and if i said nolan's odyssey starring no greek actors and with no recognizable aspects of greek culture or involvement by greeks, is the direct legacy of white supremacist colonialism that treated ancient greece as not just the pinnacle of ancient culture, but of an artificially created "european" culture, which white western europeans and their settler descendants, as the new pinnacle of culture, were the sole spiritual inheritors of.
^^^ PEOPLE ARE STILL THERE. There's a metro station across the street from the colosseum where i found a hair in my pizza slice. We drove by ruins of an amphitheater next to a motorway in greece once. It's literally just real places where real people live and have lived. It's not mythical perfect lands that once existed. I went to Itacha in 2023 and there was not enough parking space.
It's so awesome cool and progressive that the second result of looking up a trans woman on this site is a dedicated hate blog that specifically states "DNI if you defend this trans woman"
But it's okay guys, they put a sign saying "don't harass the tranny! Just let me collect all the reasons that she is unforgivable in one place :)"
It is incredibly telling that there isnt a massive anti-oneyplays fandom despite Smiling Friends being an equally popular show among tumblr queers and those guys actually doing everything gooseworx has been accused of and more
"She joked about being the next Shadman!" wow that's crazy. Chris O'Neil housed Shadman and actively defended all the vile shit he did on twitter, including lolicon of real actual children. Why is nobody talking about this. Where is the anti oneyplays fan club. Or anti GameGrumps. Or (and this is a hot one) anti Dropout. Why is there only a hate club for the tranny. Why are the hate clubs only ever for the trannies? But of course, "DNI if you make it about her being trans, thats totally not why she became our target"
I would appreciate it if people reblogged this version that specifically calls out that none of the cis men in the same industry are held to the same standard even when they've done worse, continue to do worse and have not shown any sign of changing or regretting their past actions besides "I stopped saying the n word because people would get mad at me" and not because it's racist.
For god's sake the same people that deride Gooseworx on every social media site will sometimes straight up have Max "hotdiggitydemon" "Steven Jewniverse" "Steven N***averse" "Sans from Undertale calls Papyrus the nword" "Still actively racist" Gilardy profile pics with zero self reflection. And I'm supposed to take anything ever said about "holding trans women accountable " seriously? Gimme a break
Still actively racist? Where? I've heard that he's a Zionist which would also be bad (though I only vaguely remember this claim now so I can't say if it's true) but I've never heard anyone say that he's saying racist things to this day.
Kinda related to this, I will also note that Gooseworx is also someone who has not shown any sign of regret for her past actions, specifically the racist things she said. In fact, she barely addressed them. She made a really weak lackluster apology ("I'm sorry for everything I've said on streams," didn't even address a lot of the other stuff) after waiting a few days, sitting back, and doing nothing while Black fans in her community were being harassed for being "uppity." The only time she actually made a statement was a stupid joke statement about how racists should shoot themselves, again, after the controversy had moved into real life because of Plainrock.
I'm not saying there should be a hatebase stalker blog. I hate it too, and it is also not fair that some people who are as bad as or worse than Gooseworx are not receiving this level of attention. But not once do you actually make it clear that Gooseworx is also barely apologetic and has done nothing to show remorse for what she did and said.
I love how in just one post you have combined the defense of a cis man who was actively worse in every possible way and a claim that actually the trans woman isnt getting enough pushback for her past actions. All while saying "oh but I could not possibly support harassment of her. How such a hate fandom appeared is an unsolvable mystery"
Max Gilardy was not just "edgy", he was someone who drew racist carichatures involving racial slurs and then harass black people that would take offence with that. He had so many nword moments, even in recent memory (the now deleted gold digger tweet. It was an unfinished rhyme. You get the rest) that it is hard to even remember them all. He has only stopped actively engaging with right wing accounts, drawing tasteless political cartoons and posting an image of a fleshlight titled "ideal woman" within what, the last 2 years? Way after he has supposedly "regretted his past and apologised". Or when he made a blatantly racist depiction of Shigeru Miyamoto for his video about joycon drift complete with a slit eyes and a violently racist accent.
And are you serious? "He's racist" "Well I only heard that he's a zionist" Yeah that's what I said.
