Sideblog for fandom discourse, meta-discussion of fanfiction, medical/science/political stuff, cute animals, funny posts, and everything else that doesn't fit on my themed blogs. I'm Cyan, ace, she/her, Scandinavian. ER doctor by day, problematic by night. This blog is Three Laws Safe.
Reblogging because pissing on Sparta is one of my hobbies. And yes, totally check out the link above. Brett has a lot of great discussion and scholarship on why Sparta was proto-fascist garbage, and he presents it with both snark and accessibility.
No one should get their concept of history from 300, and I say that as someone who enjoyed 300. 300 is a comicbookification of a legend, and legends are already exaggerations.
You know, one of the most shameful consequences of scifi/game authors not knowing shit is cyberpsychosis, or Essence, or whatever in-universe asspull for a mechanical limiter on how much cyberware you can cram into a character sheet.
There is an easy excuse in real life! You may not be able to get both a pacemaker and a DBS device because they're both pieces of sensitive equipment that could theoretically interfere with each other, and nobody engineered them not to. Trivially you can extrapolate this to all cybernetics. If your various augs weren't Specifically designed not to mess with each other (and of course the various megacorps might take things a step further, making their shit actively hostile to mix-and-matching), you might have problems; and obviously, the more pieces of hardware you've patchworked yourself with, the worse things get. You'd have to be one real crazy motherfucker to tell a back-alley doctor to load you up with whatever they've got.
It's more grounded and more realistic and less shitty and it actively enhances the atmosphere of cyberpunk in a way that "losing your humanity" does not. we are missing out on much because none of these writers know anything about how medtech works
I've got a few thoughts about cyberpunk kicking around in my head for a while, it always struck me that the obvious fix for "cyberpsychosis" was less that you've carved away some irreplaceably human part of yourself , and more that your body has been hijacked by your own tech.
Think about it: you've got a threat analysis module loaded into your optics and a lighting-reflexes aug patched into your arm muscles all the way down to your trigger finger. Both have programming that's been told to optimize its function because that's what you want out of military grade hardware. How long do you think it's going to take for your eye to start talking to your trigger finger and for them to come to the conclusion that the most "optimized" course of action is to stop consulting the sluggishly squishy meat brain they're patched into and start identifying/eliminating threats before they begin?
The danger of plugging too many unregulated mods into your body shouldn't be that you're less human for it, it's that your slowly building a killbot in your own body that's more and more likely to start treating YOU as the disposable peripheral.
You can even doing the same thing with non-combat based upgrades. An influencer who gives themselves over to routine optimization and engagement boosting personality augments could end up watching from behind their own eyes as their social-media persona puppets them through every AI scripted interaction
i think americans should have to put a banner above their post that says U.S. CENTRIC ADVICE/INFORMATION. i think political posts should clarify that they are giving protest/societal/class information relevant only to the USA i think i would like to stop getting halfway through a post with really good information and then realising it is not widespread advice and is only applicable in the united states of america
for the love of GOD can we PLEASE stop treating us-centric advice as applicable to the whole entire world. Please. beyond anything else, i do not think you guys understand how difficult it makes it for young people to interact with and learn information relevant to them.
at a certain point, treating us-american advice as universally applicable borders on misinformation. i am not saying that it is done maliciously, but it is dangerous at worst. i do not want younger people going around assuming that certain laws do/do not apply to them and getting in trouble because of it. i worry about what 'fundamental/constitutional/labour rights' are only legally defensible in the USA. i worry about kids who do not know yet to wonder where the advice is for, and take it as fact because a post that reads "EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW THIS" begins with "EVERYONE".
okay yes all the tags are very very good points but i would like to point out the main reason i made this post, which is that
if you are non-american then it can be dangerous to hold beliefs about your rights that are only applicable in the US.
i am australian and i have seen young australians have completely us-american perceptions on the rights they hold (or do not hold) in regards to protest, police officers, self-defense, medical care, higher education, debt, and legal proceedings. i am not talking about "boooo americans" i am talking about the genuine danger it might present to have us-centric assumptions in high-stakes situations
(please do not chalk this up to 'if you don't do research then you are stupid'. i made this post with young people in mind. that being said i am willing to bet it also applies to others, ie those who are newer to non-local internet, older folks, or those escaping high-control environments.)
