Wave Celestial Intent

Lorenzo Salgado Araujo was shot to death in Houston, Texas, USA, by ICE agents earlier this week, on July 7th. Araujo was 52, and was in the process of completing his citizenship authorization in the United States. He was family man who was deeply dedicated to his wife and three children, and supported his coworkers at their construction company without fail. He was assaulted by ICE during a traffic stop and, according to ICE, fled while using his car as a deadly weapon, justifying his murder. As there is currently little to no civilian footage of the murder and ICE has complete control of the narrative, holding ICE to the fire will be exponentially harder than the murders of Renée Good and Alex Pretti.

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"

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'Lindsey Graham is dead.' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]

Boston Hunters:

New England’s coastal hunter, the osprey doesn’t circle and wait. It picks its target, folds its wings, and hits the water talons first. We move fast and we move first, striking out the competition without hesitation. The Hunters are inspired by Harriot Hunt who, like the osprey, set her mind on a goal and made it happen. A trailblazing physician, she was one of the first women to practice medicine professionally in the USA, despite being denied admission to Harvard twice because of her gender. Like Harriot, the Hunters are ready leave their mark on history books.

Los Angeles Queens:

Inspired by our namesake, Lizzie Murphy – nicknamed the “Queen of the diamond”- the LA Queens are built on the confidence, presence and influence she carried throughout her trailblazing career, qualities that also define Los Angeles. Lizzie Murphy broke barriers at a time when opportunities for women in pro sports were extremely limited, showing the world how true talent rises to the top. We carry the Queen of the diamond’s legacy, channeling her confidence, ambition, and style. It’s time to claim the throne.

New York Heights:

Built around the ambition, intensity and relentless standards associated with New York, the Heights demands excellence. Just like our namesake, Dorothy Height, we’re ready to rise to the occasion. One of the most influential leaders of the civil and women’s rights movements, Dorothy Height dedicated her life to advancing equality for all. As we take the field, we‘re inspired by her confidence, leadership, and unwavering commitment to her goals. Just like Dorothy Height, we‘re ready to rise to the occasion and change the game.

San Francisco Firebells:

Boston Hunters:

New England’s coastal hunter, the osprey doesn’t circle and wait. It picks its target, folds its wings, and hits the water talons first. We move fast and we move first, striking out the competition without hesitation. The Hunters are inspired by Harriot Hunt who, like the osprey, set her mind on a goal and made it happen. A trailblazing physician, she was one of the first women to practice medicine professionally in the USA, despite being denied admission to Harvard twice because of her gender. Like Harriot, the Hunters are ready leave their mark on history books.

Los Angeles Queens:

Inspired by our namesake, Lizzie Murphy – nicknamed the “Queen of the diamond”- the LA Queens are built on the confidence, presence and influence she carried throughout her trailblazing career, qualities that also define Los Angeles. Lizzie Murphy broke barriers at a time when opportunities for women in pro sports were extremely limited, showing the world how true talent rises to the top. We carry the Queen of the diamond’s legacy, channeling her confidence, ambition, and style. It’s time to claim the throne.

New York Heights:

Built around the ambition, intensity and relentless standards associated with New York, the Heights demands excellence. Just like our namesake, Dorothy Height, we’re ready to rise to the occasion. One of the most influential leaders of the civil and women’s rights movements, Dorothy Height dedicated her life to advancing equality for all. As we take the field, we‘re inspired by her confidence, leadership, and unwavering commitment to her goals. Just like Dorothy Height, we‘re ready to rise to the occasion and change the game.

San Francisco Firebells:

Thanks for responding and reblogging! Sincerely, a person involved in volunteer groups whose members are getting older every year without enough young people stepping up to replace them and she'd like to figure out why so she can help improve things. without judgement or criticism.

TLDR: In ten days last month, the Wikimedia Foundation fired the longtime lead developer of MediaWiki and disbanded the team whose entire job was to listen to volunteers. Most of the people they fired were union organizers. Wikipedia’s editors are now threatening to strike in solidarity. The Foundation is sitting on $296 million in reserves and a freshly profitable AI revenue stream. This is a confrontation with global implications.

"You hold more leverage than a cancellation could ever give you, and it works in the opposite direction. A donation that disappears is invisible. It shows up as one anonymous line in a spreadsheet, gets blamed on the economy or a bad fundraising email, and teaches the institution nothing.

