Sophie Djeme-Mi Koumazock’s doctor prescribed her a new drug to slow the progression of incurable breast cancer. But as a federal employee,
When 43-year-old Sophie Djeme-Mi Koumazock was told her incurable metastatic breast cancer was no longer responding to her medication, she was reassured knowing she had another option.
Her doctor said her profile made her a candidate for the drug Truqab. While it wouldn’t cure her, it would give the Quebec City mother of four young kids more time with her family.
But her hope didn’t last long.
Costing up to $12,000 a month — double her previous medication that had been covered by her insurer Canada Life — Djeme-Mi Koumazock was shocked to learn she wouldn’t be reimbursed for the new treatment.
“It’s destroyed me. I didn’t know what to do,” she said.
While Quebec's health insurance board covers Truqap under exceptional circumstances, federal public servant Djeme-Mi Koumazock is enrolled in the Public Service Health Care Plan (PSHCP). Administered by Canada Life, the federal plan does not cover the drug.
Djeme-Mi Koumazock contacted her employer and union. While her union is helping her with her case, she's been told the decision is policy. She's now forced to pay out of pocket until she finds a solution.
Full article
This is why universal healthcare has to include pharmacare.
We'll figure out what's wrong with you for free, but if your insurance doesn't cover the medication you need then fuck you?
People here love to talk about how people in the States die or are crushed by medical debt due to the cost of healthcare. But the same can and does happen here due to the cost of medications.
Just because it's less common here doesn't make it any less wrong. Pharmacare is healthcare.
a thing about me is i basically never notice a wig or other kind of hairpiece in tv/movies. it has to be party city territory for me to even twig it. people will complain about characters' wigs looking bad and i will nod along but there is like a 90% chance i did not notice for a second while watching. i consider this mostly a blessing.
I think one of the funniest things about Jane Eyre and Pride and Prejudice is that people act like Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet are complete opposites.
They’re really not.
Yes. On paper, they couldn’t be more different.
Elizabeth is witty. Jane is reserved. Elizabeth grew up surrounded by family. Jane grew up alone. Elizabeth’s story is bright, social, and full of banter. Jane’s is gothic, lonely, and haunted. But underneath all of that, they’re fighting the exact same battle. Neither of them will let someone else decide what their life should look like.
“I refuse to marry someone I do not love wholeheartedly, and I refuse to do something just because society says so.”
Elizabeth refuses Mr. Collins. Not because he’s poor. Not because he’s cruel. But because marrying someone she doesn’t love would mean giving up the right to choose for herself.
Jane refuses St. John. Not because he isn’t respectable. Not because he isn’t kind. But because she knows marrying him would slowly erase who she is. And I think that’s where the two novels quietly agree.
People tend to describe Elizabeth as someone who marries for love. I don’t think that’s entirely true. She marries for respect. Love follows.
The reason she rejects Darcy the first time isn’t because she doesn’t love him. She doesn’t know him well enough to love him. She rejects him because she believes he lacks the qualities she refuses to compromise on. Only after Darcy changes—and only after Elizabeth realizes she judged him unfairly—can they meet as equals.
Jane follows the same pattern. People love talking about Rochester’s redemption. But I don’t think Jane Eyre is actually Rochester’s story.
It’s Jane’s.
Every major choice she makes is a refusal to lose herself. She leaves Gateshead. She leaves Lowood. She leaves Thornfield. Not because she’s running away. Because she refuses to compromise the one quality that defines her. Throughout the novel, Jane is self-affirming even amid the gravest adversities. That quality is impossible to repress. Even when she loves Rochester, she refuses to become his mistress because she knows that love at the cost of her own principles isn’t really love.
That’s what makes both novels feel surprisingly modern.
Neither heroine allows love to become the loss of self.
