"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.
yall ever think about writing but it is literally the words you’d put on paper? just sitting hanging out with friends and your internal monologue has turned into your writing voice and it’s in the middle of the nastiest smut scene or the most gut-wrenching dialogue you could imagine but you’re finally putting the words together for it?
A witch puts a spell on a girl, a sleeping spell that promises the girl shall wake through true love’s kiss. Men come and kiss her. She slumbers. Women come and press their lips to hers, but still she sleeps. Many years past, and the girl remains still. One bright morning, a lost little boy finds her resting spot and clears the dust and grime from her face. He offers her a kiss on her forehead, and her eyes flutter open. She never feels romantic love for a man nor a woman, and she cares for the boy until the day she dies.
A young woman is imprisoned in a castle by a monstrously formed prince. The servants of the castle hope for them to fall in love, and when the spell is broken they assume their prayers have been answered. They are all surprised, but nonetheless pleased, when it is revealed to them that the young woman and prince are the truest of friends, and nothing more.
They say the kingdom is ruled by an evil queen, a woman who is incapable of loving. She is unmarried, she has no consorts, and she wishes for no partner. She is the wretched queen, the heartless queen. She must hate her daughter, for her daughter is beautiful, and women are incapable of liking another woman who’s prettier than themselves. It must be for this reason that the princess was sent away, not for how she was attacked by a man in the woods. They say the kingdom is ruled by an evil queen because she cannot love. The queen loves her daughter, and that is enough for them both.
There lives a prince who is forced to choose a bride at the ball. He meets many beautiful women, but find none which he loves. He spies one in a gorgeous gown and wonder in her eyes, and he dances with her all night long. The kingdom is sure he has found his bride. When the clock strikes midnight he tells her how he will never love a woman, or a man, in the way he is expected to. The beautiful woman smiles and tells him she expects nothing from him. The next morning the prince and the beautiful woman are missing, having run off together to see the world. They leave their shoes behind in their haste.
Many kinds of love exist. It doesn’t all have to be romantic.
You're afraid to write because you care too much about your craft. Not because you suck.
You want it to be perfect. Worthy. You're scared it won't be good enough. But the thing is, everything you write is worthy if you write it with heart.
That fear doesn't make you a fraud, or lazy. It makes you a perfectionist who doesn't write as much as they should because their fear is choking them. Your writing will never be perfect—nothing ever is.
So stop waiting for the perfect moment and go pour your heart out. Unleash your wild—and slightly disturbing—imagination onto those pages. Go create magic that only you can make.
GO WRITE THE THING YOU KEEP THINKING ABOUT DAY AND NIGHT. And make sure you write it for yourself before anyone else!
Anyway heres a list of things I think solarpunk is really good for:
Another angle for green movements - a lot of green movements have been skewed into ecofascism, dieting and various other capitalist interests. We risk this too, but with work, this is a path those who seek to live alongside the earth without falling into a cult or buying a bunch of crap.
Getting a hobby- I've seen so much wonderful textile work, eco- gardening and people developing skills - particularly during events like action week. For a world so focused on consumption, this is lifechanging. I'm learning hobby electronics and now I can fix my friends phones. That is tangible and immediate change. Graffiti and sewing go hand in hand here.
Gathering social groups and communities of likeminded folks - ALL OVER THE WORLD. The support network it creates makes forming structured movemements easier. Punks have known this since forever. Small music venues, library book clubs, and political groups all because of random groupchats. [I'll admit, forming structure should become a priority - with WORK, TIME and TRUST, it's happening.]
The mission of solarpunk as a literary subgenre is to show what is possible. Its aligned with science fiction in this respect. Science fiction inspires so much in the world, and solarpunk will do the same.
You actually cannot skip to being good at a creative endeavour that you haven't put much practice into. You cannot trick your way out of the 'knows that your work is not what you want it to be but don't know how to improve it' stage by planning or reading or talking about it really really hard. At some point you just have to craft through it until your brain finds it's own unique way back to the 'everything I make slaps' stage and be prepared to start the cycle all over again. You just have to make that project you're excited about slightly less good than you want it to be. (Says this standing in a pool of blood and covered in blood and also coughing up a little blood)
I do feel like half the writing discourse boils down to this, as if you can somehow outline-edit-15 draft your way into being a good writer, instead of just sitting down and writing.
