The Bowery Presents
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Hole
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Show & Tell
ojovivo
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d e v o n
roma★
bliss lane
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taylor price
NASA
KIROKAZE
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One Nice Bug Per Day
Kiana Khansmith
gracie abrams
Noah Kahan
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@comfortabledoug
In case anyone gets curious:
I was previously @hufflepuff-that-cant-find
While this was a reference to a fairly safe source of modern content, was a parody of a very dangerous source of content.
Comfortable Doug is quite comfortable.
this is helpful to getting started on anything regardless of what you call it (from this post)
problem solving steps
IMPROVE distress tolerance skill
opened up ravelry to look at patterns and the very first thing i saw was
The Garment by Robert Cole
I had to immediately look for myself and I feel like this post needs the addition of the very first line in the pattern description
excerpts from erin in the morning's article on the ioc's ban on transgender women and sex testing policy
"But AI can't do your job. It can help you do your job, but that doesn't mean it's going to save anyone money. Take radiology: there's some evidence that AIs can sometimes identify solid-mass tumors that some radiologists miss, and look, I've got cancer. Thankfully, it's very treatable, but I've got an interest in radiology being as reliable and accurate as possible. If my Kaiser hospital bought some AI radiology tools and told its radiologists: "Hey folks, here's the deal. Today, you're processing about 100 x-rays per day. From now on, we're going to get an instantaneous second opinion from the AI, and if the AI thinks you've missed a tumor, we want you to go back and have another look, even if that means you're only processing 98 x-rays per day. That's fine, we just care about finding all those tumors." If that's what they said, I'd be delighted. But no one is investing hundreds of billions in AI companies because they think AI will make radiology more expensive, not even if that also makes radiology more accurate. The market's bet on AI is that an AI salesman will visit the CEO of Kaiser and make this pitch: "Look, you fire 9/10s of your radiologists, saving $20m/year, you give us $10m/year, and you net $10m/year, and the remaining radiologists' job will be to oversee the diagnoses the AI makes at superhuman speed, and somehow remain vigilant as they do so, despite the fact that the AI is usually right, except when it's catastrophically wrong. "And if the AI misses a tumor, this will be the human radiologist's fault, because they are the 'human in the loop.' It's their signature on the diagnosis." This is a reverse centaur, and it's a specific kind of reverse-centaur: it's what Dan Davies calls an "accountability sink." The radiologist's job isn't really to oversee the AI's work, it's to take the blame for the AI's mistakes. This is another key to understanding – and thus deflating – the AI bubble. The AI can't do your job, but an AI salesman can convince your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job. This is key because it helps us build the kinds of coalitions that will be successful in the fight against the AI bubble." - Cory Doctorow, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Criticizing AI
"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.
In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o'clock! As if it were afraid that nobody would.
Seven-nine, breakfast time, seven-nine!
In the kitchen the breakfast stove ejected eight pieces of perfectly browned toast, eight eggs sunnyside up, sixteen slices of bacon, two coffees, and two cool glasses of milk.
"Today is August 4, 2026, the city of Allendale, California."
Somewhere in the walls, relays clicked, memory tapes glided under electric eyes.
""Eight-one, tick-tock, eight-one o'clock, off to school, off to work, run, run, eight-one!" But no doors slammed.
It was raining outside. The weather box on the front door sang quietly: "Rain, rain, go away; rubbers, raincoats for today..."
Outside, the garage chimed and lifted its door to reveal the waiting car.
After a long wait the door swung down again.
At eight-thirty the eggs were shriveled and the toast was like stone. An aluminum wedge scraped them into the sink. The dirty dishes were dropped into a hot washer and emerged twinkling dry.
"Nine-fifteen," sang the clock, "time to clean."
Tiny robot mice thudded against chairs, whirling their mustached runners, Kneading the rug nap, sucking gently at hidden dust. Then, they popped into their burrows. The house was clean.
"Ten o'clock." The sun came out from behind the rain. The house stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes. This was the one house left standing. At night the ruined city gave off a radioactive glow which could be seen for miles.
"Ten-fifteen." The garden sprinklers pelted the windowpanes,
running down the charred west side where the house had been burned evenly free of its white paint. The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hand raised to catch a ball which never came down.
