Nerdy ADHD: The Feed

If I tell you this is a horror dance number it still won't prepare you. That last move was so terrifying even the judge was like "Let go! Let go!" If you told me they're actually possessed I'd believe you.

The music is a remix of the song Mere Dholna from the Bollywood movie Bhool Bhulaiyya, a remake of the classic Malayalam horror-comedy Manichitrathazhu. It's about a young bride that seemingly becomes possessed of Manjulika, a dancer of the ancient royal court whose tragic death has turned her into a vengeful spirit, one who evokes the wrath of the goddess Durga Kali. In the iconic scene that is repeated across remakes, the groom and his family discover his bride dancing in the dead of night in a manic, disassociative fugue, wearing a moth-eaten dancer's costume and a face smeared in kohl, ash and vermilion. She's hallucinating that she's Manjulika dancing carefree for the court with her lover. The upbeat music is deliberately incongruous with the pathos and creepiness of the scene in reality, especially as it crescendos in the bride's head to the moment when the king decapitates Manjulika's beloved in a fit of jealous rage.

This specific number is by the all-male troupe B Unique, performed for the Indian reality talent contest Hunabaarz. It's a modern fusion based on Bharatnatyam that turns up the creep factor by 200% and is basically a showcase of contortionism and synchronicity. One of the most perfectly choreographed and executed dances I have ever seen. Truly incredible!

Hey everyone,

It's Your Local Bardic entity, Gallus Rostromengalus of Bread Jesus and other Weird Tumblr Story Fame.

Despite my best efforts to mitigate mt Terrible English Dental DNA, today two of my teeth broke.

I don't even have a fun story about this, it's literally terrible genetics and stress-grinding my teeth in my sleep.

I just got back from emergency surgery to get the pieces pulled and the hole in my jaw closed so I don't get an infection, but a second reconstruction surgery to give me a bone graft and dental implants will be needed so I can actually chew and use my mouth for it's intended purposes.

I do not currently have dental insurance. I haven't talked about it here much, but my husband was unemployed after getting laid off for almost all of last year. He has a job again, but it pays like 2/3rds of his previous one and the benefits are crap. Like no dental insurance until he's worked there at least a year.

So I'm on the hook for the full cost of Today's emergency surgery, Medication, and the necessary follow-up reconstruction, which my dentist estimates will cost between $5000-$7000. Our dentist has given us every discount she can and we have a payment plan, but losing half our household income has left us with no savings and credit cards at their limits. Even though I only need to come up with $500 this month to go ahead with the reconstructive surgery, I do not have any money to spare. It will also be VASTLY cheaper overall to pay for everything up front rather than pay interest over the months with the payment plan, but literally anything will help me right now.

Link To My GoFundMe

Link To My Ko-Fi

Thank you all so much, Gallus

Now take this logic and apply it to things like ADHD, autism, clinical depression, and other less visible/divergent disabilities. You cannot think your way out of feeling.

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"

and EVEN WHEN things were more muted/neutral, the neutrality was OFFSET by ACCENT COLORS and HIGH CONTRAST between the wood tones and everything ELSE

ALSO AMERICAN COLONIAL INTERIORS POPPED OFF, Y'ALL (IN TERMS OF COLOR/COZINESS)

PEOPLE USED WHITEWASH AND COLORFUL TRIM OR EVEN JUST COLORFUL FURNITURE IF THEY COULD AFFORD TO DO SO

AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON FRENCH AND BRITISH AND AMERICAN WALLPAPERS

"ELIZABETH" YOU CRY, "WHY ARE YOU BEING SO EXTRA THIS MORNING?! IT'S MONDAY"

Because, my friend, my war on GREIGE will NEVER end.

Historic interiors were filled with LIFE and LIGHT and COLOR. ALWAYS HAVE BEEN.

Part of the reason we don't see a lot of textile art is because, frankly, textiles tend to degrade over time - especially ones that had utility! And yes, pigments and weaving and dying all boosted the expense of things, when we were finally reliably block-printing fabrics and broad reams of paper, it was no longer just the wealthy who could afford pretty patterns!

In the Americas, a far wider variety of pigments also became available because of the abundance of... well, a shitton of flora and minerals, some of which weren't as common in Europe.

WHY THE HIGHLIGHTER COLORS? you ask.

CANDLES.

Those colors reflect candlelight and natural sunlight REALLY WELL.

Humans LOVE bright colors, it's NOT just a thing for kids. We live in a brilliant, vibrant, multifaceted world. We ALWAYS have.

