~All pronouns, genderqueer/genderfluid, polyamorous (I š my partners!), sapphic bisexual~ ~Master's of Science in Clinical Mental Health Counseling~ ~Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome zebras unite š~ ~Compassion and love should always be at the heart of politics and discourse~ ~Big leftie and lover of trans folks š~
aren't gorillas gentle giants or something. i stay out of his way, he doesn't maul me, we have a nice time picking out clothes together in opposite sides of the mall
Male gorillas are super aggressive and territorial. Also they interpret nearly every human mannerism as a sign of aggression or a challenge. Smiling and eye contact are both things that zookeepers have to be taught to suppress when theyāre in the vicinity of gorillas.
This is all irrelevant because the obvious answer is five black mambas. I mean, thatās not actually very many snakes, and malls are fucking huge. And unlike a gorilla you can definitely outrun a snake if it does show up. Find an open space in the mall where you can see any snake coming and just hangout out there. Fucking easy.
Misguided! I would much rather have a mallmate I can easily see and hear coming. I'm confident I can stay out of the gorilla's way, but if I step on a snake or one otherwise gets the jump on me, it's all over.
It's not just about the physical danger either, it's about my mental health. One gorilla, unless he's actively mad at me, I just keep a healthy distance between us and make sure I never get trapped. With the snakes, it requires a lot more constant vigilance
Black mambas have a reputation build on being very venomous and very fast. I'm not sure why you would think you could outrun one (or five) in an enclosed space like a mall.
Malls usually have pretty slick floors, and escalators. Iād choose the gorilla simply because I think that would make an more interesting story (and a better-selling autobiography, I Survived the Mall Gorilla) but I think Iād stand a pretty good chance at avoiding the mamba. Theyāre fast and aggressive and will chase you but unless we started immediately beside each other I think my sneakers would have the terrain advantage over scutes.
fucking enamored with the implication that this gorilla is fully intelligent but is trying to manufacture plausible deniability like the movie barnyard
Imagine if we did the āpublic libraries are punkā thing for other subcultures. Imagine if people made shirts that said āSoup kitchens are grungeā or āMixed Use Urbanism is Juggaloā.
so many people ive known have pushed themselves to burnout trying to deny their disabled reality, skipping accommodations, skipping rests etc. and the world convinces them that the solution to their burnout is to push even harder. itās a huge tragedy. i know social pressures make it tough but i want more disabled people to make things easier for themselves where possible, to opt out of things that harm them when possible, to quit while theyāre ahead. be that person today! protect yourself where you can! take micro breaks while doing your hobby. get that shower chair. sit to brush your teeth. lie down in the middle of the day, even if only for 5 mins. these things add up and itās so worth it.
so the context is that it was "Heated Rivalry theme night" & we also gotta talk about the Fox News article on this. expected amount of homophobia but you just gotta laugh
With families in attendance Tuesday night, the Pickles decided to honor the HBO show by creating a script where a pitcher hits a batter. The batter charged the mound, and with little kids watching, the two men embrace and start kissing. At least one little girl can be seen covering her eyes as the men kiss.
Meanwhile, in Philly, sane America was celebrating with a Sandlot tribute and Ray Charles singing "America the Beautiful."
The divide between sane America and the demented America that Portland wants to export across this country can't be any clearer. This isn't about two men kissing. This is about taking one of the final wholesome places left for families ā the Pickles are holding a Fart Night this Friday night ā and turning it into a LIB stunt factory where kids are subjected to the Alphabet Mafia's whims. [...]
"Little girl in the background immediately, instinctively, and rightly, covers her eyes. Everyone knows this sāt is wrong but white liberal women keep forcing it into ever(y) facet of our lives. Fatigue," wrote a Twitter user.
That was immediately countered by the typical lunatics who want to normalize this spectacle.
"You mean like any little kid does when they see two people kissing..? They find all kissing gross. Gtfo here with your bigotry," the lunatic replied.
me personally i think demented america is the only america worth loving, and next the MLB should require every team engage in competitive gay sex bare ass naked on the field in front of thousands. only then will our sick liberal thirst for power be satisfied
apparently the pitcher is gay in real life tho!!! legend shit this must have been so fun for him. also he's hot as fuck. only gay men should be allowed to play baseball actually
"Guess I can check off 'making out on the diamond during a professional baseball game' from my list," the gay pitcher, who goes by J.P. Hardy, wrote to his fans on Instagram Story.
"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 āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 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 āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
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 assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā 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 Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā 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 Japanās 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 ākept losing trackā 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 āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā 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 āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā 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 ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās 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 studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā 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 Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā 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 āfinding the main ideaā 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 āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā 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 ādeep workā 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 sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā 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.
Iām afraid I donāt 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? Kā12 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 āstudents will adapt.ā 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 studentsā sentences before theyāve 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."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt 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!
āI was on a strict diet during Episode VIII, and she was like, āKid, get into that fridge and take some chocolate bars. I have many there.ā And I did,ā he recalls. āI failed my diet because Carrie Fisher told me to. And it [felt] great.ā
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