22. Any pronouns. My main blog is @thisbloghasapurposeiswear , if you wanna follow me back go to that one instead. My Icon is the questioning flag, not something gross.
Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.
Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.
All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.
After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.
It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.
And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.
The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.
Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.
ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.
Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.
*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.
If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.
"Friend" is an AI wearable device designed to provide "companionship + emotional support"— i.e replace human friendships. Its literally an AI chatbot that you wear around your neck. "Friend" just paid for the largest ad campaign in NYC subway history
And Every. Single. Poster was vandalised, it literally looks like some of the most beautiful art you have ever seen
Kylie Robison and Boone Ashworth of WIRED both wore these stupid things for a couple weeks and reported the kind of experiences one might expect to have with an interactive AI device invented by a 22-year-old techbro:
The chatbot-enabled Friend necklace eavesdrops on your life and provides a running commentary that’s snarky and unhelpful. Worse, it can als
If the idea of a microphone-packed wearable that's always listening to your conversations raises privacy concerns for you, just know that you're not alone. If your experience is anything like ours, wearing the Friend will likely earn you the ire of everyone around you. Curiously, you might even end up being bullied by the chatbot itself.
-(Wired article)
Robison quickly grew to despise the gizmo. She wore the device to a party organized by AI startup Anthropic, and ended up being accused of “wearing a wire” — to her, an indication that “even at the most tech-minded gatherings, the thing was a complete taboo.”
-New AI Necklace Listens Constantly and Uses All That Data to Complain About You
A 75 yo man proudly came into the cafe wearing an Ultra Maga hat. I excused my barista from the register to handle the transaction.
"The hat is customizable," he said, struggling with the velcro patch on the front. "If I need it, I have an ICE one too. I pick based off the business i walk into."
"Customizable is an important hat descriptor," I said. "what can I get you?"
"You wouldn't believe how offended people get these days," he said. "And I'm supposed to do something about it if you're offended? You chose to be offended!"
"We all have hundreds of thousands of decisions everyday," I said. I thickened my accent. "That's what my stepdad always said. But I can make one easier - we have a delicious Ethiopian roast available."
"Like if I told you you have a bull ring," he said, "because bulls have rings in their noses. Is that offensive?"
I laughed. "I've heard that before."
"It's a joke, but people get offended. Maybe you're offended."
I looked at him. I smiled. "You aren't trying to offend me though, right?"
Of course he was. I was being friendly and the friendlier I was, the faster he switched topics. He was saying anything inflammatory he could think of to see if I'd take the bait. After about 20 minutes of my redirecting and deescalating, he settled into a more normal interaction. He took up too much of my time showing me a product I'd feigned mild interest in to get him to stop talking about getting accused of inappropriate behavior at work. When we finally disengaged, he spent 10 minutes trying to catch my eye again. When he failed, he left.
There's this new breed of customer who insists on trying to incite political conversation through their clothing and, when that doesnt work, their snide little comments. If I owned my own business, maybe I would have given the guy the fight he wanted. But I work for a corporation and I love paying my bills so I deescalated.
Anyone wearing that type of shit and preying on workers for their own spank bank material is a brainless fucking sheep.
something i want to mention because i’ve seen it growing as a trend online is that not only do people do this just for their own gratification, but watch for glasses. smart glasses are a growing segment of the consumer market, and creeps like this are harassing people in public in order to gather content without the victims being aware they’re being filmed
I wanted to use what ‘reach’ I may have here to share the Carolina Wildlife Center’s urgent plea for donations. If they are unable to raise $75,000 to cover ongoing and future care of their wildlife patients, the center will have to close July 20th, 2026. The services provided by CWC to the community are incredibly valuable, and without them, many wild animals will suffer without the care they need.
