“The police spend very little of their time dealing with violent criminals—indeed, police sociologists report that only about 10% of the average police officer’s time is devoted to criminal matters of any kind. Most of the remaining 90% is spent dealing with infractions of various administrative codes and regulations: all those rules about how and where one can eat, drink, smoke, sell, sit, walk, and drive. If two people punch each other, or even draw a knife on each other, police are unlikely to get involved. Drive down the street in a car without license plates, on the other hand, and the authorities will show up instantly, threatening all sorts of dire consequences if you don’t do exactly what they tell you. The police, then, are essentially just bureaucrats with weapons. Their main role in society is to bring the threat of physical force—even, death—into situations where it would never have been otherwise invoked, such as the enforcement of civic ordinances about the sale of untaxed cigarettes.”
— An excerpt from Ferguson & the Criminalization of American Life by David Graeber (via actjustly)
since i think many will have had the memory slip with just how many other atrocities have occured in the past 11 years, or are simply too young to remember, the last bit about the sale of untaxed cigarettes isn’t just some hypothetical, it’s a reference to the killing of eric garner
this is the origin of the slogan “i cant breathe”, which was revived in the wake of the killing of george floyd.
with few exceptions we have only seen black characters graphically get brutalized. they had closeups of louis’s body and face after lestat tried to murder him showing the extent of what was done, we saw just how burned and disfigured he was after her suicide attempt, claudia’s death is one of the most graphic i’ve seen on any tv show, we got closeups of their ankles slashed and shots of louis being kicked in the head and claudia being shoved into a box of live rats by the coven members. the majority of louis’s scenes in episode 7 were of his decapitated head on a pike, forced to look at his body as it flailed, begging to die, forced to apologize in something so close to a saw trap that it was bordering on copyright infringement while being painted as cruel and deserving of the abuse and then branded by armand.
we didn’t see any shots of lestat’s head in the bowling bag. we saw him burn, but it was portrayed as comical. we did not see bruce as he died, we did not see lestat get torn up by the wolves, we did not watch nicki die. in the majority of the scenes where a white character is injured, the action is cut away, out of frame, out of focus, mostly implied.
the extent of what we saw of the brutality of black characters now feels almost fetishistic. at the end of episode 105, lestat is floating in the air looking dreamy and louis is beaten to a pulp on the ground; episode 207, lestat is put together in a suit with his hair done and louis and claudia have been severely beaten. like, after this season, the rest of the show just looks weird.
i designed this piece to resemble a chest that is post-mastectomy top surgery, just like mine; raven's wings and torso represent pectoral muscles, and his legs and talons are double incision scars.
in tsimshian adaawx (true tellings, not folklore or myth) as well as some neighbouring nations, it's said that raven used to be white long ago. as is often the case for trans people, i made drastic changes to my presentation and body from what i was born/grew up with/pressured into; so i found meaning that raven once looked very different too. it's also an analogy for adaptation: the white half of raven represents the old ways, & the black, modern times - ntvs broadly have had to adapt our ways as colonization continues, & i think two-spirit people have a unique relationship with this; we try to find ourselves in our histories that are sometimes nearly totally erased, we move in & out of colonial genders & western LGBT identities as it suits us.
also, raven is very resourceful & transforms into other beings; likewise, we adapt & transform. hes also self-motivated - not even stealing the sun is off limits! we are also by necessity self-propelled, tenaciously chasing down treatment or making other transformations. even when we have to sneak under the noses of authority figures in our lives to do it.
this split between two also gets at my own experience - in english terms, i'm approximately nonbinary. i needed T & top surgery, but my transition was not to a man but a different "woman" gender. it's very painful for me that under colonial gender, i am flattened. i'm more comfortable than ever as this new kind of woman, but i had to accept that many will initially perceive me as a man, even if i'm rarely read as cis. it's like i'm inbetween two worlds - and my life is MILES better for not dealing with severe dysphoria now that i'm mostly done with my transition, don't get me wrong, but it hurts to not be seen for the wholeness of the role that i occupy.
some other details: the two faces on raven's hips with hands up symbolizes support from within & out, and how we are in dialogue with ourselves, our communities, & the universe. it's a call to action to support 2S natives, & an acknowledgement of those who uphold it.
the gold ovoid is the sun, which he stole. the sun shines on us all no matter who we are. he's also holding more light in his talons - medicine, which is transition, transformation, and community.