The five spots of paint - the man, the woman, the children, the ball -
remained. The rest was a think charcoaled layer.
"Twelve noon."
A dog whined on the front porch.
The front door recognized the dog voice and opened. The dog, once huge and fleshy, but now gone to bone and covered with sores, moved in and through the house, tracking mud.
The dog frothed at the mouth, ran wildly in circles, biting at its tail, spun in a frenzy, and died. It lay in the parlor for an hour.
"Two-fifteen."
The dog was gone.
In the cellar, the incinerator glowed suddenly and a whirl of sparks leaped up the chimney.
"Two thirty-five."
Bridge tables sprouted from patio walls.
Playing cards fluttered. Martinis manifested while music played.
But the tables were silent and the cards untouched.
At four o'clock the tables folded back through the paneled walls. "Four-thirty."
The nursery walls glowed.
Animals took shape: yellow giraffes, blue lions, pink antelopes, lilac panthers. Hidden films clocked through well-oiled sprockets, and the glas walls lived. It was the children's hour.
"Six, seven, eight o'clock." The dinner dishes manipulated like magic
tricks, and in the study a click.
"Nine-five." A voice spoke from the study ceiling:
"Mrs. McClellan, which poem would you like this evening?"
The house was silent.
The voice said at last,
"Since you express no preference, I shall select a poem at random."
"Sara Teasdale. As I recall, your favorite...
"There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done,
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone.
At ten o'clock a falling tree bough crashed through the kitchen window shattering cleaning solvent over the stove. The room was ablaze in an instant.
"Fire!" screamed a voice. Water pumps shot water from the ceilings while the voices took it up in chorus: "Fire, fire, fire!"
The house tried to save itself, but the wind blew and sucked upon the fire.
Scurrying water rats pistoled their water, and ran for more. And the wall sprays let down showers of mechanical rain.
But too late. The quenching rain ceased.
The reserve water supply which had filled baths and washed dishes for many quiet days was gone.
From attic trapdoors gushed a green chemical.
But the fire was clever. It had sent flames outside the house, up through The attic to the pumps there. An explosion! The attic brain which directed the pumps was shattered.
The house shuddered, its bared skeleton cringing from the heat. And the voices wailed, "Fire, fire, run, run," like a tragic nursery rhyme, a dozen voices, high, low. One, two, three, four, five voices died.
Other choruses could be heard announcing the time, playing music, or cutting the lawn by remote-control mower. A scene of maniac confusion, yet unity; singing, screaming, and one voice, read poetry aloud in the firey study, until all the film spools burned.
In the kitchen the stove could be seen making breakfasts at a psychopathic rate, ten dozen eggs, six loaves of toast, twenty dozen bacon strips, which eaten by the fire, started the stove working again, hysterically hissing!
The crash. The attic smashing into kitchen and parlor. The parlor into cellar, cellar into sub-cellar.
Smoke and silence.
Among the ruins, one wall stood alone.
Within the wall, a last voice said,
over and over, "Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is ...”
nothing will ever be funnier to me than the 30-50 feral hogs joke phase, I think about it at least once a week
Happy 30-50 feral hogs day
Happy new year! Here's the end of the 1953 EC Comics adaptation of Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains," first published in Weird Fantasy #17.
Via @cirnineball
Today is August 5, 2026!
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!!
So whenever the news cycle gets too depressing, I scroll through horse sales ads while drinking my morning coffee instead. Even tho I'm not around horses anymore, and don't intend on getting back into that world.
Now, my partner hasn't been around horses much at all. So you can imagine my surprise when he not only became very invested in looking at random horses with me, but started actively enforcing horse ad time like it's some long-established relationship ritual we have.
After like three months of this, he has a surprising amount of opinions on horses and horse breeds despite never having been around one since he was 8. And since I kinda live for his comments on these horses by now anyways, here are some highlights:
he seems to have a nagging suspicion that irish cob yearlings aren't real, because they look too fluffy to be true. I'm with him on this
he likes Mustangs the most, because they have the friendliest faces.
He groups ottbs into the 'boring' or 'looks like a very big dog' category.