(If ever you have the opportunity to visit the Stencil House at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont (pictured above at 3, 4, and 5), I highly recommend.)

And that's before you get into American painted murals:

Since people keep complaining about "nOnE oF tHeSe ArE wOrKiNg ClAsS" without actually seeing the full version of the post, or bothering to add any of their own, please see above, but also, below.

Note: Textiles depicted below are either reproduction or illustrations of, because textiles are notoriously degradable, as mentioned above.

I'm salty about this because the bad faith take is that in a clearly casually thrown-together post-and-follow-up-reblog, I'm not accurately representing everything. Am I? Honestly, no, and that's why I made an addendum reblog. I also work full time and mandatory overtime during work's busy season so I end up working ~200+ hours a month instead of 160. So no, I don't have time and energy to comb through non-academic sources and shit-tier search engines to scrape together something that I trust YOU, THE READER, to find your g-damn self.

The kind person who reblogged with the stencils did the GOOD FAITH take and added on glorious images of stencilry. Lovely!

Other folks have decided to send snippy and passive aggressive DMs and complaints in the tags.

I bring this up because this kind of attitude is a reason why the historical ~community~ on this hellsite is so unbearably difficult to deal with sometimes.

We should be willing to not immediately accuse people of not posting flawless and peer-reviewed academic OPINIONS on what used to be the Furry-And-P0rn-Sexyman-Website.

Should people be clear when discussing historical things? Yes.

Should audiences take responsibility over their own consumption of social media to not have everything spelled out for them on a tangential topic addressed in what was clearly a goofy, late-night emotional post? Also yes.

Did my posts get my point across? Yes! Then I guess it was a success. And I'm not getting money or clout from this, so the assumption that Being Incorrect/Unclear/Unintentionally Misleading is worth getting sniped is wholly unwarranted. Please note that I am FINE with being wrong, or having someone request that I edit the original post. That isn't the problem.

If you think I'm misrepresenting something or if you think the "we live in a colorful world" post is spreading misinformation about the state of color in the lives of people in every strata of society during the Georgian period throughout the Anglosphere, then message me about it. Politely.

If you don't have something to contribute other than bad faith takes and accusations of classism, keep your passive aggressive--and frankly PERFORMATIVE--gatekeeping to yourself.

Actual color names include Empress Lilac, Dewy Iris, Spring Stream, Mermaid's Song, Tantalizing Teal, Sandswept, & Crystal Coral. You only have to live with white and beige if you want to!

and EVEN WHEN things were more muted/neutral, the neutrality was OFFSET by ACCENT COLORS and HIGH CONTRAST between the wood tones and everything ELSE

ALSO AMERICAN COLONIAL INTERIORS POPPED OFF, Y'ALL (IN TERMS OF COLOR/COZINESS)

PEOPLE USED WHITEWASH AND COLORFUL TRIM OR EVEN JUST COLORFUL FURNITURE IF THEY COULD AFFORD TO DO SO

AND DON'T GET ME STARTED ON FRENCH AND BRITISH AND AMERICAN WALLPAPERS

"ELIZABETH" YOU CRY, "WHY ARE YOU BEING SO EXTRA THIS MORNING?! IT'S MONDAY"

Because, my friend, my war on GREIGE will NEVER end.

Historic interiors were filled with LIFE and LIGHT and COLOR. ALWAYS HAVE BEEN.

Part of the reason we don't see a lot of textile art is because, frankly, textiles tend to degrade over time - especially ones that had utility! And yes, pigments and weaving and dying all boosted the expense of things, when we were finally reliably block-printing fabrics and broad reams of paper, it was no longer just the wealthy who could afford pretty patterns!

In the Americas, a far wider variety of pigments also became available because of the abundance of... well, a shitton of flora and minerals, some of which weren't as common in Europe.

WHY THE HIGHLIGHTER COLORS? you ask.

CANDLES.

Those colors reflect candlelight and natural sunlight REALLY WELL.

Humans LOVE bright colors, it's NOT just a thing for kids. We live in a brilliant, vibrant, multifaceted world. We ALWAYS have.

(If ever you have the opportunity to visit the Stencil House at the Shelburne Museum in Vermont (pictured above at 3, 4, and 5), I highly recommend.)

And that's before you get into American painted murals:

Since people keep complaining about "nOnE oF tHeSe ArE wOrKiNg ClAsS" without actually seeing the full version of the post, or bothering to add any of their own, please see above, but also, below.

Note: Textiles depicted below are either reproduction or illustrations of, because textiles are notoriously degradable, as mentioned above.

