I must not explain the joke. Explaining the joke is the joke-killer. I will face my followers who did not get the joke. I will permit them to pass over me and through me
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japanās Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they ākept losing trackā of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on āfinding the main ideaā in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a ādeep workā lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
Iām afraid I donāt have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? Kā12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that āstudents will adapt.ā They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish studentsā sentences before theyāve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
America has a weird relationship with cults where theyāre terrified of small cults (or organizations they think are cults) but completely normalized massive cults that hurt many more people (eg: LDS Church, Jehovahās Witnesses, the Amish, Scientology, most Megachurches)
To anybody asking if the Amish are a cult, the answer is yes, very much so.
Theyāre a high control group that isolate you from society. The cult decides how you dress, how you behave, who you marry and how. They control what you know, blocking all information from the outside world. They control how you feel and what youāre allowed to think with threats of both social and supernatural harm. Theyāre a cult.
The best method to determine if a group is a cult, in my opinion, is Steven Hassanās (cult expert and former cult member himself) BITE model.
BITE stands for Behavior Control, Information Control, Thought Control, and Emotional Control.
The more points a groupĀ āscoresā on the model, the more of a cult it is.
I think this model is the best one for several reasons:
Itās more nuanced thanĀ ācultā orĀ ānot cultā and doesnāt make false equivalences between groups
Itās versatile, applying to groups big and small, and cults of all kinds, religious, political, financial, etc.
It focuses on whatās important, which is what the cult does to its members, and those membersā experiences, and not on irrelevant details like how uncommon their doctrines are or whether they have a charismatic leader
#you might notice that there are a lot of similarities between cult techniques and those of abusive partners#and that is an important thing to be aware of
Itās tricky with parenting, because parents have to control their childrenās lives to start with, since newborns are incapable of taking care of themselves.
A healthy parent will gradually relinquish control as their child grows and becomes more capable. And even while theyāre in charge, they will treat their child with honesty and transparency and respect. Theyāll prepare their child for independence, giving them the tools they need to live their own life.
A culty, abusive parent will go far beyond the level of control that their role requires. They will use manipulation and undue influence, taking advantage of their childās naivete and malleable mind for the parentās own benefit and agenda. They will continue to exercise this control well into their childās adulthood, possibly their whole life.
Every once in a while, I wish the friendship meter from the Sims was real so that way when people tell me "I used Chat-GPT" they can visually see just how much respect I just lost for them in that moment.
One time an acquaintance told me she entered Snape's star chart into chatgpt and I could physically feel that meter dropping three separate times over the course of her sentence
"You'll be left behind if you don't get onboard with AI!" okay let's assume for a second that AI is The Future or whatever. Let's assume that it will be the cornerstone of all future work. Let's assume that, like the investment guys floating on the surface of the bubble are desperate to have us believe, It Is Inevitable. Frankly I still don't think I'd lose much by ignoring it until that day comes. Like I simply do not believe that prompt engineering could take all that long to learn. Call me naive but I think that if AI became critical for my life tomorrow, somebody telling me how to access chatGPT (I imagine they've got a website or an app or something?) and being like "Remember how you used to use google when it still actually worked? Start there" would be enough. I think I could figure it out in like an hour, tops, by fucking around with the site and maybe looking up some tips on reddit. So like. Even if "AI is the future" did somehow magically turn out to be true, I don't see how that affects me at all right now or why anybody bothers saying so. "AI is the future, if you were smart you'd be using it!" no I wouldn't. It still wouldn't be a skill that's worth my time to learn yet. Pointless addition to the discussion. Maybe I'm dunning-krugered or something but I simply do not think that it would be difficult enough that I would need to start practicing right now or I'm missing out on something.
"You'll need AI in a decade so you should get familiar with it now!" I think if you start getting familiar with it now, and I start getting familiar with it in a decade, we're going to end up at the same proficiency pretty quickly. Doesn't seem like the kind of skill where "X years of experience" is relevant. I don't think that's a skill gap that would be hard to close.
