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ok but this unironically works. talk about how the working class is exploited and you can basically sell full-on marxism to your average republican if you do it right. all you have to do is avoid the words "Marx," "capitalism," "socialism," "communism," "means of production," etc - just use synonyms. say "big business" or "corporate shareholder interests" instead of "capitalists." say "a government that prioritizes the needs of the working people" instead of "socialism." it WORKS. I've DONE it. the hardest sell are usually things like social and racial equity, welfare, things like that, because people have been primed with the racist/classist idea that those things are somehow unfair - but you can get your foot in the door to getting them to buy into those too if you start with class issues. read up on your theory, make sure you REALLY understand your own ideology, because that will enable you to reword it and successfully sell it.
In my experience, you can often help sell 'welfare' stuff by appealing to self-interest with a touch of Aren't We Great.
Disability benefits: "I mean, sure, there are probably some sad sacks who are gaming the system, there always are, but hell, with the amount of taxes we pay, the government can afford a few freeloaders, right? I'd rather pay for a couple people who don't really need it than not have the system at all for if I need it, or my kids do, or whatever. I mean shit happens. What if some asshole drunk driver puts me in the hospital and it takes me a year to get back on my feet? Or Heaven forbid something permanent happens. I'll sure be glad that I can get disability then, won't I?"
UBI: "I dunno, the kind of guy who'll just sit on the couch playing Call of Duty all day if he doesn't have to work, I kinda don't want him on my job site anyway. That type is just taking up a place that you could fill with someone who'll actually get the job done, you know? You end up short-handed even though you technically have enough people because everyone else has to pick up his slack. And it'd mean that if your boss is a dick you can tell him to shove it and not worry your kids are gonna go hungry while you find a better place. We can sure as hell afford it."
Racial equity: "I've got a lot more in common with a Black guy who's just trying to get the job done than I do with some rich white asshole who thinks the sun shines out of his ass because of how much money mommy and daddy have."
"Here’s a trick I learned during the Obama presidency for handling certain types of political labels.
Take, as an example, the Tea Party claim that Obama is a Communist. Don’t take the word of the person making the claim (Tea Partiers). Don’t rely on the rebuttal of the target (Obama), because that will just be dismissed. Go to the group itself (Communists) and ask them. Ask an actual Communist if Obama is a comrade and see how they answer. Watch as they laugh at you, then explain in great detail how they wish there was a Communist in the White House, but here’s a long and exhaustive list of why that just isn’t so.
Now apply this logic to the claim that Hillary is pretty much the same as a Republican. Ask an actual Republican if they think Hillary Clinton is one of them. Watch them laugh, and then explain in the same exhausting detail why that just isn’t so. Some of them might concede that she’s better than Trump, but that’s not the same thing.
Finally, go ask a White Supremacist if Trump is one of them. As they excitedly explain how Trump is the guy they’ve been waiting for all these years, and how he’s really empowered their movement, use this to guide how you will be voting in November."
Source: a 2016 facebook posts by Craig Enan, since then deleted (OG link here)
I like to think that the guard that Odin sent to recover Loki's body in TDW agreed to help him with the plan.
Like, guards in TDW in general seem kind of nice to Loki (yes, he's a prince, he's also a prisoner and him being a prince didn't stop servants from openly mocking him in T1, so I do not think the guards did it out of obligation), and I also do not think that it is possible for anyone to hide the fact they got rid of their country's ruler without anyone in the palace finding out, no matter how competent they are, at least someone had to know the truth. And I think that the guards were more than happy to welcome Loki after Odin said he would gladly send them to death to avenge Frigga.
Considering the way guards treat Loki throughout the movies AND the fact that Odin loudly proclaimed that he was gonna sacrifice them all, I am starting to think that there's a possibility that the guy who came to pick up Loki's corpse and found him alive and injured just might've picked Loki's borderline dying ass and put him on that throne himself.
Tim, walking into the Batcave and noticing everyone’s distraught appearance: What’s wrong?? Who died??
Stephanie: We have bad news Tim. You should sit down.
Tim: Oh shit did someone actually die?? Who was it this time?
Dick: Remember that civilian that we catch trailing after us every so often? The one who was involved in the Penguin incident awhile ago?
Tim: Oh. Clarissa O’Neal? What about her?
Damian: She was taken hostage by one of Black Masks henchmen. We didn’t make it in time to save her.