You know, when I've remarked that a lot of the responses to my posts feel like people are just plucking out keywords they think they recognise based on the shape of them and replying to what they imagine the post says based on that, the possibility never occurred to me that this is actually how many American schools are currently teaching kids to read.
Like, my assumption this whole time has been that when folks go "I misunderstood this post that says [thing] as saying [unrelated thing] because I mistook [word] for [completely different word that happens to start with the same letter]", that was a bit. What do you mean they're teaching kids a reading method that's tailored to produce this exact error?
Thank-you to all of my new Internet stranger friends for being so gracious about having my post shoved onto your dashboards. I loved reading all of your kind tags and comments! Both Martin and Bosco have been gone for several years now but for 24 hours, they felt very present in my life. I greatly appreciate this gift. â¤ď¸
Thank you to everyone who commented in their tags or messaged me. Indeed, today is âMartin and Bosco Dayâ. I originally whimsically blazed this photo on 13 July 2022. I never expected Martin and Bosco to travel so far and make so many new friends. The experience has been such a gift for me.
yue suffers under the traditionalism of her culture the same way katara does but since she doesn't actively fight against it up to and including her death no one talks about it. the instant iroh (a firebender she does not know besides his moment of fighting zhao) suggests that the solution is to sacrifice herself she is ready to do it without hesitation. even her dad doesnt seem sad about it upon hearing the news, he just accepts it
yes đđ #myrosebride
before i elaborate more on yue, i would also like to point out something crucial about katara that i think a lot of people neglect: from the ages of 11-14, her village was almost entirely female. with the exception of sokka, everyone she interacted with on a daily basis during these extremely formative years in any childâs development were with women and girls of various ages. while women of course can still maintain the system in the absence of men under patriarchy (and we do see this to be the case in their village to an extent), katara does not have to worry about being abused by the men around her, because there are no men around her. of course, her life is under potent threat, but that threat is external, not from her own people. sokka may be a pain in the ass, but he doesnât actual wield any material power over her. she takes out her frustration with being forced to do domestic labor out on him, but heâs not even the one ordering her to do that: their grandmother is. sokka only has any authority whatsoever because he tacitly agrees with everything kanna believes, and she is truly the one in charge. katara feels stifled, miserable, and angry in her village not because of the traditions of her people, but because of the genocide they are facing. perhaps, in a world where the fire nation did not devastate the southern water tribe, kataraâs greatest gripe would be the patriarchal traditions of her culture, but we really have no way of knowing that. she takes her anger out on sokka primarily because she has nowhere else to put her rage, and as her older sibling, he is the easiest target. that is the social dynamic that characterized her early teenage years.
while katara did technically still grow up in a patriarchal society, it was a highly unusually organized one, since it was still being led by women, with no men save for a single teenage boy. katara has the ability to fight back against the sexism she faces because she was actually raised to value herself. she is confident in her own agency and strength and feels it is distinctly cruel and foolish to deny a woman their rights on the basis of their gender because the only misogyny she ever truly faced growing up was her brother saying âboys rule girls droolâ and inane shit like that. she was certainly never raised to think she couldnât be a great waterbender, and we see from hamaâs pov that for at least a century women waterbenders in the south have been at the vanguard of the resistance and actively fought against the genocide of their people. the fact that pakku denies her is thus totally absurd to her, because from her point of view, itâs quite literally the first sheâs ever heard of the notion that women cannot use waterbending combat forms. of course she is familiar with the idea that men and women each have distinct social roles (and she has definitely internalized some of these notions subconsciously, even if she also resents its most obvious manifestations), but she has never once truly entertained the idea that her lifeâs only value is to serve men, so she balks at the idea that she âbelongs in the healer huts,â that she is already engaged despite only being fourteen, that she must be the one to apologize to someone being unreasonable and cruel to her simply because he is an old man and she is a young girl. she has the frame of reference to notice how fucked up these manifestations of patriarchy are, because she grew up in a village surrounded by women telling her how amazing and special she is, and so she knows her own worth and will never compromise that for anyone.
