Enjoy!!

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"

TOMORROW (Jul 11), I’ll be at the Idler Festival in LONDON.

While the AI bubble is primarily a material phenomenon (driven by the calculation that bosses are easy marks for a sales pitch that sees them replacing workers with software), there is an inescapable ideological component to it: the desire for a world without people in it:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/13/vibe-governance/#k-hole

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/07/10/posthuman-as-in-no-humans/#hell-is-other-people

AI dangles the possibility of a world without ego-shattering confrontations between bosses who tell themselves they're in charge, and the workers who know how to do things and insist on telling bosses that their ideas are dangerous, illegal and/or unworkable:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

A world without people might be lonely, but it sure would be convenient. How maddening it must be to invest billions in Amazon warehouse automation, only to have to slow down or (gasp!) stop the machines so that the workers who serve as "humans in the loop" can stop to pee! Isn't there some way we can make that their problem, not ours?

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/06/one-click-to-quit-the-union/#foxglove

With AI, the fact that you need to pee – or get paid – does become your problem, rather than your boss's. After the majority of your colleagues have been fired ("because AI will do their jobs"), you become painfully aware that there are plenty of people who need your job, who will happily step in to take it if you complain too much about your bladder or your paycheck.

Even better is when the "human in the loop" can be outsourced to a company overseas, which allows bosses to simply set-and-forget a set of requirements for how the human part of the AI's labor is to be done without ever having to meet or even think about those workers' conditions. This is the illusion of full automation, in which the AI does the job "like magic."

The "magic"? A human being stuck in AI Omelas, tormented by an algorithm that sets an inhuman pace, demands inhuman perfection, and metes out pitiless punishments for any misstep – or perceived misstep – without appeal or explanation. So often, "AI" stands for "Absent Indians": low-waged call-center workers pretending to be robots:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/29/pay-no-attention/#to-the-little-man-behind-the-curtain

There are many differences between jobs performed by machines and jobs performed by people, of course. But the biggest difference between a machine and a person is moral consideration. A person deserves and demands moral consideration: for their wellbeing, their feelings, even their bladders. A machine gets none of this: you can curse at it, kick it, snap out orders without a "please" or "thank you."

There's only one kind of person you get to treat like this: a slave.

Slavery is labor without even the pretense of moral consideration.

I saw this when running newpipe. But wait, it gets deeper. I clicked on the details buttons and it said as of today, we have 83 days left until Google rolls out this new requirement for apps inside and outside of the google play store. If any developer disagrees with their new terms and fees, they will be blocked!

I'll share some of the info below:

Looks like they're trying to nuke the remaining privacy and freedoms we have left on the internet.

What to do?

-Get your developer friends to not comply to their new guides

- Sign the open letter on the site and take action by checking out the full resources list on their website as well!

To summarize, this is all daunting especially when you feel all alone with unfair and inhumane regulations comming out faster than improvements but we got this working together!

Share the link with your friends, family and anyone who will listen!

As a white person raised in a white supremacist society, you’re gonna fuck up sometimes. That’s just a fact. But racialized people often aren’t able/comfortable speaking up when y’all do some shit because of the power imbalance/not feeling up to educating when you may be resistant/don’t think the “fight” will be Worth It.

Show initiative without making it A Struggle or playing the white guilt card. Show you actually care about them, their struggles, and the way you interact with them BEFORE they have to have a bigger Conversation with you, beyond when they need to yell about someone else being racist.

Even close friends or partners are not necessarily safe. I have had partners dismiss accusations of racism just off hand, I have had partners treat me like a repository for knowledge on Muslim cultural practices despite the fact that *my family has been Christian since Jesus,* hell I have had a partner say I was overplaying my pain at the genocide to get sympathy.

