Thanks to a pair of a bionic gloves, this 80-year-old classical pianist can finally play the piano again. The maestro, JoĆ£o Carlos Martins, had lost dexterity in his hands due to aging and health complications. His face at being able to play piano again says it all. š¶
JoĆ£o Carlos Martins isnāt just any pianist, heās one of the best pianists alive today. The dude has been playing piano for over 70 years (his career started when he was 11, but by the time he was 8 he had already won a contest playing Bach), and out of those 70, 56 years he spent playing with some kind of disability in his hands.
By the time he was 20 years old, JoĆ£o Carlos had already been invited by Eleanor Roosevelt to play at the Carnegie Hall, played with the biggest north american orchestras, and recorded the entire work of Bach for the piano. At the height of his skills, he could play 21 notes per second.
In 1965, at 24 years old, he suffered an accident during a soccer match which ended up causing an injury on his right elbow, damaging his ulnar nerve and atrophying 3 of his fingers. This caused him to stop playing for a year, and to play with difficulty until his 30s.
After long periods of physical therapy, but still with much difficulty, he returned to the stages and was received several positive reviews and was acclaimed by the public. However, he ended up developing a work-related musculoskeletal disorder, which forced him to stop playing again.
This wasnāt enough to make him give up on his musical career, and even with atrophied fingers and paralyzed hands, he still managed to play and record all basically of Bachās work from 1979 to 1985, still being wildly popular despite his difficulties.
However, the worst would come in 1995: at 55 years old, during a robbery in Bulgaria, JoĆ£o Carlos was struck in the head with an iron bar, resulting in neurological sequelae which paralyzed his right arm. After a lot of physical and neurological therapy, he managed to move his right hand again enough to play the piano with both hands, but due to a worsening of his condition, at 58, he started to develop troubles not only moving his hand, but also speaking, so he had to go through another surgery. It didnāt seem like he would recover much movement in his hand after surgery, however, so he used the short time he had before his hand atrophied completely to record one last CD with both hands.
In 2001, at 61, he recorded the album Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, written by Maurice Ravel for Paul Wittgenstein, an austrian pianist who lost his right arm during World War 1.
His intention was to record 8 albums using only his left hand, however, his left hand developed a disease called Dupuytrenās contracture, causing his fingers to become permanently bent and contracted, as well as causing pain. He went through another surgery, this time in his left hand, but it didnāt prevent him from losing movement in his left hand, causing him to have to abandon the piano, seemingly for good.
This still didnāt keep him away from music, and after learning to conduct from a friend of his, he became a conductor in 2003, at 63 years old. Due to his paralyzed fingers, JoĆ£o Carlos couldnāt actually hold the baton or even turn the pages in the score (at least not fast enough to not stall the music), however, so instead the maestro simpy memorized every score note by note. He memorized, on average, 5000 score pages. (Unfortunately, he started to develop dystonia on his left arm, causing it to twitch, which caused him to have to stop conducting for a while, but he came back shortly after and has been conducting ever since.)
He went through another brain surgery in 2012, to recover the movements in his left hand, but at this point it was so atrophied he hadnāt even opened it in 10 years. He still occasionally played the piano in important events, and he even played at the opening of the 2016 Summer Paralympics in Rio, but his playing was very slow and he could barely use his fingers, playing only a single note per second (compare with his 21 notes per seconds back when he was young).
(JoĆ£o Carlos Martins playing at an event in SĆ£o Bernardo do Campo, 2013)
His bionic gloves were custom made by an industrial engineer, after said engineer saw him playing live and thought he could probably come up with something to help him. After he approached JoĆ£o Carlos to offer his help, the bionic gloves got ready just in time for him to play at the 466 anniversary of the city of SĆ£o Paulo, in 2020, where JoĆ£o Carlos claimed āthis is the first time in 22 years I place all 10 fingers in the keyboardā. Now, in 2021, he often posts videos of himself playing, and he always gets very emotional while doing so, and he is hardly seen without his new bionic gloves.
A diagnosis of the scrambled political culture of todayās Atlantic elites, with Trump read as symptom as much as cause. Can the concept of h
This golden age for Western governing elites nevertheless bred potential problems for their class rule. First, the very transformation of asset wealth on which the new elite floated threatened to fracture the internal coherence of the ruling classes, for whom wealth, power and territory had traditionally gone hand in hand. The effects of economic globalizationābringing foreign-institutional ownership of national assets and the dilution of local capitalist classes, amid the swirl of international fundsāhas also broken the previous links of kinship and culture between state elites and asset-owners.
on the de-linking of the capital and state and the structure of neoliberal class coherency
As Herman Mark Schwartz puts it: āthe strata of elites whose cooperation is necessary for making the system runā now āprioritize their own private interests at the expense of their collective class interests.ā [...]
On the horiāzontal plane, meanwhile, the governing classes struggle to craft cohesion between different fractions of capital and help asset owners articulate interests across sectoral or geographic lines. This in turn renders strategic coherence difficultāsomething evident in the geo-economic tumult of the past year, from the tariff bonanza to the destruction of Gulf oil-and-gas infrastructure and terrorization of the low-wage migrant workforce. [...]