every single conversation abt ip on here devolves into a bunch of people being really anxious that someone is going to take away their hypothetical income from them for their creativity and like, that is already happening. that is literally happening. how do you think publishers like penguin, harper collins, macmillan et al got big and stay big? how do you think publishers like elsevier et al maintain such a stranglehold and charge such amounts? do you even know how individual IP rights operate these days, especially when you're licensing them to a company? have you read a contract ever in your life? have you had to work on preparing a contract ever in your life? do you think your much vaunted, precious authors have the rights to reprint their books whenever if they realise their publishers are fucking them over? don't make me fucking laugh. at the very least please pull your heads out of your asses and read helen dewitt's extensive chronicling of her run-ins with the publishing industry as is. god knows you can pick up the biography or collected/published letters of almost any author* across time and encounter a section with their run-ins and struggles with their publishers, either because they're not being given enough royalties, or because they're writing to contract and need to give their publishers a book by a specific deadline, or a specific kind of book, even when circumstances & health issues are conspiring against them. do you think copyright gives them any control over their lives, or any sort of creative control? don't be so naive - and nevermind the fact that it is basically impossible to have a career in writing these days and that the rare few who do are writing extremely formulaic genre fiction written to, again, insane deadlines that are punishing for any sort of creative work. stop being naive!!!! take an actual look and reckon at what the actual circumstances and conditions are for producing art! it is not good! copyright is not going to save you! it is panacea at best! you will literally do better campaigning for universal basic income over championing the cause of copyright!
*off the top of my head just based on the biographies & other primary sources i've read: agatha christie, aldous huxley, jrr tolkien, georgette heyer
mind you, this is only in publishing/writing. the conditions are not that much better in other domains. music? most artists are being fucked over by their record companies cutting deals with spotify that leave them getting very little revenue while not actually owning their own masters. visual arts? a handful of artists will break through each year and it depends heavily on your ability to network and attend extremely expensive art events, from what i know of. but maybe you can get lucky working in highly exploitative conditions in a well-known artist's studio where you produce works that are sold under their name :) can't say i know much about television or film, but my impression is that its not that much better (perhaps the greatest evidence in favour of this is the way the number of working working class actors in the uk has nearly dropped completely off and nearly all of them are privately educated in one way or the other). so genuinely who do you think the so called ip law is protecting right now? bc right now from where i'm sitting, it is protecting literally those with the greatest amount of money and purchasing power, on both sides of the cultural production and cultural distribution divides. which as you might imagine is anathema to any kind of genuine creative culture.
We're at the "JK Rowling is personally funding litigation to try and destroy AMNESTY INTERNATIONAL" stage of rabid UK terf brain.
Screenshot via Alejandra Caraballo @esqueer.net on bluesky
Tldr Amnesty International, global human rights organisation, published a report called 'A growing threat: the anti-rights movement in the UK'. In it is detailed, amongst others, a whole bunch of transphobic groups and organisations, including Beira's Place, JK Rowling's trans exclusionary sexual violence support service. JK Rowling threw a shit fit and got Amnesty to take the report down by threatening libel. This was obviously not enough, because you can't appease a fascist, so now she's going to bankroll a bunch of lawsuits anyway through the JK Rowling Women's Fund.*
You can read an archived version of the report here, please save it and share it.
*Not so friendly reminder there is no way to engage in the wizard books without enabling this shit.
OK I keep seeing people refer to the Michigan parasite outbreak and then others will chime in “it’s in my state too!” so to clarify this for everyone it is a NATIONWIDE outbreak reported in 31 US states as of today, July 12th 2026. There is no reason to assume it is not present in the rest of them
NBC News’ tally shows at least 26 states have reported cases of the parasitic stomach illness, as health authorities race to find the source
The CDC is tracking cases but they are significantly lagging behind the states on numbers (their data is weeks behind) so it’s probably going to be most effective to check your individual state’s infectious disease tracking.
This is a parasite that usually causes about 3000 cases of illness per year in the USA, Michigan currently has reported about 2900 (the confusion about “Michigan outbreak” is because Michigan is the first that caught an uptick in cases and has been very proactive about trying to trace them). Last official update from Massachusetts was 18 cases here centered in Greater Boston. The CDC recommends NOT assuming there are no sources of the parasite in your state even if no cases have been reported.
It isn’t an unknown illness but it is an unusual quantity of cases, and the fact that they haven’t been able to pin down the source after weeks of tracking is what makes it particularly concerning this year (harder to contain).
