But a year into his presidency and as he confronts these two very difficult and fraught situations, I see both ways in which his administration is acknowledging this big-power world they’ve entered – and ways they still have not.”

For some foreign policy experts, Mr. Biden’s ban on U.S. diplomats attending the upcoming Beijing Olympics over China’s human rights abuses, or his threat of devastating economic sanctions against Moscow while excluding a military response to any Russian invasion of Ukraine, has demonstrated little resolve, lacked clarity, and even invited more provocative actions from America’s adversaries.

“By and large, the kinds of actions Biden and his team are taking or are threatening to take do not meet this moment very well, whether we’re talking about the challenges from Russia or those posed by China,” says Simon Miles, a Russia expert and assistant professor of Slavic and Eurasian studies at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina.

“I don’t think the Chinese care at all if American diplomats show up for the opening ceremony of the Beijing Olympics,” he says. As for the Russians, he says Mr. Biden’s priorities like democracy and human rights are “not what they care about.”

Adam Schultz/The White House/AP

President Joe Biden meets via a secure video conference with Russian President Vladimir Putin from the Situation Room at the White House, Dec. 7, 2021. Among those with Mr. Biden are Secretary of State Antony Blinken (right of center) and national security adviser Jake Sullivan (far left).

Some regional experts say one key objective of Mr. Putin’s recent actions – amassing more than 100,000 troops on Ukraine’s borders, warning NATO to formally end prospects of eastern expansion or risk conflict, and intervening in friendly neighbors including Kazakhstan and Belarus – is to convince the U.S. to deal with Russia as the great-power competitor that the Russian leader sees it to be.

And there are signs the Russians believe they are making headway. At the end of a week of inconclusive diplomacy across Europe addressing the Ukraine crisis, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov said Friday that if nothing else, “they are taking us seriously now.”

Indeed, the State Department announced Tuesday that Secretary of State Antony Blinken will conclude visits to Ukraine and Germany this week with a stop in Geneva to meet with Mr. Lavrov.

Secretary Blinken spoke with Mr. Lavrov Tuesday, reiterating the U.S. commitment to Ukraine’s “sovereignty and territorial integrity,” while a senior State Department official characterized Friday’s meeting in Geneva as evidence – contrary to what Russian diplomats said last week – that “diplomacy is not dead.”

Secretary Blinken is “committed to seeing if there is a diplomatic off-ramp here,” the official said, and exploring with Mr. Lavrov “where there might be an opportunity for the U.S. and Russia to find common ground.”

Accommodating Russia

As if to remind the U.S. that great-power Russia has as much a right to a sphere of influence in its neighborhood as the U.S. does in its own, Mr. Putin took his conflict with the U.S. to a global level last week by warning that without a satisfactory resolution, Russia could act to move nuclear weapons closer to the U.S. or send troops or other military assets to Western Hemisphere locations like Venezuela or Cuba.

Is Mr. Putin bluffing? That question has emerged as a central factor of the Ukraine crisis. Perhaps even the Russian leader doesn’t know yet whether he will invade Ukraine beyond the Donbass region that his troops already occupy, some analysts say. But in the meantime, he is busy keeping the West – the U.S. and Europeans – guessing and off balance, sending in undercover teams to foment instability to provide an excuse for an invasion, American intelligence says, and thinning out Russia’s diplomatic presence at its embassy in Kyiv.

But for some foreign policy experts, including Dr. Desch, the U.S. may have to bow to the realities of the new big-power era and change long-standing policy – including at NATO – to formally accommodate Russia’s security concerns.

And that will be especially true, some add, if Mr. Biden wants to remove Russia from his list of daily worries so that the U.S. can turn its attention to what the administration says is America’s foremost 21st-century big-power challenge, China.

“‘Spheres of influence’ has a distasteful aroma about it, but that’s generally how big-power peace has been kept throughout much of history,” Dr. Desch says. And in light of that, he says, the U.S. and European powers may very well have to revise what he calls the “original sin” of NATO – promising membership to all qualifying comers from Europe’s East, no matter how close geographically they are to Russia.

“Finland had a decent life during the Cold War being neutral, and I think we could trade as a quid pro quo certain guarantees about Ukrainian independence in return for taking NATO membership off the table,” he says. “It may require a kind of Nixon-goes-to-China moment,” Dr. Desch adds, “but if you really think China is the unequaled geostrategic challenge of the 21st century, you should want to settle our differences with Russia to get that distraction out of the way.”

