We have a friend, a very dear friend, who we have watched slowly be more and more restricted by chronic illness and genetic conditions over the last year. Although ilgaksu has faced many chronic conditions before, the recent triggering of some rare genetic conditions have made their life much more challenging, and, due to treatment being largely handled by private providers with high rates, the only way to get help is to reach out to you for aid in getting them some proper ptreatment.
Early in 2025, a viral infection triggered a series of health crises which quickly snowballed in terms of severity and distress, including emergency surgery to prevent sepsis from taking hold. ilgaksu had to see a variety of medical professionals to get any sort of understanding of what they were experiencing, many of whom have been misdiagnosing them for years.
Turns out, the primary culprits are likely rare genetic conditions! We're pretty sure we know what they are, but unfortunately, with many of these conditions being so rare, the only feasible way to actually be diagnosed and receive proper treatment is through private providers. Which is where we need your help!
Treatment is crucial, but the medical care is costly. So much so that we are now at the point where we need help from anyone who has ever enjoyed the work they've done, or the bonds made in fandom, or anywhere else with this amazing person.
Our goal is to be able to afford private healthcare appointments, medications, treatment plans and testing as well as any travel that will be required to do so. The initial costs for this upfront are high, and we hope that once they are stable many of these will stop eating away at their ability to enjoy life as it is doing right now.
You can help support ilgaksu's GoFundMe here https://gofund.me/eba0202f8.
Please help us tell genetics a very resounding "not fucking today, Satan!".
"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.
still caring about internet friends you lost touch with years ago is so embarrassing. yeah i had a deam we met up irl recently. the last time we spoke was maybe 7-8 years ago. i still wear the laces we randomly decided was a sign of our friendship. i dont know what any of your socials are or if youre even active on any. sometimes i see someones art resemble yours and i wonder for hours. do you still go by that name you chose? whenever i see it i wonder if its you. we couldve passed each other in this vastness a thousand times and not have a clue.
I was tagged by @ilgaksu thanks so much for thinking of me. I'm gonna tag... hmm the usual suspects I think @momosandlemonsoda @eclecticinkling @tanrak and @silenciadelumbrae because I want to know how your brain works like studying a bug under a magnifying glass. Anyone else who sees this and wants a go, have at it!
last song: Hate You by Jim Yosef and Riell, if we're talking about what was last in my ears, but in terms of most recently discovered banger I think it has to go to 孽（Karmic Sin) by · 大猫AIGC · Oldbaby
currently watching: I recently finished Hazbin Hotel S1 and S2, otherwise video essays or letsplays seem to be the vibes lately.
currently reading: Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir, Water Moon - Samantha Sotto Yambao, Everything is Tuberculosis - John Green, Heated Rivalry - Rachel Reid (reread for comfort because Reasons)
current obsession: falling asleep to friends playing video games
currently working on: expanding my dnd universe with even more blorbo dolls to torment others (my DM) with
last search: what time the bagel shop closes
favourite flowers: I think I would have to go with multi-toned carnations, or maybe datura flowers because I've been researching them a lot lately, but anything with multiple colours looks nicest to me. I do think its funny how sunflowers were mentioned because apparently everyone says they associate them with me, even though they try to murder me if we share airspace.
Three hacktivists tried to find a workaround to Discord’s age-verification software. Instead, they found its frontend exposed to the open in
Ten days ago, the social chat app Discord announced that it would launch “teen-by-default” settings for its global audience. As part of this update, all new and existing users worldwide will have a teen-appropriate experience, with updated communication settings, restricted access to age-gated spaces, and content filtering that preserves privacy and meaningful connections, the platform said.
This, of course, means that to use Discord the way you are used to, you’ll have to let it scan your face, and the internet wasn’t happy. Many communities quickly announced their move to other platforms. Others, like the security researcher Celeste, who goes by the handle vmfunc, were convinced there would be a workaround.
Together with two other researchers, they set out to look into Persona, the San Francisco-based startup that’s used by Discord for biometric identity verification – and found a Persona frontend exposed to the open internet on a US government authorized server.
