Open the door they said

rascvjetana romantika pod Zadarskim trešnjama.

"People back then always married young it's natural!!!" Every single 1800s guide I've ever met casually mentions that, of course, you really shouldn't get married before you're at least 20, and waiting until 25 is usually better.

Or, like. Okay here's a long segment:

Just firmly going "it is crazy sexist to blame The Wife for overspending when thirty seconds of asking questions will immediately establish that her husband was outright lying to her about how much money they had. Talk to your wife like a normal person."

Or--okay, here. A section on being honest and not writing love letters in secret, because that's usually a good sign that there's something untoward going on....

....except that he then immediately acknowledges that sometimes, the reason you're hiding this from your parents is that your parents suck. That there are parents who frankly have not earned the right to approve or disapprove of your partner.

"Men and women being friends with each other is literally normal. Don't be a controlling freak."

"If you have to abuse a child to keep order in your classroom then you're a bad teacher."

and even the informed consent paperwork lists atrophy as a side effect of testosterone. why would that be a painless experience? if your arm or your lungs started to “atrophy”, to become weaker and smaller, couldn’t they also start to hurt?

trans guys take testosterone for the systemic, permanent, whole-body effects, right?… and you don’t believe people when they say “this drug has systemic permanant effects, all throughout the body”?

Here and here are some reddit screenshots both from r/detrans and r/ftm.

Here is my master spreadsheet of reddit testimonials which is currently sitting at 89 entries (don't think I've been sleeping on it! And don't think I haven't started archiving the posts ;)))) they're there forever bb :)))) .

Uh? Who actually understands this shit? Those are made-up words. No one outside of your cult has a clue what you're talking about. Wtf

This is what you sound like:

A what?

Well excuse the fuck out of me! I don't speak post-modern made-up word salads and metaphysical woowoo.

Bonus:

[Image ID: The Destiel confession meme edited so that Dean answers 'Daniel Cressy, 23, is the first person to be functionally cured of sickle cell disease via gene therapy!' to Cas 'I love you'. /End ID]

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"

A few months ago, I asked a man in the hospital waiting room - in the ENT department, for extra audacity points - if he could please use headphones, and he said 'no, I don't have any,' and when I said 'well, no-one else here wants to hear it,' he just shrugged and said 'but I do.' He kept listening to it without even turning it down, and everyone else just rolled their eyes and muttered about what a prick he was. A middle-aged woman once told me that I needed to 'mind my own business' for asking her just to turn it down, because she was listening to it at full volume, and then she proceeded to loudly bitch about my appearance with her daughter for a solid 5 minutes, interspersed with direct suggestions that I should sincerely consider fucking off, and it was only when everyone else in the train carriage confirmed that they, too, had been pissed off by her behaviour that she stopped yelling at me and sat back in her seat with a face like a smacked arse. And once, I asked a bunch of teenagers on the train if they could turn it down, and they started filming me and told me they'd make me 'TikTok famous', which frankly excited me in the moment, but has since sorely disappointed me because I've yet to become a household name.

There's too much for me to copy/paste everything. Here are some excerpts

These stupid, lazy pieces of shit can't even write about themselves. They're too busy melting their brains on tiktok every day, and no, that's not an exaggeration; look at this dumbass whose username is literally "maybe I'm not smart." Instead of learning, she's on tiktok all day:

I do question just how vigorous these essay requirements were if this dumb sack of shit was able to cheat so easily, but still.

This guy in particular should be beaten with a bat. Columbia suspended him, but this cheating piece of shit doesn't care. He's a techbro who wants everyone to cheat on everything:

This part makes my blood boil

"Use responsibly" go fuck yourself! You know you're marketing it for people to cheat!

The article says one professor was despairing that like half of the essays he received were AI-generated, and there's no way to stop it...which is so crazy to me, because the article only briefly mentioned a really easy way to prevent cheating...

Bluebooks! Make them write by hand! Hello! This is insane! Students all have ShitGPT open in class? Here's an idea: don't allow them to use computers in class! This problem instantly goes away if you take the tech away! If people are so worried that all of their students are cheating, why the fuck are people not going back to handwritten assignments, which were the norm for most of college's existence? It's not impossible in most fields. Yes, you can make your assignments so specific to your course and course texts that it becomes difficult to cheat, and people should definitely rethink some of their lesson plans, but requiring in-class, handwritten work would make a lot of this go away. Like, I promise these students will live without their god damn computers or phones. Ban them in class. Also fuck some universities for not just having a blanket anti-plagiarism policy that includes genAI

And here's the real harm:

Young people are addicted to tiktok, refuse to read or write anything by themselves, nuking their critical thinking skills, believing everything their phones tell them, and are (if they're not caught and suspended) pursuing degrees in subjects they don't actually know shit about. These are future professionals who can't even complete basic tasks and probably don't even have a Wikipedia-level understanding of their field. Going to college is a choice, you can go into a trade if you don't want to do the work of a college classroom, and there's no excuse for cheating your way through school. Period. I'm sickened by this article. Absolutely sickened, and it's infuriating how you find people on here repeating the anti-intellectualism of the right, saying it's okay to cheat and not know anything about the subject you're getting a credential in because higher education is a scam anyway. It's all about excusing their own laziness and refusal to get off social media.

Ultimately, I think the solution is rethinking how the classroom is run and how assignments are turned in, but I think there's probably a lot of reluctance among schools and universities to do that. They'd have to crack down and start failing people for cheating as soon as they're caught, but I'm sure the entitled "the customer is always right" attitude towards education in America would flip the fuck out. But if serious change isn't implemented soon, we'll have doctors who can't treat patients without asking their phones what to do, or teachers who don't actually grasp a subject enough to effectively teach it, or more lawyers fucking over clients by using ShitGPT to do their work for them. What are the long-term effects on human innovation and invention if everyone is getting their problem-solving skills nuked by a glorified chatbot?

Eh bien plusieurs organisations impliquées dans cette affaire et associations de sinistrés climatiques ont lancé « Se compter pour peser » afin de comptabiliser (enfin) les personnes touchées par le changement climatique en France.

Parce que jusqu’ici l’État ne se préoccupe pas de comptabiliser les personnes impactées dans leur quotidien, ce qui l’arrange car ça lui permet de nous ignorer et d’ignorer le problème.

I am a raccoon biologist and one of the few people in the state allowed to take in captive bred raccoons that had been possessed illegally. The raccoon in the photos is Moonshine, but she is currently at the animal sanctuary where I work as I had been quarantining multiple new intakes from an abuse case. I still have two males (Rum Tum Tugger and Electra) left in my home enclosure as we are getting them neutered and then hopefully sending them to an AZA accredited zoo.

So the other two in my group are used to my antics by now. We’re all friends, so the pair of them decide that the one guy in our group gets to be the nurse. Now, my Juliet and I have been friends for a couple months by this point, so I decide to be a little more dramatic.

We put Juliet on a spinny chair, and pump it up as tall as it goes, and my baby, closeted lesbian ass crouches on the floor, ready to be as melodramatic as possible. Like, I’m about to do a rendition that makes William himself walk into the class and tell me to take it back a notch or twelve.

And then I look up.

And holy shit.

There she is, Juliet, haloed in the worst fluorescent light known to mortals across the globe. Light just streaming down around her, that weird off-green colour that it always is. And she’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. My little gay soul is barely holding on as the words barely leave my lips, breathlessly. “But soft… what light from yonder window breaks?”

And Juliet was the sun. Romeo was not exaggerating that line at all.