Andriy Dubchak/AP

A Ukrainian soldier in a trench at the line of separation from pro-Russian rebels, in the Donetsk region, Ukraine, Jan. 8, 2022. President Joe Biden has warned Russia's Vladimir Putin that the U.S. could impose new sanctions if Russia takes further military action against Ukraine.

For others, the real problem is that the U.S. does not seem to know exactly what it wants from a resolution of the Ukraine crisis, while Mr. Putin has a very clear strategy and is tying up the U.S. and the Europeans in deploying it.

“For me the big problem is that it’s not clear what the Biden administration endgame is here,” says Duke’s Dr. Miles. “Is it to put Putin in his place? Guarantee that Ukraine is never threatened again? It’s not at all clear.”

From the perspective of some in Europe, a concession on Ukraine would not be such a bitter pill to swallow, since Ukraine is not seen to be anywhere near meeting the requirements for NATO membership anyway.

“NATO membership for Ukraine is not on the horizon at this point, so with that being the reality, some arrangement guaranteeing political independence and other freedoms of a sovereign state” could be worked out, says Sven Biscop, director of the Europe and the World Program at Egmont Royal Institute for International Relations in Brussels.

Europe focused on multilateralism

What matters most for Europeans is settling differences with Russia diplomatically – and ensuring that Europe is part of any regional negotiations and not left on the sidelines by big powers Russia and the U.S., he says.

President Biden taking any military response to Russia off the table was a “relief” to most Europeans, Dr. Biscop says, since any big-power military confrontation would come at Europe’s expense.

“What Europeans want most is that any talks [over Ukraine and Eastern Europe] be trilateral, something Russia tries constantly to make problematic by dividing Europe and feeding internal tensions,” he says. “But no Europeans were expecting the U.S. to go to war for Ukraine, since no European state is thinking of going to war for Ukraine.”

More broadly, Dr. Biscop says, Europeans – who remain focused on multilateralism as the 21st century’s best option for “addressing tensions among great powers” – are worried that in an era of big-power competition, President Biden is shifting the U.S. toward what he calls a “more classic” vision of multilateralism.

“What I see is the U.S. returning to an interpretation of multilateralism that is closer to how the Chinese have always seen it, which is as an arrangement providing places where powers meet and talk,” he says. “It’s more just a forum, but not the level at which big powers do their decision-making.”

Europeans “can feel that the U.S. agenda is driven much more by Asia, and for the most part people understand that,” Dr. Biscop says.

“We see that resolving tensions in Europe would free up bandwidth and allow the U.S. to focus on China and Taiwan,” he adds. “Some fear that the U.S. might give in too much to Russia to turn its attention” to the Pacific, “but generally we don’t want that resolution to happen without us at the table.”

J. Scott Applewhite/AP

Republican Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska arrives at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, Dec. 2, 2021, to vote on an appropriations bill. She incurred the wrath of former President Donald Trump by voting for his impeachment, but she won't have to face his preferred candidate in a GOP primary contest this year.

Donald Trump’s victory in Alaska in 2020 extended a half-century run for Republican presidential nominees in that state. But at the same time, Alaska’s voters also approved a ballot measure that is now complicating the defeated president’s revenge campaign against GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump over the Jan. 6 invasion of the U.S. Capitol. 

The measure, which passed by a narrow margin, replaced party primaries in Alaska with a single open primary. The top four vote-getters will proceed to a November election with ranked choice voting, in which voters list candidates in order of preference for runoff rounds if none wins a majority.

Other states have adopted open primaries and ranked-choice elections, but Alaska is the first to combine them. Proponents say the reforms should boost politicians who work across party lines, since they no longer have to cater to their party’s base to win the primary. If adopted more widely, advocates say the system could serve as an antidote to partisan polarization and government gridlock. 

“It encourages candidates to talk to all constituents and to build a broad coalition and to serve them,” says Robert Dillon, a Republican consultant who worked on the Alaska ballot measure.  

Senator Murkowski, the daughter of a former Republican senator and governor, has never been beloved by Alaska’s conservatives. She famously lost the GOP primary in 2010, but went on to wage a successful write-in campaign in the general election, with support from independents and some Democrats. After her impeachment vote against former President Trump last year, Alaska’s Republican Party voted to censure her.