yueâs situation is entirely different. after all, katara is not her mirror; sokka is. if anything, katara is her foil, her opposite. katara has the agency yue is denied. yue was raised with privileges katara was not: wealth, safety, resources, comfort, security. but katara had the privilege of being allowed to value herself. keep in mind that even though kanna may torment katara by making her do laundry, sheâs still the type of person who crossed the entire globe to get away from cultural values she disagreed with, and those are the kinds of beliefs she is imparting upon her granddaughter. katara would never stand for being forced into an arranged marriage against her will; to her, the very notion is unthinkable. but to yue, it is her duty. she is a woman (read: just turned sixteen, therefore of marrying age) and a princess, and so she has equal duties to her father and her people (note that katara is also the daughter of the chief, but she displays absolutely no feelings regarding this fact whatsoever one way or another; hakoda is just her dad to her, nothing more). although yue is clearly a person brimming with desires, emotions, passions, interests, hopes, dreams, joys, fears, thoughts, humor, excitement, wisdom, and curiosity, her personhood is not recognized by anyone in her tribe (that we see). her father sees her as a symbol, her fiancĂŠ sees her as an object, and they both view her as property to be traded in an exchange she is not privy to and has no real say in. yue does not want hahn in the slightest, and yet she will be expected to bear his children, his heirs. in a beautifully tragic way, becoming the moon spirit was actually the best option available to her. in her final moments between human and spirit realms, she can finally exercise her own autonomy, and chooses to kiss sokka without guilt or shame. she can only reclaim her agency once she renounces her humanity.
there is a lot to be said about the ways in which yue and sokka parallel each other. it is, after all, yueâs primary relationship in the narrative. she was constructed specifically with this dynamic in mind. I could and often do enumerate the many ways in which they function as mirrors to each other, the most obvious being the ways in which their duties to their respective father-chiefs and cultures/people leads them to fully internalize the notion that their martyrdom is not only logical and necessary, but indeed, the ultimate exercise of their utility, which means that self-sacrifice is actually aspirational, because all they are good for is performing their duty. yueâs duty as a Woman and sokkaâs duty as a Man involve functional differences when practiced, but ultimately arrive at the same conclusion: their ultimate purpose is to die for their people. their bodies are mere vessels, they must endure their pain silently for the sake of their people, their lives are not their own. yes, sokka complains a lot, but never where it counts. yes, yue cries a lot, but she never renounces her duty. and sokka would never force her to renounce her duty, because even if she claims he doesnât (which is funny in its own way, lol he literally doesnât tell anyone anything!), he understands what thatâs like. sokka and yueâs story could only ever end in tragedy, because as much as they love and value each other, they do not value themselves enough to fight for their happiness. had the siege not happened, yue would have married hahn, and been miserable. the only person who could possibly intervene on their behalf and advocate for yueâs agency is katara, not sokka. and that is not because katara loves yue; after all, she barely knows yue. but unlike sokka, and unlike yue, katara loves herself.
as katara says in âthe painted lady,â you canât wait around for someone else to save you, you have to help yourself. that is the ethos that guides her. even when she acts in service of helping others, it is with the philosophy that she is doing right by herself before all else. she is her own hero, and by exercising that heroism, she is proving her own strength and power and reaffirming her own heroic narrative. of course she has a great deal of compassion for others, but that stems, first and foremost, in compassion for herself. she is guided by a very strong self-belief that what she is doing is right, that she is always fighting on the side of justice, that her anger and passion is always righteous, that she has the capacity to be a hero. and again, that is because she was raised by kind, competent women who told her time and time again that she is special, that she is the embodiment of hope for their culture, that she is valuable and worthy and strong. sokka grew up believing that his ultimate duty was to lay down his life for katara, and katara was raised with the belief that her duty was to live. to live, and to be a hero, and to bring hope back to her people. and so, if given the opportunity, she would fight for the right for yue to choose whom to marry, to dictate the terms of her own fate, to act upon her own desires. because katara knows this to be a fundamental right that she deserves, and so she recognizes that everyone else deserves it too.
Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:
She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papersâand every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.
Yale University, 1969.
Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.
Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"
The faculty answered firmly: No.
Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed itâher husband Pierre really deserved the credit.
Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.
So she started looking.
She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"âessentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.
There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.
The professors had been wrong.
But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.
Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.
But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official historiesâthose same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.
It wasn't random. It was systematic.
Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.
Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.
Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.
She needed a name for what she was documenting.
In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gageâa 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.
In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.
The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.
Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.
For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.
Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.
Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.
Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.
Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:
Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structureâcredit went to Watson and Crick.
Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fissionâomitted from the Nobel Prize.
Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomesâreceived little credit.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogenâinitially dismissed.
And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.
Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.
The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out.
You guys rlly don't realise how much knowledge is still not committed to the internet. I find books all the time with stuff that is impossible to find through a search engine- most people do not put their magnum opus research online for free and the more niche a skill is the less likely you are to have people who will leak those books online. (Nevermind all the books written prior to the internet that have knowledge that is not considered "relevant" enough to digitise).
Whenever people say that we r growing up with all the world's knowledge at our fingertips...it's not necessarily true. Is the amount of knowledge online potentially infinite? Yes. Is it all knowledge? No. You will be surprised at the niche things you can discover at a local archive or library.
Every single craft has been paying âThe Passion Taxâ for generations. This term (coined by author and organizational psychologist Adam Grant) â and backed by scientific research â simply states that the more someone is passionate about their work, the more acceptable it is to take advantage of them. In short, loving what we do makes us easy to exploit.
Guest Column: If Writers Lose the Standoff With Studios, It Hurts All Filmmakers
If the phrase âvocational aweâ isnât part of your lexicon yet, stop scrolling and read Fobazi Ettarh:
Vocational awe describes the set of ideas, values, and assumptions librarians have about themselves and the profession that result in notions that libraries as institutions are inherently good, sacred notions, and therefore beyond critique. I argue that the concept of vocational awe directly correlates to problems within librarianship like burnout and low salary. This article aims to describe the phenomenon and its effects on library philosophies and practices so that they may be recognized and deconstructed.
âVocational Awe and Librarianship: The Lies We Tell Ourselves
I see it in every field Iâve ever worked in: publishing, open source software development, higher education. It describes pretty much every industry that relies on creativity, altruism, or both.
I think it is crucial we remember that âvocational aweâ as a concept is two-pronged: it is meant to describe how librarians (& anyone working in a profession often described as a âvocationâ, such as teachers, healthcare professionals, etc) are made âeasy to exploitâ because they are primed not to see their job as âjust a jobâ, and it is also meant to underline a mechanism by which members of those professions will virulently defend their jobs & the institutions they are part of against any critique, most notably critiques that attempt to articulate how those institutions & those professions can be oppressive & violent & perpetuate exploitative & bigoted norms within society:
I challenge the notion that many have taken as axiomatic that libraries are inherently good and democratic [emphasis mine], and that librarians, by virtue of working in a library, are responsible for this âgoodâ work. This sets up an expectation that any failure of libraries is largely the fault of individuals failing to live up to the ideals of the profession, rather than understanding that the library as an institution is fundamentally flawed. [emphasis mine]
& further down:
By the very nature of librarianship being an institution, it privileges those who fall within the status quo. Therefore librarians who do exist outside librarianshipâs center can often more clearly see the disparities between the espoused values and the reality of library work. But because vocational awe refuses to acknowledge the library as a flawed institution [emphasis mine], when people of color and other marginalized librarians speak out, their accounts are often discounted or erased. Recently, Lesley Williams of Evanston, Illinois, made headlines for being fired from her library due to comments (on her personal social media accounts), illustrating the hypocritical actions of her library in regards to the lack of equitable access to information. Although she was advocating for the core library value of equitable access, similar to that of the âConnecticut Four,â her actions were regarded as unprofessional.
