Buck's love is an ouroborus, devoured tale meeting hungry head again and again. Circular and unending.
or, five times buck and eddie don't say i love you and the one time they do
the days of begging and the days of theft | 51K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Bobby is a corpse.
The mere thought is revolting. But it's the truth and it's all he can see.
Rot covers the edges of Bobby, black and dark green, bubbling up beneath the skin near his ears and at his throat, coating his fingers so they look like they've been dipped in oil.
Wrong wrong wrong. It beats like a pulse. A bloody rhythm.
Bobby is a corpse. Wrong wrong wrong. Dead. Wrong wrong wrong. Alive. Wrong wrong wrong. Both. Wrong wrong wrong.
or, bobby's ghost haunts buck and eddie
wash out the salt | 28K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (all for the game/jerejean)
"But you wouldn't take as good care of yourself as me."
Jean supposes that is right as well. Still, he doesn't have to admit it.
"Is it okay?" Jeremy asks again. His thumbnail brushes ever so slightly along the line of Jean's bottom lip. The ice pack gets situated between them, held out in the palm of Jeremy's open hand.
"Of course, Jeremy," Jean says, admitting something else he shouldn't. "It's you."
or, 5 nights + 1 morning
days of dust | 5K | Teen & Up | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
03/25/2025 3:45 AM - Missed Call - Eddie
[Voice roughened with sleep] "Don't mix in the honey until the very end. For the tea. If you put it in too early it cooks out and won't be as sweet as you like it. I, uh, sent you a text with very detailed instructions on how I make it. Knew you were never paying attention. But, yeah. Honey [pause] at the end. Oh, and stir counterclockwise. Don't ask why. It makes a difference, just accept it."
or, eddie and christopher are in texas, buck is in la, and they all keep missing each other but somehow still stay connected
crying after sex | 81K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Marie's eyes flutter open and then she looks at Buck, brown eyes sultry and kind and warm.
God, he misses Eddie.
Buck chokes on it. Everything about Marie, every mark she has left on him, washes away. All of it, all of the good and fun he buried himself in, that he set himself free with, is replaced. By Eddie. By the missing him. By the wanting him.
Instead of Marie’s lipstick and spit in his mouth, all he can taste is Eddie. All he knows is Eddie. All he wants is Eddie.
or, eddie moves to texas, buck spirals and has a lot of sex and spirals some more
with my constant heart | 12K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (if we were villains/james x oliver)
Oliver would swallow James whole. Consume him. Open him up and stick his fingers in each chamber, each ventricle of James’ heart.
Violently. That’s how Oliver wants. He has seen James every way, glowing golden with joy and superiority and humor, darkened by grief and guilt. He has seen James at peace and at war. He has seen James naked in every way now, and touched him too. And it’s not enough.
or, james and oliver are reunited
a ghost in my lungs, a ghost in my mouth | 84K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Buck is soaked to the bone. Skin puffy. Neck and chest lacerated by the cruel touch of lightning, as if it’s still contained within him and not eager to let him go. His curls are matted. Eyes charged but also vacant, like he is looking through two planes of reality and can’t focus.
Awful. Beautiful.
Eddie wants him to go away. Eddie wants him to stay. Eddie wants to shout at him until he wakes up. Eddie wants to forget this horrifying, pale version of his best friend, the man he loves. Eddie wants to touch him, make him real and whole.
Buck takes a single step forward and Eddie’s breath collapses in his chest.
He thinks Maddie is saying something, his name maybe, but it’s so muffled and distorted, and it doesn’t matter, not when Buck with his sad sad eyes is opening his mouth and saying, “I’m trying.”
or, in the aftermath of the lightning strike eddie is haunted by buck's ghost
death wish love | 15K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Eddie opening the door, casual and filled with a type of swagger Buck didn’t understand. Pantsless. Thighs on display. Flushed and sweaty in his thin button up.
Buck isn’t sure why the memory of that image makes his throat go tight. It didn’t faze him all that much at the time because he had other things on his mind and was sad enough that a true act of divinity probably wouldn’t have gotten a reaction out of him. But now–
Well, now Buck looks at Eddie. Bare legs and a hint of his thighs. That dark mark on the back of his right leg peeking out from the hem of his shorts. Hair mussed and a little damp, curling behind his ears.