But this year, she won’t have to face a challenger in a Republican primary. Instead, her Trump-endorsed rival, Kelly Tshibaka, a former state official, will need to win more votes in a ranked-choice election, which will include non-Republican voters. 

Mark Thiessen/AP

Former lawmaker Jason Grenn was a sponsor of the successful 2020 ballot initiative that replaced Alaska's party primaries with an open primary, sending the top four vote-getters to the general election, where ranked-choice voting would determine a consensus winner. The Alaska Supreme Court is set to hear arguments over the reforms on Jan. 18, 2022.

Critics of Alaska’s reforms say they will weaken parties and confuse voters who rely on parties as identifiers to fill out their ballots. Alaska’s Supreme Court was scheduled to hold a hearing on Jan. 18 in an appeal case filed by plaintiffs who sued unsuccessfully last year to stop the changes on constitutional grounds. A ruling is expected by next month. 

“Parties are an efficient way for people of identical or similar political beliefs to gather together. I think the political party system has to be made stronger rather than weaker,” says Kenneth Jacobus, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, who include the Alaskan Independence Party. 

Even reform advocates say it will likely take multiple elections to see the true effect on who runs for office and how the winning candidate governs, making a stampede to the political center somewhat unlikely for now. And analysts caution that the centrifugal forces driving Americans apart, and poisoning the political well, aren’t easily unwound. 

“It takes many cycles to see what these things will produce,” says Alexander Theodoridis, an associate professor of politics at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. “None are a panacea for party polarization.”

In Virginia, Republicans used ranked choice voting last year to select statewide candidates for executive office. Nominee Glenn Youngkin, a former businessman, went on to capture the governorship in a state that had voted for President Joe Biden by 10 points. Governor Youngkin’s victory shows that Republicans can win in swing states – or even Democratic ones – if they nominate candidates who appeal more broadly than a pro-Trump firebrand would, says Mr. Dillon. “He was the candidate who represented the majority of Republicans in Virginia, and he was able to beat a Democrat in a state we thought we’d never win again because he had a broad consensus.” 

Similarly, Democrats in New York City used ranked choice voting in their primary last year to nominate Eric Adams, a former police officer who ran to the right of his progressive rivals. Mr. Adams took office this month as the city’s 110th mayor. 

In the case of Virginia, where GOP delegates held a virtual convention, it’s possible Mr. Youngkin could have won a traditional primary. But the lack of a party primary almost certainly made it harder for an “extreme Trump-y” candidate to win, says Professor Theodoridis. “You had to have a broad base of support. You weren’t going to win with 25 or 30% and everyone else against you,” he says. 

Alaska is just the second state after Maine to adopt ranked choice voting for general elections, joining dozens of smaller jurisdictions. But the state’s open, top-four primary, which expands similar measures used in California and Washington, may prove a more consequential reform. Several states plan to hold ballot initiatives this year to put similar reforms to voters. 

Advocates say open primaries are essential to expanding voter choice, since most congressional seats are so politically lopsided due to geographic sorting and gerrymandering that only the primary matters. According to Unite America, a nonprofit that campaigns for electoral reform, 83% of congressional races in 2020 were decided by primaries in which only 23 million people voted.

Senator Murkowski, the only GOP senator up for reelection this year who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, will be on the ballot not only with fellow Republicans but also Democrats and other hopefuls. “It’s all the flavors of the bakery served up for everyone to choose from,” says Jim Lottsfeldt, a consultant who is running a Murkowski super-PAC. 

Mr. Trump has made clear what flavor he prefers. “Kelly Tshibaka is the candidate who can beat Murkowski – and she will. Kelly is a fighter who stands for Alaska values and America First,” he said in a statement last year. That puts him at odds with Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, who is backing Senator Murkowski. 

Still, the biggest impact of Alaska’s electoral reforms may be in Juneau, where state policymaking has been gummed up by partisanship, says Jason Grenn, executive director of Alaskans for Better Elections. A majority of voters in Alaska identify as independent or nonpartisan and want to see their state government tackle practical issues, not wage partisan warfare, he says. 

Mr. Grenn saw for himself the power of party affiliation when he served a term as an independent state representative. Lawmakers who might have joined forces on issues fretted over a possible primary challenge if they crossed a party line. 

An open primary “changes the incentives for politicians – who [will be] rewarded for working across the aisle and finding solutions to problems, as opposed to being punished for working with Democrats if you’re a Republican,” he says. “We have do something that can lower the temperature in the room.”