And I think that’s why both women are constantly described as “stubborn.” It’s funny how literature has a habit of calling women stubborn whenever they insist on having standards. Elizabeth is criticized for rejecting Mr. Collins and initially refusing Darcy. Jane is told she’s foolish for leaving Rochester and later for refusing St. John.
From everyone else’s perspective, they’re throwing away perfectly good futures. Security. Status. Comfort. From theirs, they’re protecting something far more valuable.
Themselves.
Both novels quietly argue that losing yourself is far more dangerous than losing an opportunity.
Maybe that’s why Jane Eyre and Elizabeth Bennet have endured for centuries and are still being shown in media today. Not because they found the perfect man. But because people almost always succumb to peer pressure and allow society to reshape their opinions.
They don’t.
Jane never lets anyone else’s expectations define her conscience. Elizabeth never lets anyone else’s expectations define her judgment. They stay strong and keep to what they believe in, through thick and thin, no matter what.
They don’t become admirable because they fall in love. They become admirable because they refuse to become someone else in order to be loved. And maybe that’s the real romance both novels are trying to defend. Not finding the right person. But refusing to become the wrong version of yourself while looking for them.
Once a wildfire starts, it can spread to an area too massive to control.
July 16, 2026
When the boreal forests of Canada catch on fire, no one can do anything about it in many cases. The forests are part of Earth’s largest land biome, a greenbelt of wilderness that encircles the globe, and they’ve been suffering from the planet’s thermostat being jacked up. Wood-boring pests that flourish in milder climates have swept north and east, through tens of millions of acres. Droughts and dwindling snowpack have stressed the trees. They are ready to burn.
Many people simply don’t grasp the sheer magnitude of the boreal forest or what it would take to manage fires across its enormous area, Jed Kaplan, a professor in the Department of Earth, Energy, and Environment at the University of Calgary, told me: “You can’t control these fires. You cannot put personnel, fire engines, over an area that is the size of the entire American South, or something like that. It’s just way too big of an area.”
And so the fires spread, pouring out smoke that washes over the residents of faraway cities. The “Ontario Armageddon” (as one wildfire newsletter called it), along with several large fires burning in northern-Minnesota forests, has left Toronto with some of the worst air quality in the world this week and has shrouded New York City in a sickly gray haze. Canada has 869 active fires at the moment, and most are burning in wilderness areas where authorities monitor them but don’t try to put them out.
Although these boreal forests have evolved to burn and are adapted to fire, the size and intensity of the wildfires have increased as the atmosphere warms. Two of the worst wildfire seasons on record in Canada, in terms of acreage burned, occurred in the past three years, the worst of which was in 2023, when smoke crossed the border to cover East Coast cities and turned New York’s sky a deep, eerie orange. Smoky summers have become a familiar reality in Western Canada and the western United States, but eastern cities are now dealing with the same problem more often, Anabela Bonada, the managing director for climate science at the Intact Centre on Climate Adaptation, at the University of Waterloo, told me: “It’s slowly becoming a fixture.”
The smoke rolled into her area, outside Toronto, yesterday and quickly reached the worst level on Canada’s air-quality health index. The fires also prompted the closure of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, in Minnesota, this week. First Nations communities in Ontario have been forced to evacuate. And in one particularly harrowing incident, caught on video, the crew members of a freight train in rural Ontario were surrounded by flames. They managed to escape.
Canada’s wildfire season had been off to a slow start, but now more than 6 million acres have burned so far this year, on pace to become the third-highest total on record. “What is unfolding is what climate and forest scientists have been predicting for 30 years,” Werner Kurz, a retired senior research scientist at Natural Resources Canada, told me. “That as the world gets hotter and drier, we are exposing forests to more and more risk, and the old strategies of fire suppression are simply being overwhelmed.”