"A donor who speaks up is much harder to wave off, because donors are handed a door that the Foundation’s own staff and volunteers aren’t. You should walk through that door instead of slipping out the back.

"In practice, that means writing to the Board of Trustees, whose job is to hold leadership to account, and telling them in your own words that your support has always been a matter of trust, and that trust depends on how an institution treats the people who build it.

“They’re not smarter or faster they’re buying up others’ lifetimes to do their chores”

I see this reaction a lot, and I gotta say, it always makes me a little sad. Whenever the conversation of exploitation of labor comes up, inevitably someone finds themselves struggling with the guilt of “It is so important to me not to contribute to exploitation but I cannot do this thing myself and need someone else to do it for me, so how do I even approach that?”

Exploitation isn’t in the hiring of a service worker. Exploitation is in the respect you show them for their ability to perform the service you need from them.

I have been on a cleaning service staff before, and also been someone who hired a cleaning service, and I can tell you for sure that a lot of cleaning crews (especially worker owned ones) absolutely LOVE their clients and are genuinely happy to be able to make their lives better. The clients they don’t like? Those are the ones who disrespect the workers.

When I was involved with a cleaning service, we had everything from little old ladies living alone to McMasions with five cars as clients, and I can assure you that whenever there was someone who clearly hired us because they were overwhelmed or unable to keep their space clean, those were the households where you put a little more elbow grease in and did a deep clean even when it wasn’t paid for, because you could see how much these people were trying and struggling, and they were always so kind and generous and often embarrassed when talking to you about the job.

I only hired a service a couple if times in my life, but whenever I did, I worked with the same people as often as I could, tipped as well as I could afford, and tried to be the kind of client I would want to have, and that’s how I often ended up with my baseboards cleaned too, or my fridge scrubbed and organized or a restorative clean done in a high use room even when that wasn’t what I had scheduled or paid for.

I’ve heard the same thing from all manner of service workers over the years. Many of us like our jobs! We enjoy the work. It’s the customers that can do a number on you.

Mainly because I read it and thought, "Ah, OP is talking about how we are in a new Gilded Age" where graduated taxation on the .001% has eased and the political influence of the .001% has grown enough that the (economically speaking) middle class and lower class are being squeezed while the .001% revel in the kind of stuff Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg, et al get up to. Making islands. Rockets. Yachts that fit inside other yachts. WTF level of stuff.

It's not quite that Bezos is buying lifetimes to do his chores. He's creating a situation where people urinate in bottles in body damaging work to create wealth that allows him to have multiple immense homes / yachts / rockets whatever that he buys the lifetimes of multiple staff to maintain them. Possibly even unoccupied.

This is very different than having people come into a residence, ones own home, to clean it better than a body would/can. Same with yardwork. Same (as post above says) with having your teeth cleaned or your pizza delivered. It's just work. All work is selling your lifetime. Office job, service worker, sex worker, whatever. It is selling your time on this earth that you can't get back for the thing you need to live, money. Sometimes it's exploitative, sometimes it's not. Sometimes you can control that. Sometimes, you, an individual, you can't.

Now, in true Tumblr fashion going to go on a complete tangent and talk about the end of the Gilded Age and early progressive era.

For some context, I am currently working on writing a book set in San Francisco 1900ish that spends a lot of time shifting between folks in the poorer districts South of the Slot (the rail for the cable car) and Nob Hill. Many of the characters are in service industries: housekeeper, maids, building labor into union labor, sex workers, owner of laundry/laundryman, etc.

In my research I came across a simply amazing series of articles / interviews with a sex worker in 1913, and formed a lot of my thinking for thinking about labor for the last several years since I came across it. Let's let the woman speak for herself,

“Well, I wondered, was there anybody in the world, according to that, who didn’t sell herself or himself for money? Didn’t everybody supply some demand, in some more or less disagreeable way?”

A number of the characters are "elite" and own 20, 30, 50 room mansions that occupy full city blocks. During my research I came across this great Ambrose Bierce line, which encapsulates things,

Governor Stanford of the Central and Southern Pacific is a pirate and a pig, but Governor Stanford of California Street is a gentleman and a philanthropist. In his dual character of malefactor and benefactor he somewhat resembles the ideal highwayman dear to the hearts of the novel writers, who sometimes bestows in charity as much as one half of 1% of its plunder.