Opening a bookstore in the middle of a pandemic is not for the faint of heart. But Lucía Boned, co-owner of Terranova, a specialist art bookshop, was convinced she had found the right space: an early 1900s shoe store in a pedestrianized street in Sant Antoni, a neighborhood in Barcelona with a famous outdoor book market.  

“There was a lot of uncertainty and nerves, but I followed my intuition,” says Ms. Boned, who opened Terranova in October with her partner, Luis Cerveró. 

Books are placed face forward in a burst of bright colors, giving the store the feel of an art gallery or museum gift shop. It’s a strategic choice rooted in practicality as much as aesthetics, since the well-worn shelves are already sagging under the weight.  

Independent bookstores are making a comeback in Spain, particularly in big cities. In Barcelona and the broader Catalonia region, 15 bookstores opened in 2020 and another handful – including Terranova – in 2021. For a country that endured Europe’s longest lockdown and one of its highest COVID-19 death tolls, it’s a point of light for readers and writers. Tired from working online and watching bad news on their TVs, many Spaniards found comfort and escape in physical books, and emerged from lockdowns with a renewed appreciation for the cultural and social cachet that bookstores bring to a neighborhood.

“It is a very positive development,” says Álvaro Manso, spokesperson for Spain’s Confederation of Booksellers’ Guilds and Associations, which represents around 1,100 stores. He says sales in 2021 were higher than before the pandemic, with a forecast of 20% growth when full-year sales are calculated. “Normally the book sector doesn’t see double-digit growth.”

Dominique Soguel

Books are on display at Llibreria Finestres in Barcelona, Spain, Nov. 29, 2021.

While the 2020 lockdowns in Spain boosted demand for online retail and services, as they did in many countries, they also led residents to appreciate what they had before, including local bookstores, says Mr. Manso. “Seeing the city without business in the first days after the lockdown reinforced the view that there is a need for neighborhood businesses that breathe life into the city,” he says.

The lockdown also changed reading habits: Individuals spent an average of 8 1/4 hours a week reading during the lockdown period, a full hour more than in 2019, according to the 2020 Barometer of Reading and Book Buying Habits.

This upward trend held true for young readers, too. “We’ve gained new readers, especially children – as well as people in the 30-to-40 age bracket, who were not reading before due to [child] care responsibilities and who have now resumed reading. Parents want their boys and girls to read and have forged this habit for their kids in these difficult times,” says Carmen Ferrer, president of The Guild of Booksellers of Catalonia. 

A book in hand

Maria Lopez, who was out hunting for books in Sant Antoni market last month, says she used to read three books at a time before she became a parent; she’s now down to one. “Reading is something I try to transmit to my daughter because since I was a child I have always had a book in hand,” she says.

She appreciates the new choices for bookworms in Barcelona. “It’s great to have a range of small bookstores to choose from,” she says, noting that larger stores often don’t know the authors or titles and can’t advise as well as independents.

Dominique Soguel

Pavel Milev and Patricia Acinas pose for a photo inside their bookshop, Restory, which they launched in October 2020 despite the challenges of the pandemic.

A short walk from Terranova is a secondhand bookstore, Restory, where Ms. Lopez likes to browse. Co-owner Pavel Milev opened its doors in October 2020 and has more than 14,000 titles for sale, starting at three euros ($3.40). He says that young readers have surprised him with their passion for books. “It has given us hope and energy to see how many young people come in here and then return seeking advice, wanting to open horizons through reading. It is very, very gratifying. But the truth is people from all generations and social classes show up here.”

Among his clients on a recent Sunday was a tattoo artist looking for inspiration in comic books. Another was Lucas González, who browsed for nearly an hour before buying a detective novel. Born in the Canary Islands, he now lives in Cologne, Germany, where most retailers close on the Christian sabbath. “I’ve never seen a bookstore open on Sundays,” he says.

Digital competition

Like Terranova and Restory, the majority of new bookstores here are passion projects of individuals with a narrow focus; most were conceived pre-pandemic. But Barcelona also has chain stores that occupy thousands of square feet.

“I love literature so much that a good bookshop for me is like a treasure,” says Elena Aguilar, who is making her first visit to Finestres, a large store with an outdoor cafe and cozy couches inside. She averages 10 books per month that she buys or borrows, in addition to gifts from families or friends. “It is a very pleasant surprise to see so many new bookshops open.”

