I still remember Howard [Ashman] coaching Sherri [Stoner, reference model for Ariel] on that first day, in the scene where the witch magically draws Arielâs voice from her. Howard acted out for Sherri a way of physicalizing the loss of her voice. He showed her how her body would react as the witchâs disembodied magical hands pulled the voice from her throat. He acted out the torso drawn forward as the hands tugged, followed by the head, and then a sharper movement as the voice is pulled out of her. It was dance-like and very visual, clear and dramatic. And I still see what Howard showed Sherri when I view the actual drawn scene in the final film, animated by Leon Joosen. â John Musker
The Little Mermaid (1989) dir. Ron Clements and John Musker
i relate to car anon so much, all my friends have started learning to drive and i haven't, i did my preparation exam but i've only tried driving for real once and it freaked me out so i haven't driven since. it sucks to be reliant on others for transport since everything ever is so car-dependent (especially since i live in the suburbs) but idk maybe my adhd means it's not meant to be.
I think the key is to start really slow and go at your own pace. Donât try to rush it or try something you donât feel ready for yet. This probably means learning with a friend or family member rather than an instructor because my understanding is the courses are often fast-paced (but I could be wrong).
For my first driving lesson, my dad and I went to the parking lot of my community college on Thanksgiving Day because thatâs when we knew it would be completely empty. It was a huge parking lot so I didnât have to worry about crashing into anything. I learned how to turn the car on, go into drive/neutral/reverse/park, drive, brake, turn, and turn the car off.
I got to go super super slowly at first because I wasnât on a road so there was no one behind me to get impatient. I could brake as much as I wanted. Then once I started getting more confident, I went a little faster and worked on turning and getting a sense for how the car moved and where it was in space.
You can practice in a parking lot as many times as you want before trying streets, but once you do, youâll want a quiet neighborhood without a lot of car traffic, where cars are likely to go slowly. The person teaching you can drive you out to somewhere like this if you donât have it in your neighborhood. My dad took me to a neighborhood nearby like that and I practiced just driving slowly, making turns, and stopping and looking at intersections. To get to and from our house we needed to go on a scary fast road, so he drove on that.
Eventually he had me drive on the scary fast road, then bigger scary fast roads, and I started driving myself to classes every day on it (with my mom next to me) so I would get more and more confident. Eventually I was completely comfortable doing that but hadnât driven on a highway yet. So he drove me out to a âsmallerâ chiller highway than the ones near us for me to practice on, then eventually I practiced on the interstate, and then finally the one Big Scary interstate.
This doesnât need to happen fast. I had my first driving lesson in November 2012, and took my driving test in March 2014.
I have ADHD, and so do a lot of people who drive! It may turn out that driving isnât something you are able to master, but I would not assume that just from being nervous at one session! I would encourage you to give in another try, and to go slowly â both in terms of progression and literally. If you want to spend your entire first lesson just driving in a straight line at 1 mile per hour, that is okay.
Adding some advice from someone who waited to learn until they were 22 (unusual in the US) bc I was so nervous:
1. If your parents are too nervous or just too much your parents, use a driving instructor. Or a family friend who has been driving 10+ years. My mom was great for the initial mechanics but once we were on the road she was way too impatient, so I switched to an instructor. (In my state you have to do so many hours with a school anyway).
2. If you can, a nice intermediate step between parking lot and actual streets is a long driveway on a college campus or in a state park. It feels more like a real road and there are other cars but you HAVE to go 5-10mph. They CANâT get mad at you for going slow. (They do sometimes but you know youâre in the right so itâs ok).
3. Sing out loud, either to music or by yourself. My first session, my mom noticed I kept holding my breath. So the rule from the second session on was that I had to be singing or pull over. Whaddayaknow, I was less anxious once I had air in my lungs.
you know even aside from the VERY warranted criticisms of Joanne and her despicable politics I think everyone's been really wondering what the fuck there is to do with this enormous HP series on HBO other than beat more money out of the dead horse. like, what is there to explore that hasn't been covered by the generally well-received and inarguably iconic movies? what fresh interpretation of the story justifies all that?
and I do not have to hand it to them, but I will say that I never in a million years could have guessed that one of their hot new character reimaginings was going to be taking the head of the blood purity house, the guy who torments his students beyond reason on a regular basis, the guy who has a specific hate-on for the protagonist because he wanted to fuck that kid's mom, the guy whose hair and nose are frequently remarked on to emphasize that he's a unpleasant and creepy-looking motherfuckerânever would I ever have guessed that anyone would have come up "hey, what if that guy was Black?"
and they went through with it! deranged! and you can't even chalk it up to any notable effort to diversify the series or anything; I've checked! this cast is still white as shit! as far as I can tell this is the only Black person employed by the entire wizard school! whole rest of the staff, white as hell. couldn't even pretend they gave enough of a shit to cast any other Black actors or other actors of color. just made the biggest shithead there a Black guy and patted themselves on the backs. truly everything Joanne touches is so seething with bigotry it's unreal.
