fighting begins with the will to live

Do I actually know more than four colours...?

Came across this art installation, Liza Lou's Kitchen, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. It's a kitchen made of tiny glass beads, that artist Liza Lou did, taking 5 yrs. to complete, from 1991 - 1996.

My favorite part is the sink.

he really likes to watch the printer print. It seems like he thinks there’s some kind of creature in there that I have the mysterious power to summon that he can then hunt for sport?

he sticks his entire arm inside the printer and breaks it if I don’t put some kind of physical burrier between him and the printer but like he purrs so loud when it starts printing and will beg harder for people to print things than he will for treats.

he just loves hunting the printer so much. he even tried to climb inside the place the paper comes out of the printer when he was a kitten.

No matter where he is in the apartment if the printer makes a noise he sprints full speed. He also knows which button to press to get the printer to print like the ink levels info and alignment sheet, so you have to make sure it’s off or locked up or he will print nonstop himself and then attack the printer and jam it.

is it inconvenient that my cat is obsessed with the printer? yes, but damn if it’s not also adorable.

Gosh, so much -

I wish they would include real accessibility when creating their "safe spaces". Dismantling social structures needs to be accompanied by breaking down physical barriers - you can't preach acceptance and equality past a flight of stairs. You can't say "all are welcome" when not all can enter the space and move about it freely.

(It is truly so devastating to enter a space that is suppose to be all about love and acceptance, and still feel strange and unwelcome. So many queers in my area don't even know how to Talk about my disability, let alone accommodate for it)

I wish they would read up more on disabled history and teachings, because they'll discover a plethora of transferable knowledge. For many (white, abled) people, coming into their queerness or trans-ness is their first introduction to medical rights, cure vs. care, public access and visibility, marriage rights, anti-sterilization, and more. But these issues are at the core of the disabled experience, especially for those born disabled (and poc), and our knowledge is vast, developed, and transferable.

(If you are unfamiliar with "nothing about us without us", the crip crawl, the social model, or the curb cut effect, you've not even covered Disability 101)

I wish for kinky queers to learn from kinky disabled folks! They make up such a large portion of the kink community, as the culture allows for so many assistive devices, tools, suspension, unique positions, and breaking down the many ways people can have sex! There are so many sexual educators who are disabled, and they have such valuable knowledge!

I wish queer people could invest as much time and energy celebrating July (Disability Pride Month) as they do June (Queer Pride Month). Be outraged that we still can't get married without losing our medical coverage! Celebrate the disabled folks in your life! Spread awareness and boost disabled educators, activists, and artists!!

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"

Do you have medications which will be destroyed if exposed to excessive heat, like insulin? How are you gonna carry them and keep them cool? Do you have to carry your entire day's worth of belongings with you at all times, or do you have a friend's house or something where you can stash them? How much extra time are you gonna have to waste traveling back and forth? An extra hour this way, an extra hour that way. Gotta factor in the time. What if it's chilly overnight? Do you have to carry your jacket with you? What's for lunch? Can you bring food, or will the heat ruin it?

All sticky and sweaty from the sun, just wanna peel your clothes off and cool down in the shower? Designated times when showers are available at many shelters are periods of maybe sixty minutes, maybe twice a day if you're lucky, 5:30-6:30 AM and 9:00-10:00 PM or whatever. No other accessible times. Can't make it because you're at work? Too bad. Get off work later than that, and just wanna quickly bathe? Too bad.

Do you work full-time, clock out exhausted, and wanna take a nap in the afternoon? Find a park with shade, I guess, because you're only allowed inside the shelter between 10:00 PM and 5:30 AM. Did you get off work a little late? Too bad, you missed the strict curfew of 10:00 PM and now you're not allowed in the shelter. Can't hang out on the bus, can't linger too long at the coffee shop, can't doze off at the library. Many cities went out of their way to explicitly criminalize falling asleep--or merely sitting in one place for too long--in a park, too. Are you sick? Can't take a nap. Are you disabled? Can't take a nap. You're forced to be awake, all day. You're forced to be upright, or moving. No loitering. No sleeping. No taking your shoes off. All day. Every day.

Do you need even a quick momentary escape from the heat? Well, you'd better have money. Even if you do, you'll have to doctor your appearance, go stealth-mode, don't attract the attention of petty middle managers. The coffee shop now locks their bathroom. It's for paying customers. Maybe you bought some tea. Well, don't overstay your welcome (the boss saw your backpack and perceived that you're homeless, which means you're essentially an intruder now, so you better get out and move on soon). The university campus added card-swipe readers to all the doors, so now you can't visit the library or cafeterias. Oh shit, you spent money on the tea, so now you can't afford lunch.

You don't have a pantry, you don't have a refrigerator. No pasta, no rice, no meal-prep, no stovetop, no oven, no leftovers. So you pretty much have to eat out all the time. You'll bleed more money.

And during a heatwave, during summer in general in some climates, each day brings the same challenges and anxieties again.

Where are you sleeping? Outside? What are the cops gonna do to you? What about the sneering homeowners, skeptical of your presence in their neighborhood? Staying at a shelter? Every morning, you enter a lottery, hoping your name will be randomly selected, giving you one of the available spaces to sleep indoors at the shelter. Maybe 300 people competing for 75 available spaces. And these aren't even necessarily 75 beds, might simply mean 75 available spaces to sleep on the concrete floor. So all day long, you commute, you hide from the sunlight, you go to work. And you wonder. You worry. You don't know if you'll even get to sleep on the floor later tonight, if they don't draw your name. Should you make alternative back-up plans, identify an outdoor space to sleep in? You line up single-file at the shelter door. Required. Can't be late. Is it still hot outside? Do you need to pee? Better hold steady. (In seasons other than summer: Is it raining? Is it snowing? Is there frigid wind? You've gotta stand in line for thirty minutes.) You find your designated inch-thick cheap plastic mat on the floor. No phone charger, no power outlet. Better not lose track of your phone, your bag, your cards/cash. Leave it unattended for a minute, and not only might it get snatched, but the shelter staff themselves will toss unattended items in the trash. Stepped to the bathroom for a couple minutes? You left your water bottle next to your floor-mat, now it's gone. In the same room with you, maybe 50 people, maybe more. Some crying, some conversing, some feuding, some coughing. All night. Next morning, 5:30, the lights are on, you've got ten minutes to get up and get back outside. Oh shit, did you take off your glasses? Anything you accidentally leave behind, you'll never see it again.

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.