Obsession

The World’s Most Incredible Libraries You Can Still Visit

Having trouble reading infographic here?

"The installation depicts a chain of people holding onto one another, symbolizing solidarity and mutual assistance. The hand of the final figure extends beyond the fence, allowing visitors to grasp it and symbolically take part in the rescue.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

for those who don't know, schools in india have students take these major exams in class 10 and class 12 called 'boards' which act as a final exam. boards are nation-wide, and every single student of class 10 and 12 is required to give them, and they're given the same paper, depending on which board your school is under.

now, just this year, class 12 students under the CBSE board had their papers checked by a new system called the on-screen marking (OSM) system. as the name suggests, the papers are scanned and the teachers check the papers of all these students through the scans. the problem? the scans were shitty. some students reported that the scans of papers under their name weren't theirs, but someone else's paper. students reported that their scans were blurry, pages were missing, and some didn't even have a scan. not just that, but the officials incharge of all this refused to explain how things like this happened! heck, even the teachers checking the papers complained about this.

this is the exam students give before entering college. this is the exam that could potentially get them a seat in a college. these are the marks that their future depends upon. and this is how it's going away — by unprofessionalism.

now, as a person from manipur, i'd like to truly emphasise how shitty it was, and still is.

the manipur conflict began in 2023 and still has not been resolved. those displaced families? still displaced. villages, schools and churches have been burnt down and the government did not care for it. mass shootings, killing of people, rape and so much more happened that if I listed all of it here it would be too long. I am lucky enough that my hometown was left unscathed but so many of my manipuri friends had to watch as their villages burnt down and their ancestral homes got wiped away. the conflict was between tribals and non-tribals, and tribals have had the bear the brunt of it. the state of manipur is now divided, and tribals can't even pass through the non-tribal regions because they fear and know that they could be killed.

what's worse is that the only airport of manipur is located in a non-tribal region— leaving us tribals to have to find other ways to just be able to visit home and family. those in northern manipur go from nagaland, while those in the south go from mizoram. the roads to manipur from both those states are not the safest, and in the beginning of the conflict we had to hear so many people dying on the way because of the unsafe roads. think of that— we couldn't even go home without risking our lives.

There is nothing wrong with wanting promoting your own language, but what about the students who opted for French and German in middle school? You cannot expect them to choose Sanskrit in grade 9th with absolutely no base or knowledge on the subject. Not to mention, French and German teachers could lose jobs over this, their livelihood.

This is not as major as the previous two points, but this reflects on the current state of the Indian Education system, which is absolute shit.

Also as someone from Uttar Pradesh, I hope the Manipur conflict gets resolved soon and those who suffered find peace. This also goes for the students who suffered from the NEET scam.

May the the students who died and their families find peace.

This triggered a religious uprising in which the old elite were butchered and their computers smashed and all electronic intelligence banned forever.

The result of this was the development of techniques to maximize human power. The Bene Gesserit's body control and observational skills. The massive intellect of Mentats - human computers. The unstoppable combat skills of Swordmasters. Guild Navigators, who get high on magical drugs, see the future and guide space ships safeely at FTL speeds.

Of course, this all takes resources, so this just created new elite nobles with the money to employ/become these kinds of people, who oppressd the masses and treated them as garbage.

Goodbye to the old boss, hello to the new.

It is pretty much the essence of Dune that all revolutions simply lead to a new set of bosses, as bad or worse than the previous ones.

2026.06 ~ Top 7 longest fics posted on AO3

1. Follow You by WolfGang_JB [E, 519k]

What if Draco had managed to escape his Manor with Harry and everyone else when they had very barely avoided Voldemort? What if he somehow managed to convince Harry to help him?

2. The Parts That Won't Heal by whoeveristhatbadger [E, 334k]

Draco never asked to survive the war. It wasn't part of his plan to have to continue going afterwards, through the trials and the repercussions and having to go back to Hogwarts despite nobody wanting him there. What's the point of it anyway, when the wizarding world will never again respect him? Death would have been more agreeable. Then Harry shows up with a badly sewn heart. [...]

3. It's the same damn thing, that made my heart surrender by hoe637282 [E, 148k]

In which Draco’s greatest enemy is a chair, Gryffindors are confusing, Unspeakables are even more so, and Harry Potter is becoming a problem. It’s a good thing Draco is above frivolous things like love. Right?

4. The Hidden House by DrSchaf [M, 147k]

The force of forgetting made the tower disappear first.

5. Stone of Theia by @mykkitno [M, 139k]

After the war, haunted by Grimmauld and suffering from dreams and visions, Harry finds himself in an otherwise empty room, except for a rune-covered table and a crystal ball. Not understanding the significance, he grabs the ball, intending to throw it. The next thing he knows, he’s holding an amulet, there’s a ring on his finger, and he can hear Sirius pounding on the wall. Offered a chance to change things, he knows nothing will be the same again.

6. A Spell Written in Fire by @eeniiart [?, 82k]

Draco Malfoy was doomed. His life was in shambles, when an unfortunate event sends him back in time, just before fourth year. Getting a chance to change the horrible future, he decides to stop the Dark Lord from rising again. For that, he needs to figure out how to do that first - comes the brilliant idea: stop Harry Potter from participating in the Triwizard Tournament. What could possibly go wrong?

7. Accident on Valentine's Day by obscure_parakeet [T, 74k]

[...] What starts as a ruse from Harry's side: play nice with the blond git and accept the betrothal to get out of the Dursleys ends up being the best thing that has ever happened to him.

—

※ Word count: 1k ~ 15k

※ Word count: 15k ~ 40k

7 Minutes in Hell by spider_lily_57 [T, 15k]

If anyone asks, I was under Imperius by Maelduin [E, 23k]

London Skies. by @blaiddseren [E, 15k]

SILENCE/Onomatopoeia by HecateInLove [E, 21k]

Oh, Will Wonders Ever Cease? by aberthknox [M, 16k]

Weasleys’ Wizard Wetivities by Dame_RID [M, 15k]

When I Saw You There by @an-evening-botanist [E, 39k]

You don’t seem to understand by @lizardio [T, 29k] *typo

—

Ongoing Fest/Exchange

※ Fics would be listed elsewhere.

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 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.

Because it fucking matters that y'all are being confidently and persistently wrong. Because this attitude of "my uninformed opinion matters just as much as the facts" is going to screw us all.

If you can't be bothered to read the thing you're commenting on, never mind the other comments on it, before blurting out the first thought that pops into your head, you are at best wasting your time and everyone else's. You are not contributing meaningfully to the conversation. Just because you have the opportunity to say something doesn't mean you should, and if you don't know what you're talking about because you haven't been paying attention, you shouldn't.

And when you say things that are blatantly wrong, or misrepresent what other people said, you are actively sabotaging the conversation being had. You are misinforming other people. You are undermining their trust in the discussion.