Finally a hand sewing tutorial on a hemline that isn't just the ladder stitch! the ladder stitch disappears when you tighten it, but it's not meant for hemlines because it breaks really easily! The overlock stitch is more stable, so it holds much longer, and it won't pucker or warp the fabric!
im sitting on a patio at my favorite cafe rn and im hand stitching them hem of a dress im working on. and i can see why someone would say im being performative by working on something like this in a public space. but frankly theres no element of that. i just want to work somewhere that isnt my apartment. i want to be in public, i wanna chat with strangers, i wanna see the world. itās nice to hang out somewhere that isnt my home!
what i mean is when you say people are being performative you discourage them from doing shit they love in public. and thats no way to foster the world we want to see.
various tv, film, and theater producers for the last 50 years smacking themselves in the forehead like fuuuuck how can we make it easy to understand why carrie is alienated from her peers and callously bullied at school WITHOUT making her a hideous fatass like in the book
Referring to someone as your āpartnerā sounds as if you are deliberately obscuring their gender and may subtly out you. āMy exā, however, is entirely unobtrusively gender-neutral. #breakupallrelationships
"I can't believe humans would hunt the thylacine to extinction, humans are fundamentally evil" Hey, did you know that extinction was long thought to be impossible, and within 50 years of humans realizing that extinction via overhunting was a possibility it practically stopped happening? Did you know that humans are so desperate to prevent more losses that they're funneling millions of collective hours and billions of euros into helping other species? Hours and euros that could be spent on humans, and species on whom humanity's own survival does not depend? Did you know that due to an accidental introduction of rats, the Lord Howe Island stick insect population was brought down to 24 individuals and now there are tens of thousands of them?
This bug. This bug that, to most humans, is utterly useless, relatively gross, and completely foreign. Humans saved it because humans do not want to cause another extinction ever again if they can avoid it.
me: "have they tried not being fucking ignorant religious bigots?"
article: āI suspect that a bit of the steam has gone out of the LGBT thing,ā Backman told the right-wing outlet, staying ahead of the issue. āThere may be the odd protester, but if they have got armies of PR people laser-focused on that then I suspect it may be OK.ā
The thing that pisses me off the most though is the fact I know so many LGBTQ+ individuals that still go there, and they are surprised when I actually don't. It's literally like that tweet.
"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 āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 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 āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
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 assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā 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 Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā 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 Japanās 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 ākept losing trackā 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 āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā 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 āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā 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 ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās 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 studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā 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 Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā 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 āfinding the main ideaā 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 āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā 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 ādeep workā 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 sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā 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.
Iām afraid I donāt 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? Kā12 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 āstudents will adapt.ā 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 studentsā sentences before theyāve 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."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
OKAY STRAP IN because this is one of the WILDEST stories in aviation history.
In 1990, a British Airways BAC One-Eleven, captained by Tim Lancaster and co-piloted by Alastair Atchison, was cruising at 17,000 feet.
Around 15 minutes after take-off, flight attendant Nigel Ogden entered the cockpit to bring the pilots something to drink. One second everything was fine. The next second, the pilot's side window blew out from the force of the pressurized cockpit. Even though he was strapped in, the force of the explosive decompression ripped the captain out of his chair and pulled him though the window.
The flight attendant immediately leapt forward and grasped the captain's belt. The force was so strong - due to the plane's speed - the captain slipped and was pulled almost entirely out of the plane, but the flight attendant caught his leg. The captain laid on the roof, then the side of the fuselage (the above image is an inaccurate recreation - the side window was smashed) and the flight attendant's entire arm was soon outside of the plane, gripping him.
(Recreation from the show Mayday at the point of decompression)
At the same time, the event caused the autopilot to disengage, and the captain's body hitting the flight controls caused the plane to enter into a deep dive. The throttle was set to full power and could not be accessed due to debris, meaning the plane was descending rapidly. The co-pilot, experiencing hypoxia, fought to control the plane's dive while allowing it to continue descending to a level the passengers/crew could breathe at. He attempted to contact air traffic control, but the wind made communication impossible, so he broadcast a mayday signal. Finally, he was able to re-engage the autopilot and level the plane out at a breathable altitude.
