I made my first sock! Which was great up until I remembered I have to make a second one.
One Nice Bug Per Day
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Cosmic Funnies
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
$LAYYYTER
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Game of Thrones Daily
official daine visual archive
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Not today Justin
almost home
No title available
Today's Document
wallacepolsom
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Noah Kahan

tannertan36
Fai_Ryy
NASA
Xuebing Du

seen from Germany
seen from Germany
seen from United States

seen from Singapore

seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Vietnam
seen from Indonesia
seen from Iraq

seen from Türkiye
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United Kingdom

seen from Netherlands
seen from Italy
seen from Australia
seen from Türkiye

seen from Belgium

seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
@saraliia
I made my first sock! Which was great up until I remembered I have to make a second one.
Today's Adventure is that I, after an unintentional 13-hour power nap,
Got woken up at 6AM by a phone call from a friend stranded in Montana because of the heat wave and almost no cell service because of their crap provider.
OhSoThat'sHowIt'sGonnaBe.jpg
Ok.
I somehow summon a week's worth of spoons and in less than 30 minutes and 5 phone calls, get them
A hotel
An appointment with a mechanic from 2 states away
A perscription refilled from 2 states away
and A Pizza
Go me.
But then it's 8AM and there are unscheduled live humans at the door and while EVERGENCY MODE is still on, I have already blown through a ton of spoons, and also probably shouldn't meet whoever it is wearing just a pair of bootyshorts that say "CRYPTID" in Gothic Font on my ass.
So I greet them in those shorts and a T-shirt that I manage to put on both inside out and backwards
#nailedit
It is, Fortunately, not the mormons.
it is, Unfortunately, two UPS guys trying to deliver my other in-house friend's new phone except the new guy doesn't know how to operate the "sign for package" device, and the old guy that's supposed to be mentoring him is like, 92, deaf as a post, and doesn't actually know how to operate the device either.
by the way
it is already
over 100 out
it takes almost 30 minutes to sign for the phone
when i get back inside, i discover that apparently the Corgi has learned how to open his kennel from the inside because he is now out of the kennel and waiting for me to come in.
he also has cat litter all over his face because while he was waiting for me he also learned how to open the baby gate to the cat's room and help himself to a cat shit breakfast.
He'll be fine
He's a cattle dog, they're legally required to have at least 1 really disgusting snack they love.
but
more to the point
i have no idea at what point he learned to open his kennel from the inside
has he been staying there out of politeness this whole time??
And
I got other shit to do today.
namely.
I'm seeing a realator
The Devils most pathetic yet effective demons
I get a reminder text that I have an appointment with her
at least
I think that's what it is because what she sends me is: "🏡⏰12:00 ❔"
With the time typed in the middle like that.
She is, according to her profile, at least 80.
so I reply "😎👍"
and then she sends me a string of GODDAMN POST-MODERN EMOJI HEIROGLYPHICS THAT TAKE UP MY ENTIRE SCREEN.
She's on an iPhone so half of them don't even translate across platforms
It takes me half an hour and three different software programs and goddamn wingdings to translate, but she has sent me the address and rules about masking and not wearing shoes inside.
in emoji
instead of like
literally any other format
I am
FASCINATED
and simply must meet the woman so if I don't come back to update I got stolen by the fairies but I'm taking the Corgi with me as protection so I'll see y'all later.
Update:
It's not fairies
It's Doris.
might be about to get a sewing machine and/or start an ACAB riot.
Ok, so:
I'm going to see a prospective house because due to various circumstances, I'm probably going to be moving to the other side of a major metropolitan area in the next few months, but that's not important.
I get to the house
I get a text from the realtor
The realtor is not the person who has been texting me in emoji
The person texting me in emoji is the homeowner, who the realtor says will let me in if I want, she's running late.
Sure
Why not
I put Herschel on leash and go to the front door
As much crime as he commits at home Herschel The Hanukkah Goblin has terrific public manners, and is Very Cute so I'm about 90% sure the emoji fairy is going to let me take him through the house
Door opens.
90-something blue haired old lady with a spine like a question mark and glasses that could be used as telescope lenses opens the door.
"OH [Gallus]! How lovely to see you!"
This woman clearly knows me because she remembers my anniversary was last week and that my sister is back from Australia.
