I’ve been sharing about Bisan for a few years as long as I’ve met her, here on Tumblr. Since then, she’s married and is now having her first baby! 🍼
This GFM is for gathering funds for Bisan and her baby. I’m still not on social media like I used to be, but I’ll be sharing this campaign when I’m on.
Bisan and her family have been verified by 90-ghost, but many of their blogs and posts have been deleted, per usually with Pal/Gz campaigns.
Please give what you can, and thank you for sharing this post!
Bisan has spent the last three years helping keep her family alive during the br… Ceri L needs your support for Donate To Help Bisan An
hey so filming people without their consent is weird. you know that right? filming people you don't know and they aren't aware of what you're doing is creepy. posting strangers online is fucking weird. we're too comfortable with doing it now for shits and giggles, chasing some sort of viral hit instead of reckoning with the fact that you posted someone who did not consent to their body and face being publically used.
we're being pushed these Meta Glasses as if mass surveillance of strangers is fun and normal! it's weird!!! there are already reports that people are using these to film women without them knowing and sharing it to communities who get off on this shit. who else knows who people are filming. these glasses with cameras are not obvious and that is dangerous.
makes me so sad when my friends refuse to pirate things and insist on paying for a streaming service EVEN when i offer to do it for them or teach them. like pleaseeee i have a vpn i have a plex server i can get you whatever you want. don't buy disney+ i can be your little poob i have it for you.
idk why no one helped my sister. I can't describe her pain; she cries uncontrollably and can't move or eat. She's been isolated from her friends. Her skin condition is severe and burns intensely. The medication is very expensive because it's not allowed in our country!!
Please don't ignore my sister's tears and help me provide her with medicine before it's too late.
After my brother's death, I became helpless and desperate, but I will do my best to raise the funds for treatment and save my sister. Please, everyone, help my little sister by donating here or via PayPal... Verification
@miracleon63rdstreet is a black trans women who has gone through absolute hell and back. She is currently in a lot of debt and she and her cousin don’t have enough money to feed her cats and her cousin’s kids. She is living with her cousin and her cousin’s electricity bill is due on the 10th
if anyone could give her money on her cashapp, venmo, paypal, or chime it would be greatly appreciated
Me, my cats, my cousin and her kids need help getting food too, all our foodstamps ran out early, we have no food left or foodstamps for the
Instantly exchange money for free on Cash App
Venmo is a digital wallet that lets you make and share payments with friends. You can easily split the bill, cab fare, or much more. Downloa
Go to paypal.me/MarsRayL and type in the amount. Since it’s PayPal, it's easy and secure. Don’t have a PayPal account? No worries.
I also need help getting my kitchen fixed after a flood and pipes broke, the ppl working on my home were paid just enough to start repairing and renovation and cleaning everything up and getting my home fixed, but the kitchen sink and counter is completely destroyed and I need about 250 dollars or so to get the rest fixed, they said the price to get the sink and counter and get it all fixed up will be 650 dollars and I just need help covering the rest to finally get my entire home fixed including foundation, plumbing, and more.
So if yall can pls reblog this for me as much as possible or don8 if you can, it would be a HUUUGE HELP. 🙏🏾😔❤️
WE RUNNING IT BACK!!! Melanin Beam Challenge 2026!!!
There's only TWO DIFFERENCES in the rules this year:
1) instead of only posting on August 8th (we hit post limit last year!!!) we are going to post them between August 7th and August 9th!!
2) tag your pieces with #melanin beam challenge AND #black character design - we got #melanin in the top Tumblr tag for 15 minutes last year, let's see if we can do two 👀
Yall are so fucking self important, I don't see anime women with a transmisogynist lens, I see anime with a critical feminist postcolonial lens and SO SHOULD YOU! SO SHOULD WE ALL! It's the way you consume anime and create entire identities and subgroups based off of what anime girl animal you are that fucks this other anime girl and what if they're sisters or IDEK even without the incest shit, if you watch hentai regularly, and ESPECIALLY if you consume loli/shota pretty much at all, you are WEIRD and you're NOT A FEMINIST FOR DOING SO. I can't believe I have to pull out the Asian card on this so much because like, it all used to be so obvious, but yes rabid western anime consumption has affected my life and the lives of other Asian women (and men) negatively and honestly the lives of teenage girls IN GENERAL and I care about talking about the cause of it WAY more than I care about your strange insistence on watching that like. When I was a teen I watched some hentai sometimes and then as I got older I just couldn't stomach it anymore. My tastes in people scaled with my age and also I was like man this sucks they sound like screaming children. What's going on with you? Do NOT use autism as an excuse, I swear to god, because I know a lot of autistic girls, cis and trans, that are into anime and manga but don't sexualize it and surround their identities around it. But yeah, go watch your trans positive futanari hentai. Jesus Christ.
"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.
More on this later perhaps, but as leftists we really need to examine how we give "mutual aid"
We don't live in a vacuum, these "radical alternatives to charity" basically function the same way re: societal structures of privilege and social capital.
If the only people who get your "mutual aid" are the charismatic leaders or the pretty white women then no you're not radical and the neediest are better off jumping through a million hoops to qualify and get to their local food bank. We are failing miserably.
