those were the days... Picture the scene: Monty Python's Flying Circus ran from 1969 to 1974. Nothing, I mean nothing, had been seen like this before on TV. To really appreciate their courage and brilliance you need to know something about these days when gay marriage was not even on the horizon and most people would lose their employment if they were outed at work. The first Pride Parade was in 1970 and it was only in 1973 that the American Psychiatric Association in their generosity declared that homosexuality was not a mental disorder. Being LGBTQ+ was gradually decriminalized in various parts of the UK and a bit later in the US starting slowly in the late '60's.
Meanwhile, Monty Python was winning over hearts and minds through the funny bone. Groundbreaking.
I think Graham Chapman, the 4th man to join the scene, being gay and being a member of Monty Python is worth noting. He had a partner, David Sherlock, and was publicly open with his homosexuality as early as 1972. I just think it makes a difference in how Monty Python treated queerness in sketches when one of their members, their good friends and collaborators, is himself gay.
so i made a potpourri with cinnamon and nutmeg and ginger and cloves and orange peel and anise and i have boiled it all day and it smelled so nice i took a sip and the sip was actually wonderful so now i have drunk four cups of potpourri juice and i am only now going to the internet to ask if i am going to Experience The Torments. or if i may have a fifth.
(i cannot quite explain it, but it’s like my entire low i have had a low grade stomachache, and normally i just deal but This Juice helps a little. i am unreasonably fond of it.)
After having gone thru acct recovery a couple times early in the days of OneDrive, I got the vibe that saving ANYTHING to a propriatary service was a huge mistake, ESP anything MS. Nice to see that vibe continues to check out.
MS does not care how many years of your life you have backed up to their cloud- they can take it away/delete it for any reason at any time. Keep your stuff local on an external drive.
question for any entomologists out there: if bumblebees were of a comparable size to, say, a kitten, would they enjoy resting in my lap while i gently comb their fuzz with a barbie brush? i know that i would enjoy that but i hope they would as well.
please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.
you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.
first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.
now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:
in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.
and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.
and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.
it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:
• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.
• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.
• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.
• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.
• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.
• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.
and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.
what i'm asking:
if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.
if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.
india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.
NGL I JUST HEARD SOMEONE SAY, "MAYBE YOU DON'T NEED MORE TIME TO HEAL, MAYBE YOU NEED MORE EXPERIENCES THAT SHOW YOUR NERVOUS SYSTEM A DIFFERENT REALITY," AND YEAH... IT ECHOED IN ME]
Tumblr being the "piss on the poor" reading comprehension site makes sense when you realize that 79% of adults in the US are functionally illiterate. Same goes for Twitter and TikTok.
that's a real high number, sport. where'd you get it?
I see we're all champing at the bit to find out about the Methuselah palm.
Bear with me because this is long and not really about the palm tree. But this is an archaeology page and I love talking about how people tell stories depending on their own life and conditions.
It was the year 73. The Jewish-Roman war was coming to a close. The second Temple in Jerusalem was destroyed and Judea was no longer mostly independent but completely controlled by Romans. An extremist splinter group, the Sicarii, was holed up in the Roman fort of Masada in the Judean Desert. They had been there for 6 years already and had enough food to hold out for years.
But the Romans did what Romans do and moved a butt ton of dirt. They spent 3 months building a 114m tall ramp into the fort. Keep in mind this isn't any old fort. It's an entire section of uplifted bedrock, flat at the top and with 90-200m cliffs in every direction. It took 15'000 men to besiege it, and by my count the satellite image shows 5 different camps surrounding it. The expenditure of such massive amounts of manpower on a very out-of-the-way fort is thought to have been a political decision to send a message to every other potential rebel in the Roman Empire.
So the Sicarii had a choice between being killed/enslaved, or suicide. They chose the latter. According to contemporary historian Flavius Josephus (who wasn't actually there), 960 people were found dead when the walls were breached. Only 7 survived and were enslaved. 2 adult women and 5 children. That was the end of the war.
Keep in mind the archaeology is a little different, only 28 skeletons have been found, mostly outside the walls, and no mass grave you'd expect. The writer depicted a single fire, the archaeology says there were a bunch of little ones. The grand last stand of 1000 people may have actually been a few dozen people all trying their best to survive. Or it may not. Opinions are divided and no one can even agree if the skeletons are Roman or Jewish.
The story has been retold a few times now. Obviously you have reality, as it actually happened. We will never know what that was. The first account by Josephus depicted the Sicarii as extremists who massacred other Jewish people during Passover. The author, despite originally fighting against the Romans as a General, was granted Roman citizenship and worked for the Romans by the time he wrote the book. And again, he wasn't there. Everything he wrote down was told to him by important figures from the Romans military.
In the 20s the story was reworked into a poem by a Zionist, turning it into a metaphor for Jewish people struggling to survive, and dedicated to the author's brother who had been killed in a pogrom in Ukraine. The poem was an exploration of the zionist project, trying to decide if it was a refuge or a trap.
Later during the Holocaust the poem reportedly inspired an uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. We don't have written accounts of it, but how do you think the uprisers would have interpreted it? A story about freedom fighters? People who knew they were doomed but fought on anyway? Or a story about how suicide is better than bowing down to your oppressor?
During the 40s another Zionist (an archaeologist) traveled around Mandatory Palestine (modern Israel & Palestine, then a British territory) telling a slightly different story: one that sanitised the Sicarii and turned them into heroes. They became freedom fighters, railing against the colonisers who had killed their compatriots. Again, a pretty resonant story during the last few years of the Holocaust and British rule.