In the particularly bad stretch from 2023 to 2025, some 8 percent of Canada’s forests burned, Bonada said. Repeated, large fires have caused a decline in the predominant species of conifers, the black spruce, shifting what vegetation regrows. These enormous swaths of boreal forest from the Yukon to Newfoundland and Labrador—more than 1 million square miles—act as massive vaults for carbon, which is locked away in billions of trees and the forest floor. But so much of those forests is going up in smoke that they have become their own notable source of greenhouse gases in recent years. A 2024 study published in Science found that carbon emissions from wildfires had increased by 60 percent in the prior two decades. Fires in boreal forests such as Canada’s were the main reason. Another study, published in Nature, found that Canadian wildfires in 2023, when more than 43 million acres burned, generated more emissions than the burning of fossil fuels in all but the three most-polluting countries.
When these forest fires really get going, they can generate a destructive power that is hard to fathom. A notorious 2016 fire, known as “the Beast,” destroyed much of Fort McMurray, in an oil-producing region of Alberta, and burned across nearly 1.5 million acres. Such huge fires can generate hurricane-force winds and towering pyrocumulus clouds; when the smoke gets high in the atmosphere, it can drift across oceans and continents. Many of these fires coincide, as this week’s blazes in Ontario have, with heat waves. The town of Lytton, in British Columbia, was nearly wiped off the map in 2021 the day after it endured Canada’s hottest temperature on record, 121 degrees.
“Having these temperatures in forested areas, it’s just impossible. The forests don’t remain,” John Pomeroy, a hydrologist at the University of Saskatchewan who has studied the effects of climate change, told me. He is based at a research lab in the Canadian Rockies, in Alberta. Last week, the whole area was blanketed in smoke, he said, from wildfires in British Columbia. In addition to causing harmful health impacts, wildfire smoke also darkens glaciers in the mountains. Those darker glaciers absorb more sunlight, which causes them to melt faster. The world is caught in these loops, and they’re only going to keep repeating.
So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.
I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.
Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.
So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.
Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in an upcoming design promotion.
Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming 😵💫
Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.
Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.
I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.
The votes are in, and for another LM Montgomery read we’ll be doing the Emily Climbs Book Club in October-November!
I thought about how to set up the reading days, and even though the chapters aren’t as short as in The Blue Castle, I think it’s simplest to still have Mondays through Fridays be reading days – I found it much easier to keep track of!
However, I’m going to mix it up a little by splitting some of the chapters consisting mainly of Emily’s diary entries in half. This serves two purposes: it spreads out the reading a bit and gives more space to discuss things, and – with the book taking place over three and a half years, and the diary entries covering some longer periods within that – it gives a better sense of the passage of time in Emily’s life.
To avoid the book club overlapping with Canadian Thanksgiving, I’m going to start it the week after, so the reading schedule is:
Monday October 19: Writing Herself Out
Tuesday October 20: Salad Days (Part 1: February to April in Emily’s diary entries)
Wednesday October 21: Salad Days (Part 2: May in Emily’s diary entries)
Thursday October 22: In the Watches of the Night
Friday October 23: “As Ithers See Us”
Monday October 26: Half a Loaf
Tuesday October 27: Shrewsbury Beginnings
Wednesday October 28: Pot-pourri (Part 1: September in Emily’s diary entries)
Thursday October 29: Pot-pourri (Part 2: October-November in Emily’s diary entries)
Friday October 30: Not Proven
Monday November 2: A Supreme Moment
Tuesday November 3: The Madness of an Hour
Wednesday November 4: Heights and Hollows
Thursday November 5: At the Sign of the Haystack
Friday November 6: Haven
Monday November 9: The Woman Who Spanked the King
Tuesday November 10: “The Thing That Couldn’t”
Wednesday November 11: Driftwood (Part 1: September-October in Emily’s diary entries)
Thursday November 12: Driftwood (Part 2: November to February in Emily’s diary entries)
Friday November 13: “If a Body Kiss a Body”
Monday November 16: Circumstantial Evidence
Tuesday November 17: “Airy Voices” (Part 1: April to August in Emily’s diary entries)
Wednesday November 18: “Airy Voices” (Part 2: September to January in Emily’s diary entries)
Thursday November 19: In the Old John House
Friday November 20: Thicker Than Water
Monday November 23: “Love Me, Love My Dog”
Tuesday, November 24: An Open Door
Wednesday November 25: A Valley of Vision
Thursday November 26: April Love
Friday November 27: End-of-book wrap-up!