Problem is
I know about 500 geriatric ladies with blue hair, scoliosis and extreme prescription glasses, because I am a member of 2 quilt guilds, the scientific illustration guild, the rocky mountain SCA and stagehand for three different theater companies, so I know everyone's grandma and fuck me if I can tell them apart.
Wait
There's a quilt in thekitchen, visible front hall
I don't know faces but apparently I can recognize applique techniques at 40paces.
"...Doris? From SAQA?"
"YES! Who is this handsome little man?"
Herschel speaks enough English to know that "handsome little man" means "this person will feed me milk bones and bacon if I'm cute enough"
Immediately does a Sit Pretty and Shake.
Doris is bewitched
This is fine, but I also know I'm about to severely disappoint the realtor because there is no way in hell I'm moving into this House.
Because
The reason Doris is moving out is that her neighbor is a Cunt Magnifique and has been harassing Doris and everyone else to form an HOA and "improve the quality of our residents" because this woman has nothing better to do than be a racist-ass busy body, and recently, she's set her husband, a county sheriff on Doris, trying to bully her into signing paperwork and threatening her with legal action and writing her up for bullshit property violations
Ain't putting up with that shit
And neither is Doris, so she's selling all her shit and moving out to live with her grandchildren in Santa Monica.
But she's technologically impaired, so the only indication that there is an estate sale happening is a small paper sign in her front yard.
"Doris." I say, as Herschel makes himself comfortable on the couch for belly rubs and pieces of ham. "Did you tell SAQA or FRCC or anyone on Facebook that you're having the sale?"
"oh, I don't know how to do all that!" She sighs. "I tried to call the Denver post but they just put me on hold for ages..."
"Watch Herschel for 20 minutes and he's only allowed to have that one piece of ham."
Pics of everything
Address, time and pics to Facebook, both quilt guilds she's in, two more I have contacts for, nextdoor, and the local SCA discord for good measure.
It's 12 minutes and Herschel persuaded her to give him at least three pieces of ham.
He is petitioning for a fourth by doing a little puppy dance on the living room rug.
"OK, that's enough ham, people will be here in 10. Where is your cash box?"
Because apparently I'm running an estate sale today too.
It's fine :)
There's about 7 minutes of quiet.
Then
They DESCEND
The first on the scene is DeeDee, who doesn't believe in speed limits. She's arrived with a horse trailer. I remember that she is also moving.
"HI DORIS SWEETHEART WHY DIDN'T YOU CALL I HAD NO IDEA THIS WAS TODAY I WAS GOING TO TAKE ALL THIS TO THE GOODWILL HERE LET ME SET UP ON YOUR LAWN "
DeeDee is 73, and has a special spiritual bond with Hello Kitty. She weighs like 98lbs, dresses exclusively in neon pink sanrio clothes and the kind of eye makeup drag queens aspire to.
She also speaks non-stop at a volume normally associated with jet engines.
Half the horse trailer is already spread out on the lawn.
Doris is putting price stickers on stuff
Herschel is trying to tear open a bag of cotton batting.
This, and the arrival of approximately 56 minivans, five more trucks with horse trailers and Corgi Excitement Screaming alert Cunt Magnifique that something is happening outside.
Madame saunters off her porch up to Doris and Demands to know what's happening, you're supposed to notify the neighborhood and get a permit to-"
Doris, surrounded by her pack of silver wolves, shouts. "OH HELLO! EVERYONE, THIS IS MARCIA. I'VE TOLD YOU ALL ABOUT MARCIA." >:)c
... further details in a bit I think the Vikings are here.
~`* SOMEONE'S GETTING FIRED!!*`~
OK so.
You know those high school house parties you see in movies, where the person invites only a few friends, but those friends call their friends, and those friends call THEIR friends and soon like 500 people show up to one house and someone calls the cops and that one John Mulaney sketch with "SCATTER!" happens?
Old people will 100% do this too, except instead of a house party it's an estate sale on a wednesday afternoon and when the cop shows up there are lawyers present and he is in DEEP SHIT because his wife just spent the afternoon admitting to doing a bunch of wildly illegal shit on tape.
So when we left off, the party had really started getting underway, because Marcia the Cunt Magnifique had decided to crash the estate sale and whine about "we're supposed to coordinate garage sales as a neighborhood" and "your friends are blocking traffic on this cul-de-sac while nobody is home" weh weh-
DeeDee is about ready to throw hands but she is nowhere near the most dangerous of the Silver Silver Wolves.
