You might find an apple cider vinegar rinse helps. I do this about once a month because I have a very oily scalp and it helps to rebalance it. I also usually use a co-wash rather than traditional shampoo and conditioner so I like to do a rinse to remove any buildup.

May I present the best apple:

I think sociology and psychology largely belong in a conflict theory rather than a mistake theory context: people who want to tell a particular narrative construct some unrigorous set of anecdotes (in the case of this article) or perhaps pretend to conduct a few low power research studies whose results wouldn't generalize (in the case of published research studies). largely this is an exercise at arriving at a conclusion that was decided prior and is independent of observation.

But you and the other people talking about the article seem to be going much further than that. It's one thing to say "I refuse to believe anyone can make an honest assessment of whether X is happening" (which is defensible in isolation, although I think even that is a kind of epistemological nihilism that IME is only ever selectively deployed against hypotheses one doesn't like. "isolated demands for rigor" etc.). But it's another thing entirely to slide from that into "therefore X isn't happening, and the worrying about it is caused by old fogeyism instead of any real trend".

The central claim of the article— that more and more students are arriving at college unable to complete reading tasks that many decades of prior incoming freshmen could do— is a concrete one. It may be hard to measure and subject to rose-tinted nostalgia bias, but it's not ineffable or unfalsifiable. It's a claim for which the first wave of evidence will necessarily be anecdotal, from the professors who have been doing this for a while, and only later might show up in something more quantitative and peer-reviewable. Saying that we should ignore the anecdotal data entirely (which, in the world where the trend was real, would be the only data we had for a while) and make no updates about the state of the world or an attempt to investigate more rigorously to find the truth of the matter, is a nutty way to form a world-model. It's also one that's weirdly STEM-brained ("only that which can be rigorously measured is real"), which is why I'm sort of weirded out that I'm the one arguing against it and instead insisting on the classically humanities-coded claim that we should also incorporate fuzzy, historically-informed information when deciding what to do.

Re: “the first wave of evidence will necessarily be anecdotal” from the above post.

Some of the evidence for the drop in literacy is thin. One widely discussed study, for instance, judges students on their ability to parse the muddy and semantically tortuous opening of “Bleak House”; this is a little like assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses.

When Tumblr started talking about the Bleak House study, usually to disagree with it, I bit my tongue. I was thinking, "well, maybe it's mostly just Tumblr teenagers saying this". But when the New Yorker is dismissing it, I'm sorry, there's a serious problem.

No it is fucking not like "assessing swimmers on their ability to cross fifty yards of molasses"! What is wrong with you?!? These are incoming English literature majors being asked to read and understand a small amount of English literature.

The standard excuses getting trotted our here are maddening. You can't wave it off as "well, current readers can't be expected to know what the Lincoln's Inn Hall is like contemporary ones could"— the study specifically says the students were allowed to use any reference material they wanted for unfamiliar terms, and they still bombed.

Nor is the "well, this is a bad choice of book, it's too hard". This isn't Finnegans fucking Wake! Dickens had mass-market appeal and was a best-seller among commoners in his own time.

Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

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.

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?

Part of socializing and having friends is being a good listener even when you don't actually give a shit about the subject.

Your are hurting other people's feelings when you bluntly respond with "Anyway..." and then change the topic.

It can not always be about your preferred topic.

"It's great that you're so into this - how did that happen?" shows interest in the person and allows them to tell you about themselves. And maybe you'll find something to connect to in their journey.

"I bet all this knowledge can come in handy at some point. Like, I'd ask you to be my game show phone joker on this topic!" Is a lovely compliment and still also gets across that you don't know much about that topic. It also opens a different tangent, that of gameshows, or topics you (or others around the table) don't know much about, so the conversation might shift from the topic you're not interested in to other places.