Soon, the flight attendant's entire arm was burned from wind shear and frostbite, and his grip began to slip. The other attendants entered the cabin to see what was wrong and took over holding the captain's body. Seeing the blood covering the windows from the captain's severe wind sheer burns and frostbite, the attendants and co-pilot knew he was dead. However, they could not let his body go because it could smash into the wing, horz stabilizer, or engine, and bring the plane down.
For 30+ minutes the co-pilot flew a jet plane with an OPEN WINDOW and his co-worker's body hanging along the side of the plane. Finally, clearance to land from ATC came across over the sound of the wind and the flight attendants were able to dislodge the captain's ankles from the flight controls without letting him go. The co-pilot successfully landed the plane.
(tw below for blood)
(Taken same day as the incident)
BUT HERE'S THE KICKER: when they reached the ground and evacuated, they realized THE CAPTAIN WAS NOT DEAD.
He SURVIVED being outside the fuselage of a jet airplane traveling 550mph at 17,000 feet. His only injuries were extensive - but mostly superficial - frostbite and windshear burns, bruising, fractures in his hand, and shock. He has since stated that he remembers the event and was conscious for much of the time he was outside of the fuselage. The only other injury was the flight attendant's frostbitten/windshorn arm. Captain Tim Lancaster returned to flying five months later.
(Captain Tim Lancaster in bed several weeks after the incident, with flight attendant Ogden (+ Ogden's wife) above him and co-pilot Alastair Atchison to the far left, along with the two other flight attendants)
Why did this occur? Because the plane had received maintenance the day before, and the maintenance supervisor did not check he was using the correct screws in re-installing the windscreen.
(Recreation)
So yeah: you can apparently survive clinging to the side of a jet airliner traveling 500+mph at 17,000 feet.
Wow! Didn't expect this many likes for an aviation post.
Just a note that I was wrong - it was the front pilot's windscreen, not the side-window! I'm used to looking at Boeing windows with different positions :)
If y'all want the full story & more analysis of what exactly went wrong, Mayday: Air Investigations did a pretty decent special on the incident. It's free on YouTube here (and here on dailymotion if you're outside the US).
The āmaintenance supervisor did not check the boltsā is technically correct but ignores the amount of stuff that had to go wrong for that to happen.
1: the supervisor was the one doing the bolts (I think there was a staffing issue) and so did not have to check the work that he did
2: the window was not on the list of vital components that need to be checked by someone else even if the supervisor does it.
3: the parts store where he had to go to get the bolts was badly lit and had bolts in the wrong drawers.
4: the wrong bolts and the right bolts are almost indistinguishable by sight.
5: the correct tool to put the screws in was not available so they had to do some lite bodging to get the screws in. By this I mean it was still a torque wrench and they checked it released at the right point but the correct socket did not stay in place or something like that.
6: any slight differences between the right bolts and the wrong bolts were hidden because of the tool they were using (which would have worked perfectly if they were using the right bolts).
If one of those things had not happened then the plane would have had the right bolts when it took off.
^ absolutely critical edition and a great example of whatās known in risk analysis as the Swiss Cheese Model.
From Wikipedia:
āThe Swiss cheese model of accident causation illustrates that, although many layers of defense lie between hazards and accidents, there are flaws in each layer that, if aligned, can allow the accident to occur. In this diagram, three hazard vectors are stopped by the defenses, but one passes through where the "holes" are lined up.ā
Accidents in complex systems are very rarely one personās fault and my original post indeed oversimplified the incident for the sake of telling a straightforward story. This was not the case of one bad maintenance worker; this was a systematic failure. The holes lined up and a tragedy nearly occurred because profit (short staffing, poor maintenance facilities, poor training and tools) was prioritized over safety at several layers. Any additional degree of safety would have prevented this from occurring.
