Be The Gay You Want to See in the World

“OpenAI is already shutting down ChatGPT Atlas, its browser that could do tasks for you on your behalf, less than a year after launching it.

Atlas was announced in October, but as part of its wave of news about ChatGPT Work today, the company confirmed that it will be “sunsetting” Atlas and is targeting an August 9th date for deprecation.”

“The shutdown follows OpenAI’s push to reduce “side quests” and catch up with Anthropic on productivity features.

As part of that push, in March, The Wall Street Journal reported that OpenAI planned to combine the ChatGPT app, Codex, and Atlas into a desktop “superapp” — ChatGPT Work appears to be the result of those efforts.”

“In a thread about the ChatGPT Work announcements, which includes an updated browser in the desktop ChatGPT app and a cloud browser for work mode,

OpenAI’s James Sun said that: “All these capabilities were built on what we learned from Atlas users who took a leap of faith on a new browser.

You taught us how agents can help make browsing and doing work on the open web better, and we are applying these learnings to these new products.”

In recent months, OpenAI has also shut down the video generation app Sora and paused plans for a ChatGPT “adult mode.””

Read something else

Bitch PRIVATELY to friends

Write your own take on the premise (strongly recommend!)

All of the above

So demons (concubi in this case) and humans are different species right?

Well since the most consensual definition of specie states that if two creatures are able to reproduce with each other giving rise to fertile offspring, then they are of the same species.

Then how can cambions be fertile?

How did The Merlin create the unbalanced cambions know as merlins?

Are cambions like Valec and Zoey fertile or was it just Merlin?

or 2) greater demons wear human bodies in the mortal plane so technically that's their form when they're reproducing(?)

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 Elves are not the children of the Valar, they are the Children of Eru. The Valar themselves are "creations" of Eru but not his children, per se; there's a distinct difference between the more ambiguous relationship of Eru to the Valar and the firmly paternal relationship of Eru to the Elves (and Men). However, it is true that the Valar act like somewhat overprotective parents to the Elves that live in their domain.

The only Elves we meet in LOTR who lived in Valinor are Galadriel and Glorfindel, not Celeborn. It is true that Tolkien had some drafts where Celeborn also lived in Valinor, but those were retcons written after LOTR had already been published, and do not make sense with the text of LOTR. In the published LOTR, Celeborn is a Sinda elf who never went to Valinor, but he was a relative of Elu Thingol, an Elf king who was married to Melian the Maia, who lived with her husband in Middle-earth and definitely influenced their kingdom.

(Also, Glorfindel is doubly unique in that he came to Middle-earth from Valinor, died in Middle-earth, was reborn in Valinor, and then came back to Middle-earth. Galadriel just went the one time and stayed.)

The power of the Elves and of the Numenoreans has less to do with "proximity to Valinor/the Valar" and more to do with...well, for the Elves, it's connection to and mastery over the Soul, an for the Numenorean Men it's literal direct ancestry from both Elves and Maiar that gives them the foundation to build on that same kind of mastery. This is a complicated subject, and while geography plays a role in power, it's not as important as other aspects IMO.

Elrond having less power than Galadriel is...debateable. Personally I would rank them about equal. He is certainly less flashy with his power than she is, though.

Technically Beren was the ancestor of the Numenorean kings, so yes "part of the line," but again it's more complicated than that... Luthien (daughter of Melian and Thingol, half-Maia and half-Elf) is the ancestress of Aragorn, but it's also important to note that her granddaughter Elwing married another half-elf, Earendil, whose mother Idril was a Valinorean elf living in Middle-earth. Their children are Elrond, who chose to be an Elf (and has a lot of magical power!) and Elros, who chose to be a Man and became the first King of Numenor. Eventually Elros' Numenorean descendants founded Gondor and Arnor, etc etc etc, and Aragorn is the product of all that impressive ancestry - with a lot of human generations in-between to water it down. Arwen, as Elrond's daughter, is much more closely related to the original Elf-mortal couples (and her mother, Elrond's wife, is the daughter of Galadriel and Celeborn, mixing in even more impressive ancestors!).

Aragorn's power is not just to do with his ancestry, though; like with the Elves of old, it's a lot to do with his own internal mastery of his spirit. Faramir, also of Numenorean ancestry, has similar capabilities - but notably, his brother Boromir did not. This is because insight/foresight/"magic" was something he both had talent in and worked to master, like Aragorn. (Aragorn had the benefit of being raised by elves.)

