please behold the 24 Hours of Lemons race, in which you can only spend $500 total on a car to cross country race for 24 hours
named after the legendary 24 hour Le Mans race, Lemons rallies barely legal cars in an endurance race across America. had the privilege of sharing the freeway with this race and seeing the absolute art od this event
"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.
ALSO COVID. jesus fucking christ there has been a BRAIN DAMAGING VIRUS going around that causes MEASURABLE declines in cognitive functioning and ability to sustain focus and attention, and everyone is going around FUCKING WILLFULLY IGNORING THIS, it drives me absolutely goddamn FERAL
Local Ballard raccoon has been spotted thriving in a remarkably unique and charming body
Yes he(?)'s actually factually real and has even been given an extremely millennial nickname: Jimothy. Wildlife experts advise everyone to just leave him alone and let him live his life
what they DONT tell you about clarinets is that you have to fucking build the damn thing every single time. "what instrument do you play" fucking legos man idk
about build clarinets damn do DONT every fucking fucking have idk instrument is legos man play" single tell that the they thing time. to what "what you you you
As in almost all cases, this isn't a case of a computer DELIBERATELY being made to discriminate, it's a case of a computer RECKLESSLY being made to discriminate. Which isn't even a tiny bit better, but is an important distinction for when we talk about the dangers of this kind of thing.
AI is trained off of available data. Available data is about the real world, where racism and sexism and all that shit exists. Unless you carefully put effort into making sure that bigotry is EXCLUDED from the training, it will by default be included.
We've known this forever. There is no excuse. They don't bother, or they do a shitty job at it, because they want to make more money and carefully curating your own custom dataset without racism in it is not only extremely difficult, but very expensive.
I have a very strange link to share that a friend sent me. No, not a "'friend', eh? *wink wink nudge nudge*". A friend who's very into artbooks and archiving sent me this.
There is an unbelievable wealth of art books and educational material that is inexplicably hosted on e-hentai.
With more than a million absolutely free hentai doujinshi, manga, cosplay and CG galleries, E-Hentai Galleries is the world's largest free H
A cursory look on my part shows that almost all of this is either translated into english or has been localized. There are animation books by Tezuka. There are just artbooks you can't get anymore. This one, I am told, inspired bloodborne.
Lots of knowledge for you archived before archive.org. I hope you find it useful.
It's still a hentai site. Browse at your own risk. You might see illustrated nudity! How terrible!!!
Nhentai (a similar site) and the Internet Archive (for unrelated reasons) is facing lawsuit-related instability in the last few days, so it's good to make the time saving these kinds of priceless resources.
so when i was a kid a read this story where a boy gets turned into a mouse by evil witches. at the end (spoilers) him and his beloved grandmother manage to slaughter all the witches but they do NOT manage to turn him back to a human child. he stays a mouse. the grandmother rebuilds her home to be mouse accessible. and they discuss the fact that he's aging like a mouse, so he probably only has a few years to live; but it's ok, because the grandmother confesses that she ALSO only has a few years to live and they both agree that they wouldn't want to live without the other. So everything is alright then, and they're happy, and that's the end of the story. it's probably been over two decades since i read it and quite frankly i am still processing the intertwining concepts of love and mortality but anyway that's not my point. my point is that Rocky did not die of acute radiation sickness because he spent enough time shielded by astrophage that his body was able to handle the damage, but holy shit does he have every type of cancer. he didn't die entering grace's atmosphere but all of his organs caught fire. I repeat — his internal organs caught fire. he spent several decades in a low gravity environment. Do you know what human bodies do in low gravity? it's not good man. 20% muscle loss in two weeks. 1% bone density loss every month. Maybe carapaces and low organic matter would handle the change better, but idk, it might actually be worse.
anyway my point is, actually, i do think that Rocky and Grace would get to grow old together.
i know i'm op but op the idea of Grace arriving at Erid on the verge of death, recovering, and then living a long and full (maybe not especially healthy) life, vs Rocky arriving home a trimphant hero, a miraculous survivor of a thousand calamaties only to at long last have to pay the toll, dying tragically young, I'm.
Rocky and Grace jokingly comparing the pros and cons of bipedal vs pentapedal joint pain. Rocky wearing the xenonite exo-suit because it actually helps keep his carapace from collapsing to the ground. Grace affectionately bumping his cane against it in morse code because of course their stupid ernglish pidgin isn't enough; now that everyone know english they also need a secret language that's just for them.
Grace in his motorized bubble scooter touring the city. Naturally, Rocky's going to keep him company by riding in the stupid sidecar, how would he explain everything if he was walking beside him? And of course Rocky's telling people to repeat things and his voice is weirdly pitchy, Grace is there and human hearing is awful. It would be rude to talk normally.
Rocky pulling out the old hamster ball and curling up inside. And he knows, he knows its bad posture, but right now it hurts less. Grace curled up around him, the exterior of the ball a carefully calibrated 39 C. They are both hiding from well meaning physical therapists. Whispering doesn't actually do anything in that regard, but Rocky finds whispering hilarious for some reason (Eridian equiv of helium infused squeaky voice).
Gravity as Erid's love for them, a painful embrace they wouldn't trade for anything.
They get to grow old together. It's not enough time, but its so much more than they thought they would have; it's surprisingly easy to be okay with it. It's a tragedy from every angle except perhaps the inside.
#whatever you do don't think about adrien ok#adrien got him back. They got to see him again. There's 23 other mates who can't say the same#i think there's a world with pebbles and an affectionate blobby uncle#but in this one the infertility is the first warning that he's maybe not okay#(of course rocky avoided mentioning the chronic pain - he'd been living with most of it for decades at this point)#(and for the first year or 2 he's dead serious about getting Every doctor to work on Grace. Like at first you think hes being hyperbolic#But theres a solid period where rocky is genuinely indignant at the concept of any doctor anywhere working on someone who isn't grace#Yes he knows other people need doctors too.#but also did you consider that they can fucking wait question???)#Anyway#In the end#In the end rocky falls asleep with grace watching. a few hours go by. and then a few more.#and then grace figures rocky won't mind if he rests his eyes for just a minute.#and neither of them have to mourn.
Literally a Paper Mache Pumpkin, not a communist @commiepumpkin - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
snowghoul
vaporwave
romaincrisis
discoholicmusic
germansingergirl
izzy806
amandla
yousharknotpass
gummygunk