#lets not forget that snape is specifically an ANTISEMITIC caricature #(yes its likely unintentional. yes jkr would have denied it at the time and would deny it now. that doesnt make it any less true.) #taking the Uncanny Evil Other and making him black isnt just normal bigotry#as is often the case with hp #it truly isnt as good as it felt it was when you first read it age 12 #for a work of this scope its shockingly shallow and banal #EXCEPT for the bigotry. the bigotry is always complex. its got layers. #harry potter#(and before anyone goes butbutbut snape is popular! people love snape! isnt it nice they racebent the most popular character?? #people dont like snape people just think alan rickman is hot #black!snape would never have gotten the same attention from fandom then and wont now)
"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 âintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.â Crucially, he added that this is ânot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsâ but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationâs 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 âmeet your students where they areâ for so long that she has begun to feel âlike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.â
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 assessmentâs own language, they likely âcannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.â 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 Austinâs McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantâs smartphone â whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision â 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 Japanâs 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 âkept losing trackâ 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 âYour Brain on ChatGPT.â They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays â one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing â 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 âconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.â 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 âcognitive debtâ for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainâs 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 studentâs mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not âfree students up for higher-order work.â 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 Kâ12 schooling. Whatever the standardsâ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling âevidenceâ 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 âfinding the main ideaâ 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 âsevere or very severe.â
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that âthinking is becoming a luxury good.â 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 âdeep workâ 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 sourceâs claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into âthis is goodâ and âmaybe add more detailsâ 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.
Iâm afraid I donât 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? Kâ12 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 âstudents will adapt.â 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 studentsâ sentences before theyâve 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."
â Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canât Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
Heterosexual relationship culture is so alien to me and I donât know if itâs the fact Iâm not cishet or the fact Iâm autistic but I hear so many things that make me go âAm I insane or are they?â
Thereâs a lot of hate on widowers and I saw a woman say âYou cannot compete with a dead woman.â which is perhaps a reasonable statement to say if heâs constantly comparing you to his dead partner but that wasnât what the post was about. And I realized âOh my God, these people genuinely feel like theyâre constantly in competition with their spouseâs exes and the ex being dead makes them feel insecure that they cannot best her.â
Thereâs also been an uptick in the âmen and women cannot be âjustâ friendsâ rhetoric which I feel like is extremely dangerous and reflects the rise of fascism and sexism. Some of these stories of women feeling threatened by their husbandâs female best friend have some merit and others are like âI feel angry that my husband still talks to the girl he grew up next door to and she and her wife are invited to family gatherings and included in family photos sometimes. Am I right to be suspicious?â No. No youâre not. I cannot imagine being you and living with that high level of stress and paranoia and constant torment and jealousy about your husband having a positive relationship with anyone who isnât you.
okay look i know this isn't relevant to this post past the second paragraph but. here's the thing. the facts of the case are as follows:
1) I am widowed. my Beloved Wife of Blessed Memory(tm) died in 2019
2) I got together with my current partner about 18 months later
3) when I am committing acts of Foolishness my current partner loves to gesture at the sky to my dead wife, like "do you see this shit, my liege" and regularly says to me things like "[wife's name] was right about this" when my Foolishness inevitably comes back to bite me in the ass
4) this happens. all the time
more importantly:
5) my current partner is on tumblr
6) they love to incessantly send me posts
WHICH MEANS:
7) they just sent me this post with this commentary:
8) they really, really are ganging up on me with her. god help us if there's an afterlife and those two ever actually meet. "eternal rest" my ass, i will never know peace again
From a post on Reddit about a guy taking his wifeâs last name:
âMy last name is long, cumbersome, and clearly Ashkenazi Jew, which (while true) comes with a host of stereotypes that mostly don't fit me well. K's last name is short and international.â
UmmmmâŚ.i have so many thoughts, none of them complimentary.