The image of the Eddie in front of him now and the Eddie in front of him last night flicker back and forth on top of each other like some kind of montage or old movie reel.
And Buck feels…pink. Caught. Stomach all fizzy and turning.
or, after getting dumped by tommy and going to eddie's, buck wakes up the next morning only to be pummeled by his hangover and his attraction to eddie
sweet sunbursts of flesh pink magic | 5K | Mature/Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Buck’s magic has always been a bit volatile. Jittery. Fluctuating. A touch reckless. Messy and bright and loud.
Maddie says that a person’s magic is supposed to match the person themselves, that the form it takes isn’t happenstance or random, that it’s a reflection of your purest self, an extension of your soul that you can manipulate.
Safe to say, Buck’s never cared for that assessment.
or, buck has magic and eddie gets doused with sex pollen
cursed romantics//fatalist collision | 16K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (summer sons/andrew x sam)
Andrew just wants.
He was afraid he wouldn’t remember how to without Eddie. All of Andrew’s wanting was always so intrinsically tied up in the pathways of Eddie’s veins, seemingly born and cradled in Eddie’s blood, held within him so tightly, Andrew thought it would die right along with him.
It didn’t.
Oh, how it didn’t.
It burns brightly in him for Sam Halse, his want. It flows through him easier than anything, more intoxicating than any drug.
or, after the ending of summer sons andrew and sam figure some things out and fuck nasty about it
still the bone remembers, still it wants | 148K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
The thing is, wanting has always been easy.
The thing is, wanting has always been so hard.
or, eddie goes to therapy and learns how to want. buck helps.
i'm here with the door wide open | 24K | Teen & Up | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Eddie eats and showers and puts on clothes. He goes to work, does his job, acts as fine as he can around his friends, attends therapy twice a week, and goes back home.
Day after day after day.
And it’s so fucking quiet.
or, eddie copes with the absence of chris but also the presence of buck
Like most things with Eddie are, the regular sex is good. Fun. A fucking delight to be honest.
Buck may be a bit lovesick and forced to hide needy whines like he is some dog trying not to be too cumbersome so his owner lets him stay, but he’s also more relaxed than he’s ever been, no matter the tension of his heavy love that only grows and grows and grows.
It’s fine.
Eddie bends Buck over the kitchen table and fucks him until he’s screaming, and it’s fine. Buck rides Eddie until he’s a babbling mess and his fingernails cut into Buck’s hip bones leaving marks Buck will trace later with a wretched wistfulness, and it’s fine. Eddie kisses Buck sweetly, finely, softly, as if that alone is enough, and it’s fine. Buck fingers Eddie until he comes all over himself, the sensation of his heartbeat basically in the palm of Buck’s hand, and it’s fine.
It’s all so very fine. Buck is fine.
or, buck and eddie become friends with benefits, get high, and confess their love in the stupidest and most endearing way possible.
the mouth is the thing that craves | 11K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Buck’s free hand comes up to Eddie’s face, fingertips brushing over Eddie’s mouth which is hanging open. Eddie isn’t sure when it started doing that but it is and his tongue twitches involuntarily when Buck slips the tips of his first three fingers past the row of Eddie’s bottom teeth.
“Oh,” Buck murmurs, like he’s confirmed something to himself. “Yeah. Okay.”
There’s no room in Eddie for anything that’s not grateful or warm or good, his heart spreading out wide in his chest, full and fat and working overtime as Buck smiles to himself, all small and lopsided and boyishly charming, and says, “You need something in your mouth, sweetheart? Need to hold me close, don’t you?”
or, eddie loves buck and he really loves buck's cock
you fill my head with you | 22K | Mature | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
And then everything winded down, their friends decided to turn in and head home. Him and Eddie were the last to leave, and he–
He stumbled out of the bar right beside Eddie. He–Oh god, he threw himself all over Eddie. He flirted. He–he told Eddie that–
Buck’s hand stills, the toothbrush lying on his tongue with dead weight, uncomfortable and somewhat annoying, but Buck can’t even think about that because he fucking told Eddie that he dreams about them kissing.
