As a transsexual woman 👩 who has had multiple experiences ‼️ I have found 🔎 that the biggest block of cheese 🧀 is usually the one ☝️ that has the largest size 📈
Destroying my home's "resale value"* by painting it in colours that only I can love.
* Painting your home fun colours will not destroy its resale value even if you do care about that. Your home's value is primarily derived from its location and the structure/materials of the building itself. Paint your home however you want and if you do choose to sell it to somebody with better taste then repainting can be their problem.
hey not to advertise these twats (so don't look them up) but some absolute fucks in paris allegedly created a service where you can "rent air conditioning" (taking advantage of a climate apocalypse) and they make you pay 700€ a month for AC that costs 200€ for life.
[social media screenshot from Le Parisien, a french journal "renting instead of buying AC, the good deal proposed by [Don't-Look-Them-Up] mid-heatwave."]
[journal article from Le Parisien that reads: "renting instead of buying AC, the good deal proposed by [Don't-Look-Them-Up] mid-heatwave.
Since the start of the summer, acquiring an AC has been challenging. To answer to buyers who are faced with empty storefronts, [Don't-Look-Them-Up] has found a trick: the punctual rental of cooling units."]
ahem. and the review
[One-Star Review: Crooks that profit off of people's distress. He made me an offer for a 9000 BTu AC unit (valued at 280€) for 750€ per month. To avoid.]
they admitted in a video that they bought all the AC units DURING A BIG HEATWAVE all over Paris to empty all stocks, so that people would rely on them to get AC.
worst part of being an adult is how often youre forced to nag. you Have to be annoying or youre never getting anything done. which is unfortunate considering how common it is to teach kids to never nag and be annoying ever
a professional i am paying money doesnt show up w zero communication and IM the one who has to feel guilty for having to call him and ask whats going on. because when i was a little kid i would get yelled at for nagging. joke world
"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.
idk i would personally rather give up access to certain products seasonally or locally than have people enslaved to give me the ability to have any product any place any time. i think i can go without tomatoes in january.
Shout out to the (many) times I got called an elitist gatekeeper for saying that the only real way to fully understand a work of fiction is to experience it firsthand and that summaries and reviews are not a replacement for that
Me, reading the first 80% of the post: What do you mean, "experience it firsthand"? How am I supposed to join the Hunger Games or go on the Odyssey?
Me, reading the final clause of the post: Oh, you literally meant that people have to read the book/listen to the audiobook in order to fully understand it. And people got mad. Oh dear.
To quote what a friend of mine said after she watched Jerry Maguire (1996) for the first time, having thought she knew what it was about because of its cultural ubiquity: “you miss a lot of a movie when you don’t watch it”
a general note on historical accuracy in the Iliad and Odyssey:
the Iliad and Odyssey are not historically accurate depictions of mycenaean greece in the bronze age. they didnt preserve a cultural memory of a past civilization in the oral tradition, they were projecting their own life and times onto the ruins of bronze age cities that were still visible during their own times. thats also why they "knew" where "troy" was, because they had already built a small colony in the ruins around the time the Iliad was written.
and the Iliad and Odyssey arent technically historically accurate depictions of the iron age, either, despite being written during that time period, because they are works of fiction being told by people who are trying to tell a good story. also the Odyssey poet doesnt even get the damned geography of the peloponnese correct! probably he'd never even been there.
if you want to make your own version of the Iliad and Odyssey with period-accurate depictions of the bronze age, or even just an accurate depiction of the poems as written, there's more than enough historical data out there to do that. apparently christopher nolan thought it would be cooler to have Matt Damon wearing a roman centurion helmet from several centuries after the poems were written. which i find tasteless and boring, sure, but my favorite modern rendition of the Odyssey has a lip-syncing George Clooney so whatever.
still think it’s incredible they made a movie musical about pt barnum where the point is like love and accept yourself no matter who you are or what you look like <3 when pt barnum irl was like exploitation georg who lives in a circus and and dehumanizes 10,000 people daily. not sure how they came up with that one
"Telling a fabricated story that audiences want to hear rather than anything faithful to actual facts about relevant history" is the most authentic experience a PT Barnum movie could possibly have been, though
you make one fucking post where the point is “women are encouraged to develop disordered eating from a very young age and that impacts how we view the ‘natural’ size and shape of women” and too many reblogs later i am being accused of saying short people wouldn’t exist if they ate better growing up. i’m sorry but if you genuinely think i was saying that you are just a buffoon. i cannot and will not sanction your buffoonery.
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