I get in theory why people complain about het ships or whatever, I get wanting to watch queer media I really do, but I guess where yâall lose me is like. I saw some asshole on a post about Sinners complaining it was âhetslopââthis person was specifically doing so while also claiming Remmick was a queer character and thus they were justified in caring more about him than the Black protagonists. which is a whole other disgusting can of worms that has been well addressed by others at this point. but even in the absence of that part of the argument, like, no, i actually donât think that a hunger for queer stories is an especially good excuse to deride and dismiss a piece of landmark Black filmmaking, especially as a non-Black person. I have a post thatâs been going around encouraging folks to engage with more Native stories and characters, and I had someone come onto that post saying in the tags that theyâd need these stories to be queer in order to care. and I just think that, you know, sucks! like obviously as a queer Native I also want to see more of those stories too. but idk how else to put it other than to say that Black people and people of color shouldnât have to be like you in order for you to care about our narratives and experiences. and I think some of yâall are using this disdain for heterosexuality as a cover for your unexamined racial biases. itâs not okay to be racist to people just because those people happen to be straight, and you continue to be white before you are queer.
on an even more basic level than that, also, I simply just think some of yâall NEED to learn how to interact with media and storytelling without ships and fandom in mind. like if not being able to write fic about two men kissing is genuinely going to be a dealbreaker for you I think thatâs actually something you need to work on within yourself because at that point I think youâre no longer really interacting with art and themes and narrative so much as just kind of playing with toys. which is, like, fine I guess. have fun. but it wouldnât kill you to disengage from that from time to time. especially if would allow you to actually appreciate rich and deeply moving cultural stories from communities of color that you desperately need to learn how to see as human
âThere were two âReigns of Terror,â if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the âhorrorsâ of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terrorâthat unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.â
â Mark Twain, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthurâs Court
Some notes on the 100k Irina Rozanova Lives AU that I will never write:
Grigori dies in 2003. He accidentally eats rat poison.
There are a few rumors about it in Moscow, but nothing bad enough that Irina doesn't have to deal with old men coming on to her, gifting her jewelry, looking for a mistress or a second or third wife.Â
Ilya and Andreiâs biggest sin stops being laziness. They don't have the time to properly grieve for their father because they have to be strong. They have to push through the pain, leave it behind, forget it and live life. They have to get rid of all the parts of themselves that make them weak.Â
Irina stands next to Ilya after the draft, beautiful, elegant, and proud. And fearful, of all that could happen to her little boy so far away from her watchful eye. The sins he could succumb to. That night she puts her cross around his neck, as a reminder. That night he sneaks away from her.
She reads all the American news articles that come out about him, from both sports magazines and gossip rags. He's a ladiesâ man, a Casanova, a Don Juan. She wishes he would settle down and marry a nice girl, but it's fine. It's fine. This is what men are supposed to do. She doesn't begrudge him that. She too does what she's supposed to do, lay on her back and close her eyes for a man that takes her out to town and buys her furs and diamonds. At least Andrei has a proper girlfriend. A middle class girl, but they can't keep their hands off each other in a way that's difficult for Irina to understand.
Ilya spends every summer with them in Russia. She drags him to the ballet at least once, and then mostly lets him have his own fun. He goes out clubbing every weekend and comes back in the mornings smelling like alcohol and perfume. He trains harder than he ever did as a teenager and eats so much she jokes about selling one of her necklaces to afford that much egg and chicken breasts. He smiles at her around a mouthful of breakfast and then picks up his phone to fire a quick text. He sits to watch tv with her and picks up his phone to send a series of texts. He goes out shopping with her and his phone is always in his hand. He tipes, he reads, rereads. He blushes. She sees the name Jane over and over in stolen glances at his phone, but something about the way he doesn't mention her at all makes her stomach twist with worry. It reminds her of a time when she was young and unmarried, hiding love letters beneath her bed, chasing kisses in the dark, stealing memories before she had to become a wife. It reminds her of every bottle of sleeping pills sheâs ever held in her hands. It reminds her of all her weaknesses.
During hockey season, her calls become more often. You have to be strong, she reminds him. Focus on your career, stop giving into distractions, stop giving into temptation. You canât afford to be weak, youâll lose the life youâve fought so hard for. She asks if he still wears her cross, if he still carries with him the reminder of every lesson sheâs ever teached him.
Boston is out of the playoffs again. Ilya will stay in America until the awards are done and then come back to Russia, like always. Sheâs having his bedroom prepared for him when he calls to say heâs not coming. Not right away, at least. He has some team stuff to take care of in America, itâll only be a week, maybe two.Â
Heâs different, when he finally arrives. Happy and unguarded at first, then progressively more silent and tense with every step into their home. She canât stand to look at him. He has no idea of the things sheâs had to endure, the desire, the yearning, the inevitable heartbreak, the pain, the pain, the pain. Sheâs tried to raise him right, to make him strong, to spare him that pain. And for what? All down the drain for a week, maybe two. All for mama, I need to tell you something. As if she hasnât always known, as if he wasnât the reason sheâs still alive, fighting to be strong, to protect him from making her same mistakes.
