i will post an essay to substack by the end of september. i promise
pick a topic for me
clarice lispector, censorship, protest and silence
nosferatu, gone with the wind, and racist constructs of gender in 'dark romance'
what is a west brit? irishness, postcolonialism and immigration
grieving as diaspora
something else?
DO NOT PRESS. dervla button only. not for u
Voting ended onAug 19, 2025
the nosferatu one might not be my place to talk about, but it is something i've thought about a lot. i would also be willing to talk about the fetishisation of women's subjugation - and how the art that does this is often primarily targeted at women - without delving into race or white womanhood at all. very open to feedback & i can appreciate being told no!
people on here who have been on 10-15+ years like myself...i don't know how they claim that there were never any Black bloggers on here, or that it was always such a white website. trudy gradientlair was on here. thisiswhiteprivilege was on here. there was a feminist citation project sara ahmed was involved in on here. there was someone on here whose username was wretchedoftheearth and that was how i learned who fanon was when i was 12, by googling those words. tumblr was the only place i knew i could go to get accurate & compassionate info about what happened to trayvon martin, when everyone around me irl was rabidly racist. the amount of reportage and scholarship that happened on here before the first big wave of bans was so huge and so much has been lost. where were you when it was happening??? why weren't you paying attention??
it's cause they never engaged with non white bloggers so they never noticed them disappearing. they got the tumblr they wanted, and those of us who aren't liberal/conservative fandom bloggers were robbed of our black and brown friends, and worst of all black and brown bloggers were robbed of a dpace that once was a legitimate vector for talking about black issues. at least some members of staff know what they are doing, it's like the war on drugs in this website the way they crush black people on this website.
I literally published an essay several years ago about how a lot of people stole the intellectual work that Black feminist bloggers on here published regularly to build this website and its reputation as we know it. White people love them some revisionist history.
The reason Tumblr became the bastion of intellectual discourse that it was known for--the reason the term "social justice warrior" even EXISTS as a derogatory descriptor--is because of the work of the Black bloggers who migrated to this site from 2009-2014 from LJ and Jezebel's forums. Myself included.
sorry bud but you forgot to reblog that post about fatphobia with a tag mentioning how skinny petite little tiny thin 90 pounds soaking wet you are. now everyone on tumblr thinks you're 400 pounds and every chubby chaser within a 100 mile radius has begun moving in your direction
denial (it's just unreliable narration the narrator is an abusive racist liar but the show itself isnt) bargaining (maybe they'll fix it all in the finale? it'll all come together in the finale & it will be a good show again. oh it got worse. they'll fix it next season?) anger (this is so horrific i never have to pause onscreen violence and gore this much A BEAUTIFUL MOMENT WITH PAUL? WITH PAUL? HE KILLED PAUL PAUL FORGIVES AND ABSOLVES HIM A BEAUTFUL MOMENT WITH PAUL? A BEAUTIFUL MOMENT WITH PAUL.) depression (they ruined my favourite show. they ruined it.) acceptance (at least i pirated it)
āthe mind of a medieval person was foreign and incomprehensibleā factoid is false. the average medieval person was pretty normal. the chivalric death cult, whose members were known to literally die if prevented from riding to war, was an outlier and should not have been counted
On hearing of Anjouās death, a tailor of Orleans named Guillaume le Jupponnier, when āovercome with wine,ā burst into a tirade in which can be heard the rarely recorded voice of his class. āWhat did he go there for, this Duke of Anjou, down there where he went? He has pillaged and robbed and carried off money to Italy in order to conquer another land. He is dead and damned, and the King St. Louis too, like the others. Filth, filth of a King and a King! We have no King but God. Do you think they got honestly what they have? They tax me and re-tax me and it hurts them that they canāt have everything we own. Why should they take from me what I earn with my needle? I would rather the King and all kings were dead than that my son should be hurt in his little finger.ā
I went looking for more information on Guillarme le Jupponier, and found this article, which points to a slew of similar speeches in European and US history-- and, crucially, the fact that Guillarme le Jupponier was released after that speech, not tortured or executed, because it was acknowledged that his sentiments were extremely common.
Studying nearly 1,100 rebellions in France, the Low Countries and Italy stretching back to 1200 the historian Samuel Cohn discovered that instead of hat-in-hand deference, āgenuine, heartfelt hatred for a king or queen is easy to find.ā
"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.
The initial person to person infection being shown as an unwanted kiss. Carol getting kissed when itās clear she isnāt impacted. Helen and others dying during the joining. Carol not having the choice to come out, āeveryoneā just knowing. The grey area of Koumbaās āchaperonesā and whether they can consent. Zola saying affection is always welcome to them. Carol having her eggs procured without consent. Kusimayu agreeing, but not fully understanding what sheās agreeing to. Manousos being brought to the hospital when he has made it clear that he wants nothing to do with them. The constant drones. The woman who went to Miami, returned to be a waitress for the charade for Carol. Consent and privacy and choice destroyed under the guise of ācreating something betterā
a lot could be solved by teaching the vast majority of ppl in the global north that "neoliberalism" "globalism" and "free market capitalism" all mean the same thing. maybe then the most evil american politicians to ever live would stop getting hero-worshipped for preferring a blue necktie to a red one
neoliberalism is the system that allows american corporations to employ workers in pakistan or bangladesh or china or vietnam to make clothes for a pittance that are then sold in north america, europe etc at a significant markup. this cutting of international red tape robbed us and uk unions of all of their power as their labour was no longer as valuable as what could be extorted from countries that had previously been gutted and ravaged by imperalism & colonialism. neoliberalism allows companies whose profit margins are threatened by environmental, climate or worker's rights legislation to simply move their operations to a country where those regulations are more lax (or nonexistent). when punished for harming citizens and workers at home, they move somewhere like mexico to hurt people who don't have the power or proximity to their oppressors to easily retaliate. when these politicians champion 'deregulation' or 'liberalisation', they're championing the right of big business to pollute water and air without punishment, to more easily exploit their workers, to eradicate competition, to weaken the negotiating power of the international worker - most especially the colonial subaltern or (more plainly) poor black and brown people living in so called second and third world countries. it's very easy for this system to avoid attention from white left-leaning liberals because it disguises itself in misleading language that makes it all sound confusing and vaguely progressive to most people. this process was started by people like thatcher and reagan but continues to be championed by modern politicians that a lot of ppl on this website would prefer to see as saints
a lot could be solved by teaching the vast majority of ppl in the global north that "neoliberalism" "globalism" and "free market capitalism" all mean the same thing. maybe then the most evil american politicians to ever live would stop getting hero-worshipped for preferring a blue necktie to a red one
asked the skyrim bandits why they were living in a cave and they explained the war effort has buried the economy so they can't find work and lost their homes. I use my shout to blast them across the cave and find a preeeetty nice sword among their belongings