IF YOU ARE WHITE YOU HAVE TO TAKE THE FIRST STEP OR YOU ARE JUST PUTTING MORE LABOR AND DANGER ON YOUR RACIALIZED FRIENDS FOR YOUR FUCKING COMFORT

civilization 5 barbarians: a small rapscallion of a skeleton. his heart is full of malice that his tiny body cannot accomplish, so he settles for smacking your beverages off of the coffee table when you aren’t looking. his shenanigans are tiresome

civilization 6 barbarians:

this fucking dude -

“the beast walks,” said Harshsmell the dwarf emperor, stroking his expansive shield-beard.

“and the Fifth Age of this world comes to a bony end,” moaned Bibarel the elf, prancingly.

“that isn’t true,” said a shadow near the wall. a man stepped out of it. four swords glittered on his back, and a hood covered his face.

“who are you, and how the balls did you get into my throne room?!’ shrieked Harshsmell

“I have come to put an end to this giant skeleton bullshit”

“fool!” shouted Harshsmell beardily. “no mere man can kill Fuckmountain! he pisses fire! his teeth are made of diamonds, and inside his head are thoughts only of malice and fucking shit up. no heart lies in his chest, because he’s a FUCKING SKELETON. he’s literally made of bones, the least-stabbable organ. you can’t kill that, dipshit”

“I’m gonna.”

“he ate two castles,” Harshsmell continued, moaning. “at the same time. i was there.”

the man stood his ground. Harshsmell glared at him dwarfily. “GUARDS! this man distresses me. take him away”

the guards moved forward to seize the intruder, but he stood his ground. though his face was not visible, Bibarel studied him.

“friend, is that Skullantula the Up-Fucker that you carry?” he asked

“it is,” said the man. he unsheathed one of his swords. it was made of jagged blood, but inscribed on the side with ancient elfin magic was a skull. both of the skull’s eyes were eight-balls.

the guards stopped in their tracks. one of them gave the sword an appraising nod and a thumbs up

“and Stabslicer the Grim,” the man continued, “and the Killblade of the Metalzillas, and the Large Fucking Hellscalpel, the last sword forged by the hands of the fire wizards of Double Lava Mountain”

“the fire wizards,” rumbled Harshsmell, “have been dead for two hundred years”

“and I’m the one who killed them”

“holy shit. fuck.”

“yeah, I know, right?”

“who are you, that could do such great things? no one man should have all that power”

“i am no man,” said the intruder, and finally pulled back his hood to reveal his face. he was three wolves. “I am Three-Wolves. I am three wolves.”

“forsooth,” Bibarel medievaled.

“yeah, pretty much” Three-Wolves said. “so are we stabbing some skeleton motherfuckers or not?”

Harshsmell fretted at his shield-beard. the long-fossilized remains of ancient side-dishes fell from its depths and shattered on the floor. “for the past thousand years, no dwarven army has left the depths of our mountain home, The Home Mountain. you will march alone”

“but your dwarfiness,” Bibarel interjected, “perhaps we can still help? we could offer him a mount.”

Three-Wolves stared stoically through one of the throne room’s many window-axes. “i was just gonna get an Uber or something”

“this is no mere transportation that we offer you, friend,” preened Bibarel. “it is the lord of the giant war scorpions, Bloodvizier VII, King of the Bugmoors”

“his mighty carapace is stronger than dwarven kill-steel,” Harshsmell boasted. “and his bitey things are like fearsome spears, if the spears were really fucking sharp and full of poison and attached to a scorpion”

“bears piss themselves at the very mention of his name,” Bibarel said. “not even little bears. the big ones”

“hell yea,” said Three-Wolves. “i’ll take it. also also the elf, because I need directions”

the journey was a long and arduous one, past the lightning spires of Napalm Druid Valley and across the abyssal Killfjord of the Squid Wizard. they knew they were getting close when they saw the giant head of an evil skeleton across the horizon, because that is what they were looking for

Bibarel stared in elfish terror as the beast Fuckmountain Deathmonster swallowed an entire mountain of swords, then ate a handful of catapults for dessert “already he has slain the hobbit viking warhost from the lawless northern lands of Fuckshire. do you truly think you can stab such a terror?”

