She/her, late 30s, UK Spectator of various fandoms over the years. You’ll find all of them and more stuff I like here, in no order whatsoever. Apologies for any whiplash. ~ small_creature, GoldStandardFcukUp and ForTheSakeOfConvenience on AO3
All Creatures Great and Small (2020-) as small_creature on AO3 — listed in this ACGAS post
Slow Horses (2022-) as GoldStandardFcukUp on AO3 — listed on this Slow Horses post
For All Mankind (2019-) as ForTheSakeOfConvenience on AO3 — listed in this FAM post
General warning for spoilers and canon non-compliance throughout, and I’m super flaky about updates. Sorry, it’s just who I am as a person at this stage. 🤷♀️
i can never help but laugh whenever I see aesthetic videos of people going “oh to be loved by a writer” and then show these aesthetic pictures of poets bending over their papers with ink spilled over their fingers with notes filled with beautiful flowing letters that are all full of love for the person watching it.
Meanwhile I am a writer and I know a couple of writers who look more like the conspiracy board meme whenever we’re writing, love poem or not. And when I mean conspiracy board meme I mean it, eye bags under our eyes, coffee cups in the corner bc we have enough caffeine in our system to kill a horse, notes covered in chicken scratch writing, 50 documents are opened in our computers and none of us know where our thesis paper is, let alone where your love poem I spent all night writing is while looping a song that reminds me of you.
what I’m saying is- this is very expectation versus reality.
I dunno man. The Atlantic article may or may not be true, but all the criticism of it I've seen so far is ringing very hollow to me, like it's just emitted unconsciously without a single care whether it's true.
Hypothetically, if the article were actually completely correct, would you even be able to tell (or admit it)? Or would you still pattern-match to the same set of reflexive complains about reactionary elders and whatnot?
i think the general category of claims made in the Atlantic article are ones I wouldn't be willing to accept. Not from a "i refuse to believe smartphones are making anyone dumber" so much as "i refuse to believe anyone can make an honest assessment of whether smartphones are making people dumber"
I think sociology and psychology largely belong in a conflict theory rather than a mistake theory context: people who want to tell a particular narrative construct some unrigorous set of anecdotes (in the case of this article) or perhaps pretend to conduct a few low power research studies whose results wouldn't generalize (in the case of published research studies). largely this is an exercise at arriving at a conclusion that was decided prior and is independent of observation.
so the atlantic article is just the same old saw as "the moon's phase and mercury in retrograde tell me that the youth are revolting" and it's not a matter of critiquing the methods of astrology so much as pissing on the old farts who make their appeals to it for speaking out of turn and demonstrating that they've forgotten what it was like to be young.
Not from a "i refuse to believe smartphones are making anyone dumber" so much as "i refuse to believe anyone can make an honest assessment of whether smartphones are making people dumber"
But you and the other people talking about the article seem to be going much further than that. It's one thing to say "I refuse to believe anyone can make an honest assessment of whether X is happening" (which is defensible in isolation, although I think even that is a kind of epistemological nihilism that IME is only ever selectively deployed against hypotheses one doesn't like. "isolated demands for rigor" etc.). But it's another thing entirely to slide from that into "therefore X isn't happening, and the worrying about it is caused by old fogeyism instead of any real trend".
The central claim of the article— that more and more students are arriving at college unable to complete reading tasks that many decades of prior incoming freshmen could do— is a concrete one. It may be hard to measure and subject to rose-tinted nostalgia bias, but it's not ineffable or unfalsifiable. It's a claim for which the first wave of evidence will necessarily be anecdotal, from the professors who have been doing this for a while, and only later might show up in something more quantitative and peer-reviewable. Saying that we should ignore the anecdotal data entirely (which, in the world where the trend was real, would be the only data we had for a while) and make no updates about the state of the world or an attempt to investigate more rigorously to find the truth of the matter, is a nutty way to form a world-model. It's also one that's weirdly STEM-brained ("only that which can be rigorously measured is real"), which is why I'm sort of weirded out that I'm the one arguing against it and instead insisting on the classically humanities-coded claim that we should also incorporate fuzzy, historically-informed information when deciding what to do.
I'm just baffled because, again, I'm the STEM-lord here who is supposed to be the one pooh-poohing the importance of the humanities, but instead I'm watching a bunch of humanities people insisting that "the incoming acolytes to their discipline might not be able to read" is nbd. It's odd!
Students are not what they used to be. The crisis is worse than you think.
Re: “the first wave of evidence will necessarily be anecdotal” from the above post.
