Hi Mrs. CBC! First of all I am sending you love for all the work you do on this platform, and sending you strength for putting up with all the BS that you do ❤️ Secondly I hope you don't mind this use of your inbox but there is a cause I'd like to share which is close to me.
(Warning for brief police violence mention)
In May 2024, the University of California, Irvine, had the pro-Palestine encampment there dismantled and 47 people were arrested, some quite brutally. Among them was Dr. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, professor of African American studies at UCI. Some may recognize her from a news clip about the arrests, where as she was being detained, she called out the chancellor of UCI for spending money that could have gone toward scholarships and housing on defending genocide.
That same chancellor has a personal, racist vendetta against Dr. Willoughby-Herard, and has decided to pursue disciplinary action against her, even though the charges for protesting were dismissed. She is now on academic suspension and has received a letter of censure for five years.
This leaves her without healthcare while she has chronic health issues, some related to her 2024 arrest. I wanted to share this fundraiser which goes toward her ongoing medical and legal needs: https://chuffed.org/project/156203-mutual-legal-aid-for-tiffany
People can support her by continuing to support Palestine. At the same time I think it's also important for a great Black feminist academic to be able to thrive and continue her work within the corrupt UC system and in the very anti-Black Irvine area especially. Speaking of her work, people can find that here if they have access: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=2ZgAGXAAAAAJ&hl=en
Thank you Ice and have a great day ❤️
Our colleague, friend, and justice-devoted loved one Tiffany is facing significant financial burdens as she defends herself against potentia
FULL PAGE IN THE SOURCE LINK. i wrote out some of these for a mutual, but i thought it could be helpful to share with the tags ^~^ if you're not into creating a full-on custom page for your muses, but you'd still like to add some decoration — here are some html edits you can make within the html section of tumblr's standard layout. this includes the following, and i'm happy to provide more if there's something you're curious about:
colored text.
text with a colored background.
gradient text.
diy borders/page breaks.
scrolling info boxes.
new: basic tables.
p.s. i'm hosting these on the preview of my default theme revamp, since i know a lot of people on indie stick to that theme :p
anti blackness is also the reason for the rampant colorism that exists worldwide, even in countries with an absence of large black communities. your proximity to blackness and whiteness is what decides where you fit in the systemic tiers of racism and classism literally WORLDWIDE. no form of oppression exists in a vacuum.
most cultures I know have their own version of the n word. If anti Blackness was not so rampant then the slur wouldn't be so widespread. Yes. Even in places with very little Black population, they somehow still have their version of the the n word.
Can I request Adrian with a reader who slowly makes him realize he does like touch he had just grown to be afraid of it. Like he always wants hard rough sex but she teaches him soft loving sex and that new need for touch starts leaving the bedroom too, he needs a hug and kiss every time they see eachother, starts to like holding her hand, the feel of his fingertips slowly caressing her and vice versa.
I love your writing so much btw, the fall of Adrian Chase fics after the end of peacemaker makes me so sad😭
Touch
Adrian Chase x F!Reader
Word Count: 4.8k+
Plot Summary: Going into the relationship, you knew that Adrian had some quirks. Two months into dating, late in bed one night you come to realise why he fucks like he fights; and Adrian wants to try something new with you.
Warnings: Adults Only. Minors Do Not Interact. Reader in her 30's. Reader works at Checkmate. Soft touch aversed Adrian. Mentions of rough sex (With reader and Adrian's past sex partners). Mentions of butt stuff (M receiving). Reader is able to flip and pin Adrian — assume she's tactically trained. Belly humping. Fingering. Vaginal sex. Fucking with feelings. Upstairs neighbour activities. A little fluffy sweetness sprinkled in amongst the smut here and there.
A/N: Apologies to anon for this taking so long since you requested it, life happened, fixations fell off :( I really appreciate you for sending this request and I hope you see that I finally got around to it!
Note: My readers are written with inclusivity and women of colour in mind, with minimal descriptors or indetifying features, along with actions and intent. Everyone is invited to read. 💜
-> Do not be a fucknut! I do not give permission for my fics/plots to be copied or fed into any AI software <-
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Oh no, you're trying that thing again.
