d e v o n
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Kiana Khansmith
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gracie abrams
if i look back, i am lost
Andulka
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Love Begins
ellievsbear
Cosmic Funnies
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shark vs the universe
The Bowery Presents
Keni
★
Show & Tell
official daine visual archive
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seen from India
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seen from Slovenia
seen from Japan
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@effervescentwolf
more than an afterthought
buddie | rated E | 3.9k
“How do people have sex when they have kids?” Buck continues, knowing he’s whining a little bit, but he’s pent up, and Theo came into his life without warning so he didn’t have time to mentally prepare for everything it would entail. Namely, what it would mean for Buck’s sex life. Eddie’s face is kind of red, but he says, in that matter of fact way he always does, “Theo’s asleep right now.”
my excessive use of commas and my love of run on sentences is alluring and attractive to my readers
huge fan of the depth of a good purple but another area that draws me is definitely around aquamarine/turquoise/seafoam. you can not go wrong once the green starts getting just a tinge more blue. a gal could certainly do worse than to pull over there and stay a while
something earth shattering going on here
this is why one of my favorite all-time paintings is Ship in Stormy Seas by Ivan Aivazovsky... he was really onto something there
a close up to just... light shining through those waves, makes me feel faint with exhilaration every time
THERE IS A BOAT BY IVAN AIVAZOVSKY!!
Ivan Aivazovsky could paint glowing water. One of the GOATs for sure.
Buck and Eddie + touch - part 1
Smiley Buck in S09E06
Hm I think it’s very important to note that the full quote from Margaret from the Buckley Dinner is “You never made it easy on us. Either one of you.”
Bc usually ppl only quote the first bit but the whoooole lead up to this conversation is them berating Maddie over marrying Doug and ‘thank god she came to her senses’ and how they never bothered to visit either one of their children when they almost died.
Bc I think people forget that the Buckleys really only pretend to still love Maddie. Like, they’re going through the motions with her because she was nine when Daniel died, so she still remembered Before. They lost a child, and they distanced themselves from the other two until they forgot how to care about them.
This!!! Buck at least had Maddie to lean on, to turn to, to depend on. Who did Maddie have? Of course she would’ve ignored any red flags of Doug’s even Buck noticed, of course she wanted to believe that his tracking of her whereabouts and invitation to move with him were romantic: because the alternative was no one!! And Doug knew that! That’s likely why he wanted to be with her. And instead of Margaret and Philip being someone Maddie could turn to, they basically cut their ties to her before Doug would’ve forced the issue. And yeah, Buck was able to provide her a place to run to, but it was dependent on both him staying in one place long enough and being an adult. Even if she had never met Doug and Buck and Maddie moved away from their parents, it would’ve been a time when Buck was just 18 and still figuring out how to be an adult and who he was. Maddie, by virtue of being the eldest and older, quite older than Buck, she was always going to bear the brunt of responsibility between the two until Buck got to a place where it evened out. Meanwhile, she wasn’t even allowed to talk about her grief. Margaret and Philip at least had each other. Who did Maddie have? She had Buck but it took decades until he could’ve been an equal. Buck grew up thinking he wasn’t loved or wanted by his parents, and once by Maddie. Maddie grew up knowing exactly why she wasn’t wanted anymore, knowing her parents were capable of loving her, but couldn’t or wouldn’t work through their grief to try again, and then, in an effort to give her kid a big family, was the one to extend the olive branch to her parents to try and mend things between them. And then both her parents and Buck blamed her when the truth came out.
Pedestrian traffic lights
these photos were assembled by Maya Barkai (taken and submitted by numerous photographers around the world) for the art project Walking Men Worldwide! :)
I do think the ability to emoji-react is a net win for human communication. not only does it give you an outlet for 'I see and acknowledge this but don't have a verbal response' but it also adds a pleasing alethiometer element to things
my coworker announces that he's off to the dentist. someone reacts with a tooth emoji. is this a statement of dentist solidarity? a wish for my coworker to return with more (or fewer?) teeth than he set out with? simple word association? who can say
"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.
your car: *bounces back and forth, defeated, its hood swinging by a mere thread*
my car: *triumphantly leaps six feet in the air, spraying hubcaps in victorious fervor*
What?
