So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.
Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.
The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).
The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.
But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.
more than anything i want a world where a trans girl realizing she is a trans girl faces zero fear from that realization and subsequent coming out. Where she can say "Oh sweet, I can just be a girl? Sign me up!", no worrying if shes girl enough, no worrying if society will accept her, no worrying if she'll be an attractive girl as she transitions, no worrying at all in any way shape or form.
"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.
They’re calling emojis “hieroglyphs” again and I should be allowed to do a little grievous bodily harm as a treat. The only way you escape is if you can show me examples of a tense system, a nominal phrase, and an adverb using emojis. If not, well, then it’s clobbering time.
Where do we stand on the idea of emojis serving as determinitives (or however its spelled) can an emoji tell me if the sentence is in the past? Not really. But it can help me understand the intent and emotions behind the sentence
(Actually I'm not sure determinitive is the word I'm looking for but its the closest I can think of)
Determinative is the correct word, but no they still cannot be used this way.
Hieroglyphs are used to write only one language Egyptian. There is Old, Middle, and Late Egyptian, but these are all still progressive forms of the same language, even if grammar and spelling different between them. Culturally, the Hieroglyphic signs do not change meaning during this. A 𓀁 sign always means the word has something to do with something going into the mouth or speaking. A 𓄗 sign always comes with words to do with animal legs or certain types of power. They're relatively static.
Emojis are a global script. Anyone in any language can use them to convey an additional emotion or tone, but they do not have global meaning. As I've said before on this post:👌in the anglosphere and several other countries means 'okay', but you use that sign with someone from Brazil or various countries in the Middle East and essentially you're telling someone to 'get fucked.' The same goes for 👺 the Japanese Tengu, which, for years before 😈 was introduced, was used in place of 'the devil' as something evil, whereas Tengu are (more recently) troublemakers but more of a mischievous kind and can even be protective. Even 🙂 can have its problems. Many people will interpret it as a smile, that things are good, but some people will interpret it as a sign of dissatisfaction or upset because 😊 is used more commonly where they are.
Beyond cultural issues, the use of emoji to accompany or provide tone to an existing language is inherently personal. An individualistic use of a script, varying from person to person in terms of meaning and understanding, can never be considered to be a language in and of itself. It's not standardised, each country uses emojis for different meanings, and each subculture within those countries will have different meanings again. Hieroglyphs do not do this because they have standardised meanings.
Finally, we have to address the fact that emojis, while they might have an emotional meaning or represent a physical object, do not have any phonemes attached to them. They are not spoken, they do not have sounds (unless, pedantically, we're saying the letter/number signs do but then they're part of existing scripts and shouldn't be counted). There is the Rebus principle where signs literal meaning can be taken to make them have a sound like 👁️🐝🥬'eye bee leaf' or 'I believe' but that's still only forming a language that exists rather than emojis being a language themselves.
Hieroglyphs on the other hand are logoconsonantal, which means they are logograms (literal depictions of what they are) but also have consonantal value (sounds). For instance, 'house' is written with a sign that represents a bird's eye view of a basic floorplan of an Egyptian house 𓉐. That sign (𓉐) has the consonantal value 'pr' which, on it's own with just that sign reads 'house' (usually with a single stroke (𓏤) to indicate just one). However, the two-consonantal phoneme 'pr' can be used in other words that have nothing to do with a house. For instance: 𓉐𓂋𓂻 'pr' with a mouth sign (that has the consonantal value of 'r') and the walking legs determinative (in this case it is unread because it's a determinative, but it can have the value 'jw' that on it's own means 'to go forth'). Those three signs combined mean 'pr' 'to come'. For evidentiary consistency's sake we'll do another example: 𓅭 this sign on its own, or accompanied by a single stroke 𓅭𓏤, has the consonantal value of sȝ and the meaning of 'duck'. However, combine 𓅭𓏤 with 𓀀 and you get 𓅭𓀀𓏤 sȝ 'son'. The man functions as the determinative in son' to separate reading sȝ as 'duck' because the phoneme is the same. Then, if I want to be really thorough, I can just write 𓀀𓏤 's' 'man' if I take away the 𓅭. For a full reading I'd add a one consonant sign 𓊃 's' and then the man would go back to just being a determinative.
All this is without getting into grammar with the use of pronouns, suffixes, and tenses, which I could do, but I think I've made my point pretty clear.
Emojis are a script of ideograms that represent emotions or a literal object rather than sounds, though they can be manipulated using the Rebus principle. The meaning of each of them is heavily dependent on the users current language, country of origin, and cultural background.
Hieroglyphs are a logoconsonantal script, where each sign has consonantal value or phonemes that when stood alone or grouped with other signs form words within the various stages of the Ancient Egyptian language. These meanings are set, they do not differ over various parts of Egypt, and are not dependent on the individual using them.
That is why emojis and hieroglyphs are not remotely the same thing.
I tried to order a usb-c to hdmi connector via a site that turned out to be an amazon storefront, and amazon instantly locked me out and said if I can't verify my account via text I have to send them my passport
got so pissed once about this happening i discovered google has 'backup codes' hidden in ur privacy settings that you can generate and physically hold on to in order to authenticate yourself without any other bullshit. they really try to hide it away but it has saved my ass on several occasions when i wanted to use find my phone and it asked for a code. from my phone. to log in.
In love with this random guy who had a lock slapped on his storage unit for not paying its rental and not only did he ignore management and took his stuff out without paying, but also chose to steal the lock itself and send it to the LockPickingLawyer along with a confession letter
People always focus on the "lockpicking" part of his name and ignore that the lockpicking lawyer is, indeed, a lawyer, and can tell you exactly which crimes you committed in getting this lock to him
I can't believe this is how I'm finding out that I got a scam forklift cert.
I took the cargo ops class at school but my teacher explained that it doesn't give a certification and I'd only be okay for ship's crane and the school forklifts. she said I could take an online exam and get my cert. I paid 60 bucks.
I'm googling and I'm seeing a lot of resources saying that the online programs cover the classroom part of the exam but not the in person practical aspect.
the back of the card even had fancy numbers on it. I couldn't have known that this isn't the one. this website sounded more official than certifyme.net, and there wasn't one with a .gov address.
so, I emailed OSHA, and they said that so long as I live and work in California, there's no such thing as forklift certification. I have to be told how to do it every time I get the job.
Update: I took a certification class in shipboard Material Handling Equipment at my federal job. *now* I'm forklift certified, but only on ships and piers and only for this company, but also rated to forklift explosives and hazardous materials. Also I'm a woman now.
US based but it’s similar reasons in other countries. and of course many companies have international locations. idk if that’s why it’s happening with sour patch kids but this is a thing
My nephew is very allergic to eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and sesame. Last year my sister discovered all hot dogs and hamburger buns now contain sesame. Not "may contain", but listed in the ingredients. This year basically every brand of sliced bread also now contains sesame, making it very difficult to find bread items he can eat.
They're just adding it to their products, so they can just list it as an ingredient and not bother with worrying about cross contamination. And they aren't even bothering with telling anyone. Capitalism is going to kill us all.
"Which brings us back to Kellogg’s. Back in 2016, the company found a way around the added burden and expense of complying with the FSMA: they simply began adding trace amounts of peanut flour to their cracker products. Doing so allowed them to list peanuts as an ingredient of the product, freeing them from having to prevent cross-contact.
At the time, Kellogg’s notified Food Allergy Research and Education (FARE) about the impending change and left it to them to warn the allergic community. In this case, Pearson’s didn’t even bother as near as we can tell."
it's always "you gnawed off your own leg to escape like an animal caught in a trap" and never "why didn't anyone try to help you out of the trap" or "why weren't you provided with any other resources to escape the trap with except for your own teeth"
Pleased to report that after a day of this i am not longer craving caper brine and my mouth is not dry as usual. There's some good suggestions in the notes too that I want to try.
-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)
-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt
Just escaped from Hell thanks to the incredibly convenient road leading directly out! Apparently it was paved with good intentions? Thanks for those, everybody! They worked out great, just like always!
#i. yeah. terribly profound in a fairy-tale way #there was a door-to-door religion salesman i talked to when i little; kept hammering on about people getting tempted down the Road to Ruin #and i (genuinely confused) asked why more people didn't follow because surely Ruin was the best place to go if you wanted to help #he looked poleaxed and wandered away. i guess i can't blame him - i was about 9 and looked maybe 6. so that must have been unnerving for him #but that was my confusion with the whole heaven/hell set-up for years; surely heaven needs saints like a fish needs a bicycle #hell is where there is work to do (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)
fun fact there were at least two people named lancelot recorded in the 1292 paris census so I think we know what the 13th century equivalent of naming your kid sasuke was
other names that sound normal now but are actually From Pop Culture- meaning they were used for fictional characters before they became real-people names -include:
- Mavis (from the book The Sorrows of Satan, 1895)
- Pamela (from the book The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, late 16th century, but popularized by the 1740 novel Pamela)
- Imogen (from Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline, c. 1611. possibly a typesetting error on the earlier name Innogen)
- Enola (from the book Enola, or Her Fatal Mistake, 1886)
- Vanessa (from the poem Cadenus and Vanessa, 1812)
- Cedric (from the book Ivanhoe, 1819. transposition of letters from the earlier Saxon name Cerdic)
- Dorian (from the book The Picture of Dorian Gray, 1891. similar masculine names had previously existed, like Dorus, Doros, and Dorios, but Wilde is believed to have coined this specific usage)
- Jessica (from Shakespeare’s play The Merchant of Venice, c. 1596-7. Possibly an Anglicization- Italianization? -of the Hebrew name Yiskah, since the character is Jewish)
– Wendy (from Peter Pan, 1904. It was sometimes used beforehand as a nickname for Gwendolyn, but wasn't used as a given name until J. M. Barrie popularized it.)
– Cora (from the book The Last of the Mohicans, 1826.)
– Lorna (from the book Lorna Doone, 1869.)
– Miranda (from Shakespeare's play The Tempest, c. 1610-11.)
– Norma (from Alexandre Soumet's play Norma, ou L'infanticide, 1831, best known as the source for Bellini's opera Norma, which premiered later the same year.)