Wash your hands, wash your produce, cook it ideally, and advocate for farm workers to have access to safe and hygienic toilet facilities
that last part is extra important. nearly every one of these produce outbreaks are because of poor hygenic practices on the fields, and particularly, because field workers do not have adequate access to bathrooms. nobody wants to poison your food, but they often don't have a choice.
they also often lack proper access to water, cooling equipment (such as sun hats and portable fans), and management; this can make it significantly harder to think clearly and make a wise decision, let alone survive the day.
when this comes up in conversation, call this out. make sure everyone around you KNOWS that the reason the lettuce is constantly unsafe is because farms are not giving a shit about worker welfare, and the people growing and picking your lettuce have to walk ungodly distances in 100+ degree weather without water just to take a shit. oh, and if they DO choose to do that, they may be punished for taking an unscheduled break.
if you wanna go further, let everyone know that the majority of labor laws have an exception carved out for agricultural workers.
Republicans on Capitol Hill are starting to talk about one facet of immigration reform: how to expand the popular H-2A visa program for farm
Worth keeping up with developments in the fight over farm workers’ visas because while trying to get legal documents for workers, agricultural producers are also trying to fight for those legal documents to have fewer human rights provisions in them
once again hopelessly asking - is there anyone in Portland, Oregon who could maybe take in a trans girl and her cat for a bit if things fall apart next month? I don’t wanna be on the street and I don’t wanna lose all my stuff and especially Oliver
What is it with diabetes that makes people think they know more about it than the people who have the disorder. People hear the word diabetes and flock to compete with who can be the most ableist.
Found a video of a girl showing off Diet Soda detector strips (if there's any diabaddies that see this and want it I can link them, they're super helpful), and half of the comments were "you're diabetic you should just be drinking water..." First of all, not only are you just wrong, but you seriously expect diabetics to just never enjoy themselves? Ever?.
Saw another comment under a video about type 1 saying "you did this to yourselves. you ate too much sugar and you got yourself into this situation." And it's just so funny because they're Wrong™️. Type one diabetes is autoimmune and fully hereditary, and not at all effected by diet.
I mean, I know the answer. It's diet culture. People on their fancy diets think they're a superior human being because other people are "unhealthier" than them, and they hear diabetes and think "big fat and lazy with a bad diet" and think they're allowed to walk all over them since they're so superior. Despite the fact that it's a completely false stereotype that doesn't apply to most diabetics.
And btw please do not come under this post saying "but other disorders have that too" this is a vent post about diabetes. Do not derail.
The other thing about diabetes type 2 is that what the evidence actually suggests is that there's an underlying metabolic disorder that causes weight gain and sugar craving before actual diabetes develops.
A lot of type 2's start out as hypoglycemic -- their pancreas is over-producing insulin, causing blood sugar crashes. Insulin stuffs sugar into fat cells, causing people to get fat, if there's too much of it. The overproduction of insulin is a response to slow-growing insulin resistance. Because sugar is a vital part of human energy, people who cannot easily process sugar due to insulin resistance and insulin over-response may crave sugar in order to have enough energy to function.
So you didn't get diabetes because you got fat. You got fat because you were on track to get diabetes. and nobody is addressing the metabolic disorder. Hypoglycemics can be quite skinny -- I was for years. But if you're skinny, nobody is concerned about the fact that you are passing out when you haven't had enough to eat. Because only being fat is ever a medical problem. People who are "normal" weight obviously have nothing wrong with their metabolism whatsoever. :-(
To add somewhat to the above, type 2 is genetic. You can’t get it solely from diet alone. As a specialist nurse crudely but not entirely incorrectly once said to me “if it was just diet then every fat/unhealthy person would have diabetes”.
And now going back to the top point, I know exactly what video op is referring to and she made a different video a few weeks prior specifically about harmful comments to t1d’s and instead of getting the point, heaps of comments were basically to the effect of “but we can bully t2ds bc they brought this on themselves, they deserve to be mocked”. HUH. DO YOU HEAR YOURSELVES.
I have many chronic conditions. T1D is absolutely the worst by the landslide it’s not even close. I would not wish this on anyone. If you ever think you’d like to make a comment on someone else’s diabetes, of any type, do not do it. If you are a diabetic I trust you to be sensible, otherwise, keep your mouth shut.