thinking about mother's boy again, as one does, and i love so much buck's desperate bargaining for eddie's life, because it's not out of character at all. he's not giving up or giving in or admitting defeat. it's an absolutely calculated, clear-eyed assessment of the situation: eddie is alone, almost certainly unarmed, expecting no danger from bonnie or earl. if buck screams for help, she'll put a bullet in his head and then go out and do the same to eddie. if eddie knows he's there, he won't leave. bonnie can make him leave, and she will, as long as buck plays on her sympathies just right.
buck does not at that point realistically expect to survive. but his chances - of talking bonnie around, of another opening to escape - are better if eddie leaves now. and even if he doesn't make it out alive, he can make sure that eddie does. so that's what he tries to do.
(and yeah, of course eddie realizes he's there, of course they save each other in the end - but they were lucky, and it easily could have gone the other way.)
idk! i feel like it often gets treated as this Dark Night Of The Soul moment for buck where he gives up in despair because he doesn't think he's worth saving, but i don't think it is! i think it's the exact same ruthless pragmatism that drives a lot of buck's risky choices, and for that reason i actually also think that eddie, if he ever found out, would understand even if he hated it.
*sees whatever the fandom is doing* there's a really good story happening on the actual show if you want to watch that instead
harassing your furniture vs harassed by your furniture
Buck + flirty belt grabs
I love how Zohran Mamdani is wearing a suit everywhere. And if he has anything else he puts it ON TOP of the suit. A basketball jersey. A high-vis vest. All worn over the suit. He’s like the mayor character in a cartoon who’s always dressed as The Mayor. If I didn’t know who he was and he biked past me in NYC I’d be like holy shit was that the mayor
Not to bring the serious to a very fun post, but this reaction is exactly what Mamdani is working for with his image, because in a very real way the most effective way for him to be The Mayor is if he looks like The Mayor.
This is a man who is VIOLENTLY aware that when it comes to conservatives, he is a Muslim first, a Brown Man second, an Immigrant third, a Socialist fourth, and a human a very distant fifth, if considered at all. He was also a young adult during the Obama Years and will have seen Republicans rip Obama to shreds for wearing a tan suit instead of a dark one and use literally ANY excuse they could to try and degrade his image.
Despite the fact that a mayor who wears a T-shirt and jeans might "seem more approachable" in the eyes of the average American, Zohran Mamdani knows that someone with his profile fundamentally cannot get away with that the way his White colleagues can. He has instead put in the effort to look professional and BE approachable, because not only does it make it easier for him to reach and represent his constituents, it forces everyone, including both his opponents and establishment Democrats, to engage with the work he is doing instead of judging his image. The fact that he is always seen in a suit and is recognisably The Mayor is, while also something he has fun with, a deliberate choice to ensure he is as inarguably A Professional Politician To Be Taken Seriously. The added humour of e.g. the hi-vis is a bonus, only achievable because he works so hard to Look Like The Mayor.
Adding these tags from @haunted-stranger-garden bc they illustrate this brilliantly
@buckweek - Day 5 - outfit(s) in Season 9
my idea that never was for day 2 of buck week was for harry to ask buck how much he needed to bulk up because he keeps seeing buck's weights increase and buck telling him that it's so he can carry the entire 118 out of a disaster if he needs to. leading to everyone standing in the loft with various expressions as buck cracks his knuckles and carries them one by one down the loft stairs and deposits them in the engine. he knocks ravi's head into the railing one time and ravi contemplates transferring. chim keeps kicking him for fun. harry is weirdly good at it and he reveals that bobby used to practice carrying him too. hen's glasses almost fall off and buck has to carry her one handed while holding them because she said that if they crack he's paying for a new pair. eddie's like wait you know you can carry me you carried me after i got shot and buck's like WELL YOU'RE BIGGER NOW SO and eddie is so red and stiff (insert entendre here) as buck carries him and when he drops him off hen's like 'had fun, eddie?' and eddie's like 'please don't look at me right now.'
anyways buck carries all of them fine but when he tries to climb in the engine himself his shoelace goes loose and he trips and falls on his face. the end.