The thing where you lazily drag your fingers up and down his side and Adrian has to pretend that he doesn't want to jump out of bed and throw himself out of the window.
It just feels so weird!
He gets why you're doing it, and honestly he's trying his hardest to not let that irrational part of his brain take over and pull away, but the whole lovey-dovey-petting thing isn't his brand of showing affection, but he really is trying to be normal for you, even if it's like being subjected to listening to nails raking down a chalkboard.
"You okay?"
You'd noticed his sullen silence and how straight and stiff his body was laying beside you in bed, and you'd figured that maybe he'd just had a shit day and misplaced one of his beanie babies again or something, it sure seemed like he needed to blow off some steam when he got here and fucked you so good you could have sworn you heard the neighbours banging on the ceiling from below with how hard the bed was rattling against the wall and from how loud you were both being.
"Hm? I'm fine! I'm cool as a cucumber!" He answers too quickly to be considered casual, not that Adrian would know anything about that anyway. "I'm just tired from all the sex and stuff, and I'm definitely enjoying this whole cuddling thing we're doing right now! Boy, oh, boy, it feels really, really good!"
If Adrian ever tried to play poker, he'd bankrupt himself. The man has no pokerface and he's a terrible liar to boot.
You push up behind him to rest back against the headboard, the sheets loosely covering you from the chest down, and the moment your hand falls away from him, you see him relax entirely again, shoulders slouching and untensing in an instant.
"Adrian, do you not like it when I touch you?"
The speed at which he flips over in bed and scrambles up to sit beside you, is immeasurable, making the headboard rattle against the wall again, much to your neighbours dismay, you're sure.
"What?! Why would you think that? Of course I like it when you touch me! Like when you touch my dick, or when you grab my ass, or when you pull my hair or when you put your finger in my—"
"Alright! I got it!" You cut him off, knowing that if you don't, he's just going to spend the next 10 minutes listing all the dirty stuff you do to him.
Adrian's lips purse together, trying to hold back the barrage of words that he hadn't gotten out yet. It's a feeble attempt.
"Butt! I was gonna say butt! I really like it when you do that!" He grins, stretching from ear to ear.
"I feel like that was implied, but okay?" You sigh, shifting your body to face him better. "I don't mean just sex stuff, baby, I mean like just now? While we were cuddling? You usually love it when I'm the big spoon?"
"I do love it when you're the big spoon!" Adrian protests, whining and throwing his hands up in the air dramatically. "I just don't like the whole, touchy-feely stuff? Like the stroking? I'm not a cat, and sometimes it feels like if you have a really prickly cactus touch graze you, that sensation, but over and over and over and over again!" It comes out like word vomit, without entirely meaning to and without any holds barred.
"Adrian" He hates that tone right there, that one that says you think he's being an idiot and you're about to chide him, it's the same one he heard when he suggested Chris load his gun with jellybeans and shoot it at his face to see if he can catch any in his mouth. "Why didn't you say anything, dummy?" Dummy is a step down from idiot, at least.
"Because I really like you and I don't want you to think I'm weird, because then you'll stop touching other parts of me and I won't get to kiss you every morning when I see you in the office and that's like, my favourite part of the day now! Apart from when Fluery quizzes me on spider facts when he's bored, so maybe it's like, joint first?"
His rambled explanation is a double-sided coin, on one hand you find yourself laughing at the inexplicable way that getting to kiss you is in competition with Fluery and spider facts, on the other, you find a twinge of sympathy for him when your chuckles begins to fade and you see the way he's looking at you like you hung the moon, silently pleading with those ridiculously effective puppy-dog eyes of his. There's that fear of rejection and abandonment, seeping out of every pore of his beautiful face.
"Adrian, honey, I don't know if you know this, but I'm well aware of the fact that you're a fucking weirdo." You state, matter-of-factly. "I love that about you! I just wish you'd told me sooner, I mean we've been dating for what? 2 months now—"
Before you can even finish your thought, Adrian is moving again, flinging himself over you with all the grace of a bulldozer traversing a minefield, all just to grab his phone on the bedside cabinet beside you.
"—64 days, 7 hours and 24 minutes, if we're being pedantic about it!"