I don’t see how you can not be really, really blackpilled about this, except by resorting to the same “well, every generation says this about the youth” bromides that seem very hollow to me and that this time really is different. Like, it’s looking like only barely an exaggeration to say that an entire incoming generation about to enter adult life can’t read or write and that this is structurally impossible to correct.
I'm sorry to bring this up again, but The New Yorker is forcing my hand:
Some of the evidence for the drop in literacy is thin. One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.
When Tumblr started talking about the Bleak House study, usually to disagree with it, I bit my tongue. I was thinking, "well, maybe it's mostly just Tumblr teenagers saying this". But when the New Yorker is dismissing it, I'm sorry, there's a serious problem.
No it is fucking not like "assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses"! What is wrong with you?!? These are incoming English literature majors being asked to read and understand a small amount of English literature.
The standard excuses getting trotted our here are maddening. You can't wave it off as "well, current readers can't be expected to know what the Lincoln's Inn Hall is like contemporary ones could"— the study specifically says the students were allowed to use any reference material they wanted for unfamiliar terms, and they still bombed.
Nor is the "well, this is a bad choice of book, it's too hard". This isn't Finnegans fucking Wake! Dickens had mass-market appeal and was a best-seller among commoners in his own time.
I'm going insane seeing everyone around me poo-pooing "incoming English literature majors can't read English" as probably just old men yelling at clouds. I feel like the people in January 2020 going "hey, so, this respiratory thing in China seems bad?" and getting told either that "saying this is bad would hurt Trump, so it isn't" or "saying this is bad would be racist, so it isn't".
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.
I’m going to keep banging on about this until everybody agrees with me, because every time I post these I get the same thought-terminating clichés about Socrates, xkcd 1227, Abe Simpson, etc. even while the empirical evidence just keeps mounting, and it is driving me bananas. This time it’s from the Chronicle of Higher Education, not a neoliberal old-fudder handwringing site like The Atlantic, but the bastion of “the students are always right” philosophy hegemonic to college administration for the last decade+. At some point you’ve gotta accept that literacy collapse is a real thing that’s happening right now, no matter how many people were wrong about something similar in the past.
With five seasons aired and two more in the can, the Oscar winner has hit his stride as dissolute spymaster Jackson Lamb. 'Murderous' diet n
Its fifth season aired in the fall. Two more seasons are in the can. And as author Mick Herron continues to write new books in the Slough House series, there’s no immediate end in sight.
“I mean, if I go to Book 10, 11 or 12, I’ll have to be in a walker,” Oldman jokes. “They’ll have to get a stair lift.”
He’s still sporting the facial scruff we associate with “Slow Horses’” unkempt master spy, Jackson Lamb, and as he noted last year at a SAG-AFTRA Foundation event I moderated, he still carries a few extra pounds around the midsection, the consequence of having to portray Lamb’s greasy, takeaway-container diet onscreen.
“I hadn’t seen Gary — I’d seen him on the telly — and it happened that we were filming around the same time, and I went into the makeup trailer and I [said], ‘Bloody hell!’” jokes Oldman’s “Slow Horses” co-star, Jonathan Pryce. “I thought he had a fat suit on. I didn’t realize his dedication to his craft.”
“You have to realize it’s five seasons, and it’s murderous,” Oldman answers. “It’s French fries and hot dogs and hamburgers and ice cream. It’s disgusting, isn’t it?”
The menu hasn’t changed, and neither has Lamb, still cynical and lazy, but also brilliant when he puts his mind to it, abrasive and cruel to his team, but also loyal and protective of the “losers” in his charge. Yes, outwardly, Lamb is, as Herron writes, a “sentient grease stain,” but Oldman believes he possesses a “strong moral and ethical compass.”
Over the years, Oldman has compiled what he calls a “small bible,” a journal of things that he believes may have happened to Lamb that aren’t found in Herron’s books. In fact, the most memorable scene in Season 5, where Lamb recalls a harrowing story of one of his “joes” being tortured by the East German secret police, alongside a pregnant woman, wasn’t in the book. Lamb later insists he made the whole thing up, though we learn at least some of what he said was true in the season finale.
“When you do something like that, I have to decide whether it’s true or false and then just play the scene with enough sincerity,” Oldman says. “Remember, Lamb’s a spy and a very good liar. The thing that struck me about it came at the very end. He says, ‘Well, they never got any information out of him. They wanted a name. But he never knew the f— name.’ That always struck me as an honest declamation.”
Oldman loves returning to “Slow Horses” every year and says that as long as Apple is willing to “keep writing those checks, I’m not ready to hang up my dirty raincoat just yet.”
