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blake kathryn
d e v o n
Peter Solarz
Cosimo Galluzzi
Sade Olutola
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Kaledo Art
PR's Tumblrdome
Show & Tell
NASA
⁂
wallacepolsom
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
★
Jules of Nature
occasionally subtle
trying on a metaphor
EXPECTATIONS
Noah Kahan
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Canada
seen from Ecuador
seen from United States
seen from Vietnam
seen from United Kingdom
seen from South Korea
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from Philippines
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Brazil
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from Thailand
seen from United States
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seen from Germany
@ooc-posting
Side blog for ooc posting, my main is @but-a-licentious-prince and my other side blog for ooc hornyposting is @kitty-prince-requires-boops (you have to your age in your bio or pinned post in order to interact with either blog, minors and ageless blogs are lasered on sight )
Get ready for some sillies and politics
DM me if you want to donate for my top-surgery, absolutely no pressure tho 🫶🏻
"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.
all yall make jokes about couples and their nonromantic third wheel having fun together, but im the one getting treated to food tonight by the couple im nonromantically third wheeling. you wish you were me
I'm sorry I read this as "necromantic third wheel" and went on a very rapid powerful imagination adventure. hello lovebirds I'm the skeleton here for breadsticks
let it be known that i touch grass frequently and I’m still like this.
"lock in" is probably one of the most important phrases to enter the public lexicon in the 2020s
Most of today has been an “ehhh I’ll eat later” kind of day but now I can hear thunder and I’m like “oh fuck QUICK use the microwave NOW”
Just vaccinated three kids and got kicked thank GOD I am selling them today
Edit:
THIS IS A POST ABOUT GOATS!!
‘The biggest rollback of disability rights in a generation’ – Charities respond to Supreme Court ruling
The uk Supreme Court has just done a major rollback on disability rights and is putting more disabled people in danger
Yeah, it's fucked this. Bad.
The Court implies that individuals with profound cognitive disabilities cannot be "deprived" of liberty because their condition limits their ability to experience it—a view that devalues their fundamental rights.
they treat disabled people like animals
My wife’s idea of decompressing after the busy holiday was to rearrange every piece of furniture in our home is this an ADHD thing or just a her thing
I’m not complaining the way she’s done it is much better than it was it’s just like how is this your idea of a relaxing weekend
Listen I don't get to decide when the drunk elf that is my executive actually does the functioning but when he does we have a SMALL WINDOW OF TIME before he finds the schnapps again and we're done
yes this exactly
So to me, there are spoons (general energy cost) and carnival tickets (specific energy cost).
Spoons can be used pretty much anywhere.
Carnival tickets are only good for the carnival, and it’s only in town for a limited amount of time.
So like, if I get “kitchen cleaning” carnival tickets, I can’t use that to clean my bedroom, that’s not where the carnival is.
phrase added to permanent vocabulary
the main problem i have with america is that nothings old as hell there. i cant be so far away from a castle it damages my aura
man people really just say stuff on here huh
Noooo haha don't spread racist ideals and colonizer propaganda by idolizing white european aesthetics above all else and denying the life and accomplishments of native peoples on their own lands
People have been living in the downtown area of Tucson, Arizona for at least 4,500 years. The greater Santa Cruz river valley has been occupied by humans for 12,000 years.
You see this?
That's not a river. That's the South Canal in Mesa, Arizona (Phoenix metro area).
This is a view of the East and South canals. At least half of all the Phoenix metro canals were originally built by the Hohokam (from roughly 200-1400 CE), and are still in use (restored) today.
Phoenix, Arizona actually has more miles (kilometers) of Canals total than both Venice and Amsterdam. No, really. Phoenix has about 180 miles of canals, many of which are built on ancient canal foundations.
below is an aerial view photo taken in the late 1930's of one branch of Phoenix's canal systems:
Also have the "Montezuma Castle," if you need a castle:
I don't need to look at some 12th century European castle to see age.
@isuggestlandback
I HAVE A SUGGESTION
Hey. Why isn’t the moon landing a national holiday in the US. Isn’t that fucked up? Does anyone else think that’s absurd?
It was a huge milestone of scientific and technological advancement. (Plus, at the time, politically significant). Humanity went to space! We set foot on a celestial body that was not earth for the first time in human history! That’s a big deal! I’ve never thought about it before but now that I have, it’s ridiculous to me that that’s not part of our everyday lives and the public consciousness anymore. Why don’t we have a public holiday and a family barbecue about it. Why have I never seen the original broadcast of the moon landing? It should be all over the news every year!