By the 60s archaeological excavation was beginning to shape the narrative too. Now the story had physical proof! A grand state funeral proclaiming the skeletons were Jewish (even though they'd been found with roasted pig bones). Graves where people could pay their respects. The still-standing ramp where you could imagine the Roman horde bearing down on you. Scrolls were found, from lots of different sects, proof it wasn't just the Sicarii who fought at Masada, but all Jews. Including the Zealots, who refused to compromise with the Romans and wanted a completely independent Judea! The people who died at Masada were turned into the very first Zionists. And the very first Zionists had just been linked to just about every school of thought within Judaism. Even if there were other reasons to have those scrolls in the fort, including the fact the Sicarii were reported to be raiding Jewish villages all around the area. At a time when Israel was trying to build a nation out of people from all over the world with different ideas about what it should look like, how do you think having an origin story in common would have helped? Do you think that it could have shaped and been shaped by the dominant political narratives of the day?
And today. In the middle of the Gazan genocide. The narrative looks a little different again. Some people are drawing parallels between the Sicarii's refusal to compromise and the nationalists who insist on complete control of Palestine. Another parallel is the Sicarii's massacres of Jewish villages of different politics, and the fact there are plenty of Palestinian Jews who are suffering too. More people are looking at the archaeology of the site, beginning to question both the early archaeology and the historical record. What kinds of messages do you think the modern retellings are starting to send? What was your first reaction when you read the story of Masada, and your reaction to me talking about Palestine? Do you agree that we can equate the Romans and Palestinians in order to make those comparisons? What parts do you think I could've emphasised or glossed over because of my own biases?
Of course I've heard plenty of antiemetic takes on the narrative too. Most of them boil down to "Jews be crazy" which is, frankly, way more boring. Anyone who says that in the comments is getting blocked on sight.
I got distracted. This post is no longer about a tree. But dinner is ready so I'll end it here for now
So the archaeologists who excavated Masada found the food stores. It was one of the few things that didn't catch fire during the last days of the siege (even Josephus calls that out), the walls had just been knocked down at some stage and everything inside was absolutely pristine.
I'm sure you know if you've ever forgotten a piece of fruit in the bottom of your bag for a bit too long, but food isn't very good at staying food-shaped. It tends to rot incredibly quickly. So there's only a few ways it lasts long enough for archaeologists to find.
Fire is one of the best ways to preserve something. If you've ever had a campfire and then gone back years later you're gonna have seen that no matter how much grass grows over it, there's still a little ashy spot full of charcoal. That's because carbon on its own—basically all that's left after charring—is super duper stable and bacterial can't eat it. We have tons and tons of ancient food that's been burned. But things that have burned loose a few things (like DNA) in the process.
Freezing is a pretty good one. At least one palaeontologist has gotten to eat mammoth meat they found melting out of a glacier. And waterlogging. This is Tumblr I'm sure you've heard of the bog bodies. They get preserved because there's no oxygen at the bottom of water bodies, so there's no bacteria either. But the best preservation method is to keep it really really really dry. That's why Egypt is so cool, because everything anyone ever threw out in the desert has survived to present day. Imagine if your shopping list could be found 5000 years from now?
So yeah. The Judean Desert. Very very dry. Masada, practically untouched since the siege ended. Storehouses, full of enough provisions to last for years. And you know what ancient people in the Levant ate a lot of? Dates.
Date palms used to be all over the Levant. They were culturally significant enough to get put on currency, and the Romans imported them by the bucket load because they were tastier than other dates. Date palms grew wherever there was enough water, dried dates keep super well, and the date trade was very very profitable. It wasn't until the crusades devastated a lot of land and the mini-ice age of the 15th century that date cultivation died out and the landscape began to look similar to today.
So the Judean date palm was all but extinct (we actually don't know if ancient sources are talking about a distinct cultivar or just dates from Judea, either way) and along comes mad lass Sarah Sallon. She goes "hey you know the dates we've had in storage for 40 years? The ones that last saw the light of day 2000 years ago? What if I try and grow them?" So she and her friend Elaine take a few, hydrate them, and put them in dirt.
And the damned things grow! 2000 years in storage and the date turns into a tree. Happy as anything. There are four males and two females. So not only do we have trees grown from 2000 year old dates. We now have dates grown on trees grown from 2000 year old dates. You could eat dates only a single generation removed from what the Romans ate. If you tried hard enough of course. There's still only 2 fruiting trees.
There's also some barley from the Copper age from the same site. 6000 years old. They haven't sprouted (I'm not sure if anyone has tried) but they do still have intact DNA which, again, basically never survives because fire destroys it.
"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.
AI tool use is becoming mandatory for more and more roles at my company, unfortunately including mine, so I've spent the last week or so undergoing training courses and practice exercises for Claude Cowork, and here is my conclusion:
Congratulations, you made a computer that cannot successfully count to ten.
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i cant believe that there's still gamergate STANK on games that women enjoy. NASTY misogyny residue. stardew valley is in fact a video game. animal crossing is also a video game. so are otome games and dating sims and twee little cozy games. sometimes a bitch doesnt wanna play bloodborne that shit's hard
guys who mainly play 2k and fortnite will still be like oh youre not a real gamer for having 1000 hours in stardew. mother fucker you're larping as a basketball player
blakekathryn
ellievsbear
2087
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stormborns