I wasn’t going to derail the disability pride month post for people with peanut allergies but in relation to that topic
I have never seen another allergy that has been so viscerally hated and mocked by people working in education like nut allergies. I’ve seen fellow teachers cringe that their classroom was the “nut free” classroom that year. Support staff that are trained and willfully don’t follow cross contamination protocol in the lunchroom because it’s too “tedious” or “time-consuming”. Full preschools + childcare centers that refuse to accommodate nut allergies. Schools where the only free lunch is a PB&J. Before/after school programs and summer programs whose food curriculum has nuts and doesn’t provide an alternative activity.
Allergy discrimination is so so insidious and prevalent. It’s happening behind their back and it is everything from the exposure joke to possibly causing someone to go into anaphylaxis from willful ignorance.
Also other parents in the classroom are guilty too. The “not my child not my problem” brain rot means that those lunchboxes are like bombs for airborne exposure allergies
A 22-year-old woman said Lufthansa staffers were not sympathetic to her condition when she tried to explain her life-threatening peanut alle
I was not downplaying this. The stigma is real, and people are 100% willing to let people with allergies die.
This woman was laughed at for asking for allergy accommodations at multiple points in her trip, and was denied to the point that she was practically told she’d be refused care in the event of anaphylaxis.
I work in healthcare. I cannot get my coworkers to consistently change their gloves after handling a PBJ. They literally do not think of it, and I don’t understand why. I also don’t know how to make it stick in their brains that this is a thing they need to do.
I grew up in the early 2000s with severe allergies to not just peanuts, but ALL nuts as well as beef, pork, shelfish, seeds, kiwi, and some food dyes. The resistance that my family faced from educators in the early 2000s is frankly bananas, not to mention the shit other parents and kids got up to.
When my mom tried to enroll me in preschool, the school principal refused any basic accommodations like asking everyone to wash their hands after lunch before re-entering the classroom, not bringing straight up peanuts to snack time, etc. There was no such thing as a nut free classroom at the time. The principal told my mom and me (I was 4 at the time and definitely in the room when this happened) “if she’s so sick, she belongs in a bubble, not at school.” THE FUCKING PRINCIPAL! My mom had to threaten legal action under the ADA to get them to comply.
Look, I was on a 504 accommodation plan under the ADA for the entirety of my formative education (elementary thru high school). That’s all 12 years!!! And yet I have had teachers hand me items I’m allergic to as a “reward”. I have had other kids intentionally try to send me into anaphylaxis. One girl in 3rd grade asked me why I “wasn’t dead yet” when she had put on a lotion with almonds in it and then held my hand. I’ve had other parents write letters to the school saying what a terrible inconvenience it was to them to not be able to send their kiddo to school with PB&J, demanding I be Removed to a special education only class if my “needs” were such a “burden” to others. During elementary school “parties” held in the classroom on holidays and for student birthdays, I was always sent to sit out in the hallway or go to the library, because even though parents were only supposed to bring safe foods into the room (they had a list of all my allergies) they never once got it right. Administrators fought me tooth and nail for the right to carry my epi pen and other meds on my person at all times. Why they thought I would start dealing benadryl on the playground, I do not know. At lunch, I was always sat at a specific segregated table labeled the “Nut Free Table” alone because who the fuck is going to sit there with the literally segregated outcast? But ONCE notably I was sat on one side of a line of blue masking tape down the table top with the rest of my class on the other. One side was the NUTS side!!! As if allergens would respect that tape barrier. (Spoiler alert: they do NOT!)
Literally from preschool to my senior year of high school, I was “the peanut kid”. Other parents gave my mom books about how to “cure your child’s food allergies from HOME” by micro dosing with things they are allergic to (please never ever ever even attempt anything like a food challenge with a known allergen outside of the care and supervision of a medical professional, holy shit that’s so dangerous). My mom joined the PTA in my last year of high school so that I could maybe participate in all the senior-focused events like pool parties and breakfast at school on the first Friday of the month. The number of times another parent either (a) decided it wasn’t worth it to care or (b) intentionally brought peanut products to an event to spite either me or my mom??? I literally could not count. It happened constantly.
