I had a lot of fun with this last cover for Book III (also I couldn’t find a ref online that was right for her hands, so those are actually mine, minor hand reveal)
first incidence of good writing advice i've seen in 10+ years on this platform and it's in the notes of a mustelid wreaking absolute havoc in a german grocery store
in Finland, it is illegal to kill a bear when it’s hibernating. If you ask a hunter why that is, a number of them will tell you it’s wrong simply because it is the law, and they don’t make a distinction between what is right, and what is legal. Most people like that are perfectly normal, decent and respectable people, just like the rest of us.
But if you ask people who think about things, the answer is vague. Killing a hibernating bear would just feel… impolite? You can’t fucking shoot a man when he’s sleeping, that’s just fucking rude. It’s just not the right thing to do.
Long before hunting laws were established in Finland, you couldn’t kill a sleeping bear, and what commands you is something older than law: tradition. Even at a time when hunting was a matter of life and death, and a bear fighting for its life is mainly a matter of death, you just didn’t kill a hibernating bear, you have to wake it up first. Hunters risked their lives, the lives of their brothers and everyone in the hunting party, who were friends, family and men that they loved, to give the bear a fighting chance.
In the modern time, the hunting season of bears is in the summer, for the warmest summer months. There are many reasons for why they are allowed to tread safely in autumn and to sleep in peace through the cold months, almost all of which are rational and scientific, and do not touch the old traditions.
Old faith says a living thing has many souls - henki, luonto, itse. Plants only have one - the one that wills them to grow. Animals have two, both the spark of life and nature that enables them to act. A human being also has the third, one that makes them a person, personality, itse, literally “self”. But the soul that travels in your dreams is not the soul that defines a human - animals have that one as well. When your dog runs in her sleep, her soul is elsewhere, where a dog is needed.
One’s waking soul is elsewhere when they sleep and dream. A bear’s soul is somewhere else when they are hibernating - there are two words for “hibernation” in finnish, one of which is talviuni, “winter sleep”, and that is the one that bears have - and if you kill a sleeping bear, their soul is not in the body, it is still out there, and it can find you, and as a revenge for killing its body, Ghost Bear will kill your entire fucking family.
"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 did six perfume bottle illustrations for fragrance reviews in the Russian edition of Interview Magazine. They all had very different personalities and I wanted to show visually what you otherwise would never see.
i must say, i am a huge fan of when a book is in the middle of a very exciting plot containing many interesting problems when out of nowhere for a few pages it's like, "hey by the way, real quick, here's a detailed explanation of the city's water filtration system! i'm telling you this for a reason and you should worry about it. anyway! haha okay back to the plot" and you just get to be Scared for a while
The older i get the more i understand why some people become obsessed with privacy, not because they’re hiding something, but because being constantly perceived starts to feel spiritually exhausting.
Did you know that soda machines at restaurants and movie theaters spy on you? That most common new cars now record your sexual preferences and send it to the manufacturer (and also data about anyone who also gets in your car, walks by your car, and maybe happens to be within visual range of your car)? That grocery stores are trying to force customers to download an app to scan barcodes on shelves instead of putting up prices, so the app can scan the phone, decide how much that customer should be squeezed for, and adjust the price? That more and more innocent people are being sent to jail for crimes committed hundreds of miles away because an AI facial recognition algorithm spit their faces out and the cops didn't bother to do the most basic of checks?
I am not uptight about privacy because I'm hiding something. I'm uptight about it because the people who dismiss my right to privacy are dangerous to you and me and our families, personally, all the time.
Thanks for responding to my question about why you chose Theomione as the main pairing! I was really under the impression that Draco was gone for good when i asked that 🤣🤣🤣
Tbh after getting over the initial heartbreak i kind of liked him being dead (sorry draco😔) to the point that i was actively ignoring any hints and foreshadowing that he was coming back💀 but that’s only a testament to how much you sold me on Theomione!
Draco coming back and feeling BETRAYED by seeing Theo and Hermione together was so funny to me. He is such a little shit! The audacity and entitlement!! So you can have two lovers without communicating with either of them but they can’t have each other? BYE!!! 😂
I gave this a couple weeks since there was no way to post either the ask or the answer without spoilers (oh well!) but you definitely were not the only one who thought Draco was permanently out of the picture. Writing something with big plot twists well in advance of anyone ever seeing them can be such a funny process. We were certain so many times that things we were writing were telegraphing our intent and that no one was going to believe he was dead. And even with four people beta-reading this in advance, it's just like that sometimes, you really have no idea exactly how things will play.
And as far as liking him being dead, you for sure weren't the only person who felt that way either, and we genuinely love that. Neil and I talked several times about how we felt like Book II was a success in our eyes because we do truly think we could have kept him dead and the story still would have been beautiful and complete. I suspect it would have been much shorter, and the way it wrapped up likely would have been more focused on finding happiness after grief (also would have had to find a little time to take a dark lord down) but we could have done it. Ultimately though, we had another goal for the back half of the fic in mind, and we very much look forward to selling you on Draco coming back as hard as we sold you on the Theomione.
PS, Draco, the empath who couldn't find someone else's shoes with a map and a flashlight, will never not be hysterical to me, but WE WILL GET HIM THERE
vaporwave
andulkaphoto
tangentwithtanner
baratheonpilled
discoholicmusic
