also this hadestown proshot is what made me realize that hades literally built all that stuff in hadestown FOR PERSEPHONE SO SHE'D WANT TO STAY like SHE'S the reason he made it artificially hot and bright!! he's trying to mimic summer so she doesn't leave!! how did I not realize this before????
ALSO i knew the reason orpheus could finish the song was because he finally understood the fear and doubt hades has every time persephone leaves BUT I DIDNT REALIZE THAT THE TRIAL HADES GIVES WAS ALSO BECAUSE HE UNDERSTOOD ORPHEUS AS WELL!! like hades knew he'd fail because HE'D fail!!
also also I know there's a Thing between hades and eurydice but I didn't realize that there was also one between persephone and orpheus until now, and I think it's intended to show that they're foils of one another, that pre-seasons hades was more like orpheus and pre-seasons persephone was more like eurydice and that their focus on orpheus and eurydice is because they remind them of what they had (and think they lost) - the love o+e have for each other reminds them of themselves, and so hades wants to take eurydice away/lock her away and persephone wants to protect orpheus/let him escape because they're trying to prevent them repeating their own mistakes in their own ways
like the slime tutorial did not give me these revelations, all musicals need professional recordings for this reason!!
i'm so so happy to see the hadestown proshot doing so well in theatres and i hope this means that the People In Charge realize how much we want proshots of theatre to be made more accessible to the public who can't make it to the live productions !!!
I just feel like we're not talking enough about the pro-labor, pro-union, themes in Hadestown. My boy Orpheus is literally wearing a red bandana. He said you simply have to stand up, together, even when it's terrifying and you have never done it before. There are more of us than them. Even if it seems impossible we have hope, because we are standing in solidarity. You can only make demands of gods if you have your union behind you. And then you realise they aren't gods, and you can bargain.
I'm not saying I went to the US to see the Hadestown proshot, but today was our first full day here and we went to see the proshot. (In all seriousness, we went to visit family and that's the only reason I would come to the US right now.)
I went to the cinema with my sister and my aunt, who haven't seen or listen to the musical before. But I told them the myth before and afterwards I asked if they thought Orpheus would turn around or not in the musical. They both believed in a happy ending until the last second. (For me We raise our cups is a happy ending...)
I just learned about this recently from a Viking reenactor! Indigo dye isn't blue until it oxidizes, so when you dye with indigo your cloth or thread doesn't come out of the water blue, it comes out and then reacts with the oxygen in the air and seems to spontaneously turn blue in front of your eyes. It's a really cool process to witness.
This the report that JK Rowing doesn't want you to see. This report scares her so much that she is trying to destroy Amnesty International, a human rights organization, to stop you reading it:
Amnesty International put out a major report documenting the influence of UK based anti trans gender critical organizations and their fundin
(Amnesty already pulled the report because of JKR's threats. Of course that didn't and won't stop her - capitulating to fascists and bigots is never the answer. Alejandra captured the report and posted it, so you can read what JKR doesn't want you to know.)
I've slowly been chipping away at drawing scenes from that imaginary Muppet retelling of the Princess Bride, figured it was about time to share what I've drawn on Tumblr!
Look I don't think Supergirl (2026) is secretly a perfect masterpiece or anything (I personally thought it was like. a 6/10 fun time) but I do think it's wild that Tumblr isn't going crazy for it because this Kara is one coattailed suit away from being a Tumblr sexyman. she is the flawed messy female character people have supposedly been clamouring for. she's the popular archetype of a gruff self-destructive alcoholic middle-aged man begrudgingly having to look after a kid and growing fond of them but genderswapped and also 23. she's allowed to be visibly messy and kind of gross and her hair is constantly all over the place and she literally cries, screams, throws up, and pisses onscreen. she's caustic and mean and puts up an act of carelessness but has a heart of gold. she's heavily traumatised and coping with it terribly. if anything happens to her dog she will kill everyone in this room and then herself. she spends most of the movie in a trench coat and baggy band T-shirt. she gets into bar brawls and breaks a guy's hand. she is Going Through It 24/7 and looks the part. she stabs a guy in the throat. how is everyone else not obsessed with her.
THANK YOU! I loved Kara, what's a hairbrush?, Zor-el. I'm convinced if the exact same movie starred Pedro Pascal tumblr would be on it like starving pirrahnas.
Of course they donāt like Milly Alcockās Supergirl. Sheās a grown ass woman with zero love interests who spends the movie saving her dog, casually dismantling a sex trafficking ring while sheās at it, and preaching the importance of being good, not nice or smiley or cheerful but good. I for one adored the movie and I really hope Iāll get to see more of Alcockās Supergirl sheās now my favorite iteration of her and I love her so dearly.
"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 āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 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 āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
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 assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā 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 Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā 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 Japanās 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 ākept losing trackā 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 āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā 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 āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā 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 ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās 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 studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā 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 Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā 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 āfinding the main ideaā 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 āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā 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 ādeep workā 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 sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā 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.
Iām afraid I donāt 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? Kā12 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 āstudents will adapt.ā 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 studentsā sentences before theyāve 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."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I rewatched Supergirl 2026 and let me tell you, go rewatch it if you can. Just knowing Kara plans on killing the guy herself changes it. You see sheās not holding back in her fights, sheās trying to save the girls but sheās also not holding back against the Brigands, sheās killing them right alongside Lobo. Thereās also just a different pain when Ruthye says she doesnāt want to be like Kara, because thatās the point isnāt it, Kara is trying to make sure she doesnāt end up like her, sheās doing this for that reason. Sheās not saying that Krem shouldnāt die, just that Ruthye shouldnāt be the one to do it because she knows where that will lead, but also that Krem shouldnāt be allowed to live so she will carry that burden.
I also love Kara as a character so much. She is the epitome of being in your early 20s and trying to hold everything together and be an adult when everything feels like itās falling apart. Also that she keeps trying to do good, that no matter what happens, even if it would be so much easier not to intervene or to walk away she never does. She also tries talking first, like to the guy who stole Ruthyeās sword or when Ruthye was first talking to Lobo, but she also knows that you canāt talk to everyone. I love that she shows you donāt have to be nice and polite to be good, and that that it can be loud, in your face, and messy. She shows that you donāt have to be a paragon of perfectness to be good, and itās not always easy and there can be consequences, but itās still important, and possible, to wake up every and choose to be good.
i love Millie Alcockās Kara. sheās messy, sheās an alcoholic, sheās rude, she doesnāt have a love interest, she beats the shit out of pedophiles and dismantles their sex trafficking ring in the process. she carries the grief of an entire planet because she doesnāt think Clark, whose heart is so optimistic and so desperate to see goodness in people, can handle it. she gets her hands dirty so that a child doesnāt have to live with the guilt of murder. sheās not ditzy, or just some sexy hero girl for misogynists to objectify and drool over. sheās strong, sheās smart, sheās confident, and sheās good