Ironically, this focus on the way-s in which librarians et al are âvictimisedâ by our professional context, while disregarding the aspect of âvocational aweâ which is meant to critique all the ways in which members of âvocationalâ professions will close ranks & lock shields against any kind of analysis that does not accept those institutions as always-already perfect, could be considered an example of vocational awe!
If libraries are sacred spaces, then it stands to reason that its workers are priests. As detailed above, the earliest librarians were also priests and viewed their work as a service to God and their fellow man. Out of five hundred librarians surveyed, ninety-five percent said the service orientation of the profession motivated them to become librarians. Another study found that the satisfaction derived by serving people is what new librarians thrive on. Similarly, many Christians describe their religious faith as âserving God,â and to do so requires a life spent in service. Christians often reference Mark 10:45 to describe the gravity of a call to service: âFor even the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.â Considering their conjoined history, it should come as no surprise that librarians, just like monks and priests, are often imagined as nobly impoverished as they work selflessly for the community and Godâs sake.
We are advocating for ourselves & our rights as workers while emphasising, ceaselessly & with great insistence, all the âselflessâ ways in which we âserveâ our community & how our âself-sacrificingâ âpassionâ for our âmissionâ makes us âeasy to exploitâ. We are not advocating for ourselves by pointing out that a library is just a workplace, that being a librarian is just a job, & that if my cousin who works at an insurance company isnât expected to buy work materials with her own money, to put in unpaid overtime as a matter of course, to accept that her vacation days are basically a fiction, to see her duties inflate constantly with no acknowledgment or compensation, to cobble together part-time positions for the whole of her career, etc, then it shouldnât be expected of us either & really shouldnât be expected of anyone. We are not deconstructing the outlooks that underlie vocational awe, we are reifying them.
What makes us âworthyâ of advocacy & of protection are, specifically, our willingness to âsacrificeâ ourselves for others & for the âgoodâ of the community. This marks us as âexceptionalâ, âdifferentâ from âotherâ workers who are âdifferentâ from us because they are not motivated by âpassionâ (which like, for âpassionâ read âvocationâ), & makes us unable to identify all the points of contact between our experiences on the job & that of a lot of other people in service positions. Our experiences of âexploitationâ (quotes here because good gd, we do in fact have a white-collar job indoors & I think there is something a little obscene sometimes about the ways in which our profession discusses our issues when our offices are cleaned by like undocumented women of colour to whom most of us never even talk & with whom most of us feel no particular solidarity as workers) are not unique & are in fact common across many public-facing industries such as food service or retail - would you believe me if I told you how much overlap there is between my professional experiences as a librarian & that of friends who work the floor at Starbucks or at Aldi? A lot of the manipulative & coercive tactics their bosses use to make them accept job creep, excessive & haphazard scheduling, danger on the job, overmonitoring & micromanagement, but also the pressures they encounter when they take sick days or vacation days, etc are carbon copies of what Iâve seen happen to me & others within libraries. Bosses are bosses are bosses, whether your profession is one that is typically treated as a âvocationâ within public discourse or not; it is not true that the ways in which we are mistreated are completely & wholly unique to us. When we accept this framing, we are essentially positioning librarianship as âset apartâ from other professions, libraries as completely distinct from any other type of workplace & as wholly unique among them, & ourselves as essentially different from other workers, in exactly the way that âvocational aweâ as a concept intends to critique!