I think people consistently forget how much social capital plays a role in these individualistic 'mutual aid' campaigns and it drives me up the wall. 'Mutual aid' is not a one-way reception of financial support, and even if it were, this would in no way constitute a more equitable redistribution of financial ressources. It will always end up benefitting more well-liked, more socially adept and successful people.
It's so telling (and disturbing) that these fundraising posts come with a selfie.
It's marketing, people competing to be seen as human. And while it's often done for survival, it's marketing to racist societies that we are all part of, societies that are more likely to associate Black people with negative things than white people, and are more likely to see Black people, especially Black men, as threatening.
People who donate mean well, but these biases are implicit, subconscious, and persist in marginalized communities too. It affects everything from voting patterns to foster care to maternal mortality, so we know damn well it impacts the left-wing online fundraiser ecosystem.
And if reminders didn't work for masking, the "stop ignoring fundraising posts" and "donate to POC fundraisers" posts aren't going to be enough either.
We cannot claim to be any better than well-established charities if we let our eyes and social circles decide who gets our spare $5.
I’ve been sharing about Bisan for a few years as long as I’ve met her, here on Tumblr. Since then, she’s married and is now having her first baby! 🍼
This GFM is for gathering funds for Bisan and her baby. I’m still not on social media like I used to be, but I’ll be sharing this campaign when I’m on.
Bisan and her family have been verified by 90-ghost, but many of their blogs and posts have been deleted, per usually with Pal/Gz campaigns.
Please give what you can, and thank you for sharing this post!
Bisan has spent the last three years helping keep her family alive during the br… Ceri L needs your support for Donate To Help Bisan An
the fuck is wrong with you people like i actually never said any of this you’re up here and you need to be allll the way down there. relax. this post is about calling 2 lesbians anything other than that bc all these words have quickly started to become a synonym for lesbian and no one wants to actually just say lesbian for a person who is a lesbian. Jesus Christ
See, @hussyknee when you don't view an extremely marginalized group as actual people, you see some of them say something you found mean and project it onto the entire group while foaming at the mouth.
And before you try and say to yourself that you do see lesbians as diverse multidimensional humans, ask yourself why you legit treated us all as a hivemind.
Lesbians disagree amongst ourselves all the fucking time. We can't "make up" our [collective] "damn minds" because we don't have One, there's actually millions of us. Some of whom might even disagree with me that you're a raging lesbophobe.
the zendaya thing isnt even a new phenomenon by any means!! the article mentions margot robbie wearing the taj mahal diamond as well, and in addition to that i also want to remind people that diljit dosanjh's request to wear the patiala necklace for the 2025 met gala was denied by cartier because they said it was in a museum and could not be loaned. however they had no issues at all loaning it to emma chamberlain, a white woman, for the 2022 met gala, while they turned down the request of a punjabi man who wanted it to honor his heritage.
this behavior is nothing new. the global south and everything in it - the people, the culture, our heritage - is seen as nothing more than a decoration or commodity to colonizers. i don't even need to bring up the koh i noor or the entire british museum; these examples are recent and egregious enough on their own.
of course this is not to imply that any of the people involved here - zendaya, margot robbie, or emma chamberlain - had any sort of malicious intentions. but the ignorance is just as bad in my opinion. the ignorance is just as harmful, if not more. because it means we are not even an afterthought. it means that the real people and histories and heritages of the global south do not even register when these people are putting together looks for their movie premiers and met gala appearances. everything is just reduced down to a shiny piece of jewelry whose history they need not bother with. it's just a continued reminder of the way colonization affects us all even long after independence, of how barely-healed wounds keep being reopened even decades later. even now, we are being denied connections to our histories and heritages while they are freely being given out to those that have nothing to do with it and don't care for it. and i'm sick of it.
Amal's tent was torn into by shrapnel and she barely fled with her life.
I'm in despair that we weren't able to raise enough for her -a malnourished new mother, with an incredibly painful kidney stone disease- to rent an apartment so that she may recover with her husband and children.
Now even the tent was taken from her. She is in severe pain and is scared. Please, please consider pitching in if you can and sharing if you can't.
Every bit goes toward pain management, shelter, and feeding her new baby Mina, who is malnourished as well due to her mother's poor health.
hi there <3 i have an autoimmune disease (sjogren’s) that makes migraines and joint pain and inflammation really bad and affects my mobility, currently pretty sick and in treatment and recovery, even $1 will go a long way <3 c4$h4pp v3nm0 p4yp4l k0fi
Now that everyone is discussing Nolan's Odyssey movie, I feel like it's a good time to let non-Italians know that the production dumped plastic props into the Italian sea. Weirdly enough I could not find any article in English about it but it's a fucking problem nonetheless.
I might translate this article later today. This one was the most complete one, even in Italian news it's not talked about that much.
Non è la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe però già impegnata a bonificare i
They dumped plastic skeletons in environmentally protected areas, against the literal contracts they had to sign to get the permits to film in environmentally protected areas. Like they not only did a bad ecological thing that freaked out some divers, they literally broke environmental protection laws and their contract with the Italian government
