Editor’s Note: October 29, 2025

Hello Readers! Recently Buffalo Toronto Public Media (thank you, Canada!) launched a revival of its twenty-years-dormant kids’ show, Reading Rainbow, newly hosted by viral TikTok librarian Mychal Threets, a.k.a., Mychal the Librarian, on the PBS Retro FAST channel on Roku (with ads, harumph). Reading Rainbow was launched in 1982 with a “Ready to Learn” grant from the US Department of Education, designed to address the summer reading loss that researchers had long observed amassing during the long school holiday. By the time Reading Rainbow closed up shop in 2006, faced with contracting budgets and fast-changing technical landscape for children’s viewing, it had reached at times more than two million viewers a week and had been the most watched PBS program in elementary school classrooms. The show was long identified with its original host LeVar Burton (who became famous playing a blind space traveler and a person denied literacy by slavery); he received twelve Daytime Emmy Awards and a Peabody Award for the show, as well as a National Humanities Award for his services to culture. LeVar Burton said in a 2024 documentary on Reading Rainbow that when they first came to him with the project he thought, “What a great idea” and “did everything they asked—I mean everything. I became very adamant that since they had hired me, then what they got was me.” “He was on TV as himself,” children’s author Jason Reynolds says in the documentary, “and that’s power. It was saying your stories matter.” (He was going to leave the show to play Geordi La Forge on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but at the last minute couldn’t bring himself to say good-bye and worked out a deal to do both. “The Bionic Bunny” episode of Reading Rainbow was filmed on the set of Star Trek, with the host noting, “there’s something else that can help you explore the universe. Books.” ) Mychal Threets was flustered and honored to follow in the footsteps of his hero (“If you’re upset because I’m not LeVar Burton … GET BEHIND ME!”); like Lavar Burton he has said it’s important that he comes from “people who were forbidden from books, who were forbidden from literacy.” (His father is Black and his mother is Mexican.) The library that nourished him is a place, he says, where no voice is, or should be, silenced. (His inviting and gentle demeanor also gets him compared to another hero of his, Fred Rogers. Both Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood and the original Reading Rainbow are also available on PBS Retro FAST.) Michael Davies, an executive producer for Jeopardy! and force behind Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, began developing the Reading Rainbow reboot in 2020, but he couldn’t find takers. Meanwhile Mychal Threets enthusiasts were gunning for putting it in his hands. The style of the new show is pleasantly hokey and low-tech, redolent of the original’s merry psychedelic styling, including a very slight update of the original theme song, as well a cast of game star accomplices. Mychal Threets first fell in love with his local library when it welcomed him as a shy and anxious home-schooled child. In his twenties, disconsolate about his prospects, he sought a job in that very library shelving books, and went on to study library science and return to work his way up to supervising librarian in the same system, beginning to post soon viral TikTok videos about the library during the pandemic. He is open in his videos about his ongoing struggles with anxiety and depression (like some other admirable men in recent years), and how the library is there for people who are looking for a place of love and safety. The library “just helped my brain relax. Help it come down just a little bit. Even on my darkest days, my hardest days, books were kind of like the rescue for me.” His welcoming words in the new series caused this viewer to tear up: “libraries were the first place where I felt like I could belong. I entered the library doors and entered a world where I didn’t feel alone.” Recalling an instance of reaching out to a struggling patron and helping him find his footing, He says in a video, “The library is here to help you. Never be afraid to ask for help.” He takes pains to communicate the message that a library—and, more broadly, reading—is a place where everyone belongs. “All I’ve ever sought to do is amplify library people and library kids,” he says, “and remind them that every single one of them are readers, they’re all capable, they’re all worthy.” This message that reading can be a source of both of community and bolstering introspection seems so welcome at this moment. Good luck to you Mychal Threets! Today in Book Post for subscribers, Tracy Daugherty considers a man who sought, for better and worse, a public life in books. Thank you so much for your subscription! —AKj