The analysis of magic objects is spot-on, and the most relevant part of this discussion, so great job there. I would just like to emphasize the discussion of willpower, because that's really what it boils down to: yes, proximity to the Valar helps; yes, elven ancestry helps, but when you come down to it, the most important thing is strength of will. Elves, Maiar, Valar, Numenoreans, even regular humans and hobbits (and dwarves) - some might have a leg up when it comes to their innate willpower and connection to their own souls, but any one of them, given the strength of will and the practice of making it stronger, has magical potential.

At the time of LOTR, Cirdan has long since given his Ring of Power (Narya) to Gandalf. The third ringbearer is actually Elrond. (Again, not less powerful than Galadriel, just not as obvious!)

Another example of the Ring's (Sauron's) will dominating its bearer is when Sam briefly carries it, he has a vision of ruling over an amazing garden. Being Sam, he has the practicality to not fall for that temptation, but it goes to show that the Ring will manipulate its bearers with whatever would work best against them.

"His poor mother died when he was only two years old. I’d just begun to make money with my Hair Vigor. I’d dreamed the formula for it, you see. Some dream that. The cash rolled in. Bernie had everything he wanted. I sent him to the best schools—private schools. I meant to make a gentleman of him. Never had any chance myself. Meant he should have every chance."

If we're thinking TBC takes place 1925ish, and Barney says he's 35, then he was born around 1890 and Doc Redfern really started making money around 1892.

Given that TBC name-checks real schools like Havergal and McGill, I was wondering which private school young Barney might have gone to. Some of the prestigious older private schools in Quebec were founded just a bit too late for young Barney to attend, so it looks like the likely candidate is Bishop's College School? (I would include a picture, but the school wouldn't have been on its modern grounds at that time.)

The Wikipedia article for BCS notes that "the school catered to the sons of the Protestant elites in the United Empire Loyalists and the residents of the Montreal Golden Square Mile." Would Doc Redfern have bought property in the Golden Square Mile, or would he have been too nouveau riche for that?

Apple has sued OpenAI, accusing the company of stealing its trade secrets.

In a complaint filed in the US District Court for the Northern District of California on Friday, Apple alleges it "uncovered a pattern of theft of Apple's trade secrets by OpenAI employees who were formerly at Apple."

“Along with ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, Apple named two individuals in the suit: OpenAI's Chief Hardware Officer Tang Tan, who previously worked at Apple for 24 years, and software engineer Chang Liu, who had worked at the company for 8 years before moving to OpenAI.”

an Apple spokesperson said in a statement,

"At Apple, our teams are constantly developing breakthrough technologies to create the best products and services in the world, and protecting their work and intellectual property is something we take very seriously.

Recently, significant evidence has emerged suggesting individuals employed by OpenAI wrongfully took Apple's secret and confidential information regarding our unreleased technologies, processes and products.

We will always defend our teams' hard work and innovations, and we are taking all appropriate steps to do so."

“Tech companies have been poaching top tech talent in a rapid-fire, billion-dollar hiring spree over the past few years as they race to develop advanced AI.

But this is the first major lawsuit alleging that some of those job-hopping employees are illegally sharing their former employers' secrets with their new bosses.”

“OpenAI has reportedly been looking to push ahead in its hardware ambitions, with products like AI earbuds and a smartphone.

The move could provide OpenAI with a significant source of revenue beyond its subscription tiers, particularly as it burns through investor money.

It also has a partnership with Apple that involves integrating ChatGPT into Siri for responding to more complex queries; it's not clear what'll become of that collaboration following the suit. “

“OpenAI is no stranger to lawsuits.

Publishers have accused the company of scraping copyrighted works to train large language models like ChatGPT.

They also allege OpenAI withholds evidence about how it trains its AI models.

The safety of its products has also been questioned.

In just one of several similar suits, a mother sued OpenAI earlier this year, claiming interactions with its chatbot led to her daughter's death.”

“This mounting scrutiny comes as OpenAI weighs plans to become a publicly traded company.

It's not yet clear when that could happen, but Apple's suit could complicate those efforts -- especially if it undermines OpenAI's hardware goals.”