Please don't let money decide whether my mother gets a chance at treatment.
Every day her condition grows worse, and we are left feeling helpless because we are missing just $500 to pay for the care she urgently needs.
There is nothing more painful than watching your mother suffer while knowing the treatment exists, but being unable to reach it because you cannot afford it.
Please don't pass by our plea in silence. If you are able to help, this is the moment my mother needs your compassion the most.
Just 10 people giving $50 each would cover what we still need. Your donation today could give my mother a real chance to receive the treatment she has been waiting for.
Ahmed's family is holding on to hope, but time is running out.
If you can help, please donate now.
Every contribution could bring their mother closer to the treatment she needs.
Help My Mother Get Urgent Medical Treatment Abroad
Doctors have warned that delaying their mother's treatment increases the risk to her life, Time is running out, and her family is still trying to raise the cost of her treatment.
Donate now, your support could help her receive the care she urgently needs
jkr is literally posting upskirt photos to her social media. when will it finally get through to harry potter fans that their support makes her feel confident and correct enough to do things like this
If the holocaust denialism SOMEHOW wasn't enough for you to shut up about your favourite kids book as an adult; JK Rowling just committed a sex crime IRL against a transgender woman.
i know it's hard. but i so firmly believe the strongest antidote to loneliness is reaching out first. and continuing to reach out. again and again and again. excise any scrap of shame you hold about being the person who texts first or pitches the plan or asks to get lunch. everyone is tired and busy and struggling. and afraid of feeling unwanted and unimportant. don't let the people you love feel that way. reach out first. don't be a ghost in your own life.
last post is losing traction so remaking once again, sister is still unemployed and needs help making ends meet I got paid a short check for having to miss work because of the crazy ass weather last week and we've both got bills due. please share and help if you can 💫
Hey I just got charged a $210 credit card re-payment and practically all of my money is gone and I have other bills due tomorrow and Friday. Please please help if you can.
are people talking about the labor conditions at Taylor Farms yet? like the fact they use enslaved prisoners in their facilities?
are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?
are people demanding to see the conditions in this place that keeps making us sick? why are the enslaved workers not having the time to use the bathroom or to rest when ill? very few people would shit in front of their coworkers given any choice at all.
our last post died. like really bad so I’m making a new one
my gf and I are a black wlw couple who are trying to make it to mid August when my job starts and we need help until then. my gf needs money for her estrogen, I need money for my psych meds, and we need groceries to feed an 8 person household + a cat, and our phone bill
because of the heatwave and following storms, we haven’t been able to go out to the food bank, and while we no longer live in a food desert, the car has been in the shop for about a month now so it’s basically just been cup noodles since june, but we’ve run out.
I get that things are hard for everyone, and I hate having to make this post but we really have no other options rn as my gfs potential clients are leaving her on read and my job doesn’t start for another month.
updates: my gf has acquired her estrogen and the phone bill has been paid! however.. we still have no food because we had to deal with those two first, and the majority of our power is out because idk fuck us
we’re now basically back at square one and we still need help, but things seem a bit more survivable now.
i wish we were able to talk about women's rights without someone mentioning how much they do or don't want to have sex with them. i don't care if you're a lesbian Stop finding worth in women purely from their perceived attractiveness
"I think women should not be expected to shave for societal respect / to avoid discrimination" "yeah🤤 i love bush" ok well that's not what we're talking about is it.
i hate how many posts about trans women deserving respect always devolve into "I love girldick" or "trans rights but I don't want to date a trans person" because that's entirely unrelated to the topic at hand. you should not respond to feminism with "YESSS I loveeee you because I see you as nothing but a sex object" you people sound like other men I get stuck talking with that end up saying "free the nipple so I can see boobies in public" and thinking they're feminists. why can't we just respect women regardless of your attraction to them or not. why does it need to be brought up in every conversation regarding their rights
the year is 2035. the new beauty standard is for women to cut their ears off, as ears are a masculine trait which make the face look too big and hearing isnt necessary as it doesnt align with being demure. evil feminists say perhaps this is unnecessary and ears are natural. women are agressively proclaiming they are cutting their ears off due to sensory issues
"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.
I am Jaafar from Gaza. I am currently in northern Gaza, and we have not yet been displaced to the south. Things are very difficult here — the cost of moving to the south is $1,000, and a single tent also costs $1,000, if we can even find a place in southern Gaza. The south is overcrowded, and renting a plot of land costs $1,000 per month, or even more depending on the area. 🙂😢
I started a donation campaign in the middle of the war and received good support, but due to personal circumstances, I recently created a new link, and unfortunately, I have only received a small amount of donations so far. 😓💔 I appeal to you to help me with my new campaign and donate whatever you can 🥺😭. Every amount you give will save the lives of my family and me and may help us cover the cost of moving to southern Gaza! 😓 Thank you, and I pray that God blesses you and provides for you 🧡🫂
Here is the donation link ⬇️**
Hello, my name is Elizabeth Barnes and I am a US citizen organizing this campaign on behalf of my friend Jaafar, who is raising funds to sup
Hello, I'm Lama... My husband, Mohammed, is 30 years old. I want to ask for your help for my husband. Please support him and share his story so that it reaches everyone.🙏
My husband, Mohammed, has suffered from numerous health problems for 12 years, and the situation has worsened during the war due to shortages of medicine and healthy food. He urgently needs surgery and medication.😔
Hello, I'm Lama from Gaza, I'm 24 years old, and my husband Mohammed is 30 years old, we got married in 2022 in a beautiful, warm and quiet
The costs of treatment and medication are very high; please, every donation from you will contribute to his recovery.
Please help my husband, donate to him, and share his story so he can recover and get the medicine.
✅️Vetted by @gazavetters , my verified number on the list is (#568)✅️
Please help me, my husband needs medication and vitamins. Every donation, no matter how small, will make a difference and help my husband recover. This is a picture of the medication he needs daily, and it's very expensive. Please, just donate. 🙏
My name is Maram, I am 25 years old from Gaza. I dreamed of a peaceful life, spending my life with my husband and my three children... but the war turned this dream into an impossible one 💔😭. We lived through this genocide with all its painful details and we are still suffering from it😭. We were so happy when the ceasefire was announced, and we returned to our homes in northern Gaza after being displaced for a year and a half in a tent in the south of the Gaza Strip. After repairing a small room in our destroyed house, we began to live there and start over. Unfortunately, the war came back, and it was even stronger than before 💔. Now, we have no shelter or source of income. We have used up all our savings during the war. I know I created my campaign very late, but that's because I have no other means to help my family 🙏. I am completely confident and hopeful that someone here will help us as much as they can and save my family in these tough circumstances 😔.
I know how painful and frustrating it is to start over from scratch, but I hope to get any amount for my family 🥺🙏.
My name is Maram, a Palestinian woman from Gaza. I am 26 years old and a mother of three children: Malik (8 years old), Ibrahim (6 years old
So, please, donate to my campaign, even if it's a small amount—it will have a big impact on us 🥺. May God bless you, my friend 🥰❤️.
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