Remember when he made a blatantly racist depiction of Shigeru Miyamoto for his video about joycon drift complete with a slit eyes and a violently racist accent? That was in *2021*, years after his supposed change for the better
Or the fact that his Apu video is to this day used to shut up both racialised Voice Actors speaking out against racism in the industry (like ProZD, who to this day receives harassment for that very reason) as well as many minorities speaking out against racist stereotypes in popular media (primarily those from India)
And yet despite all that all he really had to do to clean his image was literally redesign his sona to be more goofy and make a cartoon show where he has fun with his ghost buddy.
And if you ever bring up the fact that he never really changed and the shift was only because he felt the winds change an army of 12 thousand queer teenagers with his profile pic and chuds with pepe pfps will show up in your comments to say that you're just a hysterical bitch who doesnt believe people can change, that his video on Apu is actually correct on everything, you're just overreacting and that Voice Actors of colour wanting to have more opportunities to actually voice people of their own ethnicities instead of a white guy doing a racist accent are all just asking for DEI
"I love how in just one post you have combined the defense of a cis man" stop. You didn't comprehend the post. I was asking for information about claims that were entirely new to me. I only knew the Steven Jewniverse/related controversies before this. Should I have used the /genq tone indicator? I didn't think I needed it, but regardless, I suggest you reframe your mindset and stop assuming all questioning is coming from a negative place. Thanks.
"And are you serious? 'He's racist' 'Well I only heard that he's a zionist' Yeah that's what I said." If you meant to say he was a Zionist, which I already knew, that's what you would've said. Zionists are racists, but all racists aren't Zionists. Because I know most people would've said Zionist if they wanted to refer to him as a Zionist, my assumption was that you were referring to other instances of racism, not his Zionism. Still, my bad.
I also, explicitly, did not say that Gooseworx is not getting enough pushback. That's a brand new sentence. I said she, as in Gooseworx, has not done enough to rectify her wrongdoings. My focus is strictly on Gooseworx and the actions she took; not once did I talk about other people's reactions to her at all outside of the hate blog being bad. The actions she takes (or doesn't take) and how people react to them are different concepts, the latter being something that I do not intend to predict. So I ask you to decouple those concepts, and to engage with what I'm actually saying, not make up brand new sentences that I never even hinted at. These concepts are not inextricably linked. I could've been writing this, totally in agreement with you that Gooseworx has seen too much pushback and that people need to give her room to make up for what she did.
And that's because I wanted to be that person when I first heard about this. I actually wanted to be forgiving, and I'm partly writing this out of disappointment in Gooseworx that she couldn't even do that bare minimum. I still remember waiting for her to say something, anything, when people were attacking Black fans in the community for their beliefs. So, until I say "she needs more pushback," you have no grounds to say I believe Gooseworx is not getting enough pushback.
But, I do, and I'm confused as to why you think her lackluster responses to her own racism should not receive pushback. And that's why I want to ask what your primary concern is. Is it for Gooseworx to be held accountable by an upset public in a reasonable manner? Is it for people to have consistent standards? Or is it to not criticize Gooseworx at all because she's just a wittle baby? Because I wanted to think it was the 2nd option, but your response to my criticisms of Gooseworx being "a claim that actually the trans woman isnt getting enough pushback for her past actions," while constantly avoiding addressing Goose's own actions and inaction is making me lean towards the 3rd option. Why don't you want to talk about what Gooseworx actually did?
I'm still right to criticize you for assuming how I feel about her actions. It's bad form in discussions like this. But you're right that I think the level of pushback she has received is not enough given how little accountability she is willing to take. I want to see people talking about this until she and all the other people you have mentioned, like OneyPlays, Game Grumps, Max, and maybe Dropout (though I don't know what they did) are actually apologetic and actually do something to fix it. Pushback is not the same thing as harassment, hate fandoms, and "snark communities," and me criticizing Gooseworx for what she did does not mean that I want to funnel attention towards unproductive hate sinks that, frankly, aren't even good at their job and make wildly misleading, bullshit claims. Nor will I let other people off the hook.
My god. This is obviously just about her being trans. You're contempt for her is seriously evident and you sound like every racist and misogynist when talking about Kamala Harris.
What type of thing do you want her to do for her supposed past actions? Continously grovel at the internet whenever she's talking online?
An actual apology would be nice. I talked about how bad her apology was earlier, but if you continue to insist that my demands for her are unreasonable, I can go into exactly what makes it a bad apology.
Yes, by this point, I'd say I have contempt for her. Should I, a Black person, not have contempt for someone who can't even do the bare minimum in owning up for her actions, when I have literally outlined how bare the bare minimum is? She couldn't even do that? Seriously? In this world, respect is earned.
