There Are People Who Would Give Anything For Your Ability to Read and Write

It's seven in the morning, with the golden hour of the day filled with freshly brewed coffee and the buzzing noise of lawnmowers working before it gets too hot. I'm writing this blog post from my Intel Celeron Vivobook instead of my MacBook Air—it's slower, but sometimes slower is enjoyable. (Not to mention the keyboard is somehow better.) If you can read this, you're one of the lucky ones. I've touched briefly on literacy rates before, but I think it's important I dedicate a blog post to drive such an important point. It's easy to take for granted the ability to read and write. It can feel ubiquitous—universal, as though this is a solved problem. It's easy to falsely believe we're all on an even playing field and that other people understand and comprehend the world just as you do. But this isn't the case. Worldwide, UNESCO estimates that 739 million adults still can't read or write a simple sentence about their own lives, and two-thirds are women. That's a population larger than…