Tim: ? And that’s why you guys are so upset? C’mon guys lighten up, it’s movie night
Jason, getting visibly pissed: What the Fuck dude. A civilian we were close to fucking died because we didn’t make it in time
Dick: I know you didn’t like her much but show a bit of empathy Timmy. You usually take these situations seriously
Tim: I’ve been trying to kill her off for ages. Why would I be upset??
Steph: Tim you have 10 seconds to fix your attitude before i fix it for you
Jason: Since when do you take people’s lives so lightly? Dude you need to leave before I do something i regret.
Tim: I didn’t know you guys were so attached to her. I could revive her if you want, but honestly it’s more effort than it’s worth. And she was getting unwanted attention from the rogues so she had to go.
Damian: Revive?? Timothy what are you on about? And why are you saying that like you personally set up her demise?
Tim: Because I did? The planning for it took forever but I have to admit everything went a lot better than I was expecting.
Dick: TIM WHAT—
Jason: WHAT THE HELL—
Damian: MURDER? You?!
Steph, screaming over everyone else: WAIT SHUT UP
Steph: TIM NO YOU DID NOT
Steph: TIM DON’T TELL ME YOU DID IT AGAIN
Dick: Again?!? What are you talking about?!
Steph, laughing: Guys calm down. HE was Clarissa
Tim: You guys didn’t know??
Jason: HOW WERE WE SUPPOSED TO KNOW THAT THE HISPANIC LOOKING WOMEN IN HER MID TWENTIES AND A CRIME ALLEY ACCENT WAS YOU
Dick: Tim i am THIS CLOSE to burning down your disguise room.
Damian: Timothy explain yourself
Tim: I had an undercover op that I needed a female field agent for a couple years ago to infiltrate penguins operations. Over time She became a bit too important and Black mask was threatening her. So I decided to kill her off. I got the info I needed already and it was becoming a bit of a drag keeping up appearances
Steph: You need to stop getting us emotionally invested in your aliases and then killing them off. This is the fourth time you did this to me. I’ll never forgive you for Alvin Draper, I still grieve him even though i know you’re alive!
Tim: YOU guys need to start recognizing me in disguise. Worlds greatest detectives MY ASS
Jason: DUDE YOU GAVE YOURSELF DOUBLE D’s WHY WOULD WE ASSUME THAT WAS YOU
Damian: My training in this area has been neglected. Timothy show me your disguise lair
Tim: Sure, after movie night. Let’s go
Dick: This is gonna bite us in the ass. Damian is already so good at impressions. We will never know if someone we are talking to is him or not
Tim: LMAO When i’m done with him? Yea everyone’s fucked
Steph: It’s gonna give Roger from American dad
Bruce from the corner: *Breathes a sigh of relief*
Bruce at the Batcomputer: *Sighs and moves Clarissa O’Neal from ‘Real Civilian Death’ folder to ‘Tim’s Fake Identities’ folder. Creates new folder labeled ‘Damian’s Fake Identities’
Reading is in the trenches because why did my 9 yr old nephew look at the word "jealous" and said "jewish"? And when asked why he mistaken it as such he said they both started with a "J". It's like his brain is doing autofill. No matter how many time I try to tell him slow down and sound out the words he just won't.
--
TRAP CARD ACTIVATED
No, but seriously, anon, you need to look into what's going on in his classroom because he's probably being taught this trash method instead of phonics. He does not know how to slow down and sound things out because his school has never taught him that. When you tell him to do this, he has no context for what you're even talking about.
This has come up repeatedly here, and I don't have time to froth at the mouth today, but look up "whole language".
This podcast made waves a few years ago when all the lockdown parents discovered, to their horror, that their kiddos weren't being taught to read in the NORMAL FUCKING WAY WE'VE USED FOR LITERALLY CENTURIES and were instead being taught a fake-ass method backed by vibes and antivax-levels of pseudoscience.
Intervene now, anon, or he's never going to read well.
I remember one of my grade school teachers discussing with my mother the differences between me and my sister at learning to read, and he described me as a "sight reader from the start"... which is to say, an acknowledgement that most people do not do that and it's not reasonable to expect that of the majority of kids, who really do need the phonics and the "sound things out."
Generally speaking if a kid has arrived at school not knowing how to read already, they're not going to do well with sight reading and need phonics. The few kids who develop The Reading in the way the whole language people think they should do it before they hit school.