“stabbing is for assholes,” Three-Wolves said. “i’m gonna skip straight to killing him”

Three-Wolves adjusted his vorpal codpiece and unsheathed all of his swords, and his cape billowed dramatically in front of the sun. then he kicked the war scorpion and they took off at a full arachnogallop across the obsidian plains, which were entirely covered in hobbit blood

seeing them approach, Fuckmountain reared back and stuffed a fair maiden into his mouth. her skin was as white as snow, fresh snow and not the shitty old stuff, and her bosom was really big. “please don’t come any closer!” she shrieked “it will eat me if you do”

but Three-Wolves did not hold any pity or lust in his three separate, discrete wolf hearts, only vengeance. he leapt from Bloodvizier VII and did six backflips before landing on Fuckmountain’s head. Fuckmountain roared, and lava shot from his eyes and melted swords shot from his skeleton dick. while he was roaring, Three-Wolves swung down and hurled the legendary sword Stabslicer the Grim into one of his eye sockets

“fool!” Bibarel moaned, from the middle of a giant puddle of his own fear pee “he doesn’t have eyes for you to stab!”

“i wasn’t stabbing shit,” Three-Wolves shouted back “it’s just hard to hold four swords, and i never liked that one”

he reached inside of his cloak and pulled out a dagger made out of enchanted hell-uranium, and covered with chainsaw blades. he pushed a button and they all glowed, but they glowed black

“it can’t be!” Bibarel gurgled. “the Laser Edge of the Starlich has been lost for aeons”

“like balls it has!!” Three-Wolves bellowed a mighty war bellow and sliced off Fuckmountain’s head, and stabbed him through the spine, and cut off his skeleton dick. he landed, and all the evil skeleton dust was already blowing away behind him

“friend, that was truly amazing” Bibarel gushed. “you have saved our kingdom!”

“yeah i totally did,” Three-Wolves said, stoically sheathing all of his weapons, and putting the safety cap back onto his vorpal codpiece “but there’s an even badder guy out there”

“what could ever be worse than a giant lava-pissing skeleton?”

“this” Three-Wolves said. he held up a stone covered in runes, and decorated with crystals made out of the souls of powerful monster-stabbers “it was in his head or some shit”

“a Thrall-Stone of Beam'uvee” Bibarel gasped. “but the art of making those is lost. there’s only one people who ever knew how to make them”

when they arrived in the lands of the turbo-dragons, nothing but misery and woe awaited them. Misery and Woe were the names of the sphinx liches who guarded the front door

“TRAVELERS” they shrieked, in scary voices of bones and mystery. “BEFORE YE PROCEED YE MUST ANSWER OUR FIVE RIDDLES”

and then they were dead because Three-Wolves also twisted their heads off. he was thinking about starting a collection, maybe

Bibarel the elf stayed simperingly close as they crossed the land. Castle Knifedick, loomed above them, covered with towers that were shaped like knives and also dicks. war drums echoed from the hillsides, and later, war saxophones. the legendary kill-legions of the turbodragon war host marched down to meet them

“Piss-gargling mortal!!” shouted Skullhate von Hateskull, the Bloodconsul of the Turbodragons. the Bloodconsul was elected by popular referendum every two years, because the turbodragons had a rich tradition of democracy and a robust social safety net “you should not have come here!!!”

“yeah probably” shouted back Three-Wolves, and unsheathed three swords at once “but i did”

the turbodragons readied their many arms, halberds made of crystalized shark blood and javelins made of regular shark blood. acid dripped from their stingers and their fangs and just their general anatomy, really. for a moment there was no sound on the battlefield except tense silence, and also screaming, because Three-Wolves had already started murdering them

“FUCK!” shouted the dying turbodragons “ARGH”

Three-Wolves was in his element now, and that was the element of murdering shit. a siege pterodactyl flew past and shot ballista bolts made out of the middle fingers of fossilized frost giants, and he chopped them all in half. he got cornered by a legion of thirty one shrapnel golems and machete elementals, and he bellowed the mighty Warcry of the Berserker Liches, which worked really good because he had three separate mouths for bellowing with. after he killed them all he still had enough killing left over for like thirty turbodragons

