⤑ i’m currently obsessed with heated rivalry, clark kent, pride & prejudice (2005), bridgerton, anthony boyle, cillian murphy, austin butler, elvis presley, cmat, hozier, fontaines dc, kneecap, tv girl, apollo, my cats, movies, psychology, my kindle, etc.
⤑ dni/dnf if you are a minor, racist, ableist, a terf, a zionist, homophobic, transphobic, fatphobic, xenophobic, islamaphobic, antisemitic, misogynistic, a Trump supporter, etc.
⤑ if my requests are open, please make sure to read the rules before sending an ask :)
"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.
Say you break your ankle. You could know everything there is to know intellectually about the injury. Even with this vast knowledge, you will still experience physical pain.
Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.
That is to say: you are not a bad, lazy, or selfish person for struggling, even if you know why you are struggling.
the vibes for july, for people like me who like to fill out their planners with this stuff ahead of time.
mars on uranus in gemini, july 3. this is slightly ominous and can point to accidents and unexpected violence, but i hope it also shows people that the power lies with the masses and not the elite.
neptune rx in aries, july 7. neptune's retrogrades no longer take it back into pisces. this is all aries.as with the other outer planets, the broader retrograde periods are not super eventful, but the few days around the station can be full of illusions, deceit, and manipulation, so proceed cautiously.
uranus sextile neptune, july 15. the sextile has been noticeable for certain folks for ages already but is exact on the 15th. it is a union of two sorts of ethereal; the fog of shamanic trance + the sudden clarity of god downloading info into your brain directly. but this is one of those more-global-than-personal things; perhaps a new widespread spiritual movement or awakening, even if it goes without a name.
uranus trine pluto, july 17. like the above sextile, this has been ongoing and simply perfects at this time. but this is more of a tower (from tarot) sort of energy. institutions will for sure be crumbled around this time; hopefully the right ones, leaving whatever serves a good purpose steady on its foundation.
jupiter trine neptune and opposite pluto and sextile uranus, july 20. the outer planets move into an actually major alignment, all together, and involving less-geopolitical yet very benevolent jupiter. in spite of the way outer planets are frequently construed as malefics, this should be a harbinger of positive developments on the global front.
mercury direct in cancer, july 23. finally a likely chaotic mercury retrograde wraps up. the rest of july may feature some residual weirdness but at least it should start easing off and it will be more stable if you want to enact plans or sign forms etc.
neptune sextile pluto, july 23. this should be considered in connection to the other outer planet aspects aforementioned and it is long and ongoing, over months really. but it perfects on this day and may well correspond with some major world event. hopefully a good one, but i suspect it will be unclear to the average every day peasants what exactly it's about. even so, it brings about the end of an era and dawning of a new one.
saturn rx in aries, july 26. it probably really feels like things are stuck, but this wall of an obstacle has a purpose and when you look back later you will probably be grateful that you were not permitted to rush ahead.
Transiting Jupiter enters Leo (pre-retrograde zone)
Tuesday, June 30 - Thursday, September 17, 2026
I’ve been looking forward to this - Jupiter moving through Leo has provided me with some joyous, relaxed times; when even the dire things that happened ended up happily ever after. Here’s a list of those past dates:
July 2014 - August 2015
August 2002 - August 2003
August 1990 -September 1991
Astrology has two “go big or go home” indicators: Jupiter, and Leo. Putting them together gives us over-the-top energy. We need to try to roll with it - surf on it - whatever!
Remember that Jupiter is the planet that wants us to “make the most of it;” according to astrologers Douglas Bloch and Demetra George (in Astrology for Yourself), transiting Jupiter gives us “the opportunity to expand our horizons and experience abundance.” No false modesty or inauthenticity allowed; it’s time to shine, dammit.
The following dates are when certain aspects become exact.
July 1 - Jupiter begins with a square to Chiron/Taurus. This is actually their third and final instance of squaring off (sorry!), with nos. one and two occurring last November and December. We’ve become aware of something pretty basic within us, that needs healing - in a sort of “triumphing against all odds” kind of way. Later this year, these two will be trine (Chiron having moved back into Aries); we can expect to make some real creative progress then.
July 20-21 - maybe the pivotal 2026 event: in the space of about 28 hours, Jupiter/Leo will be trine Neptune Rx/Aries, opposite Pluto Rx/Aquarius, and sextile Uranus/Gemini. Intense. And since it’s expansive Jupiter, we can’t really pinpoint with accuracy - there’s always a lot of sprawl. It’s more likely to affect the Wider World than a mere individual, but if you have any placements at around 4+° of a sign, well, hoo boy. I think we’ll all become aware of POSSIBILITIES; it’s up to us to pursue them. (None of these aspects will repeat themselves; they’re all “one and done” as I like to call them).
August 31 - on this day, Jupiter is trine Saturn, the first of three total we can expect. Just the most wonderful vibes, which we all can access. In The Book of Fire, astrologer Steven Forrest calls the successful interaction between these two, “self-respect; a sense that you are really doing something meaningful with your life; genuine, lasting accomplishment.” As it’s the first of three trines (and happens outside of Jupiter’s retrograde zone), it’s more inspirational in nature. We’ll get into the harder work (c’mon, it’s still Saturn) later on in 2027.
I feel like to really get this circulating as it should, we need it superimposed over the picture of the turkey going in the fridge. (I can't do it I'm on my phone.)
the moon in its exaltation in taurus should always be your monthly lunar reminder to rest, recover, and nourish. this month, remember there are many kinds of rest that you need - not just sleeping. don't skimp on any of them.