So true. I know a retired teacher who bawwws and tries to contradict me when I rant about whole language at our knitting meetup. She's all "different kids need different approaches!" and "I saw it work!"...
But of course it feels intuitively sensible to her. She taught herself to read at age 2. That's the exact kind of experience that does make this method sound reasonable. But like you say, if it's going to happen, it happens very early and without the school curriculum.
As for me, I've said it before, but I assume anon wasn't around: I could not learn to read.
I was in second grade. (First grade? I can't remember. Around then.) Most of my classmates were reading at least a little. Me: nothing. I could not learn.
It was even a god damn private school, but I had to have a fucking tutor. I got dragged over to that lady's office a few days a week for... two months? Four months? It really wasn't that long, as far as I know. I was more than ready to learn. I just needed an actual fucking method that wasn't lying trash. Almost at once I jumped from nothing to reading well above grade level. For the rest of my childhood, I continued to diverge from my classmates in how many words I knew, how well I could read, the works. Every year of grade school makes that gap widen. I was on the desirable side of that gap. I was lucky.
It's obvious how verbal I am from reading my tl;dr on this blog.
But I could not learn to read.
I was a couple years younger than this nephew, but not that much younger. It's not too late. Now is the perfect time for some tutoring. If you can afford it, get a pro. If you can't, do your best. But you've got to do something.
The four cueing systems if whole language reading education are a band-aid method used by severely dyslexic people. When people's dyslexia is so bad that they simply cannot learn to read effectively, tricks like cueing allow them to function well enough in society to get by. They do NOT teach proper literacy.
This system was popularised by a guy who is obviously dyslexic, refuses to acknowledge that when asked, and essentially decided that everyone else must be like him and therefore the system that helped him get by was a substitute for real literacy since it was so much faster and more achievable for him to learn to "read" this way than phonically. It's kind of like if somebody without hands was learning to sew, found it incredibly frustrating to do without hands, so they started putting their creations together entirely with fabric glue which they found easier to apply... and told everyone how much easier it was so all the schools got rid of needles and thread and sewing machines and everyone was taught to "sew" using fabric glue only and then wondered why their clothing kept falling apart on their bodies.
Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!
Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.
I used to set this one for second year undergraduate creative writing seminars on writing science fiction on a double bill with Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild" and no-one here gets out alive.
'assigned' is past tense. it was an event, coercive, forced without your approval because you were only minutes old. its not a label, its not an identity
"i am afab" no, you WERE afab. you ARE whatever gender you currently are. stop identifying with an event forced upon you at birth, even if you are cis.
HUGE developments in the big silly baby wearing fluffy pajamas fandom:
Oregon Zoo 05/30/26: This flouf is one of 15 healthy California condor chicks to hatch at our conservation center this season. A new record! #Condorable #KeepCalmAndCarrion
of these magnificent ancient creatures still alive on this world. and I was aware of this at that age because nearly half of them were in a very secretive building on a hilltop near my house, in a last ditch effort by conservation scientists to breed and raise babies.
fifteen. Just born. this season. I cry tears of joy.
You did it. You're doing it. Keep fighting for a future, everybody- it's working.
The most mind-blowing moment, not only for De La Mata but the scientists too, came when they managed to actually record the sounds that she heard in her ears – which now appear as ‘Left Ear’ and ‘Right Ear’ which begin sides A and B on the album – and in doing so opened up questions about the nature of tinnitus itself. “The NHS definition is that it’s a phantom sound that your brain is creating, that it isn’t something ‘real’, so you should try to ignore it.” By having De La Mata place her ear into an anechoic chamber, with an ultra-sensitive microphone perched in her ear canal, they were able to provide significant evidence to the contrary. “After the first recording of it, it was ‘There’s no way, this isn’t possible.’” They tried again with her breath held, and again with her tensing her ears, and again with other members of staff, but each time it became apparent that yes, the noises De La Mata hears are seemingly something physical.
"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.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DnD/comments/7asxci/oc_ygathok_the_ceaseless_hunger_final_boss_of_our/
This is the reveal of this ridiculousness during their game
The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes
honestly one of the best things we can do for ourselves is realize that people of different ages than us can still be the same kind of person as us. it's humbling and it gives everyone involved a sense of continuity, and it busts those stupid generational stereotypes media is so fond of.
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