As I mentioned earlier, vocational awe ties into the phenomena of job creep and undercompensation in librarianship due to the professional norms of service-oriented and self-sacrificing workplaces. But creating professional norms around self-sacrifice and underpay self-selects those who can become librarians. If the expectation built into entry-level library jobs includes experience, often voluntary, in a library, then there are class barriers built into the profession. Those who are unable to work for free due to financial instability are then forced to either take out loans to cover expenses accrued or switch careers entirely. Librarians with a lot of family responsibilities are unable to work long nights and weekends. Librarians with disabilities are unable to make librarianship a whole-self career.
We are reinforcing those norms when we focus exclusively on how much we sacrifice for our communities & how âpassionateâ we are about our jobs as the primary reason why our communities should care about what happens to us - when the reality is, what would actually help us is an ability to see & recognise all the ways in which we are not unique, in which even within industries that are not identified as relying on âaltruismâ & âcreativityâ (which like, if you think thereâs no altruism or creativity in working retail or in like industrial soldering or whatever Iâve got news for you, but thatâs a different topic - who is marked as having a âcreativeâ or âaltruisticâ job in our discourse? why is the power plant maintenance worker who gets up time & time again in the middle of the night to solve complex, urgent industrial problems with no standard solutions, using his hands & his intellect & his imagination, & this so that people will have continuous uninterrupted access to electricity, not considered to have a âcreativeâ or âaltruisticâ profession within those discussions?), workers are exploited in ways that will be familiar & recognisable to us. We cannot use vocational awe as a conceptual delimiter between professions because that actually defeats the purpose of vocational awe as a framework. We are accepting & perpetuating the idea that we are markedly & measurably âdifferentâ from other workers, & we render ourselves unable to analyse the institutions we are a part of as perfectible structures which are not ontologically good or even ontologically different from other workplaces but which are, rather, just workplaces, with bosses & employees, & where exploitation will occur along lines and through tactics that are familiar to many, many people across a whole gamut of professions.
I think the essential conclusion is this quote:
It is no accident that librarianship is dominated by white women. Not only were white woman assumed to have the innate characteristics necessary to be effective library workers due to their true womanhood, characteristics which include missionary-mindedness, servility, and altruism and spiritual superiority and piety, but libraries have continually been âcomplicit in the production and maintenance of white privilege.â These white women librarians in public libraries during the turn-of-the-century U.S. participated in selective immigrant assimilation and Americanization programs, projects âwhose purpose was to inculcate European ethnics into whitenessâ.
When we focus on our own victimhood, our own selflessness, our own defencelessness in the face of exploitation, the fact that we are just âtoo good for our own goodâ - what norms are we reinforcing within our profession? What foundational myths are we repeating & perpetuating, & what needs to they serve in us? Where do our loyalties lie, & what, ultimately, are we defending?
My point, I think, made more pithily: âvocational aweâ functions in a lot of professional discussions as a marker of noble victimhood (âtoo good for our own goodâ is really the best phrasing here), when in reality the most prototypical example of vocational awe might be cops. & in their case we recognise the inability to produce or even accept any critique of the institution theyâre a part of as dangerous & violent, not as an indicator of selflessness & meekness especial (while also, rightfully, not being especially concerned with the way in which vocational awe is used & weaponised by their bosses to make them work round the clock, weekends, to call them back from holiday, etc, & not really developing a huge amount of interest in the way in which belief in the police's "mission" most likely contributes to high burnout rates among cops - we recognise cops' vocational awe as something that is first & foremost dangerous to others). We also see how this esprit de corps & stubborn loyalty to both the institution & the concept of policing - perceived as impossible to perfect & always without reproach, both today & historically - become dangerously powerful reactionary forces that are typically turned towards a kind of oppressive âdoubling-downâ, particularly around matters of white supremacy & racism. How would discussions around the concept of âvocational aweâ change if we recognised it as something we have in common with the police?
stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation with the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.