This stupid, murderous golden retriever of a man has no idea what kind of hold he has over you.
"See! This is what I mean! No normal person would be keeping track of that!"
He clearly misunderstands your tone, given the way his expression drops again and how quickly he abandons his phone to hold your face in his hands instead, he really is trying to be gentle, even if those same hands have only become accustomed to inflicting pain and suffering.
"I swear, I'll change! I can change! I'll be good, I can totally do 'normal' if that's what you want me to be!" So needy and clingy, laying half on top of you, already prepared to roll off and get out of you give him the order to. He really hopes you don't, though.
"Adrian!" An exasperated sigh leaves deep from your chest. "Stop, I'm not saying I want you to be normal, I'm saying I like you just the way you are! And if you don't enjoy me touching you like that, then that's fine, I'm not going to dump you over that, you clearly have some sensory aversions to touch and that's okay!"
Green eyes rapidly blink at you as he tries to compute what you just said, as if you were speaking to him in Klingon.
"Soooo, you're not about to leave me and go find some boring insurance broker instead?"
"What?! No? How would you even come to that conclusion?" You argue, sputtering out an incredulous laugh over the sheer random absurdity he's just cooked up in his brain.
"Well I don't know! That's the most normal thing I can think of! And I'm sorry, but I'm never going to have a 401k and I think whiskey tastes like cough medicine! It burns! Beer doesn't burn on the way down!"
"Unless you chase it up with tequila." You interject, wriggling in the bed until you're laying directly under him, bringing your hand up to his head, burying your fingers in his sex-mussed curls to rake your nails across his scalp in that deep-pressure way he loves so much.
He's so deep into his ramble, he doesn't even realise he's just putty in your hands, tilting his head into your touch, craving the sensation and attention from you.
"Okay, point taken, but I bet Mr.Fancy-boring-broker-man doesn't have throwing knives! And I bet he doesn't even eat pussy! God, what a loser." A triumphant huff leaves him when he's finally done with competing with the imaginary man in his head, already busying himself with ducking his head down to plaster your jawline with needy little kisses, nudging your head back with the curve of his nose to gain better access.
"Total loser." You muse, relishing in the way he seems to have completely lost his train of thought in favour of turning all his attention on you instead, never really able to focus on the matter at hand for too long when his mind is constantly going on side-quests.
Adrian seems pleased that you agree with him about the broker, whom he's now mentally named Tom and has deemed him his mortal enemy all in one blink of an eye. The intensity of his lips on your throat ramps up, his hands getting grabby and greedy, feeling like they're all over your body all at once, his soft cock hanging between his thighs starting to twitch to life once more.
"Glad we're on the same page about that guy." He groans into the curve of your shoulder, working himself up already.
You know if you let him keep going he's just going to fuck you dumb all over again and you're going to forget to have this actual, important conversation with him, and even if you feel the heat between your legs rapidly becoming something you can't ignore, you need to have this talk.
When your legs wrap around his hips, Adrian lifts his head up to chase your lips with his own, not expecting you to turn the tide and roll both of you over until he's pinned beneath you, it takes him longer than it should to realise what just happened, and given that all his blood is currently rushing south, that's not entirely unreasonable.
"That's hot as fuck, babe!" Adrian's voice comes out in an excited chirp, willfully throwing his arms over his head into the pillows, waiting patiently for you to take the reins.
"As much as I appreciate the enthusiasm," You start, shifting to hover over his hips instead of sitting directly on top of him, biting back the smile you feel tugging at your lips when you hear him whine when you pull away. "I think we do still need to talk. I don't want you thinking you have to force yourself to like things just because you think it'll make me happy, that's not what people do in relationships, and I most definitely don't want you to be uncomfortable either."
"It's not that I don't like it! It's just… I'm not used to it, being soft or whatever. Having someone that wants to treat me like that. So yeah, it does kind of feel like sandpaper on my skin sometimes when you touch me like that, but I kind of love that you want to touch me like that anyway. Does that make any sense?"
"In the most Adrian Chase way," You cock your head to the side thoughtfully, tracking your eyes over his face. "It does make sense."
Adrian's dimples pop as he stares up at you. "See I knew you'd get it. C'mere?"