“Beyond offering simple services to estimate your age, Persona’s exposed code compares your selfie to watchlist photos using facial recognition, screens you against 14 categories of adverse media from mentions of terrorism to espionage, and tags reports with codenames from active intelligence programs consisting of public-private partnerships to combat online child exploitative material, cannabis trafficking, fentanyl trafficking, romance fraud, money laundering, and illegal wildlife trade.”
We have a friend, a very dear friend, who we have watched slowly be more and more restricted by chronic illness and genetic conditions over the last year. Although ilgaksu has faced many chronic conditions before, the recent triggering of some rare genetic conditions have made their life much more challenging, and, due to treatment being largely handled by private providers with high rates, the only way to get help is to reach out to you for aid in getting them some proper ptreatment.
Early in 2025, a viral infection triggered a series of health crises which quickly snowballed in terms of severity and distress, including emergency surgery to prevent sepsis from taking hold. ilgaksu had to see a variety of medical professionals to get any sort of understanding of what they were experiencing, many of whom have been misdiagnosing them for years.
Turns out, the primary culprits are likely rare genetic conditions! We're pretty sure we know what they are, but unfortunately, with many of these conditions being so rare, the only feasible way to actually be diagnosed and receive proper treatment is through private providers. Which is where we need your help!
Treatment is crucial, but the medical care is costly. So much so that we are now at the point where we need help from anyone who has ever enjoyed the work they've done, or the bonds made in fandom, or anywhere else with this amazing person.
Our goal is to be able to afford private healthcare appointments, medications, treatment plans and testing as well as any travel that will be required to do so. The initial costs for this upfront are high, and we hope that once they are stable many of these will stop eating away at their ability to enjoy life as it is doing right now.
You can help support ilgaksu's GoFundMe here https://gofund.me/eba0202f8.
Please help us tell genetics a very resounding "not fucking today, Satan!".
unironically i think we need to bring back computer labs because APPARENTLY some people WERENT taught basic computer literacy and internet safety in school
things about computers/the internet i think kids should be formally taught in schools because theyre important to know and the amount of soon to be grown adults i know who know NOTHING about any of these is quite frankly almost all of them (and resources to learn if you dont know these things, because its never to late to get better with computers)
how to troubleshoot by yourself when you have a technical problem
what common file types are
some very basics on how to use ""developer tools"" on your computer (because i cant think of a better way to refer to them) like task manager and command prompt (and their mac equivalents, terminal and activity monitor ofc)
how to read and understand a privacy policy and what your personal data is, as well as what it being collected actually means and steps you can take to keep it private
how to understand terms of service
(hey. if you have trouble with reading legalese and worry about being able to understand these policies anyways, here's a site that gives basic summaries of privacy policies and ToS)
what a cookie actually is
internet privacy and your digital footprint!! seriously i dont know why we stopped teaching people that they shouldnt be putting their entire real identity online in a world where your online actions can ruin you irl
basic safety measures like antivirus software (and why you should use it or if the built in one on windows or mac is enough for you) and backing up your computer (also a mac guide)
common keyboard shortcuts (and on mac)
as an additional note: things i think everyone should know on computers and the internet but schools may bit hesitant to teach about for whatever moral/legal standards schools pretend to operate on
vpns and adblockers! (btw for most of these where you can pay for things im purposefully not recommending any specific software but seriously just use ublock origin for an adblocker)
how to not get a virus while pirating something
what a temporary email is and when to use one
red flags that you shouldn't trust a website (and how to quickly check the security of a site)
what javascript on a website does and how to disable it to get around paywalls
ok one last addition! if you want to take it one level higher, i think learning the very basics of at least one programming language is good for people. it makes computers less scary and it makes you feel very cool, and a lot of people get discouraged about it because it seems overly complicated and hard to learn outside a formal classroom setting, so heres some resources for learning the very basics of python (because i consider it the easiest language to learn and knowing one language will make it easier to learn others)
an online compiler so you dont need to download anything or worry about running code directly on your computer if that makes you nervous
a basic video guide to introduce you to python and walk you through beginner steps
a guide to some syntax and commands you should know (this was literally my lifeline in my first CS class)
some performance tasks to give you things to code to practice and assess yourself
I hope this is the worst day or your life. I hope this is the absolute rock bottom. I do. Because as bad as it is, as awful as it feels, it’s almost over. And you never have to do it again. And if this is as bad as it ever gets, then you can make it through anything. You can do better. I want this moment to be your absolute worst so I know that your future is better
2/3 Confirmed, So Now There Is "Fuck You Genetics" Cake!
