The Hidden Dragon

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The most celebrated female poet of Ancient Greece after Sappho, Erinna (fl. c. 350 BCE) left behind only a small body of work. Yet her surviving verses offer a rare glimpse into the emotions and experiences of a young woman in the ancient world.

Inspired by the Muses

Little is known about Erinna apart from what she reveals in her poem The Distaff. At the time she wrote it, she was nineteen years old, unmarried, and mourning her friend Baucis, who had died shortly after her wedding.

One scholar once suggested that Erinna never existed and that The Distaff had instead been written by a man impersonating an uneducated young woman. Today, this hypothesis has been largely rejected. Women did have access to education, particularly in the region of Teos, one of Erinna's possible birthplaces. Moreover, although literary forgeries certainly existed, a male author would have had little to gain from attributing his work to an otherwise unknown woman.

One notable feature of Erinna's poetry is her use of the Doric dialect, something uncommon in literary poetry. This choice makes the emotions expressed in her verses more poignant and intimate.

Although most of her writings have been lost, Erinna's poetry circulated widely throughout the ancient world. Poets and anthologists praised her work, comparing her to the greatest authors of antiquity. Meleager included her in his Garland of poets, likening her poetry to a sweet, maiden colored crocus.

Erinna's voice still echoes today. Mangaka Satou Futaba made her the heroine of the manga Utae! Erinna (Sing! Erinna), portraying her as a young woman determined to rival the greatest poets of her age.

The Distaff

Erinna's best-known work is The Distaff. Only about fifty-four lines of the original three hundred survive, preserved on a badly damaged papyrus. In this poem, Erinna mourns the death of her friend Baucis. The text offers a rare window into the life of a young woman through timeless themes of grief, friendship, family, and domestic life.

She recalls the games she played with Baucis as a child and remembers being frightened by the monster Morpho. Looking back on those memories with tenderness, she draws a parallel between marriage and death. Throughout the poem, Erinna skillfully develops the image of weaving. Weaving was not only a traditional female occupation but also a metaphor for poetry, while simultaneously evoking the thread of life spun by the Fates.

In addition to The Distaff, three epigrams are attributed to Erinna. All are dedicated to female friends: two to Baucis and one to a woman named Agatharchis.

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Further reading: 

Karanika Andromache, Wedding, Gender, and Performance in Ancient Greece

Natoli Bartolo, Pitts Angela, Hallett Judith P. (eds.), Ancient Women Writers of Greece and Rome

Plant Ian Michael (ed.), Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome : An Anthology

Read Erinna's poetry below:

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"

I’ve had students tell me they could only get through an article (and not an academic one — short pieces written for popular audiences) by using text-to-speech functions that read it to them. No hate for text-to-speech, obviously; it’s important for accessibility, and I’m definitely not in the “audiobooks don’t count as books” camp. I do suspect, however, based on these students’ responses to the articles, that the way it’s “helping” them is by allowing them to “get through” it by passively listening rather than actively engaging. I’ve even had students admit to having ChatGPT or similar summarize the text for them because they couldn’t understand it.

Class discussions spend more & more time trying to pin down & clarify what the author actually literally said, and correspondingly less time debating different opinions on the reading. I’ve had to ease up on how I evaluate reading responses, gradually moving from “try to say something interesting, insightful, eloquent, &c.” to “try and express your thoughts on the reading rather than summarizing the ‘main idea’, even if those thoughts are ‘it was boring & confusing & I hated it.’” (I’ve also shortened the minimum length of said reading responses, as many students seem to panic & reach for ChatGPT if asked for more than they think they can write in one sitting — which is about a paragraph, apparently.) When I teach literature surveys, I have to introduce students to concepts like close reading & literary analysis, which they have seemingly never been asked to do before.

Part of the issue is definitely that basic literacy is not being taught well in U.S. public schools (cueing, &c.), but beyond that, advanced literacy doesn’t seem to be part of the standard curriculum AT ALL anymore. The “short passages in standardized tests” model mentioned in the original post is kind of… it, at least as far as many students seem to be concerned. Students have told me they’ve never read a novel cover-to-cover, because their secondary education was all centered around selections & excerpts. Likewise, that secondary education never got past the “reading comprehension” phase, and I’m often (according to them) the first instructor to ask them for analysis or even opinion.

Truncated text of tweet from MrPitBull, Mar 11, 2026:

She kept finding women in laboratory photographs from the 1800s. Then she read the published papers—and every single woman had vanished. Someone had erased them from history.

Yale University, 1969.

Margaret Rossiter was a graduate student studying the history of science. She was one of very few women in her program.

Every Friday afternoon, students and faculty gathered for beers and informal conversation. One week, Margaret asked a simple question: "Were there ever any women scientists?"

The faculty answered firmly: No.

Someone mentioned Marie Curie. The group dismissed it—her husband Pierre really deserved the credit.

Margaret didn't argue. But she also didn't believe them.

So she started looking.

She found a reference book called "American Men of Science"—essentially a Who's Who of scientific achievement. Despite the title, she was shocked to discover it contained entries about women. Botanists trained at Wellesley. Geologists from Vermont.

There were names. There were credentials. There were careers.

The professors had been wrong.

But Margaret's discovery was just the beginning. Because as she dug deeper into archives across the country, she found something far more disturbing.

Photograph after photograph showed women standing at laboratory benches, working with equipment, listed on research teams.

But when she read the published papers, the award citations, the official histories—those same women had disappeared. Their names were missing. Their contributions erased.

It wasn't random. It was systematic.

Women who designed experiments watched male colleagues publish results without giving them credit. Women whose discoveries were assigned to supervisors. Women listed in acknowledgments instead of as authors. Women passed over for awards that went to male collaborators who contributed far less.

Margaret realized she was witnessing a pattern that stretched across centuries.

Women had always been present in science. The record had simply pushed them aside.

She needed a name for what she was documenting.

In the early 1990s, she found it in the work of Matilda Joslyn Gage—a 19th-century suffragist who had written about this exact phenomenon in 1870.

In 1993, Margaret published a paper formally naming it: The Matilda Effect.

The term captured something that had been hidden in plain sight for generations. Once you knew the term, you saw it everywhere.

Her dissertation became a lifelong mission.

For more than 30 years, Margaret