That's Dr. Ruth.
Dr. Ruth turned 99 this year and went paragliding for her birthday
So you understand just how hard she goes
Dr. Ruth sort of hobbles over and point-blank asks "So I understand you've been trying to start a homeowner's association?" :3c
Marcia
Entirely misunderstanding how much danger she's in
Starts enumerating the TRIALS AND TRIBULATIONS of trying to start one, because SOME PEOPLE DON'T RESPECT AUTHORITY and all the paperwork and talking to people and she even had to ask HER HUSBAND. A SHERRIF. To go around and hand people stuff to sign.
Some people, right?
Dr. Ruth nods. Some people. She agrees.
You know.
Her son is a lawyer.
Why doesn't she give him a call?
Marcia, a Moron: Oh that'd be great!
Dr. Ruth, hobbling back to Doris: "Don't worry. David will handle this."
Meanwhile
The Friends-Of-Friends and the Friends-Of-Friends-Of-Friends are arriving, lured in because they heard the words "Longarm Sewing Machine" and "Hand-made quilts"
Various factions present include but are far from limited to: -Probably Six Quilt Guilds -The Denver Art League -The Denver Leather League -The Vikings -The Klingons -The Colorado Wild Game Share -A Pack of Scientific Illustrators -A Pack of Assorted Scientists they brought with them -The Sheep Lesbians -The Horse Lesbians -Three Extremely Competent Finnish People (My Scientific Illustration Professor and her sisters) who immediately take over the estate sale and turn it into an auction to maximize profit and keep the taxes in order.
Someone brings two additional Corgi called "Cap" and "Bucky"
They are Pembroke Corgi, and weigh about 21lbs apiece
Herschel is a Cardigan Welsh Corgi and weighs 42lbs because he's hug even for a Cardigan, and is Delighted with his New Minions.
They worship him as a God and follow him around so every time he sticks his face in something two smaller corgi faces immediately follow, like some kind of adorable cerberus.
Pelts and meat shares are being traded out of the backs of trucks and vans
Someone is making bratwurst.
Intrigued by the Brouhaha, Doris' neighbors emerge.
They are also Geriatric and very nervous, because Marcia has been harassing them too.
They are telling this to the members of these factions that are also lawyers.
There are at least 5 of them so far and David isn't even here yet.
I realize my realtor isn't even here.
I decide to text her.
She is somewhere in the crowd and having a nervous breakdown because She's SO LATE!!!
Ma'am.
It's 103 out.
I was just handed a freshly grilled Brat
Some bitch is incriminating herself on the lawn.
Nothing scheduled is happening.
Come sit in the yard and watch the Corgis play on the Palyskool plastic slide set. They're disassembling it like tiny furry engineers.
Have a bratwurst.
One of the Klingons appears, having physically carried my realtor through the crowd, and gently deposits her on the lawn before handing her a Bratwurst.
Diane, the Realtor, is not much older than I am, and from the preppie swaths of society that has "Never had a dog growing up" and "Didn't Know People Could Just. Make. Blankets?" and "What is this? It's like a hot dog but spicy?"
She is having a LEARNING EXPERIENCE.
One of the Horse Lesbians comes over and compliments Diane on her Dior handbag.
Diane thanks her ans compliments the apparently expensive brand scarf she has on. Do you. Know all these people?
Horse Lesbian explains that she's part of the SCA, and what that is, and that why yes. Her girlfriend Tasha is an armorer. Yes like for knights.
More Livestock Lesbians assemble.
They are pulling off shirts to show off livestock and battle scars, and biceps.
Diane is LEARNING A LOT TODAY.
I am just getting everyone's contact info and making sure Herschel does not consume his weight in bratwurst.
BWOOP!
Uh-Oh.
Marcia's Husband is here.
I step out front.
He has used the siren to largely part the crowd and pull into his driveway but it has closed around him and there is No Escape.
He starts huffing and puffing about blocked traffic and permits and the like, but this is not his usual Can-Bully-Without-Consequences crowd.
These are Grandmas.
Veterans of the 60's protest front who never let up.
He's starting to turn bright red and looks like he's about to cry and I've got my phone out to record whatever Incident is about to occur.