He dislikes American Miniature Horses so much that whenever we come across one, it's like he's discovering them all over again
He has developed a certain dislike for Icelandic Horses specifically. When I asked him what makes him hate Icelandics but love shetlands for example, he gave me a rather passionate explanation of how Shetland Pony ads are at least honest about selling some equine poltergeist, while Icenaldic Horse people act like they're selling Sleipnir itself. And jfc he's got a point?
Speaking of shetlands, he's a big fan of shetland sales ads and the euphemistic language they use
He also always asks me to save particularly... memorable pictures of horses to add to his growing collection. Here are some of the recent additions:
He has since dropped the fact that his family history includes one grandpa who, upon failing to become a saddlers apprentice, pretended to be 16 to join the "cavalry" of the german military in wwii. It was near the end of the war (which is also why nobody cared about an obviously underaged 13yo kid signing up), cavalry charges were a thing of the past and what few horses were left alive got put to use pulling artillery and supplies for the nazis.
But he was 13 and an idiot and signed up to join some glorious cavalry. In reality as soon as he'd been issued a uniform they were sent on foot towards the eastern front.
He ended up captured, lost his teeth but eventually got released. It took him a couple more years to walk back home, where he worked in the trades for the rest of his life. In his home he had a small office room that his grandkids called the "horse room" as he had decorated it with paintings, newspaper clippings and the odd horseshoe.
I may have been swinging wildly at the childhood memory piñata of his, so now he's enforcing horse ad time like a cockatoo terrorizing its owner until he puts on its favourite song.
He also has some more opinions on horses that I'm allowed to share if anyone is even still seeing this
the thing about media literacy is that understanding why the author chose to specify that the curtains are blue is the same skill set as understanding that the way the author characterizes all black characters as angry or all chinese characters as meek and silent is racist. it is the same skill set as being able to identify when a news source is biased or when someone is feeding you propaganda. the ability to ask "why did this person choose to present this premise in this specific way?" is a critical skill in a world full of misinformation. why are the curtains blue? maybe it's a characterization detail. maybe it's extraneous worldbuilding. why is this character written as being right all the time? maybe you're intended to disagree with them. maybe it doesn't matter. maybe you should still ask why.
The Last Unicorn really said “There will be times when you can’t find other people like you and there will be times where you'll wonder if you're really the only person experiencing the world as you are and others will even try to take advantage of you through commodification and exploitation to the point where it starts to dilute your own sense of self and will make you question if you were ever you to begin with but it’s important for you to resist the urge to assimilate and find community because there will always be people like you who will understand and have experienced these same things and the only way to combat a dark world who wants to smother your light is to FIGHT FIGHT RAGE AGAINST THE RED BULL DO NOT GO GENTLY INTO THAT OCEAN.”
And I just think there’s something beautifully and inextricably queer about that
ilove homosexuals i love bisexuals i love trans !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Yayy ayyayy ayy Weare all sooo ocool
your silence on fresh basil pesto is deafening.
Most of those iPad babies you're seeing are probably sick of that fucking tablet too.
A lot of parents are very bad at parenting and don't like their children. They don't want to talk to them, be around them or do anything with them. You know, the things kids need and will remember the most once they're grown.
So they train them from an early age that they should always be distracting themselves with something as to not be in the way or annoying the adults.
For me it was books and TV when I was little, and computers later on. That's all I did because it was all I could do without getting yelled at, and it was the closest to human interaction I could get most of the time.
Everyone loves to make fun of & complain about iPad kids but nobody thinks about the struggle of navigating life as an adult when you were forced to spend your entire childhood keeping yourself distracted so your parents didn't have to acknowledge your existence.
This was reposted to YouTube shorts and I would like to point out some comments in the video
Please give your children some damn playdoh and crayons and oversized bits of craft paper to color on. They need something more concrete and tactile than smooth glass.
Maybe they do need something tactile, but you've missed the point of the post. It's not the Ipad itself that's bad, it's the fact that the children are being neglected. You could hand a kid a whole library of books, several kilograms of play dough, a mountain of crayons, and all the craft paper in the world. But, if you don't spend time with them and you simply expect them to use those things to keep themselves busy so you don't have to deal with them, you're still neglecting the kid, and they're gonna end up with the same issues.
IMPORTANT
Running across this post almost immediately after reading the article about how some parents are letting fucking ChatGPT tell their kids bedtime stories now feels serendipitous in a way.