It’s July 20th. That’s the day of the moon landing. Next year is going to be the 54th anniversary. I’m ordering astronaut shaped cookie cutters on Etsy and I’m going to have a goddamn potluck. You’re all invited.
Hey. Hey. Tumblr. Ides of March ppl. We can do this
Hell yeah moon holiday
Ooh coming up we should celebrate
PITCH: We call it Moon Day, and then every 7 years when it falls on a Monday, that's an even BIGGER deal and we call that Moon Day Monday and go absolutely apeshit about it (the next Moon Day Monday is in 2026 so we have a couple trial runs first)
MOON DAY MOON DAY MOON DAY
moon day is 20th July!!!
Scheduling this a day earlier to remind you all and myself about the Moon Day tomorow!
Happy moon day to all who celebrate
This is your reminder to prep for Moon Day on July 20th.
MOON DAY MONDAY THIS MONTH NOT A DRILL!!!!!
Hydration Elixir
Okay, so, it's about to get Hot and Humid in the USA, so I'mma spring my tried-and-tested Hydration Elixir! For this recipe you will need:
Salt
Lemons
Water
Warning: DO NOT drink Hydration Elixir by itself! This is an elixir meant to be mixed in small quantities with a regular-sized glass or bottle of water! You're making the equivalent of a family supper-sized quantity of elixir, not an individual meal.
Instructions:
Step 1: Take a lemon, cut it in half, and juice it.
(Substitute Step 1: In the event of no lemons or inability to juice one, measure out a quarter cup of lemon juice.)
Step 2: Set lemon juice to side.
Step 3: Boil approximately two cups of water, then mix in a generous tablespoon of salt. (note: boiling the water makes the salt dissolve fast with minimal stirring, and that is why we're doing it)
Step 4: Allow salted water to cool.
Step 5: Mix lemon juice into salted water (note: Mixing the juice and water together when the water is hot makes the whole thing taste worse later)
Step 6: Pour your newly-crafted elixir into a bottle or jar with a lid, then put in fridge to cool.
Directions on Use:
Add a teaspoon or so of Hydration Elixir to a larger glass or bottle of water when you have been sweating to help replace salt lost due to said sweat. The lemon juice adds some nice vitamins and a pleasant taste to make it all more palatable.
Use Hydration Elixir in moderation, you've just made enough to last you a week or so, with enough to share some around with friends. Quickly drinking a concoction that consists of two cups of water, a lemon's worth of juice, and a tablespoon of salt will clean out your innards but good, and you will survive but it will be with Regrets.
Again, Hydration Elixir is meant to be mixed with a large quantity of plain water. The recipe is as it is because it's easier to quantify how much of each ingredient (especially the salt) to use for a bulk batch and how much of the batch you should probably take than to give measurements for a single glass of the stuff.
Plus, if you've got it already made and chilling in the fridge, then you just need to plop a teaspoon into a glass of water when you've come in hot and sweaty and tired or mix some into your water bottle to take with you before you head out.
Stay safe and stay hydrated!
Okay, you know what? Given that over the last week I have seen at least one of the common myths of "things you should not do in the heat" come over my dashboard, let us quickly go over this:
If it is hot, you will need to drink more than normally because you are sweating. You can drink too much, though usually your body knows how to regulate it.
Yes, if it is liquid and not alcoholic it counts to your drinking intake. Yes, drinking lemonades, coke and whatever counts. All of it is still mostly water with some sugar and flavors added. It is fine. Be careful about taking in too much caffeine though, as it is a mild diuretic (means it makes you pee more and hence lose more water).
Yes, you also need electrolytes as you sweat them out. But you do not need to drink sports drinks. Eat some yoghurt with fruits, or some watermelon with salt, or maybe cold soup. It will refill your electrolytes.
No, it is not dangerous for you to sleep in front of a ventilator. This is a complete myth that has absolutely no basis in science whatsoever and literally originates with an Urban Legend. Especially with the recent heat wave in Europe for a lot of people the alternative is the possibility of heat stroke. It is fine. Sleep in front of that ventilator. Just make sure you are not getting too cold.
