d e v o n
Misplaced Lens Cap
blake kathryn
★
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Discoholic 🪩
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TVSTRANGERTHINGS
Kiana Khansmith
𓃗
almost home
JVL
Not today Justin
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
sheepfilms
One Nice Bug Per Day
tannertan36
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
bliss lane
pixel skylines
seen from Japan
seen from T1
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Croatia
seen from Germany
seen from Türkiye
seen from T1
seen from Canada
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Croatia
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seen from United States
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seen from Australia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from United States
@gnars-house
I know everybody already has their own reasons to hate it, but the reason I can’t bring myself to go see the Odyssey is it just doesn’t look FUN. It looks like the Hobbit movies, how they totally ignored the tone of the book because they just wanted to make more LOTR. idgaf what the armor looks like, I’m more bothered by why there’s so much armor at all when this is NOT a war story this is a road trip story with monsters and witches and clever ruses!
This is the 85 year old creator of Roger Rabbit:
Why does this video make it look like the members of Paramore are in a committed long-term triad? I mean it's ADORABLE, I just feel like there should be more fanfiction about this.
small town diner waitress voice: Omelas? Oh, oh no, easy mistake, you're in oh - MAY - las right now, with an A. Plenty' people get the name mixed up. Nope, no utopia here, just our small little town. *face gets really grim* We do still.. Okay well we do still have a kid that we... I mean it isn't working but- well- You know. It- It's fine. I'm sure it'll start working soon.
if i was a musician i would write songs that are 100% about certain characters or ships but if anyone asked me if they were i'd be like "sorry who's that? is that from a book or tv show or ? yeah idk sorry i've never heard of them"
It drives me absolutely crazy that “I’m Your Villain” by Franz Ferdinand is so obviously about Batman/Joker and it’s just completely unacknowledged???? so yes this is a good plan
tag yourself
magnificent in the '70s
annoying in the '80s
boring in the '90s
irrelevant in the '00s
hypocritical in the '10s
completely ignored in the '20s
hypocritical was the only genuine thing to be in the ‘10s
"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.
I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!
reblog if you wear glasses. too many mutuals don't know they have glasses wearers in their midsts
A Mad Dash
At the end of June, I wrote a post which inventoried a list of “loose ends” to tie up, and slowly and somewhat surely, I’ve addressed some of the miscellaneous matters. Here’s a summary of what I’ve parceled up so far:
* Grammar – poem with “syntax”: Check!
I wrote about “Going to Him! Happy letter!” in the very late-June post mentioned above, HERE.
* Eben Loomis' poem "A Sunset Idyl": Check!
I commented on Mabel Loomis Todd’s father’s poem over the course of two days, HERE and HERE.
* Mathematics v. grammar – info on short poem re: ingots/Peru: Check!
At first, I couldn’t remember what this reminder was all about, but I finally figured it out, HERE.
* Dashes – info from Helen V’s book: Check!
That’s the focus for my post today – so cast your eyes and thoughts below, dear reader!
However, before I get to “Helen V’s book,” which is Helen Vendler’s Dickinson, Selected Poems and Commentaries, let me share a crafty little post I came across the other day on Tumblr from the mind of @gnars-house:
Of course, my first thought was, “Dash it all – why didn’t I write that?” So simple. So true. So apparent. My second thought was of Helen Vendler, for Gnars-house’s chef-d'oeuvre reminded me of my record of unfinished business and my pledge to address “Dashes – info from Helen V’s book” – so let's dive in, shall we?
In the introduction to her collection of poems and commentaries, Vendler states this (and I’ve added the bold here and there for emphasis):
Did Dickinson write any poems without a dash? I suspected so, but still – I wondered.
I paged through my copy of Franklin’s The Poems of Emily Dickinson. Poem number 9, “If recollecting were forgetting” – no dashes. Hmm…but take a look to the right of her name at the bottom of the original manuscript. Do I detect a dash?
Note: Where Franklin uses a comma at the end of Line 2 (as shown above), Johnson provides a period.