Researchers focused on whether kids that are spanked are more likely to share or, conversely, more likely to have anxiety, years down the li
2021:
Spanking found to impact children's brain response, leading to lasting consequences.
2018:
The American Academy of Pediatrics says new evidence and research not only show that spanking affects a childās brain development and increa
2016:
Kids who are spanked tend to act out more and have more problems later on.
2012:
A study reviewed more than two decades of research on the effects of spanking and found nothing positive to report, only that physical punis
2010:
A multiyear study shows spanking kids makes them more aggressive later on
I havenāt pissed people off lately by reminding them that ALL types of physical punishment of kids has been proven beyond ANY reasonable doubt to have only negative long term outcomes.
So let me scream it from the hilltops:
Stop hitting kids. End of sentence.
If you think, ābut I was hit and I turned out just fineā let me pre-reply: NO YOU DID NOT. You think hitting a child is ok, how the fuck does that qualify as āfineā?????? From one abuse survivor to another: please start healing yourself.
The World Health Organization report I highly recommend because there are so many conclusions that are shocking and yet completely obvious.
For example, being exposed to corporal punishment as a kid makes it more likely for a person to commit domestic violence against a partner. In places where corporal punishment is normal, people are more likely to think that rape and intimate partner violence are normal. Kids who are spanked are more likely to be violent with and to bully other kids.
Spanking is literally teaching a kid that violence is okay and normal and it affects the whole society.
It also talks about how corporal punishment affects the brain in its development. It changes the structure of the brain and slows the development of mental abilities. Kids who get spanked have much stronger hormonal responses to stress.
The master's thesis I edited in 2009 was a pilot study about corporal punishment and eating disorders, and turned up a correlation.
(For those currently saying "correlation doesn't equal causation," you're correct! The point of this study was to determine if there were higher rates of disordered eating in adults who'd experienced corporal punishment as kids. If the answer was no, then there's probably no statistical relationship. If the answer was yes--as it was--the research would then move on to "so is there causation here, or are there other factors?")
I don't bring this up because of the study itself. It was a small pilot study, I haven't seen any follow-up research, and the original isn't available online.
No, I bring this up because the author cited many other studies on the adverse effects of spanking to demonstrate why she thought the study was necessary in the first place.
THOSE STUDIES WENT BACK TO 1939.
ONE OF THEM WAS AN AGGREGATE METADATA STUDY.
If you're not familiar, that basically means its authors were studying studies. They took every single study on spanking they could find within a 70-year span and studied them all to see what patterns emerged. What they found was horrifying:
Every single study in that period, from the most rigorous right on down to "you can tell the authors wanted a spanking-is-good result," showed negative results from spanking. These were as diverse as increased risk of sexual abuse to depression to increased risk of substance abuse to poorer educational outcomes to greater likelihood of committing violent crimes as adults.
But that's not the horrifying part. If you're wondering how that could possibly not be the horrifying part, well...
NOT ONE STUDY SHOWED A POSITIVE TRADEOFF FOR THESE RISKS. NOT. ONE.
There was no "sports can cause injuries but can also improve self-esteem, personal fitness, and teach important disciplinary skills." There wasn't even a "homework has marginal benefits at most."
THERE WAS NOTHING. Multiple studies noted that while corporal punishment could produce the immediate appearance of improved behavior, what was actually happening is the kids were getting better at lying and hiding their undesirable behavior, and they were actually more likely to enter the juvenile detention system. The results were so overwhelmingly negative that even the biased studies deliberately designed to produce "it's good actually" results could not deliver those results.
In other words: in thousands of studies across ALMOST A CENTURY, we have never found a good reason to use corporal punishment. We haven't even found a mediocre one.
Honestly I miss the energy Tumblr had when the first Pacfic Rim movie came out. Everybody was talking about who they were drift compatible with and that was like a huge compliment. Ppl were drawing Kaijus, and Jaegers, naming āem. It was a better time
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