I work in a library maker space - so the public comes in with their projects and we help them use our tools and machines (printers, cricuts, sublimation, sewing machines, laser engraver, ect) to turn their projects into reality.
Now realistically we're not sitting down with them like a designer and creating something for hours for them, our job is to get them started, teach them the equipment and let them loose/jump in when they need help.
Most people usually pick it up just fine, sometimes we run into an issue with a file that's too small - like a postage stamp size jpg that they want to turn into a poster. Usually explaining to them why it won't work goes pretty well.
Enter Chat-motherfucking-GPT
I've now had library patrons come in with the most hot fucking garbage files, I mean like literally unusable crunchy jpg, generated .stl files that turn to spaghetti every time. And when you tell these people "Hey did you AI generate this?" They get weirdly defensive. Don't get me wrong some people take it well and realize chat gpt/ai aren't worth using.
Some people however - start gushing about how "Oh but its so good, its such a time saver! I could never make something like this." And yeah maybe that's true, maybe its not - but you didn't even try. Now I'm stuck remaking it for about four times as long as it would have originally taken - and it still looks eh-to-shit at best. Other people get pissed because "Don't you know I'm a mom, I don't have time for this I'm busy!" and again - yeah I get it - but now you fed your idea (along with the image of your kids faces) to a machine with no accountability, that steals my fucking art, and you want me to fix what the "time saver" fucked up.
I fucking promise you - whatever ChatGPT makes - we could have helped you make it better, without feeding your faces/information to it - with far less damage to the environment and taught you a new skill/hobby in the process.
Drop the AI - pick up a brush/crochet hook/pen.
a little kid came up to the desk (it came up to his like, collarbone) and very seriously asked me about baby name books, because he wanted to help name his new sibling. i guided him to the shelf (there were only two book of names) and pointed out the differences between them, and after some serious contemplation he went, âI think I should take both, just in case.â So I gave him both and he thanked me and went on his way.
And I went back to my desk and screamed into my arm for like 45 years because HE WAS SO FUCKING ADORABLE AAAAA
i love when little kids come to the reference desk alone because they want to be perceived as an adult and so they come up to you and very seriously inquire âWhere are your books about dolphins? ĂČ__Ăłâ
and of course you have to very seriously show them your collection of dolphin books while they nod carefully at your explanations and itâs SO CUTE!!! THEYâRE SO CUTE AAAH
a kid came up to me to enquire about books on queen victoria, so I promptly guided him to the childrenâs history section, and we had a lovely chat flicking through horrible histories books, when I asked him what does he like about history. he grinned, and with a smooth, brilliant smile he said âMy favourite thing about old times is torture.â
One time I had a dad come in with his ~10 year old kid and go âHi, weâre looking for, umâŠâ at which point he trailed off and looked expectantly at the kid the way parents usually do when they canât remember which Percy Jackson book comes next, but instead the kid looked up at me and very brightly and firmly announced, âThe Federalist Papers!â
"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 âintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.â Crucially, he added that this is ânot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsâ but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationâs 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 âmeet your students where they areâ for so long that she has begun to feel âlike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.â
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 assessmentâs own language, they likely âcannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.â 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 Austinâs McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantâs smartphone â whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision â 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 Japanâs 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 âkept losing trackâ 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 âYour Brain on ChatGPT.â They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays â one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing â 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 âconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.â 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 âcognitive debtâ for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainâs 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 studentâs mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not âfree students up for higher-order work.â 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 Kâ12 schooling. Whatever the standardsâ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling âevidenceâ 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 âfinding the main ideaâ 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 âsevere or very severe.â
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that âthinking is becoming a luxury good.â 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 âdeep workâ 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 sourceâs claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into âthis is goodâ and âmaybe add more detailsâ 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.
Iâm afraid I donât 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? Kâ12 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 âstudents will adapt.â 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 studentsâ sentences before theyâve 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."
â Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canât Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I want to see more polyamory pride this pride month i'm serious. Stop being weird about people with multiple partners polyamory is awesome and beautiful and queer
"You're not allowed to complain about me doing x behavior because it's not a form of systemic discrimination." Okay what if I told you that there are things in the world that are bad besides systemic discrimination. What if I told you that while x behavior may not be systemic discrimination, it is still asshole behavior. It's still antisocial (opposite of prosocial). It still makes the world worse. It's still makes you a tar pit.