Like other bookworms, she expresses admiration for entrepreneurs taking a bet on old-fashioned media in an era with so many online choices, from books to movies to music.

“It is very brave to open such a business in a digital era,” says Yolanda Casado, another Finestres browser. “It’s risky.”

But Mr. Manso is optimistic. He points out that many bricks-and-mortar stores transitioned online during the pandemic; around 800 are on a platform that allows consumers see whether a book is available in a store in their area.

“This has been a success,” he says. “People use the page to geolocate a book and then go fetch it from a local neighborhood bookshop or buy it online. It is a way for independent bookshops to have a presence online.”

Offline, however, is where bookworms thrive. Several who lingered in the new shops in Barcelona pointed to the pleasure of touching and smelling paper. “I don’t want to read on a screen,” insists Ms. Casado. A client at Terranova noted that while he might occasionally buy books online he’d rather see them and feel them in a physical store.

Many of those behind Barcelona’s new generation of independent stores stress the importance of fostering a sense of community.

“The challenge is ensuring that providing interesting content in terms of books and becoming a cultural hub does not separate you from the neighborhood,” says Mariana Sarrias, who runs a bookstore that organizes literacy events. “You must be part of the neighborhood.”

Even when she was alive, Vivian Maier was difficult to fathom. Ann Marks’ new biography, “Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny,” begins with a list of the contradictory descriptions offered by those who knew her, including “Caring/Cold,” “Feminine/Masculine,” and “Mary Poppins/Wicked Witch.” 

Many more people have become interested in understanding Maier since her death. For those unfamiliar with the story: In 2007, an amateur historian named John Maloof purchased a collection of abandoned boxes at a foreclosure auction at a Chicago storage facility. The boxes contained thousands of photographs that he believed to be of significant quality. He knew the property belonged to a Vivian Maier, but he was unable to uncover any information about her until her obituary appeared in 2009, confirming that she had been both a photographer and a nanny.

Maloof began sharing some of Maier’s images online. She became an immediate sensation, posthumously hailed as one of the great street photographers of the 20th century. Maloof went on to direct the 2014 Oscar-nominated documentary “Finding Vivian Maier”; Marks, a retired corporate executive, saw the film and became consumed with investigating its many lingering questions. 

“Vivian Maier Developed” is the result. The compelling book benefits from Marks’ dogged research and from her collaboration with Maloof and Jeffrey Goldstein, another early collector. A previous Maier biography, Pamela Bannos’ “Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife,” portrays Maloof in an unflattering light and was written without access to the vast body of the photographer’s work. Marks, on the other hand, pored through Maloof and Goldstein’s combined archive of 140,000 photos, selecting 400 images to include in the book.

Atria Books

Using a Rolleiflex camera, which is positioned at the hip, Maier – who was born in 1926 and lived in New York City, her mother’s native France, and Los Angeles before settling in Chicago – made herself inconspicuous. She shot photos of people of all races and classes, crime scenes, celebrity events she pushed her way into (Muhammad Ali, Greta Garbo, and John F. Kennedy are among her famous subjects), and her young charges throughout the years. 

The author is an unabashed admirer of her apparently self-taught subject. Of Maier’s photography, which spanned five decades, Marks writes, “With intelligence, creativity, passion, and a great eye, Vivian developed a massive and broadly relatable portfolio reflecting the universality of the human condition.” Elsewhere she refers to the photos’ “humanity, humor, and beauty.” 

In addition to featuring Maier’s photography, Marks tackles the central mystery that has remained since the discovery of her work: why she pursued photography with such evident passion yet was uninterested in sharing her photographs. (She only printed 5% of her images, with the rest of the discovered archive in the form of negatives or undeveloped film, meaning that Maier herself never saw the vast majority of her work.) 

Marks, who details her investigative and genealogical methods in the book’s useful appendices, spent years researching Maier’s family and the people who appeared in the photographs, chasing down all manner of leads. 

Vivian Maier/Atria Books

Vivian Maier took a series of photos, including this shot of a shoeshine worker, that she labeled simply “Race Relations, New York, early 1950s.”

Her task was made even more difficult by the fact that Maier was impenetrable, refusing to divulge information about her past to employers and acquaintances. She had few friends.

