todays bird
oozey mess
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
One Nice Bug Per Day
Not today Justin
Kiana Khansmith
d e v o n
Cosimo Galluzzi
blake kathryn
Mike Driver
No title available
No title available
cherry valley forever
gracie abrams
No title available
EXPECTATIONS
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Xuebing Du
Sweet Seals For You, Always
KIROKAZE
seen from Spain
seen from Spain
seen from United States
seen from Mexico
seen from Netherlands
seen from India
seen from Australia
seen from Honduras
seen from Dominican Republic
seen from Russia
seen from Uruguay
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from Venezuela
seen from France
seen from Germany
seen from Uruguay
seen from Uruguay
seen from Tunisia
seen from United States
@victorypanda
One like nitpick thing that drives me crazy is when people call Blue Whales the largest whales or the largest living mammals or some shit like that
Because yes that is true. But when you frame it like that you are completely disregarding the absolutely batshit reality that Blue Whales are the largest animals that have ever existed on earth through the entire history of the planet and they are alive right now today
sorry i went YIPPEEEEE when you unbuckled your belt it will happen again
GAME CHANGER 8.05 — “Count the Rice”
i hate when apps know that i’m screenshotting something. when i screenshot something, that’s me acting outside your realm of understanding, app. i am beyond what you consider the observable universe. you’re not supposed to perceive me. we don’t know when god screenshots the earth. we don’t know when he’s like, “okay i’m just gonna take a pic in case i ever want to add dinosaurs back to something later and don’t remember how.” and if we did, we wouldn’t act all smug about it like, “hey, you wanna share that post? you could just click here to share it.” no, man. you didn’t catch me. i screenshotted this for my own reasons. what’s next? i can’t take a photo of my computer screen with my phone out of laziness without being shamed by the printer i don’t own?
ICE killed another person in maine today, just days after the murder of lorenzo salgado araujo in houston
the maine immigrants rights coalition has released a statement confirming he was a 26 year old columbian man who was authorized to work in the US and had a valid social security number
will update this post with a gofundme link if/when one becomes available
A federal immigration agent has fatally shot a motorist in Biddeford, Maine, marking the second time in a week that U.S.
I don't have time for tumblr discourse they're calling the very hungry caterpillar degenerate art over on twitter
good art is when something looks like real life, the more real it looks the more better the art. abstracted figures give my trad children nightmares, one time they were exposed to cubism and couldn't go outside for a week
Huh fascinating, I wonder what the fash have against Eric Carle? I wonder what he might have said about his life, and influences, and early experiences that makes them say he’s part of an ‘insalubrious culture’?
Franz Marc (1880-1916) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement.
^ See THIS, THIS PART, I caught myself still having that immediate reaction of 'Wow, these are dumb and unserious people', and it's ALWAYS SOMETHING DEEPER AND MORE SINISTER.
Hanlon's Razor can fuck off.
"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!
I expected my cpap machine to make a dramatic difference right away but after waking up from my first night on the machine I think the experience can be described as I woke up and thought “well I don’t think I feel dramatically different but it also definitely feels like something in there has been unclogged”
It’s like uh like when you finally remember to clean the hair out of the shower drain after a while. But with my general vibe.
According to my app which no is not called cpapp unfortunately I only stopped breathing 1.7 times per hour. Which might sound weird but during my sleep apnea test I stopped breathing 23.5 times per hour so as you can imagine breathing is generally better than not breathing
I’m not talking about my health just to overshare btw. I think there’s probably other young people out there with sleep apnea who might need to hear someone in their 20s discussing this.
Don’t feel ashamed to get tested if you’re tired all the time or someone has told you that you gasp for air in your sleep. Get your shower drain unclogged.
I'm 35 and I got tested for sleep apnea in the fall and I was having OVER 50 EVENTS PER HOUR.
Got my cpap and holy shit the difference. I am actually rested when I go to bed at a reasonable time. I no longer need daily 2-4 hour naps just to function.
And I also suspect that it might be helping me not get as many colds, because that nightly airflow clears things out.
I'm really glad I have my cpap now and everything is better, but also wish I had got tested earlier, because maybe if I'd caught this sooner I wouldn't have developed some of the other health issues I deal with. But I thought I was so tired all the time because I'm a parent and autistic.
So yeah, even if you think you know why you're always tired, get tested just in case.
we need legislation banning games >100GB
OPTIMIZE YOUR SHIT BETTER THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR A 150GB GAME!!!
upon reviewing the notes I'm changing my position. games must be <50GB. no more mandatory 8k uncompressed textures!!! I don't believe in 8k I think it's fake
to be clear games really ought to be around 20 gigs or less. but I think in the spirit of generosity and mercy we won't criminally prosecute the developers until the file sizes breaks 50
Helldivers 2 heard you and went from 156 to 23
wait is that real
just looked it up. holy fuck. they did it by de-duplicating assets. I'm just. my jaw is on the floor. supposedly duplicating assets helps load times on HDDs but. holy fuck at what cost
it's worse than that: The Helldivers devs were told that duplicating assets would help HDD load times, but then they actually tested it and it had basically zero effect on load times!
So they had more than sextupled the size of their game by following industry standard practice that actually did basically nothing!
How did he know it was birthday?!?! HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MEEEEE
very strange cottage industry on youtube of giving exhaustive "critiques" of harry potter that amount to things like "the magic school is dangerous and that's bad!!!" and treating that with equal severity as the fatphobia or the slavery apologia, then patting themselves on the back as if this amounts to some kind of praxis
cinemasins is not praxis lol. how about materially supporting and protecting trans people from joanne and forgetting about her wizard books
I loved harry potter growing up. it made me feel seen as an abused and closeted kid. I idolized and looked up to joanne, wanting to become an author like her
then she started funnelling all her wizard book money into destroying the rights of my people and I resolved not to give her any more of my money
I didn't have to reevaluate the quality of her writing to do this. whether she's good at keeping her worldbuilding consistent or whatever has nothing to do with my decision to boycott her work. who cares how good or bad her writing is. she's killing trans people
OP, you get it. This is exactly the problem.
I'm gonna be honest for a second. I cant believe people still care about Taylor swift.
This CANNOT be left in the tags you came with RECEIPTS
Sorry, @akinari-kashihara , she invited who the fuck to her wedding??
Hi sorry
The contractor's company is responsible for running ICE's largest detention centre.
Just tried to play an ancient flute and it started filling the room with this awful miasma that wont go away
Why does staff still allow people funnier than you to leave tags on your posts. They should have fixed that by now
Having been on both Tumblr and reddit for many years, I've noticed that they're extremely similar to one another up to a point, and it is where exactly that point is drawn which also makes them so fundamentally different.
Redditors and Tumblr users will both gladly call their respective hangouts a "hellsite," shit-talk both the hypothetical average user and call their website's management incompetent corporate shitbags. They will both whine endlessly about features the site does or doesn't have and react with deep hostility to any change, and often with good reason because these websites have a long history of pushing absolute dogshit on their users. Both have massive problems with bots.
The difference is that reddit fucking hates when you post your own creations, and Tumblr is a website where literally the only thing people respect is when you post your own creations.
For anyone wondering, the PhD student's name is Myra Cheng.
Here's a link to an article about the study from the Stanford Report: link.
Across three preregistered studies, participants interacting with sycophantic AI became more convinced of their own rightness and less willing to repair relationships. Yet at the same time, participants rated sycophantic AI models as higher quality, more trustworthy, and more desirable for future use, which may explain why this behavior has persisted despite its harmful impacts.
Myra Cheng et al. "Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence." Science 391, eaec8352 (2026).
