Season 2 of apothecary diaries just suddenly makes you go like. What. What do you mean Maomao got kidnapped AGAIN. What do you mean SHE HAS A BROTHER WEâVE NEVER HEARD OF BEFORE?
"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.
1) do this even if you're under 40. seriously. I definitely should have been doing something like this for years and I only turned 40 a month and a half ago
2) if you're like me just now trying this going "oh god i've only done 15 and i think my hands are cramping" start lower than 30 and increase by 5 once whatever number you're doing no longer makes your hand cramp up. I can manage about 15 per exercise at the moment.
Apothecary Diaries is so funny. The price of rare medicinal ingredients has skyrocketed. Why? Because word that high ranking official Jinshi is looking for them got out so all the sycophants are buying them up to offer as gifts for currying favor. Why is Jinshi interested in rare medicinal ingredients? Because he needs something to motivate the apothecary heâs obsessed with.
The way Maomao exercises what power she can is fascinating. Especially because itâs almost always in service of someone else. She holds back on saying everything sheâs deduced to protect the lives of servants who are considered expendable. She refers people she helps to her father to try and get him enough business to sustain himself. She threatens ladies in waiting into doing a better job protecting their mistress. She shields a young concubine from eating dangerous foods. She tries to arrange for her older sisters to be bought out by good men who will make them happy.
Elementary is wild for many things. One of them being how Watson deals with finding out Sherlock has a new apprentice with the grace and emotional intelligence the show has spent so long establishing while also having complicated feelings on the matter. Appreciate the commitment to her character instead of going in for a full jealousy arc.
Because the jealousy arc belongs to Sherlockâs math expert lmao. Who finds out Sherlock has been seeing other math experts and crashes out a little. Who has made his moniker in the online math community an anagram of Sherlockâs name as a loving homage.
sorry about the affair Mr. Math Expert. Hope you find another detective who appreciates you
Saw Supergirl. It was a fun movie and I did really like some of the things they did, but I was ultimately disappointed. It did not live up to my expectations and I donât think it lived up to the bar Superman set. (Spoilers under cut)
Some things I liked:
Portrayal of Clark as a real light in Karaâs life but one she isnât sure she wants to let in after everything thatâs happened to her. The flashback of Clark welcoming her to earth was nice.
Scene that is very reminiscent of Clark shielding the little girl with his back. Nice parallels
The use of different suns. Seeing her between different levels of power based on geography was a really cool mechanic
The stark difference between how Kara and Clark react to pain. Kara grew up under a red sun. Sheâs used to pain so when she parties on red sun planets and gets into bar fights it isnât the shock to her system that it is for Clark who grew up under a yellow sun. Clark is used to being strong, nearly invincible. Kara is used to be normal, vulnerable.
I appreciate that theyâre showing Supergirl as a character with a much more complicated moral compass than Superman but still resting faith in her goodness.
Things I didnât like
The movie very heavily leaned on the kidnapping and rape of young girls to set stakes without ever emotionally exploring any of it. The girls are treated by the movie no different than a civilian fleeing the scene of superhero vs supervillain fight that broke out near them. Supergirl also doesnât seem to see this as any different. Even the civilians donât seem emotionally engaged in the depth of the crime the movie has used for stakes. The movie is not willing to even use the word rape. If your movie is unwilling to engage with the sexual assault of children on any emotional level for any characters involved, maybe donât use it as your big âarenât these guys so bad! They must be stoppedâ stakes. Child sexual assault is not the same as a civilian running from an alien invasion. It should not carry the same emotional stakes and emotional impact on the heroes.
Lobo could honestly be cut from that movie and nothing would change. They had a chance to use him to try to push Kara on some of her darker thoughts and actions and have some sort of reaction or dialogue about it. They donât. He could really be gone.
I think weâre meant to believe this is Supergirlâs first time killing someone??? Which like, no way. There is just no way Supergirl has never killed someone before and have that be her reaction. I really hope we reveal somewhere sheâs killed before because otherwise this is baffling. This is not someone pushed to brink or anything. Again, the movie never establishes she really finds the child sexual assault any big crime. It doesnât drive her into a rage or really fill her with any great moral indignation. She seems to find it more just distasteful? Itâs a move in the movie that if sheâs killed before I think fits but is bizarre if not.
Okay but how funny of a fanfic AU would it be if the Northern Greybeards from HoTD somehow got accidentally transported to late GoT world. âWe have come to die for the dragon queen. Youâll do.â
No show did it like Agents of Shield. Episode 1, Coulson does his best to talk down a man having a mental health crisis, proclaiming with every shred of desperation and his own sense of self âIt matters who I am!â The show refuses to make Mike another nameless victim, immediately setting it aside from large scale plotlines the avengers deal with. And as Mike screams at Coulson, blaming the agent in front of him for every way the government has hung him out to dry, that itâs not enough to be just him anymore in a word of gods and monsters, Coulson just says softly âI knowâ
No one did it like agents of shield. No one broke the MCU down into the small stories like it did.
