kinda bullshit the English language doesn't have a discrete word for an unlit campfire. you light a campfire, but what is it before you light it? also a campfire, I guess. I need to invent a word that can be intuitively understood as "the arrangement of wood that is intended to become a campfire"
well "an arrangement of wood that is intended to become a campfire" sounds like it's just a bundle of sticks and I think there is a collective word for that maybe
"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.
we literally ruined society when we invented the fourth wall. let’s bring back call and response. heckling, even. fuck you hamlet you dumb piece of shit kill your uncle or shut up
"When we took Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” into a maximum security woman’s prison on the West Side… there’s a scene there where a young woman is told by a very powerful official that “If you sleep with me, I will pardon your brother. And if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll execute him.” And he leaves the stage. And this character, Isabel, turned out to the audience and said: “To whom should I complain?” And a woman in the audience shouted: “The Police!” And then she looked right at that woman and said: “If I did relate this, who would believe me?” And the woman answered back, “No one, girl.”
And it was astonishing because not only was it an amazing sense of connection between the audience and the actress, but you also realized that this was a kind of an historical lesson in theater reception. That’s what must have happened at The Globe. These soliloquies were not simply monologues that people spoke, they were call and response to the audience. And you realized that vibrancy, that that sense of connectedness is not only what makes theater great in prisons, it’s what makes theater great, period."
I was in the front row of a Hamlet performance where the "Am I a coward?" was directed at me and I, being a no-impulse-control gremlin, hollered back "Yes!!" (they'd primed us ahead of time that audience interaction was encouraged). Hamlet got right up in my face as he kept talking and just kept going until I gently pushed him back; I forget what line it was on when it happened but he took the direction of the push and reeled away across the stage.
This meant that I had marked myself as someone willing to be fucked with, and so during the graveyard scene later he approached me again. "Here hung those lips that I have kissed--" he booped my mouth with the skull's "-- I know not how oft."
I have stories related to me from those at Blackfriars, the American Shakespeare Center (they play in a replica of the original Blackfriars, with modern safety conventions like lightbulbs in the chandeliers, but a great dedication to the way structure shaped the original work in the original Blackfriars. Their house is only about 45 ft deep (roughly 15 m I think), which is about the max distance two sighted people can be from each other and still make eye contact. They play with the stage and house equally lit, they talk to the audience, they enter from the audience, they whip up crowds from within the audience. It’s fantastic. But anyway, on to the stories.)
Hamlet. There’s a scene where Hamlet sees Claudius praying and debates whether to kill him now or wait (because if Claudius dies praying he will automatically go to heaven). The actor playing Hamlet was genuinely asking the audience the questions in the speech, and when he got to “and should I kill him now?” someone in the audience shouted “YES KILL HIM HE NEEDS TO DIE!” Hamlet took the entire rest of the monologue to that person, enumerating his reservations so persuasively that they started to nod in agreement.
Romeo and Juliet. In this production, the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt happens in several rounds, of which Mercutio won the first. Mercutio’s actor made the choice, upon his victory, to run down the audience with his hand out for high-fives. He decided this in rehearsal, so he had time to plan for the three responses people would probably give him: a) a high-five back; b) being stunned and not reacting; and c) the old “oops too slow.” What this Mercutio did not prepare for was the audience member who panicked and deposited their handful of M&Ms into his open palm. The way I heard it, Mercutio was still processing this when Benvolio came up beside him and stole the M&Ms out of his hand to eat them.
King Lear. Edmund has a speech in which he asks whether he should marry “Goneril? Regan? Both? Neither?” Again, the actor was legitimately asking the audience, and again he’d prepared for the audience to respond in favor of any of those choices. What makes it even cooler was that the next line is “Neither can be enjoyed while both remain alive,” which works as a response to any of those options. One night, though, Edmund got his answer as “KILL THEM BOTH AND TAKE THEIR MONEY!” To which he gleefully agreed, “Neither can be enjoyed while both remain alive!!”
