are we drawing the connection between worker safety and consumer safety & public health yet?

More on the health point:

"US Department of Labor proposes more than $1M fine following worker fatality at New Jersey vegetable processing facility"

Placed anywhere else in the story, it would've been just another line about the hubris of the Age of Arcanum, the ambition of the Ring of Brass. It's important to dream, because in the end we will achieve something great and unprecedented. It's important to dream, because no matter what we sacrifice, it will all pay off in the end and everyone will be grateful. It's important to dream, because we have enormous power, which means that we can be the force that changes the world. That's what the Age of Arcanum is about. New heights of genius, technological wonders, being the first to create greatness.

A fun fact about EXU Calamity-

Working on these had me stressed and overwrought, mostly because I was worried that I wasn’t gonna pull of the Look, and the aesthetic would be shakier because of me.

Namaygoosisagagun First Nation/Collins has burned to the ground. The entire community is nothing but ashes after being quickly consumed by wildfires. They did not have any support from emergency services, and no one offered aid. The community saved themselves by escaping into boats because no one came.

Mishkeegogamang and Cat Lake have lost power. Families are ending up in shelters with nothing. Armstrong, Lac La Croix, Whitesand, Gull Bay, Lac des Mille Lacs are currently in the fires path and all members are being evacuated.

All this loss, all this devastation, and it was entirely preventable.

After steadily underfunding wildland firefighting and purposefully excluding Indigenous wildland firefighters and Indigenous wildfire organizations from wildfire operations, firefighter training, decisionmaking, and resource exchanges, in 2025, Doug Ford slashed the forest firefighting budget.

It's hard to ignore his decision to cut funding and leave us out of adequate fire training (even though we've lived with forest fires for thousands of years—far longer than settlers have been in Canada—and made sure fires like the ones we're all seeing today were prevented through kinisitotēn) when, despite making up less than 5% of the population, we account for 42% percent of all wildfire evacuations in Canada.

And when we are successfully evacuated, we face discrimination and racism—like Kashechewan—because it's always been easier to blame us than it is to blame the true culprit: denialism, corportate greed, and colonization.

The people of Collins and every other impacted community deserve better.

Right now, the AFN is currently accepting donations to help Collins First Nation. If you're able to, please consider donating.

ONWA (Ontario Native Women's Association) is another great place to donate to. They have outreach vans going to motels and inns and offering food, water, resources, and cultural support to those impacted by the wildfires.

Other places to consider donating to are Mikinakoos Emergency Fund, Red Cross, True North Aid, Indigenous Climate Action. You can also send donations directly to Whitesand First Nation via e-transfer ([email protected]) and they request that you add your full name in the e-transfer comment section to receive a tax receipt.

*Before sending money, verify that the appeal appears on an official First Nation, Tribal Council or registered charity channel.

If you can't offer financial support, please consider donating items of need. Moontime Connections is currently accepting drop-off donations. If you live in the Thunder Bay area, Namaygoosisagagun Health Office is also taking in donations! They can also bemailed to Superior Inn Hotel & Conference Centre at 555 West Arthur Street, Thunder Bay, ON, P7E 5P8.

items needed are: food, diapers, medical masks, men’s and women’s joggers (all sizes), children’s clothing (newborn to size 14), children’s shoes, summer clothing, men’s clothing, toiletries (lotion, Vaseline, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, conditioner, soap, deodorant, etc.), strollers, adult depends-all sizes, dog & cat food

This is a parasite that usually causes about 3000 cases of illness per year in the USA, Michigan currently has reported about 2900 (the confusion about “Michigan outbreak” is because Michigan is the first that caught an uptick in cases and has been very proactive about trying to trace them). Last official update from Massachusetts was 18 cases here centered in Greater Boston. The CDC recommends NOT assuming there are no sources of the parasite in your state even if no cases have been reported.

It isn’t an unknown illness but it is an unusual quantity of cases, and the fact that they haven’t been able to pin down the source after weeks of tracking is what makes it particularly concerning this year (harder to contain).

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"

I’ve had students tell me they could only get through an article (and not an academic one — short pieces written for popular audiences) by using text-to-speech functions that read it to them. No hate for text-to-speech, obviously; it’s important for accessibility, and I’m definitely not in the “audiobooks don’t count as books” camp. I do suspect, however, based on these students’ responses to the articles, that the way it’s “helping” them is by allowing them to “get through” it by passively listening rather than actively engaging. I’ve even had students admit to having ChatGPT or similar summarize the text for them because they couldn’t understand it.

Class discussions spend more & more time trying to pin down & clarify what the author actually literally said, and correspondingly less time debating different opinions on the reading. I’ve had to ease up on how I evaluate reading responses, gradually moving from “try to say something interesting, insightful, eloquent, &c.” to “try and express your thoughts on the reading rather than summarizing the ‘main idea’, even if those thoughts are ‘it was boring & confusing & I hated it.’” (I’ve also shortened the minimum length of said reading responses, as many students seem to panic & reach for ChatGPT if asked for more than they think they can write in one sitting — which is about a paragraph, apparently.) When I teach literature surveys, I have to introduce students to concepts like close reading & literary analysis, which they have seemingly never been asked to do before.

Part of the issue is definitely that basic literacy is not being taught well in U.S. public schools (cueing, &c.), but beyond that, advanced literacy doesn’t seem to be part of the standard curriculum AT ALL anymore. The “short passages in standardized tests” model mentioned in the original post is kind of… it, at least as far as many students seem to be concerned. Students have told me they’ve never read a novel cover-to-cover, because their secondary education was all centered around selections & excerpts. Likewise, that secondary education never got past the “reading comprehension” phase, and I’m often (according to them) the first instructor to ask them for analysis or even opinion.

