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Just got jumpscared by a Cassandra Clare quote in a word search app

i’m going to be really honest with you guys i think the tendency to read the absolute worst possible intentions into every action you don’t agree with is getting too automatic and it’s eating you from the inside out

haaaaaaaaaaaave-you-met-ted

How dare you say we wanna eat someone from the inside. Cannibalism is wrong

fuckthisshit-ugh

please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

reblog. share. don't scroll past.

fuckthisshit-ugh

please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

what i'm asking:

we can still save her. but only loudly.

reblog. share. don't scroll past.

greenbloods

we are never going to be free until it literally doesnt matter whether a person is ugly or not

staticbluue

“People should pass a test before being allowed to have kids.” “Isn’t it scary how white people have this inborn capacity for evil?” “I’ll never pass because males and females have different skull shapes.” “Autistic people have a stronger sense of justice than anyone else.” “I don’t want AMABs in my space because they’re dangerous.” “You shouldn’t have access to hormones if you dress like THAT.” “Anyone who does something that awful isn’t human.” “Some people really shouldn’t be allowed to vote.”

This is eugenics. This is phrenology. THIS IS NAZI SHIT, YOU ARE A LEFTIST BUYING INTO NAZI SHIT. YOU ARE NOT IMMUNE TO NAZI SHIT.

Image ID: A screenshot of a Tumblr comment that reads, "Hi, so a little context here. I'm a law student. This article alluded to the notion that colleges should have stricter phone policies. I'd like to jump in and emphatically disagree. If three years ago, when I was applying to colleges, a university told me they were going to confiscate my phone like a middle schooler, I would take them off my application list immediately, because that's a huge red flag. As I'm sure the author is aware as a faculty member, colleges are a business. Whether we like it or not, it is simply an unattractive business model to tell young adults that they're going to be indebted for the rest of their lives for the experience of being treated like children. I'm not downplaying the severity of the cognitive decline crisis. I'm saying the solution cannot be to roll back the clock on technology or to infantilize adults. They're going into workplaces where they will be expected to moderate their cellphone usage, or offices where they will use technology as an aid to their job. Enforcing cell phone restrictions on young adults cannot be the answer." /end ID

NOPE STILL ANNOYED BY THIS

Not to get all boomer on main but seriously?????

Having guidelines on how students are allowed to behave in class is a "huge red flag"????? How are you going to handle having a job if you can't tolerate even a mild behavioral rule like "don't play on your phone when you're supposed to be working"?

Maybe I'm just old and out of touch but I can't even imagine a scenario in which it would be so important to be on my phone during class barring an emergency or if I was specifically asked to look something up by the professor. Like, you're absolutely right, you're going into a serious amount of debt to go to college. But, like, you know what you're paying for, right? You're paying for the knowledge and research/problem solving skills that your professors are teaching you. In class. So ... why are you wasting your money? Why go into so much debt to not even get the thing you paid for???? That's like spending $50 on a movie ticket and snacks just to throw on some headphones and scroll tiktok for 2.5 hours and then complain about the price of movie tickets.

If you want to be in college, then be in college. But if you can't be assed to put away your phone for a couple of hours at a time to actually learn the thing you decided to make into your career, then why are you going into so much debt in the first place?????

And yeah, it's also true that these college students are going into jobs where they're going to have to manage their own phone time, you're absolutely right. So how, do we think, they're going to learn how to do that? How do people learn what is appropriate behavior and what isn't? How do people learn when it's okay to shift their focus from something important?

By the people around them telling them!

A toddler does not inherently understand that it isn't appropriate to be screaming at the top of their lungs while they're right next to someone who's on the phone. They have to be told, sometimes multiple times, before they internalize that someone talking on the phone nearby means they should try to be quiet.

If you think there's nothing wrong with being on your phone during times when you're supposed to be paying attention to information or instructions, then you need someone to explain it to you. You can have it be your professor, or you can have it be your boss, but I guarantee you that your professor's more likely to be more lenient.

Especially if you're going into law! Like, damn, even if the article mentioned confiscation anywhere (which it did not), you're not likely to meet that many professors who'd jump at the chance to confiscate your phone. More likely? You'll get a warning or two, then you'll get a zero for the day, maybe kicked out of the class for the day if you still refuse to stop messing with your phone. You might get someone REALLY strict, who puts it into your syllabus and informs you that that is you're warning and anytime they catch you after that, you get punished.

But, law student, you know who's WAY more likely to confiscate you're phone if you're messing around with it when you shouldn't be? A judge. If you're in court, your job is to be paying attention to what's going on so that you can serve your client to your best ability. If you're messing around on your phone, you're not doing that, and judges don't tend to like it when lawyers aren't doing their jobs.

You want to talk about going into debt? Plenty of people have gone into debt to hire a lawyer to plead their case. And you're gonna not only waste your own money by not paying attention to the lessons you paid for, you're gonna waste theirs by not paying attention enough to do your job properly? And potentially get them a worse outcome that puts them into even more debt or, worse, sent to jail?

Scroll through your phone in your free time. You're not entitled to be on it whenever you want. You want to learn how to moderate you're usage? This is literally it. This is the lesson. You are literally being taught right now: It is not appropriate to be on your phone in class. Period.

kagayuzen

The 42nd Traditional Kaga-Yuzen Crafts ExhibitionSilver Award: Visiting dress ‘New York, New York’ Miyoji Ishida

Author’s Comment : The lights of the skyscrapers in Manhattan are beginning to turn on, and I created this work with a bird’s eye view of New York City, which is being transformed into a vibrant city.

The 42nd Annual Exhibition of Traditional Kaga Yuzen Crafts is being held at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa, from September 16 (Wed) to 22 (Tue).

leontocephagaina

"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.

bigandlong

If you see this on your dashboard, reblog this, NO MATTER WHAT and all your dreams and wishes will come true.

jae-felidae

Oh hey! Haven’t seen this in forever! Didn’t reblog it when it came across me before, not gonna skip it this time, I need some good vibes.

corneliaavenue-ao3

Reblog to give prev the power to write their fanfiction

gnar-slabdash

Reblog to give prev the TIME to write their fanfiction

cutebutalsostabby

Reblog to give prev the hocus focus to write their fanfiction.

septic-dr-schneep

Reblog to give prev the energy to write their fanfiction

imsopopfly

Reblog to give prev the executive function to write their fanfiction

miseducatedmelanicmuse

enii

I love you. I'm glad you exist.🫂

mockva

This guy's illusions are great

alexaloraetheris

A moment that I hope will live in my brain forever is the time we were walking along and the toddler, seeing a wacky waving inflatable arm flailing tube man for the very first time, stopped, gave the loudest most delighted gasp, pointed at it, and yelled to me with the biggest grin on their face, "Momma! He's a SAUSAGE!!"

It is

Kind of surreal

Watching a series in which Kristin Kreuk plays through almost all of the character beats of Lex Luthor in Smallville

Only child of a wealthy, powerful man being groomed to follow in his footsteps, sent back to a small rural town she'd been to before as a child on a journey to Prove Her Mettle, met with anger, resentment, and violence by the locals because of who her father is and what he's done, mother's not in the picture and is revealed to have been severely mistreated by the father, who's also revealed to have slept around a whole damn lot resulting in a secret younger sibling she's just discovered, and the first person willing to give her a fair shake is a small town boy beloved by the whole town with an Aw Shucks smile and a preference for blue

Of course there is one major difference between Joanna Hanley and Lex Luthor

The other characters are slowly warming up to Hanley as they recognize that she's doing everything she can to help the locals and that her father's crimes aren't her own

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