"Everyone should just do whatever they want as long as it's not systemic discrimination against marginalized people" is an abysmally low bar and I actually do think humans are capable of more. I actually do believe we can have a world where we are kind to each other and care for each other. I am going to hold people to a higher standard and say so when people aren't meeting it. I would like us not to be tar pits.
we as a society have GOT to accept that it is okay if we get blocked. you do not have the right to interact with every single person on the internet. "but then i can't interact with their content" yes that is the point "but i didn't do anything" no one owes you an explanation and you don't have to have "done something" to be blocked. let it go
Photo of a young MÄori woman with her baby on her back. The woman is wearing a kahu kiwi (kiwi feather cloak) and she has a tÄ moko facial tattoo; Aotearoa (New Zealand), late 19th century.
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 Ăš la prima volta che la produzione solleva un vespaio in Sicilia. A Lipari una squadra di sub sarebbe perĂČ giĂ 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
This is the italian insider article (the one that can't be opened without disabling ad blockers)
Concerns about prop disposal as filming on new Nolan film comes to a close
INSIDER NEWSDESK | 3 September 2025
Lipari was chosen for the scene where Odysseus encounters the Sirens
SICILY - First it made headlines for its grandeur, and now the film The Odyssey by Christopher Nolan, shot on the island of Lipari, is sparking controversy due to the productionâs inappropriate decisions regarding the disposal of certain props.
The issue concerns plastic skeletons and other props that were found by some divers on the seabed of the stunning waters surrounding the island, part of the Aeolian archipelago. At depths of at least 18 meters, installations and props were discovered that risk damaging a natural marine habitat that is under protection, writes Il Fatto Quotidiano.
The incident was reported by Giusi Savarino, the regional environmental councillor, who received the report from the Lipari Harbor Masterâs Office and has requested the intervention of ARPA (the Regional Environmental Protection Agency) to investigate possible harm to marine species in the Pietra del Bagno area.
âAlong with the permit (environmental impact assessment),â said Councillor Savarino, âwe also issued precise rules and guidelines to protect the area from an environmental standpoint. The discoveries made in recent days are a cause for serious concern, and for this reason, we will be intervening with ARPA to determine the possible impact of these materials on the habitat and marine species in this area of significant natural value.
âWe are happy to host international film projects and are always willing to support these productions,â he continued, âbut no one should think they can take advantage of our hospitality by disrespecting our natural treasures.â
In the letter sent to ARPA, the Environmental Councillor requested an urgent inspection and monitoring of the seabed at Pietra del Bagno, along with a technical assessment to determine any damage to the marine ecosystem.
Filming took place in April and concluded at the end of the month, involving major Hollywood stars: Matt Damon, Tom Holland, Anne Hathaway, Zendaya, and Charlize Theron in a film that tells the story of Odysseus, set to be released in July 2026. Lipari was chosen for its beauty, to depict the scene where Odysseus (played by Matt Damon) encounters the Sirens.
But the same beauty that led to its selection was not preserved by the production, which may now face criminal consequences for what happened. The damage comes three years after the devastating fire that destroyed much of Stromboliâs Mediterranean scrubland, caused by another film crew shooting a movie about firefighters starring Ambra Angiolini. That crew had lit a âcontrolledâ fire which then got out of hand.
Nonetheless, the show went on, and the series aired despite protests from the residents of Stromboli. Now this new incident reignites the debate around film and TV productions that choose Mediterranean gems as filming locations but fail to respect the rules that protect these beautiful places.
More Italian sources here (you can use your browser translator to translate them for you):
Facebook video posted by the Regional Councillor of Sicily mentioned in all the articles (I can translate it for people if they want although what she says is summed up in the caption)
Rai News (Rai is the national broadcasting service in Italy, like BBC for the UK so pretty trustworthy)
La Repubblica (possibly the most important Italian newspaper, the article is behind a paywall)
Quotidiano Nazionale (National Newspaper)
Lascimmiapensa (this is an independent news website for entertainment)
