Moff cross ocean

It's good advice.

I don't even want to spoil it. Just take a thin strip of paper, make a Möbius strip (turn one end around once and tape the ends together), draw a line along it, right in the middle, then cut along that line. See what you get.

Then do the same again, but instead of drawing the line in the middle, divide the strip into 1/3 and 2/3. Then cut that. You may think "oh it will be about the same result" NO! Totally different!

Upon seeing the outcome I vaguely remembered that I'd read at some point that cutting a Möbius strip in half gives you another full-looping Möbius strip, which makes sense in hindsight. My prediction was that it would create two separate intersecting loops, which was actually what happened when cutting the halved one in half again!

The second iteration is not the exact same strip again: it makes three turns instead of the original's one turn, which still makes it one surface but adds a loop somewhere in the strip. This... sort of makes sense? You can think of a flat strip as having made zero turns, and then when you turn it into a circular strip you turn each end towards itself, making two turns, which cancel out. But, if you do this with a Möbius strip, it tries to unspool its two halves, which it can't fully do because the original three turns are... probably not doubled, but increased to some number? It's five, isn't it? Two for each end-to-end turn and one more for the twist, which has not doubled because the continuity of the strip is maintained. So, you end up with an intact strip with a loop and a twist.

Anyway, cutting that in half again does create two intersecting loops! The only thing that changed was adding a loop to the strip, so I hypothesize that if you make a circular strip with just a loop, not a Möbius strip, and cut that in half, that must create two interlocking circular strips. Otherwise you could cut a Möbius strip in half to make a longer one, indefinitely.

You could certainly cut a Möbius strip out of a Klein bottle. Simply pick two adjacent lines that go across the length of the bottle and make cuts there, and as long as those don't intersect the hole then you have a Möbius strip, just not one that's equal in width in all places. But if you pick two opposite lines across the length of the bottle, does it create two Möbius strips?

Conveniently, there's an image of this, and I suppose it does? You can flatten the large interior of the bottle so that it's equal in width to the neck, and then the twist is apparent in the place where it curves inwards. Cutting across this plane leaves them not interlinked, obviously, and I'm not sure there is a cut you can make that does while still creating a continuous strip.

I don't know! I haven't meditated on embedding things in higher dimensions lately; it would take me a while.

But then my husband and I got curious and decided to look up the history of wheelbarrows, and we both thought it was surprisingly interesting.

The very next day, we were visiting a thrift store with family and my sister spotted a toy wheelbarrow for her son, and my husband said, “Did you know that Jesus was older than wheelbarrows? They weren’t invented until around 100 CE.”

I've seen a lot of terrible analysis of this photo.

People are either shoving it through an AI detector, asking Grok, or they are peeping pixels with expertise they don't have.

AI detection websites are mostly scams. They often have the accuracy of a coin flip. Even lab-grade tools are only 70 to 80% accurate in controlled conditions. And yet people are trusting a free website with an ad for boner pills in the corner to tell them if something is authentic.

I have been doing high level photo manipulation for two decades. I'm as close to an expert as you will get on Tumblr dot com.

So let's properly peep at the pixels and do actual forensic analysis.

First, I think this is mostly a real photo. Probably taken at some other point in time.

And I don't think this is fully AI generated. I actually think it is a traditional composite. I think the hand and newspaper are separate assets that were blended. It's possible the hand was AI-generated and then composited. And I think they may have taken a real photo of someone holding a newspaper and replaced the hand.

The first oddity is the fingers.

Typically when you touch an object it creates a contact shadow. One finger has a contact shadow and the other does not.

It should probably look more like this.

The next sign of a composite is the edge of the finger.

There is a sign of a feathered edge.

This is a lazy compositing technique to help edges blend without making a super precise selection. If you look at all of the other edges in the photo, this is the only one that has a feathered edge. You can see how clean all the other edges are by the top arrow and how fuzzy the finger edge is by the bottom arrow.

If I were cutting out his other hand and taking the time to do it properly, I would clean up the edge to make sure it was consistent with everything else in the photo.

If I were in a hurry, I would just feather the edge and hope no one actually zooms in.

And then there is the edge of the newspaper.

This is called a matte line. The newspaper was most likely against a dark background when they cut it out, and they did not clean up the edge.

Again, it's lazy. Because Photoshop has a tool dedicated to fixing this exact issue.

In my expert opinion, I think they generated an AI hand, took a photo of someone holding a newspaper in similar lighting, and then manually blended them into an existing photo.

But I don't think this was 100% AI-generated. You typically don't see compositing errors in generated images. They probably couldn't get the AI to generate the newspaper without garbled text.

