As someone who was alive when Bob Ross (and William Alexander before him — that’s where the approach is from) was on PBS, I can 100% testify that you can paint along with him.
You may need to learn how to set up your paints and such… but this is what people did, live, while the show aired. That’s what the show was for. I had family members create lovely works of art they enjoyed, which I still have on my walls, because William Alexander and Bob Ross both said:
SCREW METICULOUS CLASSICAL ART PRACTICES — JUST GRAB A PALETTE KNIFE AND BIG OLD BRUSH AND PAINT!
They freed a whole generation of people who were taught to paint detail and realism and exact representation of reality — people who largely gave up this kind of thing because it got tedious.
I watched the joy of family members as they rediscovered art as a messy fun spontaneous half hour activity.
going from the reddit star wars fandom to the tumblr star wars fandom is giving me insane whiplash. the upside is that people aren’t bitching about every single imperfect detail in the entire franchise, but the downside is that i’ve seen more fanart of obi wan and commander cody tenderly knowing each other than i have ever wanted to in my life in the last three hours and it has probably fundamentally altered the way i interact with the entire franchise
after the initial shock of being plunged into the icy cold lake of seeing my childhood action figures caressing each others sweaty chests in a gentle, hidden moment after a battle, i’ve been able to get my wits about me and realize that yeah, i’m kinda with it
Part of me is like “neat. Reblog,” and part of me is like “I understand now why impressionism took off, because there’s a 0% chance the artist wasn’t like ‘fuck this shit’ by the halfway point.”
making a model for comics-- this way I don't have to remember what the castle looks like and can take pictures in order to come up with interesting shots. It is just faster to do this than it is to learn blender. Cardboard tubes, hot glue, index cards, foam clay, assorted scraps.
"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.
Oh hey German tumblr peeps! Do you like scifi/fantasy and also queer stories and also feminism? Here's a bi-annual magazine for you!! Feat. short stories and essays and sometimes poetry! Also I know the current cover is extremely appealing to at least three of you! Go! Go look at it! Do it now!
I tried something out, and added some of my own little postcard-sized prints to my shop!
There's a lot, so I thought I'd show them in smaller sets here based on theme. These ones are inks based on the paintings of Caspar David Freidrich (1774-1840).
(All the paintings + a bit more of my personal experience below!)
I made these inks back in 2023; it'd been a several years’ break from drawing regularly, and I was feeling stuck as to how I could get back into the swing of creating.
One day, while flipping through a Friedrich art book I had just purchased from Powells, I couldn’t stop imagining fantasy creatures basking in the beautiful ruins he’d sketched, or flying across the vast skies he’d painted. I decided it would be fun to study some of these classic pieces. I could refamiliarize myself with some art fundamentals (like composition, values, and strong silhouettes), while also adding some fun personal details to help them to resonate with me even more. Before I knew it, I’d made nearly a dozen studies, all the while reading about his life.
Friedrich battled with a lot of grief in his life, and I was in the middle of coming to terms with many tragic events as well. Making these pieces was a lovely way to draw parallels and understand someone from 200 years ago, as well as understand myself and reignite some inspiration to draw again.
So yeah, these are a handful of the studies I'd made then. Thanks for taking the time to look c:
Sea beach in the fog (1807)
Two Men Contemplating the Moon (1819)
Winter Landscape with church (1811)
The Tomb of Arminius (1813)
Ruins of Eldena, near Greifswald (1825)
Chalk Cliffs on Rügen (1818)
"A work is not made, it must be felt." - Caspar David Freidrich
Woke up this morning thinking about Princess Willamina. A sensible, brave, adventurous young lady from continental Europe around 800 years ago - who you will not have heard of. She was the protagonist in a l-o-n-g series of bedtime stories I told my daughter when she was very young. In fact, until today, nobody but my daughter and I had ever heard of her.
I was near tears about it, because - even I had almost forgotten her. Appalling. She was a great human being. Eight to ten years old, lived in a peaceful kingdom, had loving parents. Her daily activities were (surprisingly) similar to things that we do here on the farm, such as gathering nuts in the fall or visiting a lake. Although! an enchanted bear showed up when she was gathering chestnuts, and there were some merfolk in the lake. She was an amalgamation of everything I would have wanted for my own childhood and everything I wanted my 3 - 5 year old daughter to be growing toward.