The author traces Maier’s family tree back several generations, uncovering a history of divorce, neglect, abandonment, and violence. Maier was raised mostly by her difficult and narcissistic mother but had little contact with her as an adult. She was even more distanced from her father and her sole sibling, a brother diagnosed with mental illness. Marks speculates on possible abuse in her past, given her strong aversion to physical or emotional closeness.

Many of the specifics of her life will remain unknown. What is germane to Marks’ project, however, is that by the late 1960s, Maier had developed what the author calls a textbook case of hoarding. Former employers recall their nanny’s boxes of newspapers, books, and photographic supplies not only filling her room but taking over their attics and garages as well. Her storage lockers contained a staggering 8 tons of such material.

Marks concludes that the hoarding disorder explains Maier’s refusal to show her work. “Even if Vivian wanted to disseminate her photographs,” she writes, “she was unable to let them go.” 

Vivian Maier/Atria Books

Vivian Maier captured the personalities and conflicts of urban life in “Pushback, New York, 1956."

Still, throughout the book, Marks argues that Maier was not unhappy or unfulfilled, describing her as “mostly upbeat, action-oriented, engaged, and well-informed, perpetually living life on her own terms.”  

This cheerful interpretation doesn’t always square with the reclusive woman that Marks herself has described. Nor does it square with some of the images reproduced in the book, in which Maier appears in sinister silhouette. 

This fascinating biography reveals much about the enigmatic artist, but parts of her will likely remain in shadow, as inaccessible in life as in those disquieting self-portraits. 

AP

A child takes a book from the shelf at the public library in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Dec. 27, 2021.

With a resurgence of COVID-19, virtual schooling has returned to many parts of the United States. Along with it are renewed worries over what educators call learning loss and a need to fix it. The full damage from enforced online schooling is yet to be known. Yet many in education are asking if this narrative of lost progress itself needs to be fixed. Children, after all, reflect back what parents and teachers see in them.

The idea of reversing the narrative began with an article in The Atlantic titled “Our kids are not broken.” Written in 2021 by Ron Berger, chief academic officer of EL Education, it states that schools should recognize the resiliency of students during the pandemic and honor them with “meaningful and challenging academic work, not with remedial classes.” Kids need to feel empowered in their own growth and healing, the author suggested.

Perhaps one area of education where this idea has taken hold is literacy, or the habit of reading. To meet students where they are and motivate them to read, teachers – with substantial help from publishers and distributors – have focused on how to make reading material more accessible and to nurture each student’s “agency,” or innate desire to learn through the written word.

The idea that children with access to books can be trusted to choose what to read is hardly new. But evidence supporting it keeps piling up. “The number of books in a student’s home has been found to correlate with their level of academic achievement,” Deirdra Purvis of ed tech company Mackin told Publishers Weekly, “and when provided with books that they find personally relevant, students are more likely to engage in reading.”

Recent innovations in access to books are not hard to find. Follett School Solutions, for example, is shipping books of choice to rural students outside broadband service. In a recognition of children’s digital preferences, publishers like Scholastic have set up online reading communities where kids can join peers, track their reads, and meet authors who will read to them. Scholastic’s marketing vice president, Lizette Serrano, believes the summer of 2022 could see “learning acceleration.”

Publishers have also introduced more children to audible books. “Kids who listen to books can be extraordinary readers,” educational psychologist Michele Borba told National Geographic. “It stretches their attention span, helps focus, and teaches how to be self-sufficient.”

StoryWalk, a Vermont-based program founded in 2007 that places children’s books on signs along woodland trails, now has libraries and museums literally running. Outdoors, that is. Kids and parents in all 50 states and 13 countries can follow a story page by page as they walk book trails in urban areas and parks.                   

At the other end of the literacy spectrum and taking would-be readers (as well as publishers) by surprise, one innovation comes from the “TikTok sisters.” Two teenagers in England, Mireille and Elodie Lee, produce “A Life of Literature” page on the social media site. Within months it has garnered hundreds of thousands of young followers (ahem, readers) who interact with comments and recommendations.

“By showing people a book visually, online, through photos and imagery and aesthetics, people immediately just connect with it,” Mireille told WABC-TV. “They feel the beat of the music. They see the photos and go, ‘Wow, I need to read that right now.’” 

As with many of these reading innovations, the TikTok site is a poppin’ place. And kids are reading. Often to each other.

All of this could be pointing to a different approach to concerns over lost learning. When reading communities wrap their arms around each other, they also embrace each child’s resiliency during the pandemic.