Study for those interested

loooooove this ask.

I’ve never tried to come up with an exhaustive list before, but it seems like most fantasy religions fall under a few basic categories:

Bland Polytheism. disguises itself as fun world-building but nothing about the invented religion has any effect on the plot or on any of the characters’ deepest beliefs. the whole thing is just the thinnest possible excuse to use “gods” and “damn” as profanities. some stuff I hate here (Game of Thrones) and some stuff I like (Assassin’s Apprentice)

Catholicism with Mormonism Underneath. irrationality, power dynamics, and “tradition” hiding under the smells, bells, and visible hierarchy of Catholicism. (from what I remember, Pratchett’s Monstrous Regiment falls here.)

Catholicism with Aztec Child Sacrifice Underneath. see above, except with worse outrages. (a whole slew of Doctor Who episodes fit here lol)

Catholicism with Materialism Underneath. oh so the gods we pray to were actually just regular people who were especially powerful magic users, and all magic users are actually just scientists? should we throw a party? should we invite Richard Dawkins? (Grishaverse)

Boring-Ass Modern Liberal Polytheistic Patronage. think D&D. a strong vibe of Religion is A Free Association of People Like a Social Club, You Choose Your Gods And All Are Equally Valid. especially boring-ass because faith is typically used as a tool to get the individual power to do what they want to do. (the Vox Machina show falls here; I can’t speak to the podcast)

in all these cases, the writer is using religion as a way to talk about human stories—stuff that’s wholly on the horizontal level, doesn’t touch on transcendence at all. maybe you’re literally just using your made-up religion as punctuation, as in the case of “oh my gods”. maybe your intricately described religious hierarchy is a way to explore the abuse of power (as there can obviously be in real religions!). maybe the whole point of talking about your made-up religion is to say “behind this thing I believed in there is nothing but humans vying for power”. but there’s nothing in these stories that’s specific to religion. and that’s probably not objectively bad, but it is boring and lazy to me!! give me characters who have genuine faith! give me gods who break into the narrative! give me miracles! give me the tension between freedom and Providence, suffering and trust! if this religion was real, what would it mean?? what would it be like to live in that world???

there are only a few books that do something interesting with their fantasy religion. two in particular come to mind as truly outstanding examples:

The Queen’s Thief, by Megan Whalen Turner. from QoA onward, one of the strongest themes is how suffering and freedom fits into the divine plan. how do you have faith in a god who chooses you but also allows you to undergo tragedy? what does it mean to serve a god who has their own plan? what happens to your ordinary life when you discover the gods are very, very real?

The Curse of Chalion, by Lois McMaster Bujold. like TQT, there’s a moment where the wholly horizontal plot is broken into, the vertical dimension is revealed, and everything changes. the gods being real makes a difference.

edit to add: The Witness for the Dead, by Katherine Addison! what does vocation mean? can you answer the Call beyond what you feel worthy of?

Princess of the Midnight Ball gets a shout-out for having Plain Ol’ Literal Catholicism, including an interdict plot point. Spinning Silver gets a shout-out for the “if I’m going to marry an ice fey king he darn well better respect my Jewish traditions” bit. City of Brass is fantasy Islam instead of fantasy paganism or Catholicism, but I can’t speak to anything in that book other than Dara, whom I hated and despised.

a full animatronic!

but hold the "nobody" trick!

and hold penelope's test!

and hold penelop's test— HEY YOU! GIVE ME AN ODYSSEY WITH NOTHING

nothing? :[

A few years ago I shared some of my favourite artists for Unicorn Day, so I thought it would be fun to do the same for Fairy Day!

First up is Selina Fenech! She has been one of my favourite artists for years. I have many of her artworks, oracle decks, and statues. I adore how she captures the Fair Folk, and she makes unicorns too!

Janna Prosvirina is another long-time favourite. I love her watercolour style and bright colours. There is always so much to find in her artworks

Lynne Bellchamber's work is so soft and ethereal. I adore it

The art of Toshiasan (Alex Bojarska) is just such a whimsical view into a different world. The art is gorgeous, and I love the world of the tiny sized fairies

Are there words to describe the absolute beauty of Annie Stegg Gerard's art? I haven't found them yet, I think

Sara Burrier I've also been a fan of for a long time. I love both her bright coloured works and her nature themed ones. They radiate such tranquility and joy

Of course there are many more, so I will also be reblogging some of my favourite arts by artists right here on Tumblr.

Cutting - in my opinion, the most labor intensive part of the process. The amount of time/effort needed varies depending on the pattern and if seam allowance is included or marked separately, but no matter what this process can not be done by machine. Each and every panel and piece of fabric that goes into a garment must be cut by hand by a person.

Pinning/clipping - pinning (or clipping) is the stage at which you align the pieces you are going to be stitching together and hold them together with — you guessed it! — either pins or clips. This can not be done by machine.

Stitching - the actual sewing. This can be done by a sewing machine, but that machine still needs to be operated by a human being.

Ironing/pressing - two words that mean the same thing. The iron itself is a machine, but once again, it needs to be operated by a human being.

Finishing - depending on the technique you use, there are certain finishing techniques that can only be done by hand. But, let’s assume we’re talking about fast fashion, which is usually just finished with a simple overlock/serger. Once again: these machines need to be operated by people.

These are just the basic steps to making a garment, and don’t include textile arts that I am not as knowledgeable about, such as weaving, knitting, and crochet. Also, it is important to note that there are a lot of things that can only be done by hand, such as certain stitches and decorative techniques.

Also, the machinery being operated in textile factories is not equivalent to a domestic sewing machine. We’re talking about one of these guys:

See that gray cylinder under the table, behind the knee pedal? That’s the motor. These machines can sew through your fingers bones and all and not even stop. The people in these factories and sweatshops are operating heavy machinery, and are subject to all the risk that comes with that in addition to all of the work I mentioned above.

And then you complain about your clothes having loose threads.

As it is, there are still some things that are done by hand. Harrison Tweed is done by humans, not machines. Traditional kimonos are still woven by hand and require several different people in the process, all each specialized in a specific skill. Just to put one traditional kimono together. If you're looking for cheap weaves, sure, a machine can do that, but a human is still needed to operate the machine.

From what I've heard, there is no machine that can crochet. So anything that was crocheted was done by a human.

Machines can knit, and a lot of clothes are made with machine knit fabrics. But you still have the sewing process, and I'm pretty sure knitting machines still need human supervision and set up.

So basically, even with the textiles that can be done with machines, they still need humans involved in the process.

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"