#Oh I have SO many stories from peak audience moments at the American shakespeare center#I have been to plays there that legit felt more like rock concerts#And I don't even mean the parts of the show where the cast is also a live band and they play#Covers of songs relating to the show#Fair maid of the west with Ginna Hoben#We were all SO on her side we absolutely lost our whole shit any time she even entered or exited#Knight of the burning pestle where Rick would pick a random audience member to be his lady love he was fighting for every night#And one time (I saw it thrice) he picked an older lady#And there's a part of the show where iirc he like gets almost defeated?#And he calls out to his lady love to like inspire him to keep fighting smth like that#And she Got Up Out Of Her Seat and went over to him and kissed him on the cheek#And no one was expecting that least of all Rick#And we all lost our shit whooping and hollering#They did a hamlet where...I forget who was polonius that year but there's a line where he's like 'what was I gonna say again'#And he paused SO long on that line you were legit unsure if he the actor had actually forgotten it#And once someone in the audience called out the next line and he was like 'oh that's right' and carried on#It was scripted though there were other nights no one said anything and we all sat there#In wonderful horrid awkward silence#Until he resumed#Please go if you get a chance#And sit stateside (via @rootingformephistopheles)
I was in a production of Hamlet in a small black box theatre, when a drunk guy came in from from outside, wandered onstage and started singing "We built this city on rock and roll." The guy playing Hamlet just went with it until the stage manager and crew could usher the drunk guy back outside. Then Hamlet continued with his next line, which was (no joke) "Now I am alone." Brought the house down.
So, I’ve been pulled over a few times in my life. Not many, but a few. And I’ve also been in a couple of cars that got pulled over. And let me tell you, if you were actually doing something wrong, the officer doesn’t make any small talk, just straight into “I clocked you doing 70 in a 55.” The only time I’ve ever gotten the “do you know why I pulled you over?” was the time when I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and I got let go even though he insisted to the end that I was doing 87 in a 70 (white privilege at work).
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” is a trap. It means there’s a good chance the officer doesn’t actually have a good reason to ticket you, and is trying to get you to waive your 5th Amendment rights and incriminate yourself. If you make a guess, that’s a confession of guilt.
But there’s another trap, that I’ve heard of but haven’t yet experienced. It’s “do you know how fast you were going?” With that one, they’re hoping you’ll say no, because then they can name whatever speed they want – you just said you didn’t know how fast you were going, if you deny the speed they name then you’re lying to them.
Oh, I’ve had that one. Go with “yes.” Don’t give them a number, just say “Yes.” Then they still have to offer a number and you can deny it without contradicting yourself. They could just ask you, at that point, but that’s suspiciously similar to saying they don’t know, and they tend to avoid doing that.
Also, you can always go to court and contest a ticket, and a lot of times you’ll win. Or if the cop thinks you’ll win they won’t even show up and you’ll win by default.
They like to target out of state plates because anyone who would be majorly inconvenienced by a court date two months away is a lot more likely to just pay it.
Also, if you get the court date changed to a different day of the week, the cop is much less likely to show up. A lot of cops, being the sort of people who are too lazy to get a real job, will try to have all their court dates on one day, so not being on that day means they’re probably not going to make an entire trip to court for just one case.
some of you weren’t around for the fan fiction dot net purge of 2002 (when they banned explicit content and mass-deleted thousands of fics) and the livejournal purge of 2007 (when they deleted hundreds of blogs, disproportionately targeting queer & kink content) and it shows
Boo hoo i'll be able to add more physical storage to my phone and be able to change out batteries if they degrade as well as all these other optional features I won't have to touch
I love how they add totally absurd things no one is asking for to make the idea look crazy. And still, I must emphasize, failing to make this look like a bad idea.
"Is this what you want? Is this ugly stupid bullcrap what you want??" the biggest loudest idiot in the room asks, holding up a picture of the hottest looking shit I've ever seen
some people like to get mad at disability benefits because they think its unfair people who dont work get a payout from the government while they have to work 50 hours at the human suffering factory every week. but if you tell them "yeah that sucks i think you should also get a universal allowance and not have to work 50 hours at the human suffering factory every week" thats apparently the wrong answer.
prguitarman
andulkaphoto
dailybridgerton
pixelskylines