What about my tags? My tags are mirroring the tags that the original poster was using, tags that the original poster has been using since before I even started.
(EDIT) Can you address what it is Gooseworx actually did?
1. Meh. If she wasn't a trans woman you wouldn't hound her for this stuff because it never ends with just an apology. You'll just find another reason to keep your contempt going.
2. Sorry. I don't really believe you're black since a lot of people just say that on the internet to keep a discourse going since they believe that gives them more credibility.
3. Tags that really indicate what this "discourse" really is for you.
Can you just admit you didn't read any of my posts? Do you think that after she apologizes, everyone needs to forgive her or they're the problem? People can feel however they want to feel about the things she did to hurt them. I don't like contempt, I try to be a charitable, forgiving person, but I can only do that when I have reasons to do that. Hell, when this first happened, I didn't even think she was racist - just ignorant. It was her inaction after all of this that made me conclude she was racist. If she had apologized, I would've been willing to forgive. I really hope you have people in your life who can clock you for being entitled enough to shame minorities who are hurt enough to not just accept apologies. It's incredibly clear what you are.
Not only are you being entitled on behalf of a white woman, somehow you're entitled enough to think you can tell me my race. Good fucking riddance.
You don't seem to show any regret for participating in another trans witch hunt and denying the very obvious transmisogyny at play here just because the victim of transmisogyny somewhat benefits from white privilege. Should YOU get harassed until you apologize and your harassers graciously decide to forgive you?
Yeah and if you want that image to continue happening to you, keep reinforcing the dichotomy that I have to either side with black people or trans people whenever another trans woman gets fucking crucified for having an opinion. Keep interpreting my sympathy with trans women as a racially motivated attack on cis people, that'll definitely get said trans women on your side and not at all attract other transphobes.
I'm willing to bet you made your blog just so you could be transmisogynistic with plausible deniability. Your oldest post related to trans people is 9 days old and it's you telling a trans girl that her experiences of transmisogyny from other marginalized groups are false because she didn't word it in the proper essay format.
This is Miss Darcei, she makes a lot of videos testing the range of foundation shades in various brands, and some of her videos have actually pushed some korean brands to expand their shade range!
why do americans think everyone on the internet lives in the same place as them. just saw someone say honeybees are "not native". not native to where????? the entire planet?????
saw a photo of garlic mustard somewhere on the internet once and americans in the comments were like "fun fact this plant is invasive so you should definitely tear out any you see, WITH THE ROOTS so it won't spread!" whole fucking time i'm living in garlic mustard native range. i don't think i will be doing that.
This drives me absolutely up the wall in r/birdfeeding. Every time there's a picture of a house sparrow, the entire comments are filled with americans talking about them being invasive and how they should be basically killed on sight. But often OP has not provided a location, and house sparrows have a HUGE native range. Here in the UK they're not only native birds, they're on the decline, they need our help and protection.
Me every time I see a post saying that you should destroy your lawn and cram a bunch of native plants as closely together as you can instead. Look, I'm not saying lawns are native to Australia because they're not, but our native plants evolved to burn; they are dry, their leaves are dry, and they're full of oils. If you plant native plants the way Americans tell you to that's a fucking fire hazard and you are endangering yourself and your neighbours next time we have a Black Summer.
tapping onto this, Ry's guide is for a specific part of NSW. Australia is a very very big place and there is a lot of biodiversity. So don't take one guide as The One True Guide because I used to be a ranger and lemme tell you, trying to stuff native plants in terrains they are unsuited for just creates a mess for everyone. Honestly, just google "native planting <your council> " and they will have a guide that is specific to your area.
I’m really struggling still my will to live is at an all time low I have no support nothing going on and no motivation I appreciate all the help so far it’s July 16th words of encouragement are also welcome
I swear to god the amount of times I saw people describe him as: "alpha male daddy with no emotions" is concerning. One time i've read a fanfic when michael fell in love at the first sight with a DEMON. demon. Are we deadass?? Michael?? ARCHANGEL MICHAEL?? THAT ONE ANGEL WHO HATES DEMONS WITH HIS WHOLE HEART?? WHO WOULD SLIME ANY DEMON AT THE FIRST SIGHT?? FALLS IN LOVE WITH A DEMON?? AT THE FIRST SIGHT?? This trope could be done well but only as a long ass slowburn and definietly NOT love at first sight.