When he lifts his head off the pillow, expectantly puckering his lips, you're powerless to say no. Your mouth slants over his own, and you expect him to start up again with that feral eagerness that he usually embodies whenever the two of you are tangled up like this. Instead he's practicing patience, letting you set the pace and keep control, which you know is a big point of contention for Adrian.
You feel Adrian's hands land on your hips, and for once instead of pulling you down onto him, he guides you off, kneading at the supple curves beneath his fingertips as he helps you settle onto your side next to him.
You link your arms around his neck and bury your fingers in his hair once more, earning yourself a throaty hum that goes straight between your legs.
Adrian's cock nudges against your soft stomach, already half hard again. It's a welcomed perk of being with a man who's stamina can endure hours of fighting. Or fucking; depending on the mood.
As the intensity behind the kiss you lead starts to heat up, Adrian presses his body into your own, just enough to grind himself against you. He groans into your mouth as his twitching length rubs up and down slowly — from navel to your lower abs, leaving a damp trail behind on your skin that only grows slicker with every passing moment.
"Touch me." He whines, buckling at the hips. Too needy to let his lips stray from your own for even a single second.
Immediately you go to wrap a fist around his cock, but he stops you, catching your hand mid-air to plant it on the side of his face instead. It doesn't clock right away what Adrian's asking for, not until you feel the way he tenses beneath your palm. He wants to try to get used to the feeling, maybe some part of him that he's never explored craves it, but he's never been with someone he's wanted to expose himself to like tbat — until now.
You let your fingertips stroke along his jawline, it's something you've done plenty in the time you've been together, but now you're aware of his aversions, you're taking more care to show him how good it can feel.
Every quiet shuddering breath or tick in his jaw becomes your guide, mapping out his cues to tell you when you're being too gentle.
It quickly becomes apparent that there's a fine line between touch that makes him cringe and touch that makes him melt. You only wish Adrian had communicated this with you sooner, rather than try to force himself.
Caressing his chest, between his shoulder blades, downwards over the slope of his spine. You get to revel in the way Adrian bows into you as he gradually succumbs to the warmth your touch leaves behind in its wake.
You're both breathless when you wrench your lips away from his own, his cheeks flushed, pupils swallowing the green in his eyes.
"This okay?" You don't want to just rely on his physical cues now, not when he'd been so reluctant to express himself before.
Adrian's hips haven't stopped their subtle shift this entire time, the thick purple head glistening with pre-cum.
"Mm-hmm," He nods frantically, ridding you of any creeping doubts. "F-uck babe. Can I please touch you now too?"
The corners of your lips curve upwards, Adrian has kept his hands cemented to your hips until now, and you realise it was to keep himself from moving too hastily.
Draping your thigh over his own, you invitingly open yourself up to him. "Touch me." Your tone echoes that needy lilt Adrian had before.
His dominant hand slips between your bodies, making your head drop back into the plush pillow with a sigh when his middle and index fingers find your clit, grazing back and forth over the engorged nub slowly.
"Fucking soaked," Adrian curses, dropping his head to mouth at your sternum, sliding his free hand up to the small of your back to hold you tighter against him. "N-nails. Do that thing where you scratch down my back."
You're all too happy to fulfill the breathy request, embedding the manicured tips into his alabaster skin; drawing a slow path of red streaks down the length of his muscled back.
The mattress springs beneath you protest as Adrian arcs, loudly groaning his approval over the way you're blending a lighter touch with the agonizing bliss.
"Just like that." He pleads, rocking his hips more insistently against you, letting his fingers glide south, easing them into your warm cunt.
You squirm on your side, chasing the friction the heel of his palm provides as his digits find their home inside you, pumping in and out in a steady, tantalizing rhythm.
You can hear the slick squelch of yourself, between the airy whines and murmured begs, some of it slipping from your own lips, some of it from Adrian, panting between your tits. Neither of you truly know what you're asking for, all you know is that you don't want this to stop.
Adrian's teeth graze over your heaving breast, restraining himself from sinking them into your skin, instead sucking a stiffened peak into his mouth; coaxing a wanton moan out of you.