All Hail Princess Willamina. Our lives were better because you were in them.
Ok, here is the ONLY FRAGMENT of this saga that ever got written down. IT'S NOT A COMPLETE STORY! But you are allowed to make up more yourself.
The princess has a nice life with a loving mother and father, but she gets a bit tired of all the royal rules and all the sameness and decided to set off on an adventure. She carefully packs some bread, cheese, and three lovely apples in a knapsack along with a pot of walnut dye, a sensible plain dress, and some plain sturdy boots. She sneaks off alone, dyes her blond hair with walnut dye, and changes into her other clothes. The princess dress gets carefully packed away, the sturdy boots get pulled on, and off goes Willamina over the wall via the branches of a low-hanging tree. She has dyed her hands and a bit of the back of her neck brown, as well, but she sets out very optimistically for adventure.
It’s a lovely morning and Willamina starts off along a little-used road away from the castle. Before long she comes across a runaway horse. It has a saddle pad but no saddle, and the reins are trailing. She approaches it cautiously but it seems friendly enough; she leads it until she finds a downed tree the right size for her to use to mount. She hikes up her skirt, which is kind of embarrassing, and they ride along companionably enough. When they come to a village and ride into the square, someone asks her quite loudly why she is riding a stolen horse. A group of not-entirely-friendly grownups crowd around, and the situation goes downhill until Willamina stands up very tall and regal and tells the man in charge that she found the horse loose on the road, thank you very much, and she has every intention of returning him to his owner. The real owner of the horse comes hustling over, very relieved to see his horse again. Willamina can tell he’s the owner by the way the horse pricks up his ears and greets his master happily. She accepts his thanks with a gracious nod and the crowd melts away. It is midday by now, and Willamina goes to the shady side of the smithy and has a bite of bread and cheese, with some cool water from the well, to settle herself down.
Some of the ladies of the village, led by one rather bossy woman named Mella, come over to the shady bench by the smithy where Willamina is resting and bluntly ask where she is headed and why a young girl is out by herself. She has been thinking about her brown-stained hands and quickly comes up with a good story to explain both things. She tells the ladies that she has been apprenticed to a dye-maker who lives nearby, and she is on her way to begin her 5 years of apprenticeship. “Oh, you must mean Old Maude,” exclaimed one of the friendlier women, “she could use some help at her age!” They give her directions to Maude’s cottage in the woods, two miles away, and Willamina gets underway immediately. She hikes most of the two miles and then takes a break at a particularly lovely spot in the woods. It is shady and there is a beautiful spring bubbling up. A thrush sings from a nearby bush, as if he is singing just for her. She takes a while to appreciate the peace and quiet, because there is always something happening at the castle. The thrush sounds prettier to her at that moment than the best royal musicians. Then she continues on her way to Old Maude’s house.
When she approaches Old Maude’s tiny thatched cottage she decided she better tell her who she truly is, because it wouldn’t be fair to fib about being an apprentice. Then she gets quite nervous about the fact that she is dressed as simply as a farm girl, stained brown from walnut husk dye, and smelling a bit like horse. Maude comes to the door, surprised to see a visitor. Willamina stands straight and tall and tells Maude who she is and how she came to be there. Maude’s hands are stained, too, so deeply that they might never come clean, but she is a wise and kind old woman, and she knows the truth when she hears it. “Come in, your highness,” she says with a twinkle in her eye. Willamina enters the cottage and looks around in delight. The alls are lined with drawers, small and large, and the drawers are full of all the things Maude uses to make dyes. Walnut husks and onion skin, flower petals and dried berries. Each one adds a scent to the air, and Willamina takes a deep, happy breath. There is a pot cooking on the fire in the big, stone hearth, but it contains a stew for Maude’s dinner, not dyes. The dye pots and ladles are hanging on a beam on one side of the chimney and the cooking things, fewer in number, hang on the other side. “No good mixing up the pots,” Maude explains, “it’d do your stomach no good at all to get a dose of goldenrod dye!” There are also bunches of herbs hanging from the beams to dry, and a string of onions and garlic. They sit together on a bench, and Maude picks up her knitting and proposes that they trade stories. She will tell Willamina one story about dye-making or peasant life for every one that Willamina tells her about the king, the queen, or the goings-on at the castle. Willamina thinks about all the commotion of the castle; the feasts and parades, the foreign ambassadors with their unusual clothes and accents, even the big cathedral where they worship on Sundays. She looks around Maude’s small, quiet home, where the half-grown kitten playing on the hearth is the only entertainment. She knows she can trade Maude some good stories! And so they pass the afternoon.