First of all, we want to thank everyone for all the support we've received so far! It means so, so much to see the love spread for ilgaksu, and how many people have done what they could to help out. Every contribution has been crucial in getting ilgaksu the appointments and testing needed to make a diagnosis.
Recently, ilgaksu has had appointments and testing with specialists that have confirmed two of the genetic conditions we expected. We can now work on helping ilgaksu rebuild their daily life with some of the treatment options this has offered us. We have also discovered some treatments that help alleviate some symptoms, though there is still a long way to go in fully addressing these conditions.
We are in the process of arranging yet another specialist to confirm the final condition. This will involve some long distance travel, and this where a lot of your continued support will go. We are hopeful that once these conditions are confirmed, we can fully begin treatment and help ilgaksu return to their work and hobbies.
We know many of you have already shared and donated. We still need your help to make sure ilgaksu can continue to receive medications and treatment. We come to you again asking for help — donate, share, and help us help ilgaksu!
Find the link and further updates here: ilgaksu GoFundMe
Thank you again for all you have already done to support ilgaksu. We truly appreciate it from the bottom of our hearts.
“what if kids identify with something and it ends up just being a phase-?” good. stop teaching and expecting kids (and adults honestly) to formulate permanent traits and ideas of themselves. everything in life is a phase. that doesn’t make it any less legitimate while you experience it. let people explore themselves and know it’s okay if what you think about yourself changes.
I have a friend who identified as trans for a bit but doesn’t anymore. Verified cisgender. Gave it a good shot. Good for her. Stellar ally. Her dad being a dick about it still damaged their relationship. It doesn’t matter that the identity didn’t last. The memory of how he reacted does.
We have a friend, a very dear friend, who we have watched slowly be more and more restricted by chronic illness and genetic conditions over the last year. Although ilgaksu has faced many chronic conditions before, the recent triggering of some rare genetic conditions have made their life much more challenging, and, due to treatment being largely handled by private providers with high rates, the only way to get help is to reach out to you for aid in getting them some proper ptreatment.
Early in 2025, a viral infection triggered a series of health crises which quickly snowballed in terms of severity and distress, including emergency surgery to prevent sepsis from taking hold. ilgaksu had to see a variety of medical professionals to get any sort of understanding of what they were experiencing, many of whom have been misdiagnosing them for years.
Turns out, the primary culprits are likely rare genetic conditions! We're pretty sure we know what they are, but unfortunately, with many of these conditions being so rare, the only feasible way to actually be diagnosed and receive proper treatment is through private providers. Which is where we need your help!
Treatment is crucial, but the medical care is costly. So much so that we are now at the point where we need help from anyone who has ever enjoyed the work they've done, or the bonds made in fandom, or anywhere else with this amazing person.
Our goal is to be able to afford private healthcare appointments, medications, treatment plans and testing as well as any travel that will be required to do so. The initial costs for this upfront are high, and we hope that once they are stable many of these will stop eating away at their ability to enjoy life as it is doing right now.
You can help support ilgaksu's GoFundMe here https://gofund.me/eba0202f8.
Please help us tell genetics a very resounding "not fucking today, Satan!".
I cannot emphasize enough that you not only COULD, it was ENCOURAGED. Blank video tapes for recording whatever you wanted were available everywhere and it was hard to miss the record button on the machines. They also deliberately designed stuff like VHS players that you could tell when to start recording things - as a kid I'd tell the player to record the cartoon channel beginning at 6 or 7 and then sleep in and watch the tape later - and then they would tell you how to do it in the owner's manual, this was no secret. You were SUPPOSED TO record shows you wanted to keep or that you wouldn't be home for to watch later.
Blank DVDs were also a thing and you were encouraged to transfer your VHS to DVD so you could continue owning your VHS but now with all the benefits of a DVD... like physical media is truly a fucking gift, and I cannot stress that enough