I've seen people trying to twist the famous many pots story into somehow meaning you should spend years doing endless drafts of the same story.
Just to avoid accepting that your earlier stuff is going to be beginner level work.
You wanna be a better writer? Write more. Write something new, finish it and then start something new. Repeat.
Solarpunk has failed. It's time for the Solar Gothic. Show me an environmentally conscious world that is haunted by its past; where its failures still intrude upon the present. Where the characters live in the shadow of a decadent but much more materially wealthy past whose crumbling edifices mock them with the waste and the missed opportunities they represent. Show me characters who remember the promise of modernity, the story of ever-growing progress, and either lament that it is not for them or continue to cling to it like madmen. Show me a world that's trapped, claustrophobically, in an anthropocene that they are only gradually learning to manage, and where all former illusions of mastery or permanence have been dispelled.
A little more Fall of the Black Masks, for @ajbrooks-writes, who was kind enough to ask <3 This is a little excerpt from a scene where Ragnar has to tell Qays that his daughter, Mila, has been taken by the Black Masks.
Perhaps that could have been the end of him, were Qays a different man. But the physician was not in the business of taking lives. He pushed himself off of the warrior with a guttural yell that echoed through the hall, and a hushed silence fell across the space. All attention turned to Qays as he began pace back and forth in the room, wild eyes and shaking hands. Hands which, for many years, had been devoted to healing, and which were now all too ready to devote themselves to untold violence, if it meant her return. “Fool!” he strained, a scream held back by a thin and fragile cord. “Fool!”
Ragnar rose to his feet unsteadily, watching the man warily. It seemed at any moment he would explode, like an injured beast that might strike you down in his anguish. Ragnar could well understand what monster raced through Qays’s veins in that moment, for he, too, had suffered this rage - it came to him like an old friend of whom memories often resurfaced, but never quite like that first time, when he'd first been given the news. And now...
It's happened again.
But this was different. Mila was alive, and there was time yet to save her.
“I swear to you,” Ragnar coughed, rubbing his sore throat. “I will bring her back to you, or perish trying.”
“Bring her back,” Qays growled, turning on him like a lion upon his prey. “Fine words, warrior, when you could not even keep her! Bring her back? Do you know what the Black Masks do to the women they steal? Do you?!"
Ragnar felt his fury thrumming through his neck, on the bruises that now formed where moments ago Qays had chosen mercy. "If anything happens to my child, Ragnar, you needn't worry about the Punisher, for I will be your death.” The man seemed to tower over him, all gentleness swept from his manner. His eyes had turned dark, his whole body quivering under the strain of his rage.
“I swear it,” Ragnar repeated, his wretched lungs grasping for air still. He backed towards the door, his hand searching for the hilt of a sword that was no longer at his side. It was his fault; he knew they were looking for her. It was he who had offered to protect her, he who had allowed himself to be distracted, he who had lost that which was most precious to Qays. His remorse was well-placed, for the blame was solely his, and no one else's. This time, too.
He shook his head, as if to clear away any uncertainty which pervaded his mind, and met her father's eyes, even as it shamed him to do so. He poured all of his conviction into the words: “I swear I will find her, and bring her back to you.”
He felt Qays's presence behind him, every step of the way back to the house, and though the man was not there, Ragnar knew that he would make good on his promise should any misfortune befall Mila.
But it was not concern for his own life that spurred Ragnar on. It was the thought - a creeping, silent thought that existed only in the vague corners of his mind, so that even he did not realize it - that perhaps he could save Mila where he couldn't save his wife.
That perhaps this time - this time, he would not be too late.
This time.
I won't be resurrecting the tag list because most of the blogs there have disappeared after so many years, but I may be moving these posts to their own blog to make it easier; instead of a tag list, anyone interested will just be able to follow the blog. Will update when that's ready to go.
“You write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is — Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. […] Perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.”
— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Last Interview and Other Conversations
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