STOP THE PRESSES:
When I wrote the "Note" above – about the comma vs. the period – I wondered which appeared in the 2016 Cristanne Miller edition, Emily Dickinson's Poems As She Preserved Them, a comma or a period. I checked the index for the page on which to find the poem, and I was shocked to find that the work wasn't included in the book. Well, it is – but it wasn't when I first checked. Here's the story: Below: Index entries in the Miller edition of Dickinson's poems.
After perusing the index of Miller's edition, I decided to check for the poem in The Letters of Emily Dickinson, also edited by Cristanne Miller. I discovered that the poem had been sent to Samuel Bowles in the summer of 1859. Miller included it in her book with this note: "Fascicle 1; M 40 (beginning 'Oh if remembering were forgetting –')." The "M40" stands for "Miller edition, page 40," and sure enough, there on page 40 of Miller's edition was the poem – although beginning with the word "Oh" (in italics), and not "If.”
Below: The poem as it appears in Miller’s edition.
And did you notice? There are five dashes in the poem! So why no dashes in the Franklin edition?
You see, in Cristanne Miller's edition, she included the poems "as she preserved them" -- so Miller published the poem as it appeared in Dickinson's Fascicle One, from the summer of 1858.
In Franklin's edition, his policy was "to choose the latest version of the entire poem, thereby giving to the poet, rather than the editor, the ownership of change." Since the poem with no dashes was sent to Bowles in 1859, that later version was published.
The next poem with no dashes in the Franklin edition is number 54, “‘Lethe’ in my flower.”
The lower portion of the manuscript (as seen above) was destroyed or lost; however, a transcript of the poem made by Mabel Todd when the manuscript was intact supplies the last six lines of the poem. But think about that for a moment. Todd, the editor of the first posthumously published collections of Dickinson poetry – who modified much of the poet’s punctuation and grammar – transcribed the poem – so who knows. Maybe there were dashes used throughout the poem? Vendler offers a similar – and intriguing – discussion on this matter (a dash-less poem that likely was penned with dashes) – so I’ll get to that tomorrow.
By the way, the next item on my list of unfinished business mentioned at the start of this post was “Story of the giant coffee cup." This dates back to a post from six months ago where, at the conclusion, I said, “this is eerily reminiscent of the day the planets aligned and some unknown, unseen force directed me to the giant coffee cup and saucer in Milwaukee, but I’ll save that story for another day” – and that “another day” will come one of these days! Pinky promise!
boris wants to be a hat too
i cannot BELIEVE how much people care about what other people do in fandoms. chill. take a step back. block and filter. reevaluate what YOU want out of this story/community and what you need to do to get that, and then STOP obsessing about what what other people are doing.
You just teleported to the last movie you watched! how is it going?
good
bad
great
awful
FUCK YOU I'M IN THE BACKROOMS NOW
dead
results
Amazing
Wait I have a theory. I think it’s to do with how media’s allergic to sincerity. Funny thing, I became aware of this in the early 2010s but I saw a post abt it recently where they said it was true by the early 2000s. But the point is, I think finding sincerity in unexpected places gives an important jolt to my system. The sheep movie is dumb and silly and it doesn’t have anything interesting to say. But it’s sincere as fuck in places where you would not expect a silly movie in 2026 to be sincere. It’s SENTIMENTAL even. Who let THAT past the censors?
Last time a movie made me cry like this (more actually. Way more)? Well, whenever I tell people about it I downplay it, I say it must have JUST been because of what was going on in my life and not about the movie at all because how does it make ANY sense to be bawling in the back of the theater at DEATH OF A UNICORN?
But it does make sense. Because that movie, most of it IS exactly the kind of ironic, cynical schtick that you’d expect. And then, all of a sudden, it ISN’T. And it’s not artful, it’s not done WELL, but it’s completely honestly willing to tap not only sincere relateable human emotion but ALSO the genuine fantastical wonder you get from like, Bruce Coville’s unicorn stories. How was I supposed to be prepared for that in this movie?
tl;dr we are starving for sincerity and finding a crumb of it in an unexpected place can be a great way to remember how to be human, and we should probably be doing that a lot more often.