I love this book – it’s such a delightful mix of the Gothic and the real, Emily is my favourite LM Montgomery heroine, and it’s more about the journey of becoming a writer than any other other books. The Emily series was written around the same time as The Blue Castle – in the 1920s – and has a lot of both similar and different themes.
I look forward to travelling through this book with you and hearing all of your thoughts on it!
surprisingly forward-thinking of jim henson and co. to make a female character in the 70's that's allowed to be loud-mouthed and violent and kind of overwhelmingly romantic and even a huge bitch at times and not have a moment where any character asks her to change
going through all the muppet movies in a row made me realize that like. miss piggy was made in the 70's. and it's so rare even today to have a character like her. she's loud, she's selfish, she's funny, she's extremely vain, she's obsessed with romance, she's violent, she's kind of annoying, and there's not a single moment in any of these films where she's asked to tone down any of these personality traits. i am not joking when i say that miss piggy might be one of the best treated female characters ever written
Not the “oh Einstein was probably autistic” or the sanitized Helen Keller story. but this history disabled people have made and has been made for us.
Teach them about Carrie Buck, who was sterilized against her will, sued in 1927, and lost because “Three generations of imbeciles [were] enough.”
Teach them about Judith Heumann and her associates, who in 1977, held the longest sit in a government building for the enactment of 504 protection passed three years earlier.
Teach them about all the Baby Does, newborns in 1980s who were born disabled and who doctors left to die without treatment, who’s deaths lead to the passing of The Baby Doe amendment to the child abuse law in 1984.
Teach them about the deaf students at Gallaudet University, a liberal arts school for the deaf, who in 1988, protested the appointment of yet another hearing president and successfully elected I. King Jordan as their first deaf president.
Teach them about Jim Sinclair, who at the 1993 international Autism Conference stood and said “don’t mourn for us. We are alive. We are real. And we’re here waiting for you.”
Teach about the disability activists who laid down in front of buses for accessible transit in 1978, crawled up the steps of congress in 1990 for the ADA, and fight against police brutality, poverty, restricted access to medical care, and abuse today.
Ed Roberts was one of the founding minds behind the Independent Living movement. Roberts was born in 1939, and contracted polio at age 14, two years before the vaccine that ended the polio epidemic came out (vaccinate your kids). Polio left Roberts almost completely paralyzed, with only the use of two fingers and a few toes. At night, he had to sleep in an iron lung, and he would often rest there during the day as well. Other times of the day, he breathed by using his face and neck muscles to force air in and out of his lungs.
Despite this being the fifties, Roberts' mother insisted that her son continue schooling. Her support helped him face his fear of being stared at and ridiculed at school, going from thinking of himself as a "hopeless cripple" to seeing himself as a "star." When his high school tried to deny him his diploma because he had never completed driver's ed, Roberts and his mother fought the school and won.
This marked the beginning of his career as an activist.
Roberts had to fight the California Department of Vocational Rehabilitation for support to attend college, because his counselor thought he was too severely disabled to ever work or live independently. Roberts did go to school, however, first attending the College of San Marino. He was then accepted to UC Berkeley, but when the school learned that he was disabled, they tried to backtrack. "We've tried cripples before, and it didn't work," one dean famously said. The school tried to argue the dorms couldn't accommodate his iron lung, so Roberts was instead housed in an empty wing of the school's Cowell Hospital.
