shark vs the universe
$LAYYYTER
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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KIROKAZE
almost home
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d e v o n
noise dept.
Noah Kahan
ojovivo
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gracie abrams
The Bowery Presents
NASA
The Stonewall Inn
untitled
Origami Around
🪼
RMH
seen from Spain
seen from Lithuania
seen from United States
seen from Australia
seen from Vietnam
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from Bangladesh
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seen from Colombia
seen from Malaysia
seen from France
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@willneverbreakme
can you remember the name of every person you’ve kissed?
yes, I remember all their names
I could name most of them but there are few I can’t remember
if you put all of them in a room I could put a name to at least half the faces
i’m not confident I could name a quarter of them, let alone half
I can’t remember more than one or two names
I’ve never kissed a soul and want to see the results
already can't pretend to care about the male loneliness epidemic because it isn't real but listening to the way men actually talk about their friends/what they think friendship entails makes me care even less sorry
read an AITA earlier today about a guy who would walk his female friend home to her dorm very often UNTIL she rejected his romantic advances*, then when she asks him to walk her home bc she's drunk and feels unsafe he says no. Men in the comments were clamoring to insist he "didn't owe her anything" and that she was a deceptive harpy who wanted to use her #femaleprivilege to get "special treatment"
and idkkkkkkk that could never be me sorry!! wym you don't care about your friends safety and are willing to mildly inconvenience yourself to ensure they are okay? no compassion or care for the people in your life but its an "epidemic" when you don't have friends? lol
#my favorite thing about every invented problem men have that is dire and world ending #is that it's none of their responsibility to fix it #'if men can't talk about their feelings are you making an effort to do that and check in with your friends?' #'no I'm acting exactly the same but now when I'm called out on being a dick I have an excuse that says it isn't my fault :)' #and now men being bad friends is women's job to fix not theirs lmao
⬆️ i've only ever seen the "male loneliness epidemic" used as a means to scold women. never as an encouragement for men to be better friends to each other
we are witnessing the gentrification of the term "tumblr sexyman" in real time and it is extremely disappointing. like no, live-action white boy #265 played by ryan gosling isn't a tumblr sexyman. i can't believe i have to say this but if it wouldn't get you shoved into a locker it probably isn't a sexyman
THIS IS WHAT I’VE BEEN SAYINGGGG
the emotion i just experienced is kind of indescribable
the funniest part of this post to me is that the reblog:like ratio is nearly 1:1. nobody’s just liking everyone who sees this video goes yeah i gotta inflict it on as many people as possible
local matchmaker losing it over yet another unrealistic demand from the clientele 🤣🤣
Translation by me. :))
“Even a slightly increased possibility of summoning rain is still an ability to summon rain” is such a good point
The Amnesty International report that JK Rowling is trying to censor through legal threats.
It can also be found on Google Drive here and on Bluesky here.
Please save and share this info where possible. This report has since been removed by Amnesty International due to legal threats of libel from JK Rowling. This information is no longer easily accessible.
58 seconds to demonstrate EXACTLY why professionalism requires manners.
For those of you who do not speak Corporate, this is just:
“Fuck you.” “Fuck you, too.”
Nah, there’s definitely some “are you fucking shitting me?” and “have you tried, perchance, using your eyeballs?” in there too.
This is a wizard duel to me.
(via mikkeneko)
Made a lowball offer on eBay as a joke and it got accepted. uh oh.
I’m so fucked
This tweet means a lot to me.
It’s probably a really cool and good sign that this post I made in 2014 is going around again, right?
How the new Odyssey movie sounds to me based off of what I’ve seen on tumblr
The Onion Headlines as Ghibli films
Spirited Away
Princess Mononoke
bonus:
Castle in the Sky
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
Howl’s Moving Castle
Kiki’s Delivery Service
Ponyo
The Cat Returns
My Neighbor Totoro
Porco Rosso
"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.
