The upside to the adhd forgetting that you made yourself a drink thing is thinking to yourself โman I could go for a drink right nowโ and looking to your right and seeing a drink has appeared there. Thank you, past me. I lost you somewhere but you have still provided.
You wanna log in? What's your username? No. What's your email address? What's your password? What code did we just send to your email address? Now what code did we just text to you? New IP address detected. We sent you an email. Click the link to confirm the new address. Scan your fingerprint. Turn on your camera for age verification. Sign the updated user agreement. Accept all cookies? That feature isn't available on the website. Download the app. Those features are in the app. The app that's really a web browser.
About ten years ago I watched a guy drown on a lake beside my worksite. I couldn't get to him in time and neither could the other people on the work crew. He had three life jackets sitting in the bottom of the aluminum boat he fell out of, and the boat was left spinning in circles near him with the motor going full blast.
I reblogged this last month, tagged it, and said โmight as well see if it works.โ I used this video as a reference to find all the forms that i needed (which is A LOT, especially if youโre a dependent) and sent them through the mail, not really allowing myself to hope.
dude.
$2,714 of medical debt from my top surgery - gone. im shaking this was such a weight on me for 2 years and it fucking worked. what the fuck.
Hospitals like to hide these policies under a lot of successive links in obscure places, so if you don't see anything right away, keep looking! Get friends to help! Make it a scavenger hunt. A game where you're assassins sent to slit capitalism's throat
"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 โintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.โ Crucially, he added that this is โnot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsโ but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationโs 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 โmeet your students where they areโ for so long that she has begun to feel โlike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.โ
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 assessmentโs own language, they likely โcannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.โ 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 Austinโs McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantโs smartphone โ whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision โ 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 Japanโs 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 โkept losing trackโ 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 โYour Brain on ChatGPT.โ They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays โ one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing โ 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 โconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.โ 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 โcognitive debtโ for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainโs 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 studentโs mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not โfree students up for higher-order work.โ 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 Kโ12 schooling. Whatever the standardsโ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling โevidenceโ 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 โfinding the main ideaโ 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 โsevere or very severe.โ
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that โthinking is becoming a luxury good.โ 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 โdeep workโ 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 sourceโs claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into โthis is goodโ and โmaybe add more detailsโ 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.
Iโm afraid I donโt 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? Kโ12 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 โstudents will adapt.โ 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 studentsโ sentences before theyโve 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."
โ Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canโt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I swear to fucking god. I would claw out OneDrive from my computer if I could. I would burn down their servers if I could. I would run down their stocks to the ground if I could. I hope every single one of their workers gets a better offer from a competitor in the next 24 hours. I hope every single one of their light bulbs explodes at the same time. I hope every single carton of milk in their fridge will always be expired.
Stop backing up my fucking files.
Stop asking me to back up my fucking files.
Stop taking my fucking files off my fucking computer.
I don't want a fucking reminder in three fucking days. Let me fucking say no.
Anyway this disability pride month I would like to shoutout disabled folks whose creativity has suffered because of their condition. Iโm talking people with hand tremors and pain that stop them from drawing, knitting, and playing instruments. People whose thinking has become so disorganized that nothing they write makes sense to other people. People with chronic pain who can no longer dance. People so over medicated in a fruitless attempt to maintain stability that the wells of their imagination have run dry.
I see you and I love you. You are more than your creative output. You are not a shell of what you used to be. You are a whole, complete person, regardless of what your creativity has been, is now, or will be in the future.
dump his ass. move to a walkable city. start hormones. get into fiber crafts. dye your hair weird. grow an herb garden. foster a distrustful cat. take a welding class. invite your friends over for tea and cake. get way too into obscure media. explore a new cuisine. lie to the police. protest in the streets. life has so many possibilities don't it?
make out with a frenemy. buy noise cancelling headphones. wear office inappropriate attire. quit a toxic workplace. improve your apartment. start a dog walking sidegig. get on first name basis with your local librarians. bully politicians at town hall meetings. get an unexpected piercing. cultivate farmer's market connections. trade recipes with a gossipy old neighbor. unionize your apartment complex. move to the countryside. let a friend take you larping. keep a sword on your mantleplace
get a tattoo on your 40th birthday. be tempted to buy a loom. do a charity drag show. sue your landlord. buy a really nice kitchen appliance. volunteer at an anarchist soup kitchen. rediscover a tv show you watched when you were 8. spam your state senators. shop at asian grocery stores. do cosplay. buy trans flags in bulk and mount them along the highway. go viral for unexpected reasons. move in with your best friend. make lemoncello with leftover lemon rinds. run for school board membership. explore pegging.
Is anyone else constantly bothered by the fact that all of a child's medical care is required to go through their parents? That they must rely on these people to decide when they do or don't need medical care?
No matter how injured. If a parent doesn't deem it necessary to see a doctor, it doesn't happen. Teachers can suggest a doctor visit, but unless it's a very acute injury (and even then), it's ultimately up to the parents.
You can be 13. Twisted, maybe broken ankle. You teacher lets you sit out in PE. She's concerned, and tells you to rest when you go home, and see a doctor. You get home, ur parents fill a bath and add some Epsom salts, and then laugh at you for using it moms old colorguard stick as a cane. Take some ibuprofen they say. It's just a little sprain, ur a kid.
You go to school the next day, go to ur office assistant time. Office calls ur mom to come get you, because you're clearly in too much pain for school. Your mom laughs when she gets you, says you just were so determined not to miss school. Scolds you for making the office ladies worry.
You never see a doctor for the injury.
Your parents come into the exam room at every visit. This does not stop with age, except for gynecologist. But your parents are on the medical release forms. They fill them out for you, with you. You do not get to take them off.
You never get to tell s doctor about the ankle. Even though it never quote healed right, and it hurts every day.
Then your 18. In college. Still on your parents insurance, and have no car. The on campus clinic only does std testing. You fall down some stairs. Same injury. You call your parents, crying from the pain. You are using a mop as a cane. They console you and say to have a bath, take some meds, and let them know how it feels in a few days. You end up borrowing your roommates rolling chair to get around for the weekend.
By Monday, you can walk again. You walk miles to class every day. You ask to see a doctor, but your parents won't drive the hour to come take you, and you don't have the insurance card. You are still at their mercy for medical care. The ankle tries to heal again. This time worse than before. The tendons click with every step.
Now you're in your twenties. Finally have your own healthcare. You see a doctor. You get to mention the ankle! They say it's been too long to really even know what was damaged. That you have arthritis now. It healed wrong but it can no longer be fixed.
I'm 32 now. My ankle tells me the weather. I wear boots to keep it stable. What could have been a funny story about a fall and a cast has become a lifetime injury. Because children do not have access to medical care without a parents approval.
Finally a hand sewing tutorial on a hemline that isn't just the ladder stitch! the ladder stitch disappears when you tighten it, but it's not meant for hemlines because it breaks really easily! The overlock stitch is more stable, so it holds much longer, and it won't pucker or warp the fabric!
The really unfortunate thing about mental health progress is that sometimes you realize you've made it in the form of "wow, I haven't felt this bad in a fucking while"
On the one hand it's a bit of a pick me up in a dark place to know that this will pass because it has passed before on the other hand sometimes it isn't entirely a pleasant thought to go "wow, I used to feel like this all the time. That was pretty fucking bad. It's pretty bad right now too also."
prguitarman
baratheonpilled
dailybridgerton
vaporwave
s-u-f-j-a-n-s-t-e-v-e-n-s
gummygunk
izzy806
gracieabrams