“Seize them!” shouted Skullhate von Hateskull “we shall rip the blood from their bones and feast on their guts!”

and then while his mouth was open, Three-Wolves pulled back his arm. it bulged with thews and stuff, and he threw the Large Fucking Hellscalpel like a javelin. it stabbed out all of Skullhate von Hateskull’s teeth and impaled his head, and then kept flying into space, because Three-Wolves was a really good thrower. but he was not dead yet. Three-Wolves did four backflips and jumped off of a ballista bolt in the middle of the air, then punched through his chest and pulled out all six of his dragon hearts, and took a bite out of one just to show that he wasn’t fucking around

the other turbodragons stared at this really hard, and all of them immediately both peed and cried from fear. they ran away, and some of them flew.

“friend, you did it!” Bibarel squealed elfishly. then he stopped and stared at something on the ground

“well i mean, yeah” Three-Wolves said, then noticed that Bibarel was acting stranger than usual, and he was usually pretty strange already “also what the balls is up with you”

instead of answering, Bibarel pulled a ring off of Skullhate von Hateskull’s finger. it was made out of fire, and it was inlaid with blood rubies and the teeth of especially evil smurfs, which glowed with wicked necromagics. “it is the Ring of Grimfucler, the thrall-ring of the skull lords, minted in the dark heart of one of the seven secret underground moons”

Bibarel was going to say more arcane BS, but then Three-Wolves took the ring from him

“no, friend!” gasped Bibarel “its allure enraptured hella kings in the Before Ages, but you must resist it! all who wear the ring succumb to its dark ways!”

“sounds fake” Three-Wolves growled “also it’s gotta be at least a +2 or something, so blow me”

Three-Wolves put the ring on and the ghosts of powerful king-wizards and war-sages loomed over him. they wailed with a billion centuries or pain and stretched out bony-ass bone hands at him.

“fuck off ghosts!” Three-Wolves shouted, and chopped them all to death. they crumbled into evil dust and he yawned “so anyway i was thinking like taco bell or something for lunch”

“i guess that sounds cool” Bibarel said “i’ve got like a coupon for 20% off”

and they rode off toward the sunset, which was coincidentally in the same direction as Taco Bell. but also meanwhile, in a far off land full of evil and stuff, they were being watched through a scrying pool full of mercury and hero bones, and the dark shape looming over it cackled and said to itself “THE TIME HAS COME. I WILL KILL THOSE GUYS SO HARD”

oh, your name is John you say? no it's not, now it's yuchanen. ( yeah, you have to pronounce the ח)

you want to pray to your lord and savior jesus? don't you mean your lord and savior yeshu? Or yeshua? well, thets his real name.

want to talk about adam and eva? sorry, never heard of them. ho! you must mean adam and chava, you silly goy!

Preparing for armageddon?why will you prepare to har megidu? are you going to climb it?

cain and abel? No! kin and habel! Solomon? no! shlomo! Elijah? no! eleihu!

Hebrew? No! ivrit.

ok so first of all lets start with the t rex. her very first moment is the goat leg ending up on the car, but we can see in the next shot that she is very capable of swallowing the goat whole. so how did that leg get there? given evidence that t. rexes were likely social creatures, i like to imagine that the leg on the car was more “here you go have part of my meal because you’re small” for the humans

next is her communication. i want to look at one specific thing, which was actually the thing that prompted the post

to me, that certainly looks like eye pinning. eye pinning is a behavior in birds that signals high stimulation. here’s what it looks like in a bird

it can be positive or negative, but in this case it’s probably not negative, because there’s nothing forcing the rex to stay there. if she wanted to leave the situation she could hit the bricks

the continual roaring also sort of suggests play behavior to me. there’s not really any sense in making a shitload of noise at your prey (unless you’re trying to scare them out of cover, but we know she doesn’t need to do that because we see she’s strong enough to just break into the car) so, especially because they keep screaming, that reads way more like “im making noises and they’re making noises back ^w^” then it does as trying to intimidate prey for some reason

play behavior also makes sense because we know, canonically, she’s crazy understimulated. alan grant says as much when he mentions that they aren’t feeding her in a way that promotes hunting behavior. the way she noses at the jeep and spins it really just looks more like curious interaction than anything, as well as all the chasing people she does

next, the raptors. their really famous scene is the kitchen, but first let’s establish some facts about them. we know from muldoon and what we’re shown that:

- they’re smart enough to use one of their own as a distraction for flanking maneuvers

- they’re good at problem solving enough to wait until the electric fences are turned off to systematically test them for vulnerabilities

- they’re absurdly fast. “60 mph on open ground” fast

- they are absolutely not in a big enough enclosure

- they’re not fed in a way that promotes hunting behavior either

so when you put all this information together and then look at the kitchen scene, i don’t believe for even one second that the “hide behind the counter” routine is fooling those two raptors for any time at all. that entire sequence of loudly scrambling around the kitchen while something that can keep pace with a cheetah pretends it can’t catch you? yeah that makes WAY more sense as play behavior than it does hunting, especially since we see numerous times that there are many things on the island easier to catch and eat than a bunch of skinny humans (this goes for the rex, too!)

the bit with the noises is also true here. more true, if anything. muldoon tells us the raptors are ambush predators, so why on earth would they get into a hunting ground and then risk scaring their prey off with the loud barking calls? “hi we’re here come out and play” is a much more sensible use of a call loud enough to hurt a human’s ears from across a room in that situation

This has been happening all month with little to no international media attention. Here are a few organizations you can check out for resources or to support:

ActionAid India

SEEDS India

GlobalGiving

To 2025:

Hell, they even cover the devastating heaviness of MASS SHOOTINGS without censoring or watering anything down.

They've been doing this for YEARS, and it's ALWAYS handled with dignity, respect, seriousness, understanding, and love.

Or how about when someone is put into the foster care system because their home isn't safe anymore and their needs aren't being met?

Maybe some discussions about group therapy/getting help and support?

Hey look! Here's a segment about gender expression vs taught expectation, including unlearning harmful biases and what to do when you hurt someone on accident because you didn't know it was wrong!

Look! The topic of race and diversity! The importance of unity and equity!

They even also have a more allegorical take on discrimination and being looked down on for who you are, featuring Big Bird. The conflict is about how he's not being let into a club because the one bird running the club personally decided he didn't want someone like Big Bird there.

Big Bird goes out of his way to keep changing parts of himself in order to "prove" he can fit into this club if he just changed enough. The truth comes out though, and there's nothing he can do to gain the approval of that bird. He will never be good enough in his eyes, and Big Bird starts to hate himself. His real friends see this finally put their feet down, emphasizing that you should never change yourself just to fit into one singular narrow idea someone else has.

There's A LOT of different situations this can be an allegory for. Racism, sexism, homophobia, basically ANY form of exclusion is put on full blast in this 15 minute clip. Sesame Street can be both blunt and allegorical when approaching difficult topics, and it NEVER misses or looses the point.

It does an exceptional job in both styles of representation WITHOUT watering anything down. The more sanitized everything gets, the more radical Sesame Street is suddenly considered, hence why so many "particular groups" want it gone. Hmmm! I can only imagine why that could be, in this current political climate! (I'm being sarcastic)

When Sesame Street is suddenly labeled as "questionable" or "politically/agenda motivated" content...it says A LOT about where we currently are and who gets to decide what's "best" for kids or not. Don't fall for the censorship and topic-dodging excuses that are covered by the "But think of the children!!!" movement. Never fall for it, because you know which side you're on if you do.

Sesame Street proves kids can be taught and trusted with learning about these topics when it's handled with the right amount of understanding and care. It shows what all this "controversy" is all really about. What it's always been about, actually.