It’s Wild in Here: everything on emilyadams.net, wired together

What it costs when reading goes wrong in seven parts of ordinary life, with every number linked and its limits printed on the card.

The official definition, the six skills inside the word, a real example of each, and six questions to ask of anything you read.

The levels behind the headlines about adult literacy: how the test works, what each level means, where U.S. adults scored, and what the shorthand gets wrong.

The first move: say it as a joke, see how it lands, then decide whether you meant it. The research, plus the administration’s own words, checked against official transcripts.

The second move: repetition. Why a claim you have heard many times starts to feel like something you know, with the lab studies and current claims counted from official transcripts.

The third move: identity. How tying a claim, a product, or a position to who you are makes doubt feel like disloyalty, with the studies and the data behind every card.

The fourth move: escalation. One small step at a time, so each step makes the next one feel normal, in politics, at the store, and at home.

The fifth move: exhaustion. How a flood of claims, reversals, and fakes wears people down until they stop checking, and what to do about it.

A reading game. Read a current news article, answer twelve questions about it, and see your reading level on the same scale the international adult literacy test uses.

Once saying it openly cost votes, the message moved into code: “states’ rights,” “forced busing,” “cutting taxes,” and finally a mug shot, in a campaign that came back from 17 points down to carry 40 states.

Germany’s generals demanded a ceasefire, then told the country the army had been stabbed in the back at home, a myth the Nazis rode to power. In 2020 the same move was called Stop the Steal, and it ended at the Capitol.

Since 1977, campaigns have wrapped attacks on gay people, teachers, and political rivals in the language of saving children, so that anyone who objects seems to side with predators. It cost a civil rights law, a seven-year prosecution with no convictions, a rifle fired inside a pizzeria, and hotline time meant for real victims.

For a century, propagandists have called immigrants an invading army or a planned “replacement,” so that harsh laws and even violence feel like self-defense. The idea shaped the 1924 quotas that kept Jewish refugees waiting in 1939, was cited by gunmen in 2019 and 2022, and returned in official documents in 2025.

For years before they took power, the Nazis called Germany’s newspapers the “lying press.” Then they suspended press freedom, jailed editors, and boasted that Germans were “completely immune” to foreign warnings of war. The label “enemy of the people” has done the same job for more than one kind of regime, and in 2026 it became a White House ban.

A forged Russian document “proved” a secret Jewish plot to rule the world through money, and Henry Ford’s newspaper spread it across America and, in translation, into Germany, where it helped shape a future Nazi youth leader. The plot survived its exposure under a polite name: “international bankers.”

In the 1950s, the U.S. government purged gay men and lesbians from federal jobs by calling them a “security risk.” A Navy study found no data behind the claim, and the Navy kept it secret for almost 20 years.

Twice in the 20th century, campaigns told women that legal equality would cost them the privileges that protected their homes, and recruited women to carry the warning. Women won the vote anyway in 1920; the Equal Rights Amendment died three states short in 1982.

In 1954, cigarette makers learned they did not have to win the argument. They only had to convince the public that the experts were still arguing. A 1969 company presentation called it “Doubt is our product,” and the same move later shaped the climate debate.