Roberts' admittance paved the way for other disabled students who were also housed in the new Cowell Dorm. The group called themselves "The Rolling Quads," and together they fought and advocated for better disability support, more ramps and accessible architecture like curb cut outs, founded the first formally recognized student-led disability services program in the country, and even managed to successfully oust a rehabilitation counselor who had threatened two of the Quads with expulsion for their protests.
After graduation from his master's, he served a number of other roles- he taught political science at a number of different colleges over the years, served on the board for the Center for Independent Living, confounded the World Institute on Disability with Judith E. Heumann and Joan Leon, and continued to advocate for better disability services and infrastructure at his alma mater of UC Berkeley.
Roberts also took part in and helped organize sit ins to force the federal government to enforce section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, which stated that people with disabilities should not be excluded from activities, denied the right to receive benefits, or be discriminated against, from any program that uses federal financial assistance, solely because of their disability. The sit-in occupied the offices of the Carter Secretary of Health, Education and Welfare building in San Francisco and lasted 28 days. The protestors were supported by local gay rights organizations and the Black Panthers. Roberts and other activists spoke, and their arguments were so compelling that members of the department of health joined the sit in. Reagan was forced to acknowledge and implement the policies and rules that section 504 required. This national recognition helped to pave the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990.
Roberts died of cardiac arrest in 1995 at the age of 54, leaving behind a proud legacy of advocacy and activism. Not bad for a "hopeless cripple" whose rehab counselor thought he was too disabled to ever work.
“Black Panthers saved the 504 sit-in.” – Corbett O’Toole, participant in the 1977 504 protest in San Francisco
”Along with all fair and good-thinking people, The Black Panther Party gives its full support to Section 504 of the 1973 Rehabilitation Act and calls for President Carter and HEW Secretary Califano to sign guidelines for its implementation as negotiated and agreed to on January 21 of this year. The issue here is human rights – rights of meaningful employment, of education, of basic human survival – of an oppressed minority, the disabled and handicapped.
Further, we deplore the treatment accorded to the occupants of the fourth floor and join with them in full solidarity.” – Black Panther Party media release on the protest, from website Disability Social History (click thru to see pictures of BPP news about the success of the protest!)
According to disability rights activist Corbett O’Toole, these advocates “showed us what being an ally could be. We would never have succeeded without them. They are a critical part of disability history and yet their story is almost never told.”
They were running a soup kitchen for their black community in East Oakland and they showed up every single night and brought us dinner. The FBI [guarding the building entrance] was like, “What the hell are you doing?” They answered, “Listen, we’re the Panthers. You want to starve these people out, fine, we’ll go tell the media that that’s what you’re doing, and we’ll show up with our guns to match your guns and we’ll talk about who’s going to talk to who about the food. Otherwise, just let us feed these people and we won’t give you any trouble” – and that’s basically what they did.
Please read up on the Black Panthers' involvement in the 504 movement, they were integral to the occupation lasting as long as it did and were INCREDIBLY ACTIVE PARTICIPANTS! They are more than a footnote in that part of disability history, and I want more people to know this part of their legacy!
Read about Bradley Lomax (and his aid and fellow organizer Chuck Johnson, who I've struggled finding sources on outside of articles on Mr. Lomax :( ) here and here! Together the two were integral in bringing Black Panther Party organizing and activism to the disability rights movement!
I wish there were more information on Mr. Johnson, as his work is dear to my heart as someone who also requires caregiving. ;3; <3 Considering how little information there even was available online for Mr. Lomax just ten years ago I am hoping we get more coverage of Mr. Johnson's contributions to this important part of disability history sooner rather than later. I do not want his activism ignored!
Do not let the full richness of our history be whitewashed! The Black Panthers kept the protestors fed, they HEAVILY publicized the protests in their paper The Black Panther and agitated on the protest and protestors behalf, and paid organizers' way to Washington to pressure the HEW secretary to actually sign the damn act. In turn, the Panthers did this because the Oakland ILC did outreach to them, and helped Mr. Lomax with transportation. This is solidarity buried under focus on the white organizers. Please please please cherish it. Keep it close to your heart, read about it, celebrate it, share it!