No, using sunscreen does not stop you from taking in Vitamin D, unless you are permanently using super high standard sun screen and are reapplying it every 6 hours as intended. And let's face it: you are not. Your skin gets enough UVB to make Vitamin D, don't worry about it. Skin cancer is worse.
Yes, switching between a very hot outside and a very cold context (be it super high AC or just jumping into cold water) can be a danger for your cardiovascular system, though unless the weather is very hot or the water very cold making the contrast very extreme, it is normally not a danger to people who do not have otherwise issues with their cardiovascular system. Though being a bit careful and allowing yourself to acclimatize is not a bad idea in general.
Yes, you should definitely not leave any living thing in a car while it is hot. Just don't. Cars heat up while standing very quickly and will become a death trap. If you leave an animal or a child alone in the car for even just 5 to 10 minutes, they might die. Don't do that shit.
Yes, you need to be extra careful about your medications. For once, most medications are not meant to be stored at above 25°C (don't ask me what this is in American units). But also a bunch of medications - especially psychoactive medications - will make your body worth at temperature regulation. So be careful.
Yes, you need shadow. Ideally the shadow of trees, because there is indeed a difference between that and the shadow of a building. But any shadow is good, especially during extreme heat.
In the same vein: be also careful about drugs during heat waves - like, the recreational type. Some of them work differently when your body is warmed up like that. Just... ideally read up online on possible side effects that might occur/be worse if taken during the heat.
Generally speaking: stay hydrated. Stay cool. Try to do it as well as you can in your respective situation. Stay safe.
For the record, 25 degrees Celsius is 77 degrees Fahrenheit.
Wait, is there a typo in the second-to-last bullet point? I would have thought the only difference between treeshade and building shade would be that the trees are worse because they let more sunlight through; am I missing something?
You are missing evaporation. Trees are alive and full of water, which constantly evaporates, making shadow underneath trees in general cooler than the shadow of buildings. This is also the reason why people are pushing for green cities, because anything green is lowering the temperature - and of course also green usually comes along with some natural ground which is better at heat exchange than concrete and helps breaking up heat islands.
as pride month is wrapping up, I really wanna talk quickly about how LGBTQ+ disabled people are excluded from pride.
despite literally being a community comprised entirely of some of the most historically (and in a lot of instances, presently) discriminated-against groups on the planet, a lot of queer people seem to just shit on disabled people at every chance they get— and that’s if they even remember that we exist.
it’s just baffling to me that a group of people who preach inclusivity and acceptance are some of the least accepting people out there when it comes to accessibility at events. there is no consideration for us when planning events. if they even remember that they’re supposed to be making the space accessible and inclusive, they do the bare minimum while going around saying they’re saints for doing so.
wanna go to a parade? okay, why don’t you go stand in 90+ degree heat for 7 hours with no access to water in that entire time. wanna go to this cool pop-up event? oops, there’s no wheelchair paths, and everyone is going to be blocking your way anyway. sure, we’ll hold an indoor event, but there’s no air conditioning, you’re not allowed to use the bathrooms, and absolutely no one is masking despite there being hundreds of people crammed into a singular venue. and yes, we will be deploying strobe lights at random intervals.
the general attitude is just: “why are you even here if you’re disabled? you should be locked up in your house never interacting with the rest of us, because it’s too much of an inconvenience to accommodate you.” either that, or: “huh? oh I forgot you guys existed. ummm… well at least the stairs aren’t too steep, and you can buy a $20 water bottle if you need it!” like come on. do better.
It’s such a rainy sleepy day. I should’ve taken a nap on my lunch break yaaawwn
Seeing people I know and like using AI is making me understand the protagonists of those old time sci fi dystopia's.
"Oh I don't normally use AI, I just wanted it to plan my trip"
You lived on this planet for decades, you know what you like, there are hundreds of websites where you can type into any search engine " things to do in [area]" and have at least a hundred different options.
"Oh I only use it so I can figure out what to make during the week with what I have"
The most popular website as you type in "recipes" into google have sections where you click dinner- quick and easy and those usually rely on staples + 1 or 2 items. I found 30 recipes on chicken alone.
"I had a writing idea, so I typed a few sentences into Chat GPT and I was able to write 20 pages with it."
Youdidn'twriteit.Youdidn'twriteit.youdidn'twriteit.youdidn'twriteit.YOUDIDN'TWRITEIT.YOUDIDN'TWRITEIT.YOUDIDN'TWRITEIT.
Found this video and had to make it a gif