What the fuck?
What the actual, horrible, unholy fuck?
Buck has to leave.
He needs to find a deep, dark hole to climb inside. Bury himself so that he can never come out.
He can never see Eddie again for as long as he lives and that’s such a terrifying, heartbreaking, impossible thought, but that’s the way it has to be.
He told Eddie he dreams about them kissing.
or, a night of drinking leads to buck confessing his feelings to eddie and they are both very stupid about it
baby, it's okay if we both end up afraid | 28K | Mature | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Buck hadn’t forgotten how cold the ocean is.
He hadn’t forgotten the bite of it or how the crest of a wave can feel like the edge of a knife or how the water stings and cuts and carves and settles in the bottom of your lungs and the pit of your stomach like a handful of broken glass.
But he had forgotten the water’s weight.
He had forgotten how heavy it is as it clings to you and refuses to let go, something he supposes he has in common with this powerful, almost undefeatable force of nature. Letting go has never been something he is good at, in any capacity, in any situation, always clinging clinging clinging like his very life depends on how well he can hold on to all the things that want him to release them.
OR
buck and bobby battle their past traumas in the middle of a shipwreck. eddie pines in the aftermath. and somehow, for all of them, love endures and overcomes.
it walks with my legs (to fall at your feet) | 61K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Haunts usually only appear after being dead for a while. It’s not immediate. So it’s rare for him to see them like this. It’s even rarer for him to see one when Eddie is with him, like somehow the ghosts know to stay away when they are together.
Five years and this girl is only the third haunt he has witnessed when Eddie is nearby.
Five years and this girl is the first they talk about.
“She’s trying to talk,” Buck finishes for Eddie, hesitantly and oh so carefully, afraid of spooking Eddie, afraid of spooking himself, afraid of spooking the girl trying so hard to tell them something.
Eddie looks her over the way he does a patient, clinical and concerned, trying to find what will help him diagnose and care for those who are hurting.
A faint wisp of pride tumbles around in Buck’s chest.
A stronger gust of love hooks into his ribs.
“They don’t do that,” Eddie says after a moment.
“No.”
OR
a buddie summer sons au where buck and eddie get caught up in something bigger than themselves and awaken a power that haunts them for the rest of their lives; however, the unspoken truths and love between them haunts them more than any ghost ever could
blue eyes and bare walls | 45K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
“We are not going to paint our bedroom eggplant, Buck.” The words are flat as they come out of his mouth, pressed together beneath the weight of his exasperation and disgust at the shade of purple Buck is excitedly holding in his hands.
Buck sighs and frowns then shakes the tiny card covered in shades of purple in Eddie’s face, as if doing so would suddenly convince him that eggplant is actually a wonderful color and Eddie definitely wants it to cover the four walls of the bedroom they share.
That horrendous eggplant color is at the very top of the card with a few lighter shades below it, all hues that Buck instantly gravitated to when they made their way to the paint section of the hardware store, eyes blazing bright with that particular interest of his that makes him look so goddamn devastatingly gorgeous and indicates that he’s about to embark on a long-winded ramble.
“Eddie,” Buck whines, his lower lip jutting out in a pout as a well-practiced sheen covers his crystal blue eyes.
OR
Buck and Eddie are newlyweds and looking to paint their new bedroom. What ensues is the butting of heads, some arguing of both the fun and not fun variety, and desperate paint-filled sex on the floor
to you I'm just a man (to me you're all i am) | 287K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Buck is fucking tired of living with his parents.
He’s nearly thirty years old for Christ’s sake, and he is sick to death of being at their beck and call, of having to bend to their every whim, of being constantly scrutinized while also being constantly ignored. For his entire life he has been buried beneath their thumbs, his weak, aching, fragile body pushed further and further into the ground until dry soil and broken twigs flood his mouth, left to rot with the mark of their fingerprints burned so deeply into him that there’s no way of removing them.