-And a Mercedes pulls up.
It's David.
Dr. Ruth's son.
The Lawyer.
And I emphasize that The because David is not some mere ambulance chaser.
David is the guy that the state sends to prosecute Corporate Fraud and Organized Crime and Other State Departments.
David was part of the team that took down the CO Branch of the KKK.
David is all of 5'4", very round and a balding little man that looks like the Dictonary Definition of "Nebbish" that moves with such intense confidence and authority that he pretty much has the Pillar Men Theme Blasting behind him at all times.
So when he and three other lawyers from the state's office step out of the car
Mr. Sherrif goes from red to while like color-changing octopus and I am like 50% sure he shit himself.
Because what he and Marcia have been doing is Very, Very, Very, VERY, Fucking Illegal.
"mArCiA!" he garbles. "sHuT tHe fUcK uP!"
Marcia is standing in the middle of the cul-de-sac, having spent the last 3 hours recounting to anyone who will listen about the 'measures she's had to take' and now the 5 lawyers that were here are delightedly handing over the paperwork that she had forced on Doris and her Neighbors, and pointing at all the doorbell cameras and witnesses out to the state's top prosecutor.
Friends
I ugly laughed.
FOUR HOURS LATER: -Auction wrapped up with a solid $40K to Doris' name plus pending sales on some of her larger furniture and antiques
Plus whatever David gets in damages from the county sherrif's office.
Marcia and husband are fucking busted
Herschel spent all afternoon running around and eating snacks and is passed out on the floor
Diane is "meeting up with" one of the Horse Lesbians next week.
The sewing machine went to someone else but I did open my purse and found out Doris or someone shoved a bunch of cash in there.
I'm getting ice dream and going to bed.
#stefan voice: this post has everything #senior citizens. quilts. hello kitty. vikings. horse lesbians. legal consequences. finnish auctioneers. one realtor’s gay awakening. corgis.
(@nonasuch)
Haven't posted in a while, but behold! This is my fourth Perfect Tee, fresh off the needles.
You can tell we're getting into the desperate months of zucchini excess by the way the New York times just sent out a list of 107 zucchini recipes.
#I must locate the list of 107 zucchini recipes#I'm not even growing zucchini this year I just like it lol YOU ARE IN LUCK (assuming you're able to read these)!
Zucchini is summer's gift. Embrace it with simple grilled zucchini, crunchy fried zucchini, ever-popular zucchini bread and all the options
Apparently this is just the best zucchini recipes. They aren't even including their bad and mediocre options.
Oh thank god
As someone that has grown up surrounded by beaches and done surf life saving, I know how the sea works. Lots of people dont. Every summer multiple tourists die here because they don’t respect the sea, if you’re going to the coast, here’s a thing I saw on Facebook.
Listen to lifeguards, swim and surf between the correct flags, respect the sea
As a person who grew up in Hawaii (since I was 4 years old), PLEASE BE CAREFUL THIS SUMMER! RIP TIDES/CURRENTS KILL! If you plan on swimming in the ocean or any very large body of water, search for the signs before getting in.
Stay safe out there :3
And then it becomes part of the environment, That’s Just Where it Lives, until a bout of cleaning hyperfixation where you have to concentrate really hard on The Thing and the curse is broken.
The pillow has been behind the radiator for a solid two months
this is exactly what its like and i dont fucking know how to explain this to neurotypicals in a way theyll understand
The note inside a bullet.
B-17 bomber is riddled with German anti-aircraft fire but miraculously survives. Later they discover the explosive shells were all inert; sabotaged by Nazi slaves working in armament factories.
Inside one empty shell is a written note: it's all we can do for you now.
The most important part of all this is that these small acts of bravery and noncompliance cannot be known as long as the enemy still stands, and might never be known. Just because it doesn’t seem like anyone is doing anything doesn’t mean it’s true. The best malicious compliance or subtle sabotage is the one that’s never detected, but makes ravages nonetheless.
Serafinski Blessed is the Flame An introduction to concentration camp resistance and anarcho-nihilism 2016 Taken from the original book: Run
Philosophy Podcast · Updated weekly · A podcast broadcasting Anarchist texts and audiobooks
"there comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to throw your bodies upon the wheels and upon the gears. Upon the levers. Upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop!"