First, the reading proposed does not imply elite control over the social surplus has somehow diminished; there are good grounds to say it has increased. Yet the political unmooring of Western elites has widened the gaps between different fractions of capital and made long-term planning across them more difficult. Hence Krastevās wonder over Trumpās ārevolutionary sense of temporalityāāan actor who has mercilessly seized on the apertures left by vanishing elite integrators, whose smash-and-grab politics at least promises direct gain. As the model hyperpolitician, Trump seems to offer easy rewards in the sordid struggle over rents. [...]
bourgeois class incoherence has significantly more explanatory power than treating "capital" as a unified bloc
"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
When I asked why, a student answered honestly: It was too long, and she kept losing track of what the paper was about. This was not a remedial class: These were students who had cleared the admissions process and written essays good enough to get them here. Yet a routine academic reading assignment had defeated them.
Every generation of professors has complained that their students cannot read. The lament is usually overblown, but data have caught up to anecdote, and what I am seeing in my classroom is no longer a hunch. There is a measurable, generational collapse in sustained reading and writing, and the academy is responding to it with improvisation and exhaustion rather than the structural overhaul it requires.
In February 2024, Adam Kotsko, who teaches in the Shimer Great Books School at North Central College, wrote in Slate that students who once handled 30 pages of reading per class meeting now seem āintimidated by anything over 10 pages and seem to walk away from readings of as little as 20 pages with no real understanding.ā Crucially, he added that this is ānot a matter of laziness on the part of the studentsā but of underlying skills they were never given a chance to build.
The Chronicle of Higher Educationās 2024 investigation found the same pattern across institutions as different as the Stevens Institute of Technology and Wellesley College, where the average SAT exceeds 1400. Nicholaus Gutierrez, an assistant professor at Wellesley, told The Chronicle that the baseline for what students consider a reasonable amount of work has dropped so noticeably that he has cut his readings accordingly; a 750-word essay now strikes many students as long. At Stevens, the science and technology studies associate professor Theresa MacPhail described following the mantra of āmeet your students where they areā for so long that she has begun to feel ālike a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard.ā
Worse, the national data tell the same story in colder language. On the 2011 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) writing assessment, which is the most recent comprehensive writing benchmark, only 24 percent of 12th graders reached the Proficient level, and just 3 percent reached Advanced; another 21 percent scored below Basic. The reading side of the ledger is worse, and getting worse fast: The 2024 NAEP results released in September 2025 show 12th-grade reading scores at the lowest level recorded since the assessment began in 1992. Thirty-two percent of 12th graders now score below NAEP Basic in reading, meaning that, in the assessmentās own language, they likely ācannot draw general conclusions based on concepts presented explicitly in a text.ā And yet more than half of these same seniors reported being accepted to a four-year college. That last sentence is the whole problem in one line: We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.
Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.
I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austinās McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participantās smartphone ā whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision ā measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japanās Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.
So when a student tells me they ākept losing trackā of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.
Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled āYour Brain on ChatGPT.ā They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays ā one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing ā and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and āconsistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.ā Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term ācognitive debtā for the lingering deficit.
This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brainās engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the studentās mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not āfree students up for higher-order work.ā It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.
There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their Kā12 schooling. Whatever the standardsā original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling āevidenceā from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on āfinding the main ideaā in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as āsevere or very severe.ā
In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that āthinking is becoming a luxury good.ā The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.
I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a ādeep workā lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.
I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a sourceās claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into āthis is goodā and āmaybe add more detailsā the moment I step back.
But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.
Iām afraid I donāt have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?
Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?
Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? Kā12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?
The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that āstudents will adapt.ā They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish studentsā sentences before theyāve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."
ā Tyler Jagt, 1 June 2026, "My Students Canāt Read"
The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
Iām so fucking tired of people making these big pronouncements about fantasy genre conventions and tropes and they just reference Tolkien and Gygax and maybe Lovecraft, and just absolutely skipping entirely over Robert E Howard and Michael Moorcock! They have influenced sword and sorcery vastly more than HPL, and Gygax just lifted from them and itās Vexing watching people lecturing about the subject while avoiding these absolutely foundational writers
I've been reading the Elric of Melnibone books recently and yeah, holy shit. Chaos vs Law, planeswalking, the eight pointed star, evil MC that's sad about itāand plenty more. DnD and Warhammer (at least) wouldn't be what they are without everything that they borrowed from Moorcock.
This has been my main argument against "AI" from the very beginning.
OpenAI scraped the entire web. All of which had been a labor of love from humans. Wikipedia is the backbone of a lot of LLMs, and that was volunteer human labor. They stole it and now they're selling it back to us.
And worse, they're trying to destroy the free sources that they stole from. It's destruction of human knowledge on an unprecedented scale. The burning of the library of Alexandria has nothing on this.
Gustave CaillebotteĀ - The Floor Scrapers (1875-6)
Original on top, later version below
āDespite the effort Caillebotte put into the painting, it was rejected by Franceās most prestigious art exhibition, The Salon, in 1875. The depiction of working-class people in their trade, not fully clothed, shocked the jurors and was deemed a āvulgar subject matter.āĀ
The images of the floor scrapers came to be associated with Degasās paintings of washerwomen, also presented at the same exhibition and similarly scorned as āvulgarāā.
No Air Conditioner. Everything feels pretty bad right now ngl.
Rest in Peace to all those dying of heatstroke or other such conditions.
Climate Change is real. And we are going to need massive investments in green energy, heating, and air conditioning to combat this.
Generative AI and the artist discussion is such a distraction from AIās military and police applications or its role in automating hiring discrimination.
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