ALSO COVID. jesus fucking christ there has been a BRAIN DAMAGING VIRUS going around that causes MEASURABLE declines in cognitive functioning and ability to sustain focus and attention, and everyone is going around FUCKING WILLFULLY IGNORING THIS, it drives me absolutely goddamn FERAL
DONT ask why corvid isnt wearing a shirt bc the answer is embarrassing. (i forgor to draw it)
I kept forgetting my nighttime antidepressant so I set an alarm where the sound was a recording of me saying "HEY. TAKE YOUR FUCKING PILL" because I thought it would be funny. It was funny about three times, and then it started making me mad and I'd dismiss it right away to make it stop. So I handed my phone to my partner, who made another recording sweetly saying "Okay Shira, it's time to take your medication" and now I don't get mad anymore and I take my pill. The "compassion over punishment" camp has gotta get something wrong one of these days
If the Witches books taught me anything, it's that the mortifying ordeal of being known doesn't mean the person doing the knowing is going to automatically run for the hills. I just got to the line in Witches Abroad where Nanny says 'There was no talking to Granny when she was in that mood', whereupon she left. There's no talking to me in certain moods and it's reassuring to imagine that there's people who may tolerate that and still want to hang around.
(not to say Nanny Ogg is a perfect saint, she has her downfalls too and Granny tolerates her in turn)
Which of the following moments in British politics was funniest?
David Cameron allegedly fucking a pig (2015)
Theresa May Brexit deal sees worst parliamentary defeat of any British PM (2019)
Dominic Cummings' social distancing scandal is named #Cumgate (2021)
Matt "Eat Out to Help Out" Hancock caught having affair with his aide (2021)
MP resignations reach critical mass under Boris Johnson (2022)
The Queen dies 2 days after meeting Liz Truss (2022)
Liz Truss who doesn't outlast head of lettuce (2022)
Nigel Farage has to run in by-election against Count Binhead (2026)
I'm American and I never read news from outside of my country
Something else entirely (I'll tell you in the tags)
Note: don't let your recency bias decide this, actually think back to what was the objectively funniest time on the internet.
Grace showing up to Erid starving, discombobulated, and with every disease known to man is hilarious in a morbid way because I’m just imagine Rocky shows up like “this is my alien friend! He saved my life and we bring back the cure to saving our star! Also, he’s dying and we know little to nothing about his biology to fix it. He saved you all so you better lock in and save his life. Good luck Eridian doctors!”
This leads the Eridian Stratt's Vat being reformed and they pull in some random Eridian who wrote very a controversial paper about speculative xenobiology and they're like "we have a squishy alien and you are the Squishy Alien scientist, and it's dying so you're now recruited to save it. let's go."
I’ve said for years, to anyone who’s had the misfortune of listening to me, that if you’re ever sick on an alien planet, you shouldn’t ask for their best doctor. You should ask for their best veterinarian.
This isn’t an original idea of mine btw. I read it somewhere years ago and I don’t remember where, but it stuck with me.
Doctors know one species very well. But vets have to be able to work with many different body plans. Some of which respond in completely opposite ways and have completely different healthy states. When it comes to medication dosing, healing procedures, etc, it’s important to have a medic who is able to say “that doesn’t look good based on what I know about this specific life form.” Who are used to making highly educated guesses about something they’ve never seen before, based on their insanely wide breadth of knowledge.
Not to mention, doctors treat patients who can communicate with language. Vets are used to different forms of communication. Of course, the language thing wouldn’t be as big of a problem for a human on Erid.
I never considered asking for an academic, an expert in astrobiology. That makes a lot of sense! If I ever find myself on an alien planet, I’m definitely going to keep that one in mind.
Though I still think my best bet would be to ask for an astrobiologist, a team of veterinarians, and maybe a doctor.
Doctors know one species very well. But vets have to be able to work with many different body plans. Some of which respond in completely opposite ways and have completely different healthy states. When it comes to medication dosing, healing procedures, etc, it’s important to have a medic who is able to say “that doesn’t look good based on what I know about this specific life form.” Who are used to making highly educated guesses about something they’ve never seen before, based on their insanely wide breadth of knowledge.
Also, veterianrians know what to do with a symptom
If you tella doctor that your hair is dull and you have weird groves in your nails and both of those things coincided with you feeling bad and also your brain not braining properly anymore
They will just look at you blankly and maybe mumble something about shampoo
If you tell that to a veterinarian they will most likely go
dull fur, growth issues in the claws ... yeah that sounds bad lets do some blood tests