I'm an ecologist. As you can imagine, that's not exactly a very fun profession to be in right now. Every day I have to deal with multiple different crises on multiple fronts- coral reef bleaching, extinctions, habitat destruction on unprecedented scales, and governments that don't really seem to be giving a single shit about any of it.

Do you have any advice for staying resilient and optimistic about the future?

Hi Anonymous Ecologist,

First, I can't express how much I resonate with the way you are feeling. My educational background and career have all been in either biology/ecology or closely adjacent work—and I currently work with a lot of folks doing ecology research.

Here are some other posts I’ve made about this topic that might also be helpful to you. (X) (X)

When I was freshly graduated with my ecology degree, I had a long period where I couldn’t look at a beautiful landscape or endangered animal without prematurely grieving its loss. How much longer until this forest is clear cut or degraded beyond recognition? Will this species be to my kids what the thylacine was to me? I saw only the damage, the invasive species, found flaws in any news of progress. I believed the conservation and environmental work was worth doing for its own sake, but deep down I often did not truly believe it would ever be enough to slow or push back the tide of destruction.

But the thing is, I was wrong. Not just philosophically, but my belief that everything was just circling the drain and not enough people cared to make any meaningful progress was demonstrably, factually wrong. Things have gotten better and they can continue to get better in the future, even though it doesn't always feel that way.

Here are some tips that have helped get me out of that hopeless place:

1. Consciously look for and give attention to the good news. Yes, there is damage and backsliding and grief, but I also have stories come across my feed ever day of dam removal, rewilding and reintroductions, species being spotted in places they were previously wiped out for decades, ecosystems bouncing back after receiving protections, grassroots restoration efforts, the list goes on. It’s easy to have a knee jerk “it’s not enough” or “what about X, Y, Z?”, but you do really need to stop and actually feel the hope, joy, and pride when progress is made instead of immediately moving on to the next crisis—no one can live in crisis mode forever without burning out. “Things are a long way from where they need to be” and “we are making progress” are two thoughts that can both be true at the same time.

2. Zoom out and look at the bigger picture. It often takes a lot longer to fix things than break them, and I think that can sometimes make ecological work feel like banging your head against a wall with nothing to show for it. But much like the starlight we see now can be hundreds of years (or much more!) old, in many cases we are just now seeing the major payoffs from decades of previous conservation work. Many of the known and unknown heroes who quietly, patiently did that work did not live to see the full extent of their impact. The light from the work we are doing now—the work you are doing now—may not be visible yet but it’s coming and it will be so bright when it gets here. Just because you’re not seeing it right away doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.

3. Look back at historic environment wins. Remember that we used to spray DDT on children at picnics because of how “safe” society considered it. We fought and won against acid rain and chemicals burning a hole in the ozone layer. “Save the Whales” was a pejorative for “naive, unrealistic environmentalist” fifty years ago and now many whale populations are headed towards or even exceeding per-commercial-whaling numbers. Even within my own lifetime, it wasn’t all that long ago that I had never seen an electric car and renewable energy was considered impractically expensive—now I see many electric cars every day and solar is the cheapest energy on Earth. There are species that were fully on life support when I was born that are now surviving and repopulating without human intervention. Things have looked insurmountably bad before and they have gotten better—and the progress we have made today looks a lot more encouraging when you look back at where we started.

4. Tell yourself hopeful stories. I’m sure this one is going to make some people raise their eyebrows because it sounds a bit cheesy, but it really does help to imagine the world you are working towards instead of just what you are fighting against. This used to make me super uncomfortable, it felt almost wrong or painful to imagine things actually getting that much better. But it gets easier. Imagine the cheering and celebration when we close the last coal plant. Imagine a little girl many generations in the future, about to snorkel a coral reef, with her dive instructor telling the story of all the people and all the work it took for that reef to still exist. I used to imagine how special a day it would be when it was finally safe to release frog species decimated by chytrid back into the wild—but it turns out we are already working on that decades earlier than I would have expected!

5. Recognize that hope is a more effective psychological strategy for progress than cynicism. Research has found that our society tends to view cynicism as a more rational and even sometimes more moral worldview, but the opposite is true. Cynics actually perform worse on cognitive and social tasks and they are less likely to vote, protest, or take positive action. Hope for Cynics by Jamil Zaki is a really excellent book about this. Sometimes on bad days I have to remind myself that hope is a strategy and to act as if my actions will make a difference even if I'm not really feeling it that day--if you act that way long enough your brain will start to believe it.

6. Speaking of books, I personally find it really helpful to read books by smart and qualified people who work in the interface between climate/environmental science and psychology/hope. I’ve been meaning to make a post with my ever growing book list, but Not the End of the World by Hannah Ritchie and A Field Guide to Climate Anxiety by Sarah Ray are two excellent ones off the top of my head.

I really hope this is helpful to you. And from the bottom of my heart, thank you for the work that you do. I can almost guarantee it is having a bigger impact than you know. <3

this is not life-threatening, but also who wants weeks of diarrhea and a fucking parasite in them lol. if you suspect you've already had this and it's passed, i would see a doctor. you might need an antiparasitic anyway. if you're actively sick, see a doctor and they might be able to prescribe medication to help you get over it faster.

try to avoid eating raw vegetables, scrub fruit with a produce brush and rinse thoroughly with water. again, don't bother with premade greens or bagged salads. if you buy lettuce, remove the outer 2-3 layers of leaves.

love everyone contributing to the absolute hoard of dice for emily to roll

+ bonus: some delighted emily faces