I'm salty about this because the bad faith take is that in a clearly casually thrown-together post-and-follow-up-reblog, I'm not accurately representing everything. Am I? Honestly, no, and that's why I made an addendum reblog. I also work full time and mandatory overtime during work's busy season so I end up working ~200+ hours a month instead of 160. So no, I don't have time and energy to comb through non-academic sources and shit-tier search engines to scrape together something that I trust YOU, THE READER, to find your g-damn self.

The kind person who reblogged with the stencils did the GOOD FAITH take and added on glorious images of stencilry. Lovely!

Other folks have decided to send snippy and passive aggressive DMs and complaints in the tags.

I bring this up because this kind of attitude is a reason why the historical ~community~ on this hellsite is so unbearably difficult to deal with sometimes.

We should be willing to not immediately accuse people of not posting flawless and peer-reviewed academic OPINIONS on what used to be the Furry-And-P0rn-Sexyman-Website.

Should people be clear when discussing historical things? Yes.

Should audiences take responsibility over their own consumption of social media to not have everything spelled out for them on a tangential topic addressed in what was clearly a goofy, late-night emotional post? Also yes.

Did my posts get my point across? Yes! Then I guess it was a success. And I'm not getting money or clout from this, so the assumption that Being Incorrect/Unclear/Unintentionally Misleading is worth getting sniped is wholly unwarranted. Please note that I am FINE with being wrong, or having someone request that I edit the original post. That isn't the problem.

If you think I'm misrepresenting something or if you think the "we live in a colorful world" post is spreading misinformation about the state of color in the lives of people in every strata of society during the Georgian period throughout the Anglosphere, then message me about it. Politely.

If you don't have something to contribute other than bad faith takes and accusations of classism, keep your passive aggressive--and frankly PERFORMATIVE--gatekeeping to yourself.

Actual color names include Empress Lilac, Dewy Iris, Spring Stream, Mermaid's Song, Tantalizing Teal, Sandswept, & Crystal Coral. You only have to live with white and beige if you want to!

Remember everyone that making the Constitution was infinitely more interesting and relevant to America than Thomas Jefferson’s callout post to King George, and that it marks a real 250th anniversary in terms of continuous governance. Also governance is building, not destroying!

“This country was founded by a group of slave owners who told us that all men are created equal. To my mind, that is what’s known as being stunningly and embarrassingly full of shit.” - George Carlin

Hunting for some coochie

Wrote a G up on his belt

I just remembered that this was a thing that was HILARIOUS in 2006 and apparently that was ten years ago now.

Old people: join with me in remembering how funny we found this on LiveJournal.

Young people: look at this lolrus, it’s so happy, it has a bucket.

2021:

2018:

2016:

2012:

2010:

I haven’t pissed people off lately by reminding them that ALL types of physical punishment of kids has been proven beyond ANY reasonable doubt to have only negative long term outcomes.

So let me scream it from the hilltops:

Stop hitting kids. End of sentence.

2022:

2023:

2024:

2025:

For example, being exposed to corporal punishment as a kid makes it more likely for a person to commit domestic violence against a partner. In places where corporal punishment is normal, people are more likely to think that rape and intimate partner violence are normal. Kids who are spanked are more likely to be violent with and to bully other kids.

Spanking is literally teaching a kid that violence is okay and normal and it affects the whole society.

Tl;dr What say you about teleology and how do you manage through all the dread knowing we live in a fairly Evil Society (USA)?

PS: Hannah Arendt’s Banality of Evil and Karl Popper’s Paradox of Tolerance are pretty much cornerstones of my belief system and wondering if you have any books that serve as a sort of Metaphysical Bible

Thanks for maintaining kindness despite all the cruelty!

Okay so like. There is not a good Answer to this that you can find with discussion, is the thing. Sometimes you can find it in books. Some of the clearest statements of it I've found in Russian literature where the person talking is Christian, but I don't think it's Christian, the thing I'm doing.

The secret, I think, is to find it in you. And the secret to finding it in you is to make it in you.