âI am astonished in my teaching to find how many poets are nearly blind to the physical world. They have ideas, memories, and feelings, but when they write their poems they often see them as similes. To break this habit, I have my students keep a journal in which they must write, very briefly, six things they have seen each dayânot beautiful or remarkable things, just things. This seemingly simple task usually is hard for them. At the beginning, they typically âseeâ things in one of three ways: artistically, deliberately, or not at all. Those who see artistically instantly decorate their descriptions, turning them into something poetic: the winter trees immediately become âold men with snow on their shoulders,â or the lake looks like a âgiant eye.â The ones who see deliberately go on and on describing a brass lamp by the bed with painful exactness. And the ones who see only what is forced on their attention: the grandmother in a bikini riding on a skateboard, or a bloody car wreck. But with practice, they begin to see carelessly and learn a kind of active passivity until after a month nearly all of them have learned to be available to seeingâand the physical world pours in. Their journals fill up with lovely things like, âthe mirror with nothing reflected in it.â This way of seeing is important, even vital to the poet, since it is crucial that a poet see when she or he is not lookingâjust as she must write when she is not writing. To write just because the poet wants to write is natural, but to learn to see is a blessing. The art of finding in poetry is the art of marrying the sacred to the world, the invisible to the human.â
â Linda Gregg, The Art of Finding | Academy of American Poets
"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 âintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.â Crucially, he added that this is ânot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsâ but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationâs 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 âmeet your students where they areâ for so long that she has begun to feel âlike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.â
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 assessmentâs own language, they likely âcannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.â 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 Austinâs McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantâs smartphone â whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision â 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 Japanâs 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 âkept losing trackâ 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 âYour Brain on ChatGPT.â They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays â one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing â 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 âconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.â 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 âcognitive debtâ for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainâs 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 studentâs mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not âfree students up for higher-order work.â 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 Kâ12 schooling. Whatever the standardsâ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling âevidenceâ 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 âfinding the main ideaâ 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 âsevere or very severe.â
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that âthinking is becoming a luxury good.â 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 âdeep workâ 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 sourceâs claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into âthis is goodâ and âmaybe add more detailsâ 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.
Iâm afraid I donât 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? Kâ12 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 âstudents will adapt.â 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 studentsâ sentences before theyâve 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."
â Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canât Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
do you ever find something that is so funny and you want to share it with everyone but it also requires 18 layers of context spanning things like. 90s anime. aviation history. europop. canada. in order to even remotely understand why it is so funny
in the late 90s there was an anime called initial d which was all about street racing and drifting. naturally every single drift was played for great drama and excitement.
in 1999, an italian named giancarlo pasquini released a europop song under the alias dave rogers called Deja Vu. this song was picked up as the theme song for the above anime. it in turn became a meme, a shorthand for drifting and Cool Moves as a concept.
in 1983, air canada flight 143, a full sized 767, ran out of fuel halfway to edmonton, alberta. this is not something you want to have happen to a huge airplane. the flight chose to try and make an emergency landing at a nearby decomissioned airforce base (as they were falling fast and could not make it to a proper airport), where they ran into a second problem: they were falling out of the sky at 500 feet per mile, but reached gimli (the base in question) while still too high to safely land. normally a plane would just do a big loop-de-loop to lose altitude, but they had maybe three minutes of airtime left before they hit the ground: not enough time to make any kind of circle. the pilot, therefore, decided to execute a side slip to lose speed and altitude. this is Not a move you want to do with a massive 767, because airplanes are not built for that and if you screw it up that plane is hitting the ground at a high speed at a weird angle and breaking into a million pieces. nevertheless, the captain tried it... and succeeded. the plane landed perfectly, and there were no major injuries! (a couple of people did get minor injuries when evacuating the plane after.) he did it so well, in fact, that the plane was refueled, flown out of gimli a couple days later, and continued to fly for another 20 years with the nickname "Gimli Glider."
what is a side-slip, you ask?
it's drifting.
the guy goddamn drifted his 767.
in 2008, the tv show Mayday: Air Disaster featured the gimli glider with full reenactments as an episode on season five of their show.
and so, in conclusion, the thing i have been giggling to myself about all weekend:
