I'm Meri and this is just a personal tumblr for rebloging whatever I'm interested in. Unorganised and without direction, just like me 💖 any/all pronouns (femme)
[Images description: a Twitter thread by Alisa Lynn Valdés, M.S., @ AlisaValdesRod1. It goes as follows:
“This quote, from the @ nytimes review of the Oppenheimer film: (quote) “He served as director of a clandestine weapons lab built in a near-desolate stretch of Los Alamos, in New Mexico” (end quote)... It was inhabited by Hispanos. They were given less than 24 hr to leave. Their farms bulldozed. 1.
Many of those families had been on the same land for centuries. The Oppenheimer’s crew literally shot all of their livestock through the head and bulldozed them. People fled on foot with nowhere to go. Land rich, money poor. Their land seized by the government. 2.
All of the Hispano NM men who were displaced by the labs later were hired to work with beryllium by Oppenheimer. The white men got protective gear. The Hispano men did not. 3.
The Hispano men all died of berylliosis. These were US citizens, folks. Their land taken, animals killed, farms bulldozed, forced to work for the people who took everything from them, and killed by those people. 4.
For 20 years I have been trying to sell a film based on the story of Loyda Martinez, a remarkable whistleblower whose family's land was seized for the labs. Her dad was one of the men who died from beryllium exposure at the labs. She later went to work there too. 5.
She is a computer whiz who rose to the top of her department at Los Alamos. Then she started digging for info on the Hispano men the labs killed, like her father. She filed a class action lawsuit, and won. 6.
The first Hispano governor of NM, Bill Richardson, appointed Loyda to run the state's human rights commission. She then filed a second class-action against Los Alamos, on behalf of women scientists not paid fairly. 7.
But, no. We want more films about the "complex and troubled" "heroic" white men, who conducted their GENIUS in a "virtually unpopulated" place. These are ALL lies. This is mythology in service to white supremacy and the military industrial complex, masquerading as "nuanced." 8.
Because of what the labs did to the local Hispano people in northern NM, our communities now have the highest rates of heroin overdose deaths in the nation. The generational trauma and forced poverty is outrageous. We need the real stories of Oppenheimer to be told. End.”
"having a large chest is the beauty standard" no having a large chest is the Sexual standard theres a difference. i can only even be Hot and everything i ever wear will be deemed too sexual for every single situation. tank top shows too much cleavege or side boob a button up is always too busty and a crop top will always show too much skin. having a large chest leads to so much back pain and sexualization and complaining about it makes people go "ahh grass is alwahs greener/you are the beauty standard, why complain?" like genuinely i urge yall to watch anything with a larger chested woman and notice, REALLY notice, that her chest is her entire personality. notice that people critiqing misogynist charavter designs alwayd tend to rally in the statement that large chest=misogny, casting aside the Many Many Many women and people who look like Me and just . have a large chest? and exist? and deserve respect and not to be seen as nothing more than a sex symbol by both sides? idk ikdayy
straight white people making a romance movie: haha what if it was illegal to have sex? wait what's lawrence v texas. wait what's mclaughlin v florida. wait what's loving v virginia
As preposterous and stupid as this fucking movie's premise sounded (for a light-hearted rom-com, and not The Handmaid's Tale) I didn't want to think about it too much until the movie actually came out, and then I could see if it was somehow more intelligent and subversive than the trailer let on, but guess what, it's even worse!
If this is what it takes to get a rom-com greenlit these days, maybe we should just let them die.
Sex workers are thrown under the bus, shown only as thieves who fleece men in the woods at night, while queer sexuality is relegated to a few scenes with Allie’s roommate (a woefully underused Quintessa Swindell) and a handful of pans past blurry same-sex extras making out in the background. “This night is for the straights,” Swindell’s character says to Allie, before saying that queer people have worked around straight laws for centuries.
This is supposed to be a nod to queer resilience, but largely comes off as straightwashing the history of anti-LGBTQ legislation in this country that led towards raids of queer clubs and incarceration of queer people in the not-too-distant past (let alone the current barrage of anti-Trans and LGBTQ legislation currently in the works and on the books). It’s also ignorant of the long and fraught fight for the normalization of age-of-consent laws, which, by the way, did not happen in all states in this very country until 2003. Yes, that’s not even thirty years ago.
By the end, our intrepid protagonists have not had sex with anyone, because this is a film about Romance with a Capital R (and I guess sex is not part of romance!) and for that very same reason they ultimately embrace the fascist state of things. They aren’t the only ones who refuse to fight back. No one in this cursed film is protesting this mandate beyond “repeal” signs in various windows and some creative graffiti (...)
(...) If we are supposed to believe that the film is making some subversive statement about the state of sex and bodily autonomy in this country, it cannot end with its leads embracing their chains. That’s just warmed-over conservatism running around in sheep’s clothing.
yeah i wrote this post having only seen the trailer, but jesus christ. was this movie a psyop LMAO??
also, for the unaware: mclaughlin v. florida was a 1964 supreme court case that struck down a florida anti-miscegenation law that criminalized cohabitation (and thus, as implied, sex) between white people and people of color of opposite genders. anti-miscegenation laws made marriage and sexual relationships between white people and people of color, most often specifically black people, a FELONY in several states in the united states up until the 1950s and 1960s. though it was already struck down by the supreme court, the state of alabama didn't repeal their law until 2000! there were THREE ATTEMPTS at codifying anti-miscegenation into the us constitution!
like yes, the issue here is partially straight white people's ignorance on the united states's history of homophobic policy, but it's also really important to recognize that arguably the majority of the issue here is straight white people's ignorance of the united states's history of codifying eugenics and antiblack racism.
the premise could have been interesting as a serious dystopian story, especially taking that history into account, but it wasn't written that way at all. this movie should never have been a fucking romcom making light of the violence the united states (and many other countries) has enacted on any kinds of sexual relationships it deems undesirable.
I was trying to describe something that was pissing me off but xkcd already articulated it better than I could
I'm just like. I'm very tired of the hyper individualist cynicism that's so common on here, where so many tumblrinas feel very confident saying that nobody can read, everyone is dumb, most people are unwashed dullards etc. except for me, the very special tumblr user who's smart enough to notice that everyone else is very stupid. come on now.
I think if your worldview relies on the unquestioned assumption that most people suck you're like. how do I put this kindly. philosophically you've maybe never moved past the mindset of a socially uncomfortable seventh grader.
I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.
Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!
Game preservation is important, but people rarely consider preserving the manuals as well; I really respect Vimm's Lair for being so thorough in their archival work.
I've been using Vimm's Lair for years, I have yet to see a single bad link or virus on the entire site. It's arguably the safest and most comprehensive archive of video games in existence. Preserved history
"Tutorial" on how to draw an OC with dwarfism (well, some of it).
Boring tired disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is an introductory "drawing" "tutorial" and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. Which happens to be true for everything in general.
You are heavily encouraged to do your own research because this does not contain everything you should know before making a character with any type of dwarfism.
Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.
If (when) you repost this on pinterest at least put a link to the original post somewhere..
You listen to music regularly? Why? Have you even tried quitting? Could you quit? You get music stuck in your head? Wow. You're so ruined and music brained. I bet you make your partners listen to music with you when you have sex. Music addiction has really ruined a whole generation. You know it's not realistic to expect reverb in real life, right? You're probably so desensitized that you don't even feel anything anymore when you hear a bird singing that it wants some fuck.
It is wild talking to people online where you'll be like "Hey, you're kind of being an ass," and they'll rant about how as a member of a marginalized community... oppression and violence... societal forces... lack of opportunity... and it's like "Ok, people who share some demographic with you are pushed into homelessness and sex work but they are not being assholes online. You are a grad student at Reed who works part-time as a paralegal and you are a real dick."
Genuinely one of the worst things to happen to online discourse in the past 15 years was the popularization - and thus the chronic watering down - of the term tone policing. Originally, it was coined by Black women to describe the tendency of privileged white women, when called out by WOC, to attack the way they'd spoken as a means of diverting from the substance of what was said: a literal DARVO tactic. It pointed out a specific, extant pattern of white women weaponizing their discomfort to stave off accountability and how WOC in general and Black women in particular were thus expected to speak with a servile sort of gentleness, not just as a matter of course, but particularly in situations that merited anything but.
What it soon became, however, was a catch-all justification for marginalized people to act like fucking assholes.
People started saying the most aggro, edgelord shit at the drop of a hat, and if anyone pointed out how shitty it was, the culprit would immediately turn around and claim they were being tone policed. The levels of toxicity this resulted in were through the fucking roof, and the result was multiple left-wing online communities fostering the presence of utterly vile trolls because any attempt to curtail them was met with a combination of defensive retreat into marginalization ("Oh, so [members of X marginalized group] aren't allowed to be angry?" "You wouldn't blink an EYE if a cishet white man said the same thing!") and a lambasting dogpile on whoever had dared to point out their bad behaviour.
This reached a fever-pitch in around 2014, at which point a bunch of shit happened that collapsed the established troll ecosystems across various online fronts. Since then, things have calmed down somewhat, but the impulse towards treating "hey, stop being an asshole" as a species of microaggression remained, such that it has now metastasized into - or at least significantly contributed to - the "UWU I am a Smol Bean 26yo minor and therefore I can't be held accountable for anything I say or do because I'm PRACTICALLY a CHILD" phenomenon.
At base, what all this bullshit ultimately reflects is the desire of a certain type of person to act like an asshole without consequence, which in left-wing spaces is achieved one of two ways: either by situating their target as having more privilege than them, such that they're fair game to abuse (because if they don't take the personal attacks or scathing denunciations of the entire category of person to which they belong in "good humour," then they're proving themselves to be one of the bad ones); or by situating themselves as having a unique right to never ever be criticized or held to account (because they're marginalized or disabled or having a mental health crisis or a MINOR, YOU GUYS and making them feel bad about the shitty things they said is basically abusive).
and the response btw is to not fall for it stand your ground reaffirm what they did was fucked up and dont fuck around with respectability politics there may be some who believe them and thusly believe you some evil demon but those people arent engaging in any conversation critically arent worth your time and were primed to flip on you no matter what regardless
douchewad: says or does something especially ableist racism sexist transphobic homophobic or is just a monumental asshole
you: hey that was fucked up
them: you dont understand the amount of chronic pain gender executive dysfunction i have yada yada yada how dare you come at me like this youre the racist sexist transphobic homophobic ableist yada yada yada
what you may feel inclined to say: "i understand youre going through xyz" or "im sorry youre going through xyz, but" <- dont do this actually bc thats ceding ground to the idea that their actions are in any way reasonable given the circumstances (theyre not) no level of marginalization or intersecting marginalized identities excuse being an asshole or a bigot and you are doing far more harm than good to those very communities by even entertaining the idea than to dismiss the excuses out of hand
what you should say: dont care didnt ask there are people going through all of that and more who arent racist/sexist/transphobic/homophobic/ableist assholes and what you said was fucked up
"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.