Goodmorning to the Anthropic Claude AI training scraper that suddenly decided to request 660 thousand pages (exactly the number I had remaining on the starter plan) and brought Pikiwedia down.
Sudden switch from diverse user agents like chrome, safari, messenger preview to Just Claudebot. I'm not even mad though, this is maybe the funniest thing possible, because I've inadvertently poisoned their training data with thousands of fucked up articles with normal urls.
Pikiwedia perseveres, back up with a better robots.txt. I hope Anthropic has a gery vood time with Pikiwedia's data :))
Tbh I don't even know if I want to finish watching TVL at this point. I havent seen this last week's episode but idk how the last episode next Sunday can reconcile all the hate and bigotry and racist tone deaf shit not just from the season so far but from the promotional decisions before the show aired.
Yes, Lestat is racist and misogynistic and a narcissist. And yes, they have done a decent job with the show portraying his abuse and the "Why" of him being the monster he is. And of course Lestat would forgive himself for his bad behavior because he has too. He can't cope with guilt at all so he ignores it. But not one other character has been given graces this season. Not when we're taken away from Lestats narrative. Not when we're given other characters POV while Lestat is living through his meltdown. And leading up to this other Poc cast members were almost entirely erased from promotional material. I don't think we got a single promotional interview with Delainey Hayles answering more than one question or sitting in silence.
I value media that is hard to watch because of the horrible things the characters do. It is important to have media that directly addresses racial and sexual violence and doesn't forgive it or ignore it. But I have to agree with a lot of the rest of the fan base, especially poc and black fans, this season has handled those things insultingly poorly. If they had black writers in the writers room it 100% would have been done better. But the producers and Rolin Jones are racist and they made a show for racists.
I love The Vampire Chronicles and I'm grateful that I can read them and be conscious of their faults. I value that in that writing you can so clearly see the fears and traumas and pain of a monolith of an author that in her own life exerted so much cruelty and care and hate and love and existed in such an unarguable grey area.
I loved the first two seasons of IWTV. Every change they made to the original story made it better without changing the overall themes or messaging. If anything it made the emotion more palpable. And you could tell it was re-told with such love and excitement from the crew and cast.
But this season feels more like the Mayfair Witches and Talamasca. This feels like a money grab. And I don't want to give money and attention to a room of writers and producers this comfortable and confident with jerking off racists.
Making Claudia into a one dimensional lying angry black woman stereotype when she had a cold righteous rage that simmered through all of her injustice is just so disheartening. Her complex relationship with her parental figures was so nuanced where love, respect, disappointment, and resentment merged into a special highlight of the show. A strange rant where she's inexplicably racist and hateful to Louis over the man she compared to a literal tyrant slave owner feels so off. She has the right to be angry at them both but the implication that Louis was the worst person to her serves nothing other than the writer's agenda to discount the beauty of s1 and 2.
incredibly sorry for the black writers and directors of the previous two seasons who thought they were building something. I am so sorry that your work was not respected and now dismissed by this new season. I am so sorry that the love and care with which you crafted the characters, especially of Louis and Claudia was so resented that the current writers' room chose to dilute all. I am so sorry that you are having to see the anti blackness in full force on a formerly black led show and everything you worked on- your vision- it was all wiped off. I am so sorry to Jacob and Delainey for having to work with those scripts.
There’s a happy ending to, because the robbery was unsuccessful, the couple ended up getting the money Eden needed from a movie inspired by em! Also John only had to serve part of his sentence. Check out their wedding photos btw they’re beautiful.
"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.
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!