Your fingers instinctively find their way to his ass, letting your nails mark his toned cheeks too. You guide his hips to roll deeper, feeling every inch of him sliding between your slick bodies while you unhurriedly fuck yourself on the fingers buried inside you.
It's not long before you begin to crest, arching and shaking while Adrian laves his lips and tongue over your nipples back and forth. There's nothing urgent about the way he pulls this climax from you, not like the usual frantic and fast desperation he exudes.
This time Adrian savours every second of it — from the rasping breaths you shudder out as you reach the peak, to the way your thigh shakes when your pussy clenches down and drenches his fingers.
His hips stutter as if he's struggling to hold back from cumming, and truthfully, he is. It's especially difficult to hold back with the way your heat drips down his knuckles and that keening way you call out his name.
Still, he's not done trying to prove to himself that he has the ability to be soft and slow, you deserve that version of him when he's never been able to give himself like that to anyone else.
It wasn't up until Adrian started up the Vigilante stuff that he lost his virginity, and even then, most of the suit would stay on just so he didn't have to endure the touch of skin on skin that would make him wither. Always rough with his lovers. If you could even call them that.
It was usually an anonymous hook-up from that app Peacemaker recommended. Some lucky person would find themselves wedged between the closest thing Evergreen had to a 'hero' and an unforgiving brick wall, pounded into it just so Adrian could take the edge off.
All that started to crumble when Adrian took a shining to you though.
The app got deleted off his phone and Adrian had to learn to navigate something new.
Sure, it's been a very full two months of losing yourselves in each other, testing out just how much the desks at the office can take when no one was around. Fucking you so relentlessly in the back of the Sebring that the suspension broke and the two of you had to push the car to the nearest garage on your lunch hour while his cum was still leaking out of you.
That was a fun when the mechanics eyed the both of your dishelved appearances with a knowing suspicion, and when you'd let Adrian take the reins at trying to explain to Ads and Harcourt why you were coming back late from your break.
It went down like a lead balloon when 'chasing down some sketchy looking dude' was all Adrian could come up with under pressure. That and the telltale blooming lovebites that you thought you'd been strategic enough to hide beneath his collar.
Even so, somehow you've dismantled that fear of intimacy and touch that Adrian had developed somewhere along the way, and now it was giving way to a gentleness he didn't even know he possessed.
When you're fully sated and boneless, Adrian slips his fingers out of you and stuffs them into his mouth as he raises his head, letting you witness the way his eyes roll back at your taste.
"Fuck me." You hear yourself plea, raising your hands up to link around the back of his neck, drawing Adrian in for a kiss that forces him to drop his fingers from his mouth, making his head spin.
By now he'd have you flipped over, either on your belly or your back, ready to drill you into the mattress until you're a babbling mess.
It's impossible for him to say no to you though, hoisting your leg up higher over his hip while he wraps his other hand around the base of his cock, nudging the weeping tip into you in a way that's uncharacteristicly hampering compared to the lunging thrust he'd gone with earlier on this evening.
Adrian's fingertips skirt over the back of your thigh. Up and down, soothing a sigh out of you as you stretch to fit around his girth.
"Ho-oly fuck, babe." He rasps against your lips, letting his free hand wander up to your breasts again, fondling and squeezing lightly.
You suckle on his bottom lip as the two of you start to move, rolling your hips in tandem with his own, impeded from speeding yourself up by the steadying hand grasping the meat of your thigh.
Languid, dragged out strokes steal your breath away, sharing the heated air between your panting mouths. Noses nudge and softly bump while Adrian stares into your eyes, jaw slackened as he breathes out your name over and over again.
He'll push deep and pull out slow, leaving only the first inch inside you before he allows himself to sink in, overwhelmed by the sensation of your welcoming walls pulling him in.
It's not something Adrian usually gets to bask in, but right now he can feel every honeyed inch of your channel wrapped around his cock, letting himself gently kiss your cervix with the tip.
When a gasp spills from youAdrian panics and almost pulls out altogether, thinking he's doing it wrong. You only just manage to stop him by locking your ankle around his lower back.
"Are you okay?" Adrian sputters out, stilling himself inside you, eyes darting between your own, all tooth-achingly sweet concern.
"Baby, I'm fine?" You huff softly, delighting his ears with a quiet chuckle. "That was a good gasp, trust me."
