âThis is Broadway, kiddo, not some theme park where you can be mean.â | 26 | he/she/they | general art tag is #slydiddledeeart, others filtered by fandom (ie #opart, #totart, etc), twitter and insta are @sriddledeedee
The first thing I'm doing if the ceasefire goes through in Gaza?
The first thing? God, I don't know if I can give a clear answer, because we've simply started to survive one day at a time.
But let me tell you, the first thing I'll do... is to breathe. Yes, breathe air without fear, raise my head to the sky and know there's no plane above us, that the only sounds I hear are sounds of life.
After that? I'll run. Run through our streets that have become rubble, look for my family, my friends, any signs of the life that once was.
I will run after the graves of my friends and relatives whom we know nothing about, try to tidy the graves a little, and say: my friend, the fire has calmed, we can now have a moment to ourselves without fear.
I will go back to our house, collect some memories from under the rubble, I might find a photograph or a piece of cloth or even a scent that once lived there.
I will sit with my family under the tent that sheltered us in place of our house, and I will try to tell them that tomorrow will be better, even if I don't believe that myself.
After that? I will dream. I will start drawing new dreams, small dreams... like a cup of tea on a quiet morning, or big dreams... like rebuilding our house.
And you, if you heard the news of a ceasefire, what's the first thing you're doing?
I will rebuild my family's house, and look forward to a new life full of love and peace.
The Hamam family has decided to focus their attention away from rebuilding their ⌠Annie Hall needs your support for Support Muhammad in Gaz
Help my family in Gaza to rebuild our house !!!đ
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem âintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.â Crucially, he added that this is ânot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsâ but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationâs 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of âmeet your students where they areâ for so long that she has begun to feel âlike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.â
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessmentâs own language, they likely âcannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.â And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austinâs McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantâs smartphone â whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision â measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japanâs Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they âkept losing trackâ of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled âYour Brain on ChatGPT.â They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays â one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing â and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and âconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.â Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term âcognitive debtâ for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainâs engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the studentâs mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not âfree students up for higher-order work.â It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their Kâ12 schooling. Whatever the standardsâ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling âevidenceâ from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on âfinding the main ideaâ in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as âsevere or very severe.â
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that âthinking is becoming a luxury good.â The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a âdeep workâ lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a sourceâs claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into âthis is goodâ and âmaybe add more detailsâ the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
Iâm afraid I donât have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? Kâ12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that âstudents will adapt.â They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish studentsâ sentences before theyâve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
â Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canât Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
If youâre not into butches when theyâre fat you should have to walk around with a sign that announces to the world that youâre a tasteless idiot who probably also hates beautiful sunsets and autumn leaves.
The thing about the Karen Read trial is that when I first heard about it I was like âI hope they acquit her because I think women should be allowed to back over their cop boyfriends.â and then I dug into it and realized she genuinely was framed and she was framed by complete dumbasses and if she wasnât a middle class, college educated, home-owning white woman, they would have gotten away with it and theyâve probably done this to people who could not afford to defend themselves. Then I learned about Sandra Birchmore and the other acts of heinous misconduct and violence committed by the Canton PD and I almost wished it was just a woman killing her fundamentally unlikable cop boyfriend and not open season on girls and women in Canton, Massachusetts. God, what a scary place to live and what a sickening rabbithole to go down.
too much of law enforcement is men with grudges protecting men they see themselves in from consequences. we only really hear about this phenomenon when it comes to rich people because their cases are more high profile (see: #metoo in hollywood, epstein files) but regular women just kind of have to accept the fact and move on lol because only money can save you in such circumstances
no woman should ever have to explain why she doesnt do something to her body.... 'why don't you wear makeup?' 'why don't you shave?' like. thats what i look like. idk what to tell you
I think it's insane that even in the most leftist and "progressive" spaces the idea of equating morality with looks is alive and present and no one fucking bats an eye at it. like racists and mysoginysts are always portrayed as fat and hairy and generally unkept, as a contrast to the morally good and attractive leftists of course; people will have no problem being genuinely fucking awful about someone's appearance if they're deemed to be a "bad person". and the worst part is you point all of this out and people act like you're reading too much into things like no dude you gotta start using your brain more
Not getting a ton of reporting in US news, but the Trump administration is going after donors to Palestine, including going as far as international extradition under the guide of "counterterrorism"
i feel like we should be talking more about the fact that there is a serious ebola outbreak going on in some parts of africa, particularly the democratic republic of the congo, and has been for months now.
Eighty percent of new Ebola cases in eastern Congo are emerging from unknown chains of transmission, according to WHO, a sign the outbreak i
this is specifically the bundibugyo strain of ebola (BDBV), associated with a 30-50% fatality rate and resistant to many of the standard ebola treatments such as existing vaccines and antibody measures (though as of this year there are phase 1 human trials for a vaccine ongoing). it's a risk 4 pathogen per the WHO, which is the highest end of the scale. there have been two previous major outbreaks of this strain in 2007 and 2012.
recent data suggests that there are some potentially concerning mutations going on in the current outbreak, which is at nearly 2100 cases with 798 deaths (38% fatality rate): "As of July 16th 2026, roughly 80% of all diagnosed cases are coming from completely unidentified chains of transmission, and roughly 70% of all fatalities are occuring (sic) outside treatment facilities. These numbers indicate that contact tracing and containment efforts overall are experiencing massive failure, and that the virus is currently spreading significantly faster than authorities are able to keep up with."
"Genome sequencing of early cases has identified several novel, unique mutations within the viruses of this lineage driving the current epidemic. Of remarkable concern, a handful of these mutations structurally encode the Glycoprotein Subunits 1 and 2 (GP1/GP2) and Polymerase (L Protein) in ways that have not yet been described in literature, meaning there is a possibility that these mutations may translate to a phenotype that possesses higher viral fitness."
The DRC is facing one of the world's worst humanitarian crises â now compounded by a rare Ebola outbreak with no vaccine. Here's how to help
Uganda â â discharges last-remaining patient, as WHO says Ebola has 'expanded faster than any previous outbreak' in DRC.
been stewing on an analytical approach to fiction which I call "is this book afraid of me?" and in order to answer this question you determine how hard the book is trying to make sure you don't come after the writer on twitter
Please keep making art. Please make it for yourself. Please donât let everything become even more of the same flat general appeal nonsense that doesnât seem to have anything to say
in 2014 you could come on here and say âmisogyny is bad and more ppl should consume media that includes womenâ and everyone would agree with you. nowadays you post something like âif you donât care about women you might be a misogynistâ and the reblogs are ppl saying âummmmmm this take is actually problematic bc the only way i can escape misogyny is by pretending women donât exist :/â weâre so cooked.
i know if your parents are from different countries you can inherit either nationality or both but wouldn't it be more fun if they drew a line between the spot one parent was born and the spot the other parent was born and you got the nationality of wherever the midpoint of that line is? just a thought to spice things up. like if you have one algerian parent and one egyptian parent then you get libyan nationality. it's awesome too because many people would get ocean nationality.
women should be allowed to walk around topless when it's hot out and women also shouldnt be forced into skimpy outfits they dont feel comfortable wearing at work and if these sound contradictory they are not; if anything they are two fruits off the same ideological tree.