~Mario Savio
To finish the quote by Mario Savio:
"And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it -- that unless you're free the machine will be prevented from working at all!!!"
Various Authors Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching 1993 A note from the web-publisher: I put this up to make ecodefence informatio
Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:
She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.
Yale University, 1969.
Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.
Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"
The faculty answered firmly: No.
Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.
Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.
So she started looking.
She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.
There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.
The professors had been wrong.
But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.
Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.
But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.
It wasn't random. It was systematic.
Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.
Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.
Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.
She needed a name for what she was documenting.
In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.
In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.
The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.
Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.
For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.
Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.
Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.
Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.
Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:
Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.
Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.
Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.
Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.
And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.
Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.
The Matilda Effect became standard terminology. Scholars used it to examine how credit is assigned, how authors are listed, who receives awards, who gets left out.
OP: My chickens refuse to roost on their perches, so I’m trying to find their leader among them.
when you go to a doctors office their favorite thing to do is tell you "okay check out at the front desk" when you're done. and the front desk tells you ummm you can just go! and you're like don't I have a copay? and they're like we don't know, we have to ask your insurance company first. and you're like well my insurance card says the copay is $30, can I just pay it right now while I'm standing in front of you? there's a card reader right there on the desk. and they're like nooo we have to send a representative on horseback during the next waning moon to meet with their claims adjusting associate director of benefits management and client services in the secret glade to negotiate. and you're like oh okay and go home. and you get twelve emails asking you to take a survey about your experience
AND THEN in eight months you start getting phone calls from unknown numbers and when you finally check your voicemail they're like Your Balance Is Past Due We're Going To Kill You (even though by this point you have forgotten that you ever went to the doctor). and so you go to your MyChart account and log in with your username and password and you have to reset your password for security reasons. and you get two emails that say Your Password Has Been Reset. Was This You? and you have to go find your phone and enter your two factor authentication code and then you have to select which location you visited and then you have to click through all the Reminder: Complete Your Health History Profile where they ask if you've had any new surgeries even though you definitely told the nurse about this at your visit and then you have to find the Pay Bills tab and your balance is $179.23 and you're like why is it so expensive I thought the copay was $30? and you download a PDF of the charges and find out that they charged a late fee of $15 a month even though that doesn't add up to $179.23 and you don't even remember being told you had any balance at any point and you could call a representative and ask about it but that would probably take at least half an hour and there's no way it would actually get rid of the charges. so you go pay it anyway and you have to go find a paper check to look up your bank account routing number because they'll charge you an extra 3% if you pay with a credit card and there's a fee of $2.75 for convenience also. and then you get three emails that say We've Received Your Payment! Thank You For Your Payment!
it's good to know they have a purpose because I absolutely HATE them since they are always solely on curbcut ramps here, and slippery AS HELL'S SLOPES. An angled slidey thing that if you fall will result in you being in traffic. Great. And if I am using my wheelchair? They sure are a nightmare to drive over in any direction. In the town I live in right now they're always installed pointing users directly diagonally into the intersection. because Murica I guess.
Volleyball player Yuji Nishida accidentally hit a line judge. This is how he apologized.
"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.
Actually genuinenly enjoying my customer service job sometimes
Customer (calling from Ireland): “Yes hello, I would like to -”
Sheep in the background: *gentle baa*
Customer: “Uh, sorry, what I want to do is -”
Sheep: *slightly more insistent baa*
Customer: “No, not now! -cough- Excuse me. I have a reservation and -”
Sheep: *VERY LOUD ACCUSATORY BAA*
Customer: “Arnulf! Please be quiet, I am on the phone! … Sorry, I sincerely apologize on behalf of Arnulf.”
me: “I love and forgive him.”
Customer: “Don’t, he doesn’t deserve it. Anyway, I’m calling about -”
Arnulf: *small, very self-satisfied baa*
Absolutely love how emotionally aware my child is for a 4 and a half year old do not however love stubbing my toe on the island for the 100th time today and hearing "hey mama it's okay to cry! It's not okay to throw a fit though, and we hafta re-...we have to reconitize the difference"
When I immediately say "oh no thanks" to a food she offers me she says "oh mommy, chefs try new foods. Can you take one , two, bites for me and if you really don't like it then I won't ask forever again deal?"
like you know what fine sure I'll try your truly heinous concoction because I do in fact hafta respect the deals