What's curious is that the pixel resolution is just barely bad enough that you cannot tell if the text is authentic. But it's not blurred or distorted. It is just low enough in resolution to give a sense of text without being legible. And I think that made people suspicious due to AI's reputation when text is involved.

But from what I can tell, the print size and letter spacing does seem to match.

So I don't think that is the clue people are making it out to be.

Last thing, image analysis like this is not 100% conclusive. I'm pretty sure there are shenanigans, but anyone who tells you with absolute confidence that an image is fake... is probably bullshitting or ignorant.

The missing contact shadow could be explained by the angle of the light filling it in.

The feathered edge could be motion blur.

The edge of the newspaper could be a sharpening artifact.

'Medicinal' does NOT mean 'good for you and safe to eat all the time'. A plant being 'medicinal' does NOT mean that eating it, without any idea of WHY and HOW it's considered medicinal, is a good idea. It is UNWISE to consume a plant that has a long history of use in a way that DOES NOT have a long history of use.

In addition to learning that a plant is edible, you need to learn how it is eaten, what part is eaten, when it's harvested, and how to harvest it sustainably and in a way that supports its continued existence (unless it's invasive). If people only eat the ripe berries as food, then don't eat unripe berries. Don't. Eat. Unripe. Berries. UNLESS! There's! precedent! For that plant!

Anyways, yes. Medicinal plants are medicines. They have drug interactions and side effects. You can overdose. Modern pharmaceuticals are a good thing because you know exactly how much of the active ingredient you are consuming, and there is a lot of information on the safety.

I honestly feel that the uses of medicinal plants are pretty narrow in a world where pharmaceutical drugs can be manufactured, because of all of these reasons

There is no hard boundary between "natural" and "unnatural," like, lots of medicines are the exact same compounds found in medicinal plants, except when it's manufactured you know exactly how much of the active ingredient you're ingesting.

And lots of those compounds are REALLY toxic above a certain dose because. well. They Are Drugs.

The ongoing "Jason Todd is a cop" debate has reminded me of a brilliant brief image essay by Joey deVilla. So here it is, images first and the full essay text below:

You'd want to be careful with their shit.

Not because it's bad. It's not bad. It's BIG. Bigger than you would think. Which is why you tripple check the measurements.

Why has somebody commented the Declaration of Independence here??

For context, my mom is the one who taught me to forage, and it was and is just part of life. She regularly added foraged foods to our everyday meals. I knew how to identify huckleberry before I learned the alphabet. Foraging was just another part of feeding ourselves, along with gardening, raising chickens, and going to the store. And the firmest rule was that you didn't eat a plant unless you were willing to bet your life on it being what you thought it was.

So to watch my coworker see a berry, say 'strawberry!' and then pick it and have it three quarters of the way to his mouth before I could point out that it was actually an unripe blackberry...

Well, it was a striking moment. Because while that particular mix up would not actually hurt you, the lack of paying attention it takes to mistake an unripe blackberry for a strawberry and the lack of caution it takes to put a plant that you've hardly looked at into your mouth- no wonder some people think bittersweet nightshade is a look alike to red huckleberry!

And it explains a lot about how secretive most people are about their foraging spots. If you don't care enough about your own health and well-being to actually look at the plant you're eating, how could I trust you to care for the health and well-being of the plants you want to forage and the ecosystems you want to forage from? I want my foraging spots to be better off for my interactions with them. I want to be able to go back to the same spots year after year and decade after decade and see the native plants thriving, the invasive species losing ground, and the biodiversity increasing.

But also I'm not going to pretend we aren't failing and potentially sabotaging a lot of these students. We know by now that teaching to the test is not teaching the relevant skills. We know by now that AI makes it hard to think (At least... the version being shoved at developers does.) We know by now that our relationships with smartphones tends to be unhealthy, and these are the same devices we have just given kids to "figure it out".

We took our fucked up world and fucked it up more before passing it down! And gave everyone access to a scam machine and started grading people on how much they use it.

I was failed when the school decided to use facebook as the primary way to communicate with students. When they embraced technology to give us homework after we got home, or to have us turn in homework on days we don't even have class.

They were failed when they were given instructions to appease an AI to make it so teachers don't accuse the of plagarism because their wording was too much "outside the range of what a human should write".

But you know what else? What really opens me up to articles like this?

I feel it. The pull to constantly be on my phone. The skimming instead of reading deeply. The skipping long reads. Trouble focusing. Misreading things.

Hell, when's the last time I sat down to read a physical book?!

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"