OR
Buck is the son of the president of the United States and is finally moving out of the White House. His new home comes with new neighbors, Eddie and Christopher Diaz, who quickly become the center of Buck's world.
But despite being out from under his parent's thumb, Buck's life is messy and complicated and ruled by the fact that he is the First Son which means he is always under the watchful eyes of his bodyguards. None of that stops him from pursuing a life with the Diaz boys, but there are many complications, some of which he isn't even aware of. Yet.
today i live for a drop of you | 38.9K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Eddie has such a pretty cock.
That’s the only thing Buck can think of as he kneels at Eddie's feet. It’s flushed, almost purple in color, straining, and dripping. And it’s all for Buck.
Buck licks his lips and looks up at Eddie, who is leaning against the kitchen counter, hands braced behind him, his head thrown back and his chest heaving.
Jesus, Buck hasn’t even touched him yet and he’s already panting and desperate.
OR
Five times Buck dreams about sucking Eddie's cock and the one time he actually gets to do it
red life might stream again | 158K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
The continent of Edrus is split into five countries, one for each species. Kyran belongs to the fae, Midrahi belongs to the humans, Vahlan belongs to the shapeshifters, Raelia belongs to the sari, and Dwerva belongs to the daemons. For centuries the five species have lived separately and somewhat peacefully. No one is allowed into a country that is not their home country, with the exception of members of the Order and traders chosen by each ruling government.
One tragic event brings together unlikely allies Eddie, fae soldier from Kyran, and Buck, human prince and future king of Midrahi. Together, along with their friends, they must uncover a dark secret about their world that has been hidden for too long, fight to keep one another alive, and work against an evil empire that has been hiding in the shadows ready to enslave any who don't bend to its will.
In the midst of crumbling kingdoms and dark masters, Eddie and Buck find something extraordinary together, but will they survive long enough to build something that lasts or will it all come crashing down around them?
there's always been a rainbow hanging over your head | 8.7K | General | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Eddie is going to come out to Buck.
The words I’m gay are going to cross his lips, enter the scant space between them, and fill the air with truth and possibility and freedom.
Once he can actually manage to say them that is.
OR
Eddie comes out to Buck, receives a quirky mug, and gets together with the love of his life. In that order.
we live and breathe words | 9K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Buck blinks and reads over it again. And again. And again. And again. Hot, fizzy starlight bursts inside his chest, shining across every crack and crevice as he reads it over and over. The poem is–it’s beautiful. The words plunge into his heart, engulfing it in soft blooming vines that reach into every broken part and pull them together.
Eddie wrote this.
Eddie wrote this.
OR
Buck finds Eddie's poetry, discovers Eddie is in love with him, and decides to do something about it.
slowly getting sober from the taste of your skin | 7.5K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
“I–yeah. Yes. I want everything.” He’s not exactly sure what Buck is alluding to, but Eddie will take whatever Buck is willing to give. More of Buck can only be everything good and pleasurable and right in the world.
Buck pulls away from Eddie’s neck and turns his head. “Did you hear that? Sounds like he wants both of us.”
Confusion swirls through Eddie, dampening the tiny starbursts popping through his blood. He turns to follow Buck’s gaze and his breath catches in his throat.
Leaning against the doorframe, eyes wide and cheeks flushed, is–Buck.
OR
Eddie has a threesome with regular Buck and evil!Buck
when the violence causes silence | 17.5K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Watching Buck get hit by pure crackling energy, watching him fall and dangle above the ground–motionless, lifeless–it makes everything go silent. Eddie thinks he screams, but he doesn’t hear it; he feels Buck’s name rip out of his throat, splintering across his tongue, the shards of each syllable cutting cutting cutting until all he can taste is the echo of Buck’s name alongside his own blood.