Watched a youtube video essay once that claimed the drop in quality in the mcu is because the heroes live in an âempty world.â Like the civilians are set dressing or props if weâre being generous but theyâre always conveniently out of the way during the big battles and donât ever really interact with the heroes.
I canât remember the specific points the video made or the examples they used but some of the examples I can think of of heroes in a not empty world are the bridge scene in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man, the train scene in Spider-Man 2, the boat scene in the Dark Knight, the old man refusing to kneel to Loki in The Avengers, the pencil pusher shield agent who refused to launch Project Insight because of âCaptainâs Ordersâ in CATW, and a bunch of others.
Thatâs part of the reason why I love legacy characters like Miles Morales, Kate Bishop, and Kamala Khan as well. These are people who have grown up in a world of gods and monsters and super soldiers and they chose to take that as inspiration to do their part in making the world a better place.
Most of these kind of characters are empowered by seeing these later than life figures (like in lord of the rings), but then you have people who feel powerless in the wake of all this, which is probably the more common reaction both in fiction and in real life. Itâs easy to give in to despair and hopelessness when faced against something so vast and bigger than yourself. But then you have people like Coulson who see their nothingness and run with the idea of âif nothing matters then everything I do matters.â Because if there is no big picture, or if you have no control over the big picture, then what you do have control over is the small moments. The everyday opportunities to be kind, to make someoneâs day a little brighter, to save just one person.
What can one powerless person do in the face of gods and monsters and miracles? In the face of crushing and all consuming hopelessness? They can be kind. They can reach out. Small things that might not have any effect on the whole big grand scheme. Youâre not curing cancer or saving the world. Youâre talking to a man on a ledge and telling him that heâs not alone. You find a young, trouble making woman with great potential and you give her a home, a family, and purpose. You make your small corner of the world a little bit better and that is enough to be a hero. Coulson is an agent of SHIELD and that means something. Not because of the organization itself, but because of what Coulson believes SHIELD is supposed to b, a force for good. So Coulson and people like him are going to be a force for good even if nobody else ever sees the good that they do.
a number of people seem to be interpreting this post as being about blocking people for silly petty reasons That is not my intention. This is a specifically pro-tofu post And it is serious to me. fuck you if you hate tofu
demisexuality can be so hard to explain because itâs misconstrued as you just wanting to trust the other person before you have sex with them. and I get why the misconception happens. But demisexuality differs in that there isnât sexual attraction at all before that bond forms.
I think what people have difficulty with is the idea that there are people out there who arenât experiencing sexual attraction at all until a certain point, if ever, because weâre taught that sex, libido, and sexual attraction are all the same, both in and out of queer spaces.
And when youâre learning about asexuality and demisexuality, you may learn that people have romantic and aesthetic attraction separately from sexual attraction, and that sexual and romantic attraction arenât necessarily intertwined, and that may challenge your worldview on sex.
But âI trust you enough to have sex with youâ isnât the same as âIâm not sexually attracted to anyone but you, and the reason Iâm sexually attracted to you now after weâve established this close bond is literally because of the bond of trust weâve been able to formâ.
Itâs easy to see how those can get conflated. On the surface, if youâre unfamiliar with asexuality, they may sound the same. But itâs important to acknowledge the difference between âno sex until I trust youâ and âno sexual attraction unless I trust you and maybe not even thenâ.
Demisexuality is housed under the asexuality spectrum. Itâs part of the gray area between being allosexual and asexual. Itâs part of why the definition for asexuality includes âlittle to no sexual attractionâ. Itâs a mostly asexual experience with an asterisk.
While being demisexual may have impacts on a persons sexual activity, even demisexuals have a varied relationship to the act of participating in sex. Libido and sexual attraction are not always intertwined either, which can make telling the difference tricky.
I think of sexual attraction as libido that has a compass. Since I rarely ever experience sexual attraction, but do have libido, itâs noticeable for me when that libido actually has a direction to go, rather than being a floating, nebulous, independent thing.
Remember, not everyone is demisexual. Thereâs a difference between waiting to have sex and not having sexual attraction at all until a certain point. This also inherently ties demisexuality to romantic attraction and relationships, and not all demisexuals are alloromantic.
But if you read what demisexuality is and think âeveryone is like thatâ or âthatâs just being a womanâ, you either 1) are demisexual 2) donât understand what it is or 3) both. And itâs okay to not know. Just as long as youâre willing to try to learn.
I wish I was as eloquent as you OP many years ago when people were constantly clowning on demisexuality. I was always nervous about reblogging demisexual positive posts because of how angry people got at them. It was absolutely ridiculous
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