Obviously there were more Panthers who helped but I have already lost the first draft of this and I'm starting to fade -- here's two more detailed sources to read for more, and I highly recommend you do!
The Intersections and Divergences of Disability and Race
Lomax's Matrix: Disability, Solidarity, and the Black Power of 504
Sorry to add to an already long post, but re: the sanitized history of Hellen Keller, I highly recommend this video:
It's not perfect, and the creator openly admits that at the beginning, but it does a really good job of bringing issues around disability to light AND tackles the absolutely abhorrent way misinformation spreads online.
Also there's a documentary about, I believe, that longest sit-in that was mentioned earlier in this post, it's available in full on YouTube and it's really good
I genuinely believe that the new SW trilogy wouldn’t have flopped out into irrelevance like it did if they hadn’t dumped Finn on the side of the freeway like a new pet rabbit the week after easter
Anyway in my heart Finn became a Jedi alongside Rey and inspired a Stormtrooper insurrection and Kyle Ron went back to his mom like he should have day fucking one and that angry redhead dude blew up with the star destroyer and Poe got to make it happen and at the end Rey doesn’t give a shit who her bitch ass non-palpatine parents might have been because she gets her new family like she needed and palpatine stays dead at the bottom of his musty hole like he should have and Finn and Poe give each other approximately 130% the amount of lingering meaningful looks and then one of their run-together-to-reunite moments results in a heat-of-the-moment make out like it should have and Luke and Leia meet in person a minimum of once so she can sibling slap him at least once for being a useless dramatic old hermit for a billion years and tell him to get the Chanel boots back on and stop being a sad hobo and then for no reason at all there is an ewok style moon of Endor forest party at the end like God intended
like theyre in the water and they're staring off to the side and there's something so very wrong about it and they're bending over and trailing along like deer in the headlights but you can't see what they're staring at which might make it even scarier
Not going to lie the first picture like the ghost on the water It kinda is referenced on the one picture where the Beatles are in Miami for the Help! shooting I dont have the picture but it really looks like! Especially the bending ghost resembles Ringo and The other Picture where the ghost is sitting down I also remember so much remember that that picture is Brian Epstein sitting I also don’t have the picture cause I cant fine IT aaaaa HAHAH
"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.
For all that the 1800s etiquette guides are--obviously--derangedly sexist from a modern perspective? They're also mindblowing in how casually they will assert things that MODERN DAY CONSERVATIVES would scream and cry and shit their pants about.
"People back then always married young it's natural!!!" Every single 1800s guide I've ever met casually mentions that, of course, you really shouldn't get married before you're at least 20, and waiting until 25 is usually better.
Or, like. Okay here's a long segment:
Just firmly going "it is crazy sexist to blame The Wife for overspending when thirty seconds of asking questions will immediately establish that her husband was outright lying to her about how much money they had. Talk to your wife like a normal person."
Or--okay, here. A section on being honest and not writing love letters in secret, because that's usually a good sign that there's something untoward going on....
....except that he then immediately acknowledges that sometimes, the reason you're hiding this from your parents is that your parents suck. That there are parents who frankly have not earned the right to approve or disapprove of your partner.
(I realize the phrasing there sounds a lot less strong than my summary, but--trust me on this. When you're familiar with the narrative voice of these kinds of books, this passage is downright radical. The mere acknowledgement that if you treat your kids badly, it's your own damn fault when they don't talk to you? I've genuinely never seen that before in this genre.
Don't freak out over "properly trained", either. It's just a linguistic shift--at the time, "training" was used the way we would say "raising" a child today. )
man sometimes friendship really is just "I saw this and knew it would give you psychic damage. please respond with agony" and then they do. and it's great
Blurst of times @lizzy-bonnet - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
