In this week's New Yorker, Gladwell concludes that Atticus wasn't "a civil rights hero," but rather a white man of his time, a man "looking for racial salvation through hearts and minds." He compares Atticus to Big Jim Folsom, a 1950s Alabama governor, who pointedly shook hands with black men and said "all men are just alike," but who never came out against segregation. Gladwell says Folsom (like Atticus) "knew the frailties of his fellow-Alabamians in regard to race. But he could not grasp that those frailties were more than personal — that racism had a structural dimension." Atticus, Gladwell says, just wanted individual people to be nice to each other — he didn't want to change the world, and he didn't want to recognize that the world needed to be changed.

More damning than this is Gladwell's summary of the criticisms of Atticus's defense strategy. For those who don't remember To Kill A Mockingbird from their middle school English classes, it was written in 1960 but set in the thirties. In the book, Atticus Finch defends a black man, Tom Robinson, against the accusation that he has raped a poor white girl, Mayella Ewell. Of Ewell and her family, Harper Lee writes, "no truant officers could keep their numerous offspring in school; no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and the diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings." Gladwell is blunt about Lee's portrayal: "the Ewells are trash." And Atticus uses this in Robinson's defense.

On the stand, Robinson says that Ewell bribed her siblings to leave the house on the day of the alleged rape, that she hugged and kissed him, and that she implied she had previously been raped by her father. Legal scholar Steven Lubet calls this the "she wanted it" defense — and indeed, Lee has Atticus say, "she knew full well the enormity of her offense, but because her desires were stronger than the code she was breaking, she persisted in breaking it."

Gladwell says, "for a woman to be portrayed as the sexual aggressor in the Jim Crow South was a devastating charge." He quotes scholar Lisa Lindquist Dorr, who says,

White men did not always automatically leap to the defense of white women. Some white men reluctantly sided with black men against white women whose class or sexual history they found suspect. Sometimes whites trusted the word of black men whose families they had known for generations over the sworn testimony of white women whose backgrounds were unknown or (even worse) known and despised. White women retained their status as innocent victim only as long as they followed the dictates of middle-class morality.

Atticus makes a "proud and lonely stand for racial justice" in To Kill A Mockingbird — but it's justice for one black man, not all black men. And, Gladwell alleges, he "does what lawyers for black men did in those days. He encourages [the jury] to swap one of their prejudices for another." He tries to defend Robinson by making Mayella Ewell sound suspect — because she is sexually aggressive, and because she comes from an incestuous family of "trash."

Most of us grew up thinking of Atticus Finch as a hero and champion of equality, so it's almost painful to hear him accused of classism. But rather than reading him as a white savior (or attempted savior — Robinson is convicted) of black people, it may be better to understand him as part of a complicated system of racial and class prejudice, a system which encompasses North and South, black and white, Harper Lee's time, Atticus Finch's time, and today.

The Courthouse Ring [New Yorker]

• David Kipen, organizer of community reading scheme the Big Read, pledged to eat To Kill a Mockingbird if the residents of Kelley's Island in Ohio failed to read the novel. Fortunately, everyone involved finished the book, and Kipen was not forced to eat Lee's words. • Several hours after being diagnosed with swine flu, 12-year-old Phoebe Wyburd began receiving threatening text messages, one of which read: "You will die." Fortunately, Phoebe is steadily recovering and has been dosed with Tamiflu. • Doctors may have found a new way to treat the extreme nausea and vomiting that effects many women during pregnancy. •  After 1,000 years of being visible only to masculine eyes, the treasures of orthodox enclave Mount Athos will be opened to women at the Petit Palais in Paris. • Oh. god. This is probably the most awful thing you will read all day: as part of the sexual cleansing of Iraq, gay men are being subjected to a particularly cruel form of torture in which their anuses are glued shut and diarrhea is induced. • Conservative opponents of Obama's scheduled address at Notre Dame have commissioned an abortion plane, that flies over the campus bearing the message "Abortion is terror." Classy! • German artist Gunther von Hagens is being criticized over one of his recent works, which depicts two corpses having sex. The exhibit, titled "Cycle of Life," opens tomorrow in Berlin. •  Chanel, a 21-year-old dachshund, is set to celebrate her birthday (with her owners) at a party in New York. Chanel is believed to be the oldest dog alive - she is 147 in dog years. • Good news for puking moms: severity of morning sickness is believed to be linked to high IQ in offspring. The same hormones that induce nausea may also be responsible for aiding in the child's development, doctors say. • A Swedish couple are in the process of appealing a court ruling that barred them from naming their son "Q". The court said that they may be willing to consider "Q:u" as an alternative. • A five-year-old hippo in Israel died today while being castrated by a medical team. • New research indicates that chlamydia may play a role in the development of a certain type of arthritis. • Jane Orobator, mother to Samantha, has been publicly begging for the release of her daughter. Samantha Orobator was jailed last August on charges of drug smuggling. Jane says she has not heard any news of her daughter's trial, and is unable to afford a lawyer. Clare Algar, a lawyer from charity group Reprieve, says they are hoping for a speedy trial. •

•  A recent survey has named "To Kill a Mockingbird" the most inspirational book of all time, beating out the Bible, which came in at number two. • Click here to watch an awesome video of a fox tracking mice in the snow. •  British women are more likely to have a baby before the age of 25 than they are to get married, according to a new report. • At the end of WWII, an estimated 2 million German women were raped by Russian soldiers. For decades, the suffering of German women was considered taboo, and it is only now that the first scientific study of the rapes is being conducted. • Researchers have found that women who sit up, walk, or kneel at the first signs of going into labor are likely to have a quicker labor than those who are in a reclining position. •  Ugh. A 20-year-old student from Colorado is facing felony animal abuse charges after she taped her boyfriend's eight-month-old puppy to the inside of his refrigerator. •  Aw: a widow in Japan has published a book full of text messages that she sent to her dead husbands phone. • Freakonomics compares ballet dancer's amazing leg lifts to basketball player's free-throw shooting. • Mental Floss has unearthed a very old clip of Bill O'Reilly reporting on Super Mario Bros. •  Some reasonable legislators in Vermont are working to reduce teen "sexting" charges so that high school students wont be charged with child porn for sending pictures of themselves via text message. •  eMarketer has found that way more women use the internet than men, but men visit more sites and stay online longer. • Outside Los Angeles, an order of nuns are praying for a new oven. The Dominican nuns are suffering from the recession, and without their funds brought in from sales of their pumpkin bread, times are even tougher. • Some very bored guy invented a chair that twitters his farts. If you are so inclined, you can follow his tweets here. • Just what the dying world of print journalism needs: Pumpsmag, a rag devoted entirely to gentleman's clubs and the women who work there. •

I actually read this book in high school, and it was one of the few novels that I felt really captured adolescent angst from the female perspective, while all the while illuminating a bit of history. It seems that illustrating accurately the kernel of teenage frustration is what keeps books relevant years after their publication. What books would you suggest adding to the high school canon?

Does Catcher In The Rye Still Resonate With Teens [Minnesota Public Radio]