You cannot simultaneously have a "it's easy for everyone to learn! Impossible to fuck up!" pitch and a "you MUST learn how to use it RIGHT NOW" pitch for the same product and expect to get taken seriously
So I do 3D modeling and printing as a hobby, and a few weeks ago I designed wheel guards meant to prevent office chairs from running over cables and clothes... or your pet's tail.
I got the idea from cowcatchers old locomotives used to have.
Anyways, yesterday I uploaded the model to Thingiverse, and just hours after uploading it, the Community Relationship Manager of the whole website left a comment suggesting I enter the model into a competition that's currently being held on the site.
So I did... and now it's in third place not even a day later. First place is $500, but the competition still has a month to go.
Then the Community Manager contacted me again, telling me they want to feature my model in anĀ upcoming design promotion.
Just, what is happening? I mostly made this thing for myself in, like, an hour, and now it's suddenly super popular? This is all a little bit overwhelming šµāš«
Other models I worked on for weeks didn't get nearly as popular. I swear, it's impossible to predict what people will like.
Anyways, if you want to print the wheel guards yourself, you can get the model here or here.
I also made a quiet version you can stick furniture felt pads on.
Thereās a liquor store near my house that seems to be run exclusively by frat boys. They lovingly curate these bags, which I browsed today while āOops I Did It Againā played through the store speakers. This is art to me, there is beauty everywhere for those with eyes to see it
Thereās a liquor store near my house that seems to be run exclusively by frat boys. They lovingly curate these bags, which I browsed today while āOops I Did It Againā played through the store speakers. This is art to me, there is beauty everywhere for those with eyes to see it
1) Vaping is confirmed to cause cancer. Vaping coats the lungs with toxic substances, such as heavy metals and benzene, which are known to cause cancer
2) Many vapes contain diacetyl, which, when inhaled causes popcorn lung, or scarring of the lung
3) Ultrafine particles, when being inhaled, can be lodged in the trachea (not good!)
4) Ultrafine particles can also constrict the arteries in the lungs potentially causing A HEART ATTACK
5) Vaping is relatively new. Not much studies have been done in comparison to tobacco. Plus, the vaping companies are powerful people. There is a large chance that they are purposely downplaying and even burying any evidence that vaping is harmful - just like the tobacco companies before them. They do not care about you, or your health, or the truth. They only care for money
Please Iām begging yall as an asthmatic, your fruit-flavored vapor will still give people around you who are smoke-sensitive attacks. So will weed. Donāt do it inside; if youāre at a bus stop or something try to not stand right next to people or move downwind of them if you can.
āI hated that essay,Ā ā he says to me,Ā āabout femmes who care for you when you travel; I really hated it.ā And when I ask whyĀ he tells me that he thinks it sounds like all butches should be soothed by femmes, and vica versa; he says,Ā āWhy would those femmes have assumed that you were a butch who liked femme?ā He says,Ā āMaybe youāre a faggot butch, did they even consider that?ā He says,Ā āI know youāre not just for femmes.ā
Thatās what he says, but I know what heās thinking. And even though I know how dangerous it is to assume I know what someone is thinking, I know this butch maybe as well as I know myself, and heās thinking,Ā āFuck you, for having it easy even in being queer. Fuck you for going along on your happy little way to San Francisco and finding a bunch of femmes who see you as a big stud-duck butch and just want to pour themselves through your fingers. Itās just as hard to be a faggot butch as it is to be any kind of fag.āĀ
Thereās all that masculinity to consider when you want to rub up against someone, like that old joke about porcupines:
Ā How do porcupines mate?Ā
Very carefullyĀ