But I suppose the best symbol of the era, and this kind of reality distortion was Charles "Bull" Crocker's Spite Fence. He was the task master of the Big Four of the Central Pacific Railroad. The guy who brought in labor from China to build the inter continental railroad, and a lot of them died in the mountains and the desert. The guy who witheld food from the work camp when labor wanted safer conditions and more pay. That guy. This was exploitative.

When the Big Four started moving up California Hill (hereafter Nob Hill) after the cable cars were put in, they wanted to own those city blocks I was talking about so they could build big houses with stables lined with marble out back (an actual thing). But there were already people living up there. For the most part, they bought them out.

In Crocker's case, he bought out everyone on his block except an undertaker, Mr Young, who was solidly middle class. Young had a nice house up on the hill for his family to live away from factories and ironworks down by the harbor, and didn't want to sell.

As an aside, all the books I'm reading (out of print books woo-who) soldily frame what happened next as Young's fault, but, I give these long dead authors the side eye.

Anyway, Crocker built a 40 foot Spite Fence around the three sides of Young's house that he owned. So now, instead of having a nice house with a view of the City, Young and his family lived in a well. Paraphrasing Young here, he was all, "I'm flying a pirate flag, and I am not selling to this asshole." He also threatened to put a giant coffin on top of his house, which I'm not clear if he ever did.

Now the fence did have to be reduced to 25 feet because high winds, but the fence stood.

For 26 years.

It was a tourist attraction. Folks would go up to see it.

It was a lightning rod for political groups. Both the Workingman's Party of California (separate from the Workingman's Party) and the Union Labor Party (hyper local political parties) would march up to the fence, rile up the crowd, and demand that...waits dramatically...no, more drama needed...the Chinese be expelled because they thought immigrants from China were taking jobs out of the largely Irish-Italian-French population of the city.

Given there were riots in which people died in Chinatown, but the fence didn't come down, and no one every did diddly to Crocker's mansion, says what their real priorities were.

Which as I was reading about all this, and trying to think how to incorporate this element into the childhood of one of the characters, it made me think about the populism of Trump, MAGA, and America Firsters.

I mean, here are these incredibly rich people up on this hill in these mansions that cumulatively represent a level of wealth it's hard to comprehend, and incredibly poor people doing their best to survive.

But the energy of working labor was redirected at a specific group of immigrants. Rather than the real problem, the rich guy who was maintaining a spite fence, and got/maintained his wealth through extremely exploitative practices.

Time passed. Charles Crocker died, and his children maintained the fence.

The undertaker literally had his house moved out of the lot (it was easier when there was no plumbing involved), but refused to sell.

The Spite Fence was by then around an empty lot with a hole in it. That's what the "elite" are like.

The undertaker died, widow refused to sell.

The Crocker's actively maintained the Spite Fence. Even mumblity 20 years on during gale force winds that scoured San Francisco in 1901, knocking down fences (spite or not), early electrical poles, etc.

It was only in 1904, two years after the Mrs. Young died that her children sold the land to the Crockers, and the fence came down.

Sadly, it did not burn in the 1906 fire that incinerated all the mansions on the top of Nob Hill (+ 80% of the city of San Francisco, and leaving 250k people homeless).

Obviously, I am writing a fictional novel in which there is magical realism, so I say fuck it. That Spite Fence shall go like it was meant to go. As kindling for the Crocker mansion.

What I'm trying to get across here is, I've spent a long time doing a lot of time thinking about the Gilded Age, and the new "Gilded for Certain Folks" age that we are in. There are so-called populists who want to distract working people for power.

But the 1900s were also the dawn of an era of real populist change. Spite Fences like Crocker's Spite Fence were made illegal. It wasn't the 1% of the wealth of the uber rich were willing to donate that made things better for people, it was legislative and collaborative action. It was advocacy, and quite frankly taxing the rich to pay their fair share. It was changing systems so they were fairer. e.g., back then State Senators were appointed by the State Represenatatives, not elected, so graft was rampant.

Not completely fair. Obviously. The work is never done. It is on-going.

The new spite fences are digital. They are AI. They are not physical.

In a post telling you that

“there is nothing wrong with you; you’re doing your best in a game rigged against you, probably not enough people and fruit tell you that”

don't decide it's about how you are exploitative if you pay someone to help you do a task. Listen to the sex worker from 1913. That's everyone who works.

“there is nothing wrong with you; you’re doing your best in a game rigged against you, probably not enough people and fruit tell you that”]