"Are you sure? You're not just saying that? What if you decide to praying mantis me because I did something wrong?"
"Huh?"
Adrian rolls his eyes, idly thumbing over your nipple. "Like when a female mantis is done mating she'll bite off her partners head?"
You purse your lips together to stifle a laugh, choking it down before replying, "That's probably the first correct animal fact I've ever heard from you and it's during sex?! Also, I'm a little fond of your face and the body it's attached to, so I think I'll pass, thanks."
"Pfft, like your mind doesn't wander sometimes, and I'm always correct." He pouts petulantly, shifting himself all the way back into you with a subtle jut of his hips. "And only a little fond?" His lips arc into a stretching smile when you moan, it's the most intoxicating sound Adrian has ever heard.
"A-alot. I love your stupidly handsome face, okay?"
Love.
It's not like you were declaring anything to him then and there, but with the way the comforting warmth spreads through Adrian's chest, anyone would think you did just that.
He's been tip-toeing that word for years. The only people that have ever said it to him were his parents and that one old lady at Fennel Fields who used to come in for the early bird special that kept mistaking him for her high-school boyfriend. She was a good tipper, even if Adrian was constantly having to dodge a cheek smooch whenever he went to clear her table and he's haunted by the memory of the filthy note she'd left for him on a napkin that one time.
Adrian's concept of love just barely existed, and it was solely based off fictional media. He was never sure it was a feeling he was capable of, but now you're making him question that — almost every single day.
Sure he loves his best friends, he loves Eagly. He loves how it feels to watch the light drain from someone's eyes at his hands.
This though? This is different.
His hand wraps around your ankle, pulling it up a little higher behind his back, opening you up in a way that allows for your clit to grind into the thatch of curls at the base of his cock.
The headboard knocks, but it's quieter and infrequent now, side-on, drinking each other's morphing expressions of pleasure in,
Adrian's plants his palms flat on your ass, pushing you forward onto his cock over and over again as your vocalizations rise in volume and pitch, groaning with you as you tug on the curly ends of his hair.
"Adrian, I need to—" Your warning cry is smothered, eager lips tackling your own as he gives in and rolls you beneath him, plunging deep repeatedly just to coax that gentle pulsing around him into a frenzied clutch as your back bows. It was the nudge you'd needed, if the sticky slick that makes a mess of his pubic hair is anything to go by.
Adrian cums seconds after you, emptying himself inside you as he whimpers into your agape mouth, unable to withstand the unforgiving pulse and heat of your pussy.
The two of you stay like that for what feels like an eternity, winding your arms around his middle when he slumps into you, dropping his mouth to your throat to pepper lazy kisses all over.
Despite the way Adrian prefers to fuck, he's always like this after — clingy and dopey. It's a moment of blissful peace that neither of you get to bask in very often.
And it's broken by your jerk off neighbour throwing a hissy fit again.
Bang. Thud. Bang. Thud.
Slamming his fucking door open and shut in protest.
"Seriously?" You grumble, chancing a glance at the bedside clock to see that maybe his grievence is justified given the late hour blinking back at you.
Before you can even stop him, Adrian is scrambling off you, leaving you feeling empty all of a sudden. You prop yourself up on your elbows, watching him hunt for his jeans in the scattered mess of clothes on your bedroom floor as the wet patch beneath your ass spreads over the sheets.
"What are you doing?"
"Noise disturbance babe!" Adrian exclaims as he shoves his foot into one of the legs, struggling to keep balance on the other foot, his red streaked ass jiggling as he hops around. "Someone's gotta go talk to the guy, set him straight. There are laws about that kinda thing!"
The manic grin on his face tells you he has more plans for Jeff in 2B than a quiet talking to.
"Adrian." You warn, flopping back into the pillows, exasperated and sleepy.
"It'll just take a sec, I swear!" He lies blatently, tugging his shirt on over his head back to front before swiping up his glasses.
You're too tired and fucked out to stop him.
Hopefully Jeff has more common sense than to open his door at this time of night. If not, you can only pray that it won't look too suspicious when Jeff suddenly ups and leaves to go on an extended vacation to the middle of Alaska; or wherever his inevitable 'goodbye' note will claim he's gone.