All afternoon they sat and told stories. Willamina told Maude about the ambassador from Kressland, and the eye-popping plumes he wore on his hat. They were so long, and swept behind him so far, that his hat got pulled entirely off his head when the feathers got caught in a closing door. He had been furious, even though the hat was not much harmed, and her father the King had had to soothe his ruffled feelings and feathers while Willamina held both her hands over her mouth to stifle her giggles. She had admired those feathers mightily herself, and was thrilled when the king and queen gave her one as a Christmas present. She tried to tell Maude about the gorgeous colors, and how the long feather had a shiny, blue ‘eye’ at the tip, but she wasn’t sure Maude believed it. Maude told her about digging roots in the spring to make a special tea, with the birds in the woods singing their spring songs so loud you wanted to hold your hands over your ears, and boiling onion skins just-so to make a powerful yellow dye. That dye could make the soft goats’ wool that was spun into yarn for the finest ladies as yellow as sunshine. Willamina thought about the princess dress in her pack, which was as soft and yellow as sunshine, and felt humble to realize how much work had gone into making it. She asked Maude to show her knitting, because seeing the yarn in Maude’s fingers turning inch by inch into a stocking was making her ever so curious. Maude gave her a skein of deep brown yarn, “the same color as your hands and your, ahem, hair,” and a funny wooden tool with a hole in the center and small nail-heads sticking out of the top.
Create your protagonist: A charming child a few years older than yours who shares several interests and looks similar.
Pick a topic: Gathering nuts in the fall / A children's horse race / an ocean voyage.
Add drama: There's a bear! / self explanatory / A storm at sea!
Make it Fairy-tale-ish: The bear is actually an enchanted human and he can talk / horse races don't actually need magic, just regular horse hijinks / The court magician is able, with great effort, to calm the wind, and the captain and crew are Very Brave and Capable.
Add lots and LOTS of sensory stuff: The woods had colorful fall leaves and smelled wonderful and there were birds flocking to migrate. The sack with the nuts got satisfyingly heavy. There was a festive picnic lunch. / The pounding of the hooves, the track runs through a green forest, the feeling in the pit of your stomach when the horse jumps an obstacle / The ropes are creaking and the sails snap audibly in the wind, it gets suddenly cooler, clothing is dampened by spray, the waves go from blue-green to gray.
Resolve that shit: Enchanted Bear does not want to change back, is very happy living in the forest eating heavily and sleeping half the year (YES I'M PROJECTING!) / The race is won or lost with only a few minor injuries and everybody has a delicious meal / The ship makes it back to port and several lovely dolphins are spotted frolicking. Have a feast to celebrate.
The stakes are very low, here, your audience is very young and is unlikely to critique your sentence structure or use of adjectives. Have fun!
some of you weren’t around for the fan fiction dot net purge of 2002 (when they banned explicit content and mass-deleted thousands of fics) and the livejournal purge of 2007 (when they deleted hundreds of blogs, disproportionately targeting queer & kink content) and it shows
This came dangerously close to being a good bird photo. Glad this Brewer's Blackbird made the executive decision to take off right when I took the picture.
in the tradition of outcast (2014), dragon blade (2015), and the great wall (2016), we need a movie set in the 1630s where a disillusioned member of the embroidered uniform guard and a profit-driven jianghu mercenary flee the corrupt and crumbling ming dynasty and somehow end up in the equally corrupt city of cologne, where they become key players in the fight against the sinister forces of cardinal richelieu and eventually secure the peace of westphalia and the end of the thirty years’ war. this is a million dollar idea i’m telling you
i really do love this concept. the protagonist is like i’m sick of dealing with wei zhongxian’s shit, i’m gonna go someplace where people are holy and don’t even know how to act like this (the impression of europe he got from the jesuit missionary he had a tactical lunch with once), and so he travels 5000 miles and as soon as he stops to catch his breath he runs into cardinal fucking richelieu, the european wei zhongxian