We lost the plot. You know what? No, actually what i hate about casino cups fandom is how some people treat characters like some "shipping assets" to their ocs. They dont care about complexity of a chracter, they make them completly bland and it makes me so mad.
Those ocs are also the most uninteresting thing ive ever seen. I slowly started to hate most of the oc x canon trope in casino cups because it is SUCH a nothingburger. Shipping literally ruined everything in this fandom and this is coming from someone who is a huge shipper in any media. This fandom became SO BORING because of aus and ocs.
Of course again its not like i have some big problem with those aus and ocs some of them are really interesting and i admire them a lot. But again like 70 percent of casino cups aus follow the same pattern which makes them boring.
Sorry if its a bit messy my thoughts tend to get messy when i rant about certain topics😭😭
tony's chocolonely mildly pisses me off every time i eat it. like yeah i get it ur doing a whole symbolism thing about unfairness and whatever, but its actually SO DIFFICULT to eat fucking. gerrymandered chocolate. your symbolism is ruining my chocolate experience.
like. ur already more expensive. i understand this. i am willing to pay more money to have slave-free delicious chocolate. why must you punish me further by making it a goddamn puzzle to break a piece off.
Tony's Chocolonely does not ensure a living wage for cocoa workers in West Africa (see 2020 report by Voice Network).
Food Empowerment Project maintains an updated list of chocolate brands they recommend based on the following standards:
transparency about the country of origin for cocoa
if sourced from Western Africa, the workers must own the companies/be in charge of the profits from their labor (this standard is because child labor and slavery have been widely documented for decades in this area)
if sourced from Brazil, the workers must own the company and/or be in charge of the profits from their labor, or the company must be going above and beyond to support the workers and their families (this standard is because "child labor and slavery only recently have been documented in cocoa in Brazil" and they are "giving Brazilian companies that are trying to address the issue by supporting the workers and their families the benefit of the doubt.")
this isn't perfect, obviously, but it is much more grounded in the rights of workers than the various certifications (e.g. Fair Trade, Rainforest Alliance, etc.) you'll see on product packaging
I think it should be noted that the Food Empowerment Project specifically only lists companies making "at least one vegan chocolate product" and that they only ask about the companies' vegan chocolates specifically. Their list is not an exhaustive resource for every type of chocolate.
[Source: "Understanding Our Chocolate List" from their website]
Before I found that link I was curious as to why I didn't see any Norwegian manufacturers on their list(which makes sense now, as their chocolates are almost exclusively milk chocolate) and looked up where our companies source their chocolate from and found Nidar gets theirs from the Rainforest Alliance and Freia from Cocoa Life, both of which have been under scrutiny for not preventing child labour and not paying farmers a living wage among other things. So it appears Norwegian chocolate is out of the ethical picture.
I stated this in the comments of the post already, but it’d probably be better to add it as a reblog, so it’s more visible and doesn’t need to be restated by anyone else in the future.
So, Tony’s allied with Barry Callebut to get its cocoa. Barry Callebut is one of the biggest chocolate companies in the world, and it is unethical, obviously. This led to Tony’s revealing in February 2022 that 1701 child laborers were in their supply chain. Barry Callebut had over 21K at the time. Both of those numbers have risen, and Tony’s has outright admitted they don’t give a fuck about child labor laws when asked about it, content to let children to continue farming their cocoa instead of actually doing the activism they claim to do. (business-humanrights.org, feb 6 2022)
About a week ago, Tony’s joined Barry, Nestle and Ferrero in pushing against the reinstatement of important EUDR deforestation legislations. Under that regulation that they pushed against, they would’ve had to be more transparent about their supply chains for their more key ingredients - So Tony’s is lobbying against the exact thing they claim to stand for. (confectioneryproduction.com, mar 18, 2026)
Won’t restate @closet-keys’s addition, of course. That’d just be redundant and maybe annoying since, yknow, it’s already been said.
If you wanna find a better chocolate brand it’s really damn easy. There’s lists on slavefreechocolate.org of both the ethical and unethical companies. Both lists can be found here:
Below is a list of chocolate companies that only use ethically grown cocoa. Find out how you can tell if the chocolate you are ea
And it doesn’t have the vegan product restriction the other list has, which solves @aloofraven’s issue.
"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.
Speaking of Ojibwe! There’s a new point and click game to help teach the language! It’s called Reclaim! Azhe-giiwewining, and is currently on sale on Steam!
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