Luvitsa

Today this woman called our information desk and said, “my son’s band is playing tonight. I want to come see him, but he never answers his phone…..I want to be there. Have you heard anything about his band?”

And I felt so bad for this lady but I’m not in the music scene around here so I had to tell her no, sorry.

Five hours later, I’m hiking and run into a group of guys setting up for some outdoor performance, and as I watch them unload the drums it hits me.

“Hey,” I said, “are y’all in a band?”

They said yeah and smiled and I told them “one of your moms called today. She wants to watch you play, but she can’t get a hold of you. Call your mom.”

And they all pulled out their phones and started discussing whose mom it probably was as they presumably dialed their own.

And now, unless we meet again and recognize each other, that’s who I’ll be forever to those guys–some mysterious courier for mom-messages who came out of the woods and told them their mom called.

I didn’t even tell them why their mom called me. Who am I to their mom?? Nobody even asked. They just took my word for it and called their mothers.

"Us? Oh, of *course* our Dachshund sleeps inside- we just let him out in the morning and make sure he comes back for dinner. He just does his own thing, no worries."

"Um, you know it's not humane to keep a chihuahua confined to an apartment? They're dogs, they're natural predators. They need to experience hunting behaviors or they get depressed. No we don't leash ours, he absolutely hates it, we just let him come and go whenever."

Yall get how fucking stupid that sounds, right? So stop letting your goddamn cats get eaten and attacked and infected and hit by cars

A toddler would probably love full unattended access to the neighborhood too, but we don't do that either, do we

One day a new tenant moved into the building. "Did you know," he said to me, troubled and scornful, "that the people across the hall from me are Jews? Polish Jews!" (Three months later we were North African Jews.) "The peace and quiet in this building are lost! You can't imagine how noisy these people are, how dirty and familiar. In the building where my sister lives, there is a Jewish family from Central Europe, and can you believe it. .. etc."

Suddenly, I was brought back to my senses, outside of this easy, apparently peaceful relationship which I had had with my neighbors. This man, with whom I was partially able to identify, brutally reminded me of the abject image he had of my people, an image which was an integral part of his universe, of this universe which I wanted to adopt. And now what was I to do? Was I to be silent or did I speak? Speak! A dignified protest. "Watch your step! I am a Jew myself, etc. . .." But then, once again, there I was out in the open, a Jewl A Tunisian Jew! The disguise was over and the assimilation stopped. Would it have been better for me to keep silent? To say nothing? No, because even if the disguise remained, the assimilation had still been arrested, identification suddenly became impossible. How could I continue to identify with people who despised and insulted me? Inside, at least, I again become distant, different, and separated as usual.

Of course I might have insisted, pursued identification at any price, but one can see the cost. In order to reach my destination I would have had to ratify this condemnation of my people and myself which the non-Jewish universe proposed. In order to assimilate, I would have had to assimilate not only the model, but also the accusations and the injustices. I would have had to swallow the poisoned fruit.

You only have to look at how many footballers who have rape accusations against them that happily represent their countries in huge tournaments like the World Cup without anyone really giving a shit to see what bollocks that is.

Cristiano Ronaldo (Portugal), Achraf Hakimi (Morocco), Thomas Partey (Ghana), Gonzalo Montiel (Argentina), Thiago Almada (Argentina), Junya Ito (Japan), Kaishu Sano (Japan), Ryan Mendes (Cabo Verde).

General discussion on rape and assault allegations related to the current world cup (via The New York Times)

Accusations against Cristiano Ronaldo (via USA Today)

Accusations against Achraf Hakimi (via The New York Times)

Accusations against Thomas Partey (via The Guardian)

Accusations against Gonzalo Montiel (via The New York Times)

Accusations against Thiago Almada (via ESPN)

Accusations against Junya Ito (via Reuters)

Accusations against Kaishu Sano (via Japan News)

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"

Ceija Stojka’s bibliography

Ceija Stojka (1933-2013) was an Austrian romani writer, painter, activist and musician. She published three autobiographies: We Live in Seclusion (1988), Travelers on This World (1992) and I Dream That I am Alive - Liberated From Bergen-Belsen (2005), in which she describes the persecution of Austrian Roma by the Nazis and the time she spent in Auschwitz, Ravensbrück and Bergen-Belsen, from her perspective as a romani girl.

“A Gypsy Dreaming in Jerusalem,” Amoun Sleem

Amoun Sleem is a Palestinian Domari* woman living in Jerusalem. At 16 years old, she founded the first and only Domari rights organization in the Middle East, which aims to support the Dom people, and especially Domari women. The Dom have been facing intense racism and persecution from the Israeli State for decades.

