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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"

Below is a list of Palestinians from the Gaza Strip who have either followed me or reached out to me via my ask-box this past week.

I compile these new lists throughout the week, then post them every Monday. I used to post them every Friday, but this will allow me to catch up on any messages or headlines over the weekend. I also share each account’s donation posts for added visibility.

“Board of Peace”

On January 22nd, a proposal for a multinational “Board of Peace” was signed by United States President Donald Trump at the World Economic Forum, in accordance with his 20-point peace plan. This coalition, approved at the UN on November 17th of last year under Resolution 2803, is meant to aid in the reconstruction and re-stabilization of the Gaza Strip.

However, the Board of Peace as it’s been established has been called into question, with some world leaders and diplomats expressing concern that it might undermine the UN’s authority.

Additionally, it has been criticized as yet another self-serving imperialist overreach by Trump, which seeks to create multiple properties for real estate and tourism, all with no input from Palestinians in Gaza themselves.

On July 12th, the Middle East Monitor has reported that the US Army has begun constructing a new military base near Gaza's border, supposedly to help enforce Trump's 20-part peace plan.

On July 1st, the Board of Peace has announced the creation of "humanitarian," "Hamas-free" zones for unarmed Palestinian civilians, which will be policed by a multinational International Stabilization Force (ISF) as the IDF continues to colonize the Gaza Strip.

Additionally, on July 6th, Hamas has announced the dissolution of their government operations in Gaza, as part of the aforementioned peace plan. A technocratic committee called National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) is set to take its place. However, NCAG is still stuck in Cairo, Egypt due to concerns surrounding the coordination of responsibilities and presence of armed security protecting them.

A Ceasefire in Name Only

As of July 13th, the IDF has killed 1,108 Palestinians and wounded 3,378 since the so-called "ceasefire" went into effect on October 10th, 2025. According to UNICEF on June 19th, this includes 265 children, with an average of one child death per day.

According to Gaza’s Government Media Office, Israel has committed at least 3,465 ceasefire violations between October 10th, 2025 and July 10th, 2026.

On July 10th, NPR has reported that the IDF now occupies nearly 70% of the Gaza Strip, with the yellow line having shifted further into Gaza City as early as January of this year.

Back in December, IDF Chief of Staff Eyal Zamir declared the yellow line is Israel's new borderline, while defense minister Israel Katz also announced the construction of new illegal settlements North Gaza. It's safe to say that the yellow line has been Israel's way of annexing the territory.

Amid the US-Israel' starting a war with Iran, Israel has once again closed the Rafah border crossing. During its short opening period, only a small trickle of 50 medical evacuees per day, along with two companions for each, were allowed to pass through. Additionally, evacuees reported constant delays, abusive interrogations, and confiscation of their belongings.

Palestinians in Gaza have begun panic-buying food due to this sudden closure and newly imposed aid restrictions. Already inflated prices are rising even higher because of this, which makes the cost of barely surviving even more expensive than before.

On top of all of this, there has been a surge of rat infestations in Gaza's displacement camps due to the ongoing build-up of garbage and raw sewage, all with no infrastructure to manage any of it. This is causing a spread of rat bites among the displaced, particularly children, leaving them vulnerable to infection and dangerous diseases.

Palestinian Genocide in Gaza, 2023-present: Death, Injury and Starvation Figures

As of July 13th, the official death toll of Palestinian civilians has risen to 73,231 and 173,686 wounded, and with over 42,000 having received life-altering injuries, according to an October 2025 report from the UN. Altogether, both the official death and injury tolls account for more than 10% of Gaza’s population before Israel’s siege.

On January 26th, an analysis of Gaza's civil registry by Al-Jazeera found that 2,700 Palestinian families have been completely wiped out by the IDF since October 2023. Roughly 6,000 more families have only one surviving member left.

According to several studies conducted over the course of this genocide — the first published by British Medical Journal and the second by The Lancet — the Gaza Health Ministry’s official death toll is an extreme under-count. Indirect deaths from starvation and disease, combined with official figures, might bring the toll into the hundreds of thousands.

On September 16th 2025, the United Nations’ Independent Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory, Including East Jerusalem and Israel, has officially concluded that Israel has been committing a genocide in Gaza for the past two years and counting.

As of October 7th 2025, 460 Palestinians in Gaza have died of malnutrition and starvation since October 2023, including 154 children. Although the numbers are no longer being reported, they have continued to climb as Israel continues delaying food and aid from entering Gaza.

On November 25th 2025, the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany released a study determining not only that the death toll is more than 100,000 people, but that the average life expectancy of Palestinians in Gaza has fallen by 44% in 2023, and 47% in 2024.

More statistics and infographics of civilian deaths, imprisonment and damage to nearly all of Gaza’s infrastructure can be found here.

More death statistics here, including the names of adults and children killed in the genocide.

Palestinians in Gaza still need all of the help they can get to rebuild their lives, as well as heal from the horrific physical and psychological violence inflicted upon them by the Israeli occupation.

Fundraisers that are extremely low on donations (i.e. less than 10% funded) are marked in red. Those whose donations have slowed down are marked in orange. An exclamation point emoji (‼️) indicates a stagnated fundraiser (i.e. no movement in two or more days).

Vetted Fundraisers

🍉 Nazmy Abouda (@nazmy27988) - 3,292/10,000 EUR raised on GoFundMe | donation post | #380 on GazaVetters ‼️NO DONATIONS IN 16 DAYS‼️

New/Not Yet Vetted Fundraisers

These fundraisers have not been vetted by confirmed Palestinian vetting accounts or organizations. These campaigns are hosted by crowdfunding sites with donor refund policies. Use your best judgment when deciding whether to donate.

He didn't do it.

The cops very clearly planted evidence on him because they had to make an arrest because all eyes were on them and whoever actually did the deed was making them look stupid.

Why would the real killer hero have kept the weapon on his person and traveled two states over while carrying it and a manifesto in his bag, conveniently turning the crime into a federal matter? The same guy whose bag they found in a park, filled with monopoly money? Why did the police turn off their bodycams, take Luigi's stuff, drive a block away, turn their bodycams back on, go back into the restaurant, and then arrest him?

a little closer

perfect

Instead of a cutesie reference to film censorship it was an explicit statement of defiance of Maryland's criminalization gay sex, which was not repealed until 2002. This wasn't a guy saying "Oh they can't put what I do in the movies according to a completely voluntary industry code" he was saying "The State of Maryland wants to put me in jail for being gay and having gay sex."