What did this fuckin priest elder guy say in the Brothers Karamazov (this is not a recommendation to read the Brothers Karamazov) (pause for whipping through Dostoevsky) (priest is speaking to a woman here who's like "how tf do I have faith if I literally just don't?" and this is not a pithy response, this is after a lot of back and forth)

"By the experience of active love. Strive to love your neighbor actively and indefatigably. ... If you do not attain happiness, always remember that you are on the right road, and try not to leave it. Above all, avoid falsehood, every kind of falsehood, especially falseness to yourself. Watch over your own deceitfulness and look into it every hour, every minute. Avoid being scornful, both to others and to yourself. What seems to you bad within you will grow purer from the very fact of your observing it in yourself. Avoid fear too, though fear is only the consequence of every sort of falsehood. Don't be frightened overmuch even at your evil actions. I am sorry I can say nothing more consoling to you, for love in action is a harsh and dreadful thing compared with love in dreams. Love in dreams is greedy for immediate action, rapidly performed and in the sight of all. Men will even give their lives if only the ordeal does not last long but is soon over, with all looking on and applauding as though on the stage. But active love is labour and fortitude, and for some people too, perhaps, a complete science. But I predict that just when you see with horror that in spite of all your efforts you are getting farther from your goal instead of nearer to it -- at that very moment I predict that you will reach it and perceive clearly the miraculous power of the Lord who has been all the time loving and mysteriously guiding you."

So I'm more or less atheist, and more or less pagan, or something else. I was raised atheist, so the Lord who has been all the time loving you stuff mostly makes me want to skip ahead to the next paragraph.

But the real motherfucker of this is that he's right. There's no shortcut. The way to find the love of humanity is by doing acts of love towards humanity. Especially humanity where it's at its worst and smelliest and dirtiest and meanest. It's so hard to explain, but I bet that others who've worked with the poor or who've worked in medical care or in indigent defense or something similar will know instinctively what I mean. The more you genuinely with your whole heart offer your hand to people in need, the more things just make sense. The more you meet them where they are and listen to their truth, the more you see yours. There's no shortcut.

When I was in high school, I watched one of the really early HBO efforts at being next-level television, a show called Carnivale. The show was off-putting to me. It had a visual and storytelling vocabulary that I struggled with. The characters were all weird and petty and angry and mean and afraid and gross. And about episode six or seven I realized I loved them more than I loved any other purer characters I'd ever read or seen. That was a start, for me, of the idea that people are lovable not because of their goodness but because of their weaknesses and failings and petty bullshit.

The monsters are all too big. Algorithm? I can't beat algorithm. That's a battle on a scale I can't even understand, let alone fight. Algorithm is an ocean-level current and I am a Fish. My choice is to swim out of the current, and I have as much as I can. (This is a practical choice: algorithm-based social media makes me feel sad, stressed-out, and stretched thin every time I scroll and scroll and scroll, and eventually I turn off things that make me unhappy.)

Systemic racism? It's a whole damn system! It's law after law after tradition after rule! I can fight battles that are sized to me: I can take other, more battered fish, and help them swim out. Once I know the layout of the current really well, I can suggest ways to divert the flow of the water so that a lot of fish might be spared that battering. And I can educate other fish about how the water flows so that they can recognize paths to improvement the way I do.

We all gotta narrow the scope. Save one fish, and then when you're ready, go do it again. If you aren't in a position to save a fish, grow a flower. If you can't grow one, draw one. The more beauty and simplicity and love that you bring into the world, the more it's okay. The more it makes sense.

There's no one book; I didn't get here by the beaten road. I started with an emotional drive towards justice and a brain to direct that drive towards a place that doesn't do damage, and I ended up somewhere I did not think I was going.

But there are a couple books that have made me feel like yes, this, completely.

The Enchanted, by Rene Denfeld - description makes it sound like fantasy but it isn't. Not even magical realism. Just, a magical way of seeing the real. A death penalty investigator, a priest, and inmates on death row. This book understands why.

Resurrection, by Tolstoy - Russian novel. lol not his most famous, generally agreed to be not his best work. But there are some quotes from this thing that are like. Hey Mr. Tolstoy can you tell me how you know what it's like for me in the year 2k25 to walk into this hideous jail to speak to my client about his fate, when you were writing halfway across the globe in like 18whatever? Can you explain to me why your description of the hideousness of Russian prisons and your story of people dying on the march to Siberia who were murdered, but were murdered by the rules and the regulations and somehow not by any one person, is a mirror to ICE and now? This book is about us. That doesn't mean it's not about Russia.

Non-Violent Communication and No Bad Parts are both books that aren't even about morality, not exactly, but they both made me gain something in my understanding of violence and harm.

The Secret Life of Bees was also formative to me in my moral development but I'm not sure I can articulate why. Some realization of "oh, this is the same, we're the same" that got me when I was young and made me less closed off to what other people see.

The third book of the Graceling trilogy, Bitterblue, is also something very important, about memory, and trauma, and accounting for the past.

I don't know that this was intellectually satisfying. My journey was an accidental one, as I imagine most real-life journeys to moral philosophies are.