Squirrel, late 20s/early 30s, she/her, ace, bambi lesbian, and desperately trying to navigate adulthood. It's not going well. Blank blogs get blocked. OC blog: notxjustxstories My Redbubble
Look I love unconditional devotion love stories as much as the next person, but there's really something so deliciously raw about conditional devotion.
I have served you and I have loved you for decades, but I will not give up my principles for you. You cut out part of my heart and took it with you down that path that you insist on walking, but you walk it alone. Even when the bleeding, gaping hole you left in my chest kills me, I will not follow you.
I am an archeologist. I specialize in a somewhat obscure but by no means boring or meaningless Neolithic culture in Germany.
It has a Wikipedia page. A well curated, surprisingly extensive Wiki page that encapsulates all the important information about the culture, including literature references for further research.
One day, we asked Chat GPT about this culture. W were curious which details it would get wrong.
ALL OF THEM, except for the fact that it's a culture in present day Germany.
It didn't even get the chronological time frame wrong and called it a celtic culture.
When we told it it's wrong, it came at us with made up literature sources. Literally made up. It took two well known German archeologist who weren't even active at the same time, added a year - both were already dead - and sold that as source.
And it LITERALLY would only have had to quote Wikipedia to get everything right.
THAT is how unbelievably shitty and wrong all those AIs are.
They are making shit up. They are not sourcing information, they're just slapping words together by their most like relative occurance.
Do not trust ChatGPT or any other so-called AI ever.
kermit and scooter riffing on how their physicality doesn't let them open the envelope to announce the winner. the audience immediately cracking up when it cuts to statler and waldorf because they know what the bit is gonna be. jim henson slipping into the kermit voice accidentally before bouncing back at record speed and riffing on it. richard hunt genuinely laughing at jim's joke but doing so in-character. prime muppets was something else man
"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.
I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!
"why haven't you gone outside once all week?" THESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUNTHESUN
academic dishonesty is not something you can spin as moral lol i do not want to share a career field let alone a social sphere with a bunch of chatgpt using ass bitches
ppl are so annoying âyou canât paint ur bedroom pink youâre an adultâ i did not spend my entire life waiting to grow up and control my life to paint my bedroom beige
when I first bought my house, I announced my decision to paint my bedroom purple. I had wanted a purple bedroom for thirty damn years, you fucking bet I was gonna have one now. My friends decided, for some reason, that I meant what one of them referred to as â14 year old girl purpleâ (through whatâs wrong with the colors a 14 year old girl chooses, I donât know, even if theyâre not what I want as an adult). They didnât believe me until they saw the color on the actual wall, even thought they helped me pick out paints. My mother, meanwhile, decided to get worried that if I painted my bedroom a âdark purpleâ, it would be âdepressingâ. As if, with an entire house to live in, I would spend all my time in the bedroom, which I wanted to be dark because I would be sleeping in there. In the damn dark.
I had like one, maybe two friends who were all like FUCK YEAH YOU PAINT IT WHATEVER COLOR YOU WANT, PURPLE BEDROOMS ARE AWESOME.
But when they actualy saw the finished bedroom, every single one of them was like, âOh yeah, thatâs really pretty.â (Well, the ones who supported me from the beginning were more like WOOHOO.)
And the moral of the story is: Fuck âem, please yourself. Either theyâll come around, or you can safely ignore every question of taste they opine about for the rest of time.
This applies to other adulting activities, too. When I was a kid, I decided that I wanted to have a wedding cake made of doughnuts. When I got older, I figured that I would be âmatureâ about it and get a traditional cake, which the older adults approved of. Now that Iâm 25 and facing the possibility of actual marriage in the near future, Iâm just like âmarriage is a social construct but it comes with tax & insurance benefits, so just give me that goddamn doughnut cake.â If they donât like it then they donât have to come to my wedding.
Iâm thirty and my first big furniture purchase was a custom coffin shaped coffee table that opens up and is lined with purple crushed velvet. I would have loved it at 13 and I love it now. Growing up doesnât mean you have to abandon what makes you happy.
I have told this story before, and I will tell it again, because I am An Old now and repeating stories forever is our prerogative:
When I bought my house, the kitchen was multiple shades of dingy white. It was dismal, but it was now mine! So went to the hardware store for paint (well, several trips, painted swatches on panel, etc â Iâm very picky. But this was the final, ârealâ trip). It was a busy day in the paint section. There were at least five people behind me in line.
Now, remember, latex paint is slightly lighter and brighter when wet than it is when dry. And Iâd decided to paint my kitchen candy-apple red. The hardware store employee took my gallon off the Paint Jiggler and cracked it open to put a dab on the top, revealing the most incredibly deep pink, and behind me I hear the entire line of people say,
âOh my god.â
âŚin perfect chorus.
I did not realize up until that moment that shocking a crowd of strangers with my paint color choices was a life goal, but at that moment I felt an absolutely overwhelming sense of achievement.
When I first moved into my place, I painted the spare room, that eventually became my office, lime green, the kind of lime green that glows down the corridor when I open the door - The colour was only available as an âaccent colourâ in the section of paints intended for childrenâs playrooms, and in the shop I got a lot of âOh your son will love this!â And from people I knew I got a lot of âOh well, youâre 21 now, youâre basically a teenager, this is a terrible idea, youâll hate it and need to pull out all the furniture to repaint it.â And I have to report that I am now in my forties and my office still looks like this, and it makes me smile every time I see it.
not decorating trends; those have always existed. but the idea that color and decoration is inherently childish
this is the dining room at the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts, from 1878 (where I used to work, briefly). the walls are TEXTURED MICA SHIMMER on a green background. Adult Space For Adults!
A jewelry shop in Paris c. 1901. kids canât buy jewelry!
who can forget the classic 1950s colorful bathroom? Iâm not a huge fan, but still! adult space! bright colors; decorative designs!
meanwhile âyouâre immature if you like Art Nouveauâ is a hot take Iâve really, seriously seen on this webbed site (only once, thank the gods). I donât know who started this, but Iâm going to kill them
I think a lot of it stems from the ubiquitous Waterhouse prints that were sold on college campuses for 20 years. like why would I get a free pass if it were Monet instead Western culture is stupid. The entire point of being an adult is breakfast for dinner and cake for breakfast and dying with the most toys.
The examples of decorated homes above are both either modern or upper class, which makes it easy to dismiss because âsure the rich people have beautiful homesâ and âsure, modern middle-class people have lots of color in their homes.â
So hereâs two examples of traditional Norwegian farmhouse interiors. You know. The kinds of places peasants live in.
This type of painting is called ârosemalingâ and today you usually find it on, like, carved wooden bowls and such that are only used for decoration. But back two centuries ago, it was very common to find the interiors of homes covered in it, in projects that were painted little by little over the decades. Because itâs beautiful to look at, paint is the cheapest way of decorating your house, and what else are you going to do on the long winter nights when itâs too dark and cold to work outdoors?
But mostly, they did it because it made them happy, and it was beautiful.
