whenever i look into a historical monarch who doesn’t get talked about much and is just kind of a blank spot in my understanding of the historical narrative, 95% of the time what i find is pure white hot blistering capability. a pencil pusher for the ages. a 39 year reign with no more than three hours of sleep a night. there aren’t any good stories from his reign because he systematically caught and stopped all catastrophic good stories before they could start. you shrimply must respect it
Okay but like. You know how some people will be like “the government’s so big there are agencies I haven’t even HEARD of!” That’s this. That’s thousands, hundreds of thousands of people monitoring Ebola outbreaks, ensuring your drinking water is clean, managing that diarrhea-causing pathogen that’s in our lettuce now. You didn’t hear about them because they did their jobs so well. And then DOGE fired them. And now we have to deal with the consequences.
There’s a liquor store near my house that seems to be run exclusively by frat boys. They lovingly curate these bags, which I browsed today while “Oops I Did It Again” played through the store speakers. This is art to me, there is beauty everywhere for those with eyes to see it
Is that adjacent to the chamber that coats your body in a sensation dulling membrane for your own protection allowing you a facimile of normalcy while it's immediately obvious to anyone who so much as glances at you that you were in the first chamber?
20 years later. you're kermit. opening night at the muppet theater. you look up. you can't believe it. those two awful cunts from next door are here. neither of them died yet. they're going to be here, forever.
i want a Superman story about Superman realizing she's a trans woman. how would she tell people? who would she tell? how could she tell them? through what possible ways would she transition? Kryptonian biology may not necessarily be compatible with human hormone replacement therapy and needles are certainly out of the question. if she figures it out, at what point does her presentation change? superman can't take a break, people need her, even if her haircut is getting awkwardly long and her body is uncomfortable to be in. everyone on earth knows who Superman is, knows her face. is her secret identity threatened if Clark Kent mysteriously starts to transition at the same time as Superman? if she only lets one be publicly out, which one? and what would it feel like to put on that costume -- in either case -- if so? if someone tries to attack her on the street, as Ms. Kent, how does she hide her secret identity? how would the world itself react to someone with the strength to juggle planets being a tranny? with her super-hearing there's nothing she wouldn't know about what people are saying, nevermind what's being written in the press. how does SuperMAN, one of the most definitive icons of masculine indomitability and resilience, cope with changing? would her strength, her confidence, her ability to do anything suddenly be used against her? why can't she be more like wonder woman? why is voice training so hard even for someone with super-ventriloquism? does anyone know what it's like to be able to run faster than a speeding bullet and leap tall buildings in a single bound but to not be able to find a cute pair of shoes that fits? to be indestructible but afraid to use a public bathroom? would even the most powerful person on earth not feel just as helpless as i do?
i want to stress that it is crucial, like genuinely imperative, for this story in my mind that magical super special magic sci-fi kryptonian HRT that instantly rewrites Kent's DNA does not exist. it is not on the table. the entire thing is that Kent would have to transition slowly and awkwardly just like everybody else while also bearing the nonstop pressures and responsibilities of being "The Man of Steel" to literally every single human being on the planet. she doesn't have time to agonize over whether her shave was close enough before leaving the house if a plane is about to fall out of the sky
again i think some people are fundamentally missing a key point. this would be a story about how violent of an idea it is that a woman cannot be "Superman" and "Superman" cannot be a woman, and the myriad social forces that actively and passively enforce this ideology on everyone, including the very real and very strugglingly transgender Kent. it's about the vulnerability and frustration of it all, it's about secret identities and shame and choice and the unfair burden of tact, and all the superheroics stuff would just kind of a framing device. i swear to god give me a two week vacation from work and i'd have a script written
I hate you Ozempic craze I hate you 'heroin chic' I hate you weight loss ads on public radio I hate Burn Fat Fast ads every thirty seconds I hate you I hate you I hate you
I grew up before the term 'thigh gap' was invented I grew up before 'hip dip' was invented I was born before 'muffin top' was a thing before 'clean girl look' was a thing before 'glass skin' was a thing before razoring off peach fuzz was a thing and I'm so so so fucking tired of us inventing new concepts purely for the purpose of convincing people to hate their own bodies enough to buy products
Last time Tuberculosis ran through the USA a small number of people got it on purpose to look skinny and waifish and delicate and used makeup to look flushed and bony and when the Victorians figured out tapeworms people would infect themselves on purpose to starve themselves smaller and women and now in the year of our lord 2026 there is a noticeable fraction of the USAmerican population genuinely thrilled about a treatment-resistant microbial parasite that makes you shit and vomit your brains out for a month because side effects include weight loss and STILL we talk about being skinny like it's the natural default setting for all healthy people as if it's a self-sustaining standard and not an imaginary goal that we are constantly constantly constantly beating ourselves with a whip to acheive
A lot of people seem to mix up ‘community’ with ‘friend group’ so when they read ‘no one should be abandoned by the community. No matter what they did’ they think it means ‘you have to be friends with abusers’. When in reality it means ‘no matter what someone does they shouldnt be left to go homeless and be denied financial, housing, medical, etc aid’
You don’t have to be friends with these people, no one is saying that. It’s just saying that you should support rehabilitative justice, support programs that help homeless people, support funding for free medical services, and make sure they don’t turn away anyone who needs help.
(dry look) Nobody gets to tell me when to cringe. I reserve such assessments to those who have sufficient experience to correctly judge what’s cringeworthy.
And if you have a story idea you want to share, but don't have the time to write it? Outline the idea in a post. Maybe someone will write it. Maybe you'll write it later. Maybe no one will write it except in their imagination, which is beautiful too.
Do prompts communities not exist any more? I mean, this is what kink memes and similar were - people sharing story ideas ("I'd like to see X and Y together doing Z") and other people responding. If you have an idea which you want to see given life, and you don't have enough time or confidence in your own skill level to do it justice, give it to the fandom and let other people play with it.
Also: you're allowed to write it and not share it. Not everything you write has to be shared with the fandom. If you're not confident that what you've written is going to be able to be shared without your ego getting shredded in the process, just don't share it. You're allowed to write the stuff that "nobody wants to read" (you want to read it - you're not nobody!). You can write it and keep it private.
A lot of the prompt communities I used to be part of died off because of a lack of moderators willing to remove over-entitled assholes who would have screaming tantrums if nobody picked up their prompt and wrote it for them to read. Also the migration of forums to discords killed a lot of them because even with threads on discord you only see them if you're subscribed to them, so good fucking luck finding them even within a community.
"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!
“The status quo is the best you’re gonna get” was the entirety of the Democratic platform for a full decade and Mamdani fucking annihilated it. I sure hope the Democratic Party doesn’t pursue physical retribution for politically destroying them like this.
I mean, we kinda already knew the Democratic platform was bogus because of Minnesota. Not because of Walz, but because the 93rd Minnesota Legislature went to work and accomplished more major reforms in one year than most Democratic strongholds can manage in a decade, and they did it with a very slim majority. So anyone who claims it's easier for Mamdani because he's a mayor... Minnesota proved what can be done with a governor and 51% of the legislature, and if states can do it, so can the federal government.
more than anything i want a world where a trans girl realizing she is a trans girl faces zero fear from that realization and subsequent coming out. Where she can say "Oh sweet, I can just be a girl? Sign me up!", no worrying if shes girl enough, no worrying if society will accept her, no worrying if she'll be an attractive girl as she transitions, no worrying at all in any way shape or form.
seeing people say "this trope has been done to death" as if that's ever stopped anyone from eating bread. BREAD HAS BEEN DONE TO DEATH FOR LITERALLY THOUSANDS OF YEARS AND WE STILL WANT MORE BREAD. write your chosen one AU. write your coffee shop meet-cute. write your 47th iteration of "there was only one bed" because guess what??? we're still hungry.
1. Lots of people have one but you don't really think about it until they start talking about making waffles and you're like "oh shit they have a waffle maker"
2. Messy as fuck and you know what as far as I see it why even bother when you have pancakes, you don't need to bother with all those fluids and crevices with pancakes
3. WHY DOES EVERYONE AT THE WEDDING THINK YOU NEED ONE
4. Theoretically implied fun with whipped cream until it melts and starts soaking into shit
5. If you don't prep ur surfaces ur gonna have a bad time
6. It's fun in the kitchen but only on like special occasions cause again it's a pain in the ass to clean