Heās saying,Ā ā I want to show up at brunch someplace and assume that anyone who I want to flirt with will want to flirt back, and will do it, will want to, without fear of recrimination from hir community. I want you to put something in that book of yours for me. I am a butch whose identity, sexual or otherwise, has nothing to do with femmes. They are not my natural partners in this gender crime the way they are yours.I wake up and sleep in the arms of butches like me, butches who understand the whole host of things about my life, my world, the way I see things, the way things affect me that no one else could understand. Write about us. Write about that we have sweet hot sex in which no one has to put on a pair of panties, or take them off; write about how good it feels when ze fucks me hard, so hard. Write about ho it feels to fall asleep with the weight of a butch on you, tattooed arm and one furry leg pinning you down and grounding you in your sleep.Ā
āWrite about all the ways in which butches are for each other, comfort each other. Write about how we understand all the shit that comes in the world for our partners and salve it as best we can, about how I have all the more respect for hir because of all I know it takes to survive as a butch.Ā
āWrite about how, as soon as butches were no longer the scourge of dykedom for aping masculinity, or whatever that baloney was, it became faggot butches who were scorned and derided. Everyone understands butch/femme because it seems familiar, like Ozzie and Harriet but with better hair and more pussy. Everyone understands femme on femme, even though you donāt see it often because it doesnāt read queer, you know, but itās in the first images ofĀ ālesbian loveā most of us see, in porn or on television. Two long haired pretty girls smooching in a daring fashion wherever they happen to be. No oneās threatened by that, not the dykes, not the men, nobody, but if I want to kiss my butch anywhere, Iād be damned sure of my audience, or better yet, better be sure we donāt have one.
āI can be a butch without opening doors for girls,ā Heās saying.Ā āI can do it even if I follow while dancing, I can do it without spending mu Saturday afternoons as a femmes shopping bottom at the mall and I do. I am. I am honorable, I take good care of the people I love, as well as I possibly can; I watch out for my community. I have a butch heart full of love that I can express when I feel safe enough; I walk in the world resisting gender norms and transgressing gender rules, transcending them. I am fixing whatever I can, whenever I can, and I laugh, and play, and let the spaces in my masculinity show, just like you, just like every butch. I get all slicked up in a suit and tie and I pick up my date, also in a suit and tie, and we just open the door if we get to it first and we take turns paying, and it doesnāt make me less butch. It doesnāt make me less anything. It doesnāt mean that I donāt think femmes are swell, I surely do, but they are not my salvation when I travel, they are not the North of my heartās compass. Thatās butches for me, and I will always go a little weak when I see someone scared and hardened and delighted and ashamed and proud ā proud like me.Ā
āYouāre writing a book? Of course, Iām glad, but donāt chicken out. Donāt write a book that speaks so many volumes about your adoration for femmes that it leaves out the ways in which I know you cherish butches too. Yes, not the same was as you cherish femmes, entirely differently, butches and femmes are different creatures, sure, but I donāt just mean how glad you are and will always be to have butch brothers, a butch tribe. I mean, make sure you donāt forget to mention that you put butches on their knees in front of you from and enjoy them, that you kneel down too, that you sit sometimes stunned by how much you want to lick a buzz cut or a hot tattoo, that you know what a great grace it is to fall asleep next to a butchās heart nad muscle and skin and ink and fur, that you understand how wonderful it can be to feel butch arms around you. Make sure you mention me, make sure you give me and my lovers and my life the same benefit of some of your words, make sure you donāt write another book that leaves us on the cutting-room floor. Give us a place on the landscape, help us become visible. Say this: Say that when butches love butches they hold lightning between them, that it burns as much as it illuminates. That itās the sweetest burn Iāve ever known in my life of searing pain, that keeps me from feeling the flames of the worldās hate licking the soles of my boots, that I hold it in my heart and it fuels me every day. Say that it shows me things I could never see in any other way, that without it I would grow cold and die. Say there is nothing else Iād rather be.ā
- S. Bear Bergman, Faggot Butch, Butch is a Noun, 2006
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