OR
Buck gets struck by lightning and Eddie mourns. When Buck wakes up, Eddie takes him home and tells him what Buck means to him.
addicted to the softness of your touch | 694 | Teen and Up | Read on AO3
For the tumblr promt "your lips are really warm"
forever tastes like you and me | 1K | Teen and Up | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
For the tumblr prompt "would you like to go on a date?" "i could do a date."
even when i'm lost, with you i'm found | 947 | Teen and Up | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
For the tumblr prompt "I never thought driving around could be romantic"
and i could be good, i know that i should | 4.3K | Explicit | Read on AO3 (911/buddie)
Eddie is putting a little product in his hair, knowing that Buck loves it when it’s slightly messy, when he hears his boyfriend walk through the front door. Buck had gotten ready at Maddie and Chim’s place, stating he had a very special outfit planned and needed her help with it. Eddie’s been a little anxious about it, unable to imagine what Buck has in mind but eager to find out.
OR
Buck wears a skirt and Eddie has feelings about it
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"Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.
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 generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.
I want to be very clear on this: it is not just dependence on smartphones and phones causing mental atrophy. It's that for decades we have taught Three Cueing System as a way to read, and while we are now beginning to correct, it is catching up with us. The reliance on smartphones and short form video are in part a result of illiteracy, not necessarily a cause of it, because we have failed to give students the tools to actually read but also paired it with the belief that they can read. They do not seek remedial reading help but blame the materials for being unclear or too difficult, when the fundamental problem is that the more complex the text, the less functional the three cueing system is. They are often quite literally guessing what the text says by searching for words they recognize (or think they recognize but cannot verify) and texts rapidly become impenetrable nonsense. Of course people will reach for their phones when 90% of the text they encounter in their daily lives and schooling is not accessible to them!
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HE GOT THE SHEET MUSIC FOR THE PERFORMANCE SHE LOVED SO SHE COULD RECREATE IT AND BE HAPPY WITH IT HE SAW HOW MUCH IT MEANT TO HER AND DID WHATEVER HE COULD TO GIVE IT TO HER AGAIN TO HAVE ALWAYS OH SAM THE MAN YOU ARE
My abortion was really one the most hated kind of abortion. I wasn't underage. I wasn't raped. I wasn't in medical need.
I got pregnant not through some fluke or 1 in a 100 contraceptive failure. I got pregnant because I was knowingly and willfully having unprotected sex. Out of wedlock too if that matters.
It was my own fault, I was being irresponsible because I knew I could always get an abortion if I got pregnant. My abortion was as close as it comes to 'using abortion as a contraceptive' as anti-choicers love to say.
I didn't abort it because my health was in danger or because I didn't have the ability to care for it or whatever else. I did it purely because I didn't want a child. I wanted sex and I didn't want to deal with any consequences from it.
There's no moral here. I don't feel bad about it whatsoever. I suffered no karmic consequences or punishment from god. My life is amazing. I want to rub this in the face of every conservative and anti-choicer. I did the terrible thing. I had an abortion for the most selfish of reasons and literally nothing happened. Suck it.
i would like a hug…. JUST KIDDING! i would like TWO hugs. (suddenly becomes cold and standoffish) i don’t need anything or anyone and i don’t want to talk about it.
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undiagnosed autistic people will be like "I don't get upset when my routine changes though!!" and it's because they've built a set of if-then loops in their head to pick from one of 6 different strict routines and they do get incredibly upset when they're unable to keep to any of the 6 scripts. I'm john normal
This is called a fault tree. You will always know how to act if your fault tree captures all possible scenarios. In NASA Mission Control during mission critical events like landings there are huge binders with fault tree protocols, kind of like choose your own adventure books except you’re not the one making the choices, the universe is making them for you and you’re just trying to keep up.
The engineers who develop fault trees, I am told, often imagine new ways for their precious spacecraft to die (new branches on the fault trees) either while in the shower or lying awake at 3am, because human
Was just thinking about this the other day. Yeah I have a favorite seat on the bus (middle of the bus, near the back doors, slightly elevated, facing forward), but I don’t get upset if someone is already sitting there, I just pick one of my other favorite spots. Then I realized that most people probably don’t have a favorite bus seat, let alone a series of backup favorites.
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yrene and aelin make me so emotional, their one moment together and the chain reactions it sets off, the assassin and the healer saving one another in different ways and saving the world together godddddd