College was better, but I still occasionally had people BALK when I asked them to please not eat a Nature Valley bar with whole nuts in it right the fuck next to me in lecture, thanks. Work parties and catered lunches were always impossible. A few conferences I went to as an undergrad were SUPPOSED to be nut-free, but always fucked up the catering. At one, they set up snack tables by every exit of the conference auditorium so that when people left after the talk, they all congregated around the exits and opened macadamia nut cookies and granola bars. When I had subsequently had a massive allergic reaction and needed help getting home (I’d walked) after taking like 200mg of benadryl, the staff offered me a stack of napkins and a lukewarm apology.
Food allergy is a disability which touches literally every aspect of a person’s life. Everytime I share with someone new about what it was like growing up with my allergies, they have never heard anything like it in their lives. They’re always like “holy shit, seriously??? People did that??? Kids tried to kill you??? Parents wanted you kicked out of the classroom????” Yeah, man. Yeah. My own brother (who doesn’t have any allergies at all) doesn’t understand why I don’t “eat more adventurously” and why I won’t travel internationally. So, saying it REALLY LOUDLY for people in the back:
FOOD ALLERGY IS A DISABILITY FOR WHICH EVERYONE SHOULD BE ABLE TO ACCESS ACCOMMODATIONS AND HAVE THEM TAKEN SERIOUSLY.
So this story is less about me and more about an acquaintance of mine. About a year ago some classmates and I were privileged enough to go visit Germany for 3 weeks as a school trip. My acquaintance, who for the sake of her privacy we will call Amy, had a deadly allergy to sunflower seeds and certain other grains. I do not know for certain if the flight attendants were made aware of this fact.
When on the flight Amy was fed bread that contained multiple things she was allergic to. The packaging was completely unlabled and she was never offered an allergy warning before or during the 13 hour flight. She had an allergic reaction and had a very hard time breathing and had to take the ONE epipen she had access to for this whole trip that day. She would not be able to get a new one. The flight attendants did not give a singular fuck about what happened to her and the position she was put in because of their carelessness.
Fast forward to the end of the trip. Luckily Amy had no further incidents during the trip. We get on the plane for the flight home and Amy asks about the food for the flight and if she can have the ingredients list. She also makes it clear to the flight attendants that this is really important because she has already had an incident and no longer has her epipen.
Do you want to know what the flight attendants did?
They kicked her off the plane. They kicked a seventeen year old off a plane and left her behind in an unfamiliar city because they would rather not deal with her disability. She delayed the flight for several minutes begging and crying for them to not leave her there. She told them she had no way of accessing a new epipen here, but they said she couldn’t fly without it. Me and my friend who were sitting next to her held her and argued with the flight attendant to keep her on the plane. She sobbed as she said she could just not eat anything, or that she could eat what she brought aboard. They still kicked her off. Bless the chaperone that chose to stay behind with her so she wouldn’t be alone.
You want to know the most fucked up part after that? The flight attendant who kicked her off was amused about the whole thing like it was some funny joke. Another one complained that “In all his years of working this job he had never been so disrespected.”
Amy and the chaperone ended up sleeping at that airport over night before they could get on another flight. I don’t remember if she was able to get another epipen for the flight home but I think she was.
Case in point, allergies are a serious disability that NEED to be treated with more respect and severity. Regardless of what they are. Someone’s life could be at stake. When someone has a disability they need to be accommodated. Don’t give them a hard time or make jokes at their expense. So what if you have to give up a thing or two to make sure they don’t die. You’ll survive not eating that specific thing for a bit. And as someone who grew up with someone with a serious allergy, I promise you it is not that hard to give something up for the safety of others.
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem “intimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.” Crucially, he added that this is “not a matter of laziness on the part of the students” but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Education’s 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of “meet your students where they are” for so long that she has begun to feel “like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.”
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessment’s own language, they likely “cannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.” And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
— Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Can’t Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
If he goes through with giving checks to "victims," we should all register and give the money straight to mask blocs and efforts to send respirators to people in less privileged countries.
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