“I write this book to show the difficulties of being Gypsy, but also to show the creativity and beauty in the Gypsy culture. I write it to thank the people who were placed in my life as helpers and encouragers. Many of them have passed away. I hope the readers will enjoy my story as I have enjoyed living it. I give thanks to God for what He has given me in these years.” (x)

“A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia”, Elena Lacková

“The book recounts Lacková’s life story from her childhood in the Romani settlement until her retirement in 1980 told through the lens of an extraordinarily gifted and strong-minded Romani woman against the background of developments in the second half of the twentieth century in the former Czechoslovakia. Lacková´s fate is testimony to the fate of the Roma as a group in that country.

The text describes the frictions between, on the one hand, Lacková´s position as a Communist and a civil servant taking part in the implementation of state policies towards Roma as citizens of socialist Czechoslovakia and, on the other hand, her approach to life, her attitudes and her way of thinking, which reflect her immersion in Romani tradition and values as well as the hierarchies of rural Slovakia. Also reflected is her determination to help improve the situation of local Romani communities, which had suffered war-time persecution and isolation, and from the ignorance of the post-war local authorities. The book describes her motivation and willingness to take part in the Romani emancipation movement.” (x)

“American Gypsy,” Oksana Marafioti

Oksana Marafioti is a Russian Romani and Armenian writer, naturalized American citizen. “Marafioti’s book, American Gypsy: A Memoir, published this month, is a humorously honest story of growing up Gypsy, touring Europe with her family of performers, dealing with racism in Russia, then adapting to the U.S., where she was caught between the old world and new amid teenage angst, high school and her musician father’s psychic/exorcism business.” (x)

“Zwischen Liebe und Haß”, Philomena Franz (only in German)

Philomena Franz is a Sinti Auschwitz survivor. Her “autobiographical narrative, Zwischen Liebe und Haß: ein Zigeunerleben (1985), is significant as the first survivor account of the atrocities that were inflicted on Roma during the Second World War. For the past forty years, Franz has been active as a speaker at schools, universities, and community meetings, emphasizing the importance of remembering the Holocaust and its victims.“ (x)

“Never Enough Time in the Day: Memoir of a proud Romani woman”, Olga Fečová (only in Czech)

Olga Fečová (1942-2022) was a respected member of the Czech romani community. In her book, she “captures the idiosyncratic inhabitants of a disappeared world, one of Romani settlements where life was lived traditionally, of tenement houses with balcony hallways in the Old Town of Prague, of “colonies” housing the working class, and sincerely shares her life experience and opinions about it all” (x)

“Our Settlement”, Irena Eliášová (only in Slovak)

“Irena Eliášová was born on 3 May 1953 in the Roma settlement of Novésa (Nová Dedina u Levic) in Slovakia. Her father made a living as a musician. In the 1960s the family went to seek work in Czechia. They stayed at numerous places both in Southern and Northern Bohemia. She only finished elementary school because following her father becoming ill she had to take a job and help provide for the family as a seamstress. After getting to know her future husband the couple moved to Liberec. When her three children grew up, she finally became fully invested in her beloved writing. In 2008, she published the first book of memories called “Our Settlement”.” (x)

“Zigenerska,” Katarina Taikon (only in Swedish)

Katarina Taikon was a famous Swedish Romani rights activist, nicknamed “the Martin Luther King of Sweden.” In her autobiography, she criticizes the living conditions Roma are forced to live under in Sweden. Her book had a tremendous impact in Sweden and in the lives of Swedish Roma, as it drew attention to the poverty and the racism they face from the larger society, leading to the first social mobilizations aiming at improving the lives of Roma in Swedish society.

“Sur ces chemins où nos pas se sont effacés,” Pisla Helmstetter (only in French)

Pisla Helmstetter (1926-2013) was an Alsacian Sinti (romani) woman. In her autobiography, she reminisces about her childhood, spent travelling among French landscapes, in the 1930s, and about her teenage years, during which her family was persecuted by the Nazis, who ethnically cleansed Alsace of all its Roma, deporting them to concentration camps or forcing them to internment camps.

my issue is it's just fucking everywhere, all the time. everything has an ad in it. you cannot even drive into town from my place in the middle of nowhere without seeing several billboards and yes! I'm talking about back roads! not even the highway! back roads in a township with very low population density! I just want to be able to exist without someone trying to sell me something.

I feel like there's a very palpable impact of nonstop advertising every single day of most people's lives. people define themselves through products and consumerism. again, I assume this is being studied, I'm not looking it up until after my ad break, but I don't think it could be great for individuals and society at large to be constantly sold things. I feel like a crazy person yelling at the void, but I think there's something to this.

prev, i'm sure you mean my guy Leonid Pasternak