You're on the cusp of drifting off when you remember the baseball bat you keep by your front door, groggily calling out to Adrian as he attempts to creep out.
"Leave the bat, dummy!"
"Awh, man."
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"Dude, get a room." Economos laments, shielding his eyes with a hand when Adrian bounds over to your desk just to plant a sweet kiss to your lips while there's a little down time.
Adrian frowns, barely lifting his head to throw him a look of utter confusion over the low partition between your desks. "We're literally in a room right now? And I did technically pay for this place, so if you really think about it—"
Economos interjects before Adrian can go off on a tangent, "It's a turn of phrase, dumbass. I meant take that somewhere else before I barf up my cheerios onto my desk or something."
"Ohhhh! I knew that."
"Bullshit." John mutters, burying his head in his computer to avoid making direct eye contact with the overly-affectionate public display.
You grin up at Adrian from your chair as his hands find your shoulders, allowing yourself to relax when he starts to massage gently. "He's right though, if we had a HR department, I think we would have been written up at least 5 times this morning already." Your hand drifts away from the keyboard to pat his own. "C'mon, lover boy, get your ass back to your desk."
"Fine." He relents, pouting the entire way back to his own workstation.
Adrian's cheeks have barely touched the seat when a new email notification pops up in the bottom right hand corner of his screen from you.
Subject: Meet me in 5.
Supply closet. John said get a room, and I don't think we've tested out the acoustics in there yet. Let's hope it's sound proof.
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You probably remember this photo. It was taken as a prop to look like an old family photo of Javi and his dad back home on their ranch.
At this point, I’m starting to believe it never existed digitally and the only version we’ll ever have is this tiny, blurry one… BUT THAT’S NOT EVEN THE PART THAT BROKE ME. BECAUSE:
I’ve seen this scene approximately one billion times. In the show. In screencaps. In edits. In GIFs. And somehow, I never noticed that the photo is RIGHT THERE behind Javier in his office !!!!!
And the way he keeps it there is so painfully Javier. It isn’t properly framed. It isn’t sitting on his desk where he can look at it all day.
He just casually tucked it into the corner of the official presidential portrait behind him. Like he wants a piece of home nearby without making a big deal out of it.
He doesn’t need to keep it directly in front of him. Maybe looking at home all day would only make him miss it more.
But he still wants it there. Close enough to know he has it. Right behind him.
I’M FINE. THIS IS FINE.
And because the photo is behind him instead of facing him on his desk, everyone who walks into his office can see it. For someone as private as Javier, that feels strangely personal. He’s quietly letting people see this tiny piece of his life outside the DEA. His dad. His home. Their ranch…
Maybe everyone else noticed this years ago.
But somehow, after three years and more Narcos rewatches than I could ever count, I’m only seeing it now. And yes, I feel slightly embarrassed.
BUT I’M ALSO SO EMOTIONAL ABOUT IT. Javier Peña keeps a photo with his dad in his office.
"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.
matter of fact let's put peepaw in a black kurta pls. the slutty brown boy uniform. bring him to the function and all the aunties will swoon over your handsome doctor bf
at the function, he gets bombarded by wide-eyed, awestruck, hopeful medical students (and their parents) "is it true that you're an ER attending?? can you give me some advice?"
and through a mouthful of lamb biryani, jack replies: "yeah. don't do it"
put on the p*tt season 1 and man.... that really is a dead wife. you have the better lighting, better acting, better writing, better everything. heather is there, gloria is there, samira has actual screentime, r*bby is less annoying, myrna is terrorizing his ass all day long, dana has no fucked up accent, the little farmboy is mostly in the background where he should be all the time........ these are two completely different shows lmao
My hope for whoever is reading this is that your life starts making sense and coming together. I hope the good days are right around the corner for you.
everyone hates western billionaires and rightly so they're destroying our world but i gotta remind myself to hate the ones in my corner of the world cause they dont get shamed enough. hate Ambani and Adani just as much, single handedly funding a fascist regime and destroying the world and killing people. i dont talk enough about how much i despised the ambani wedding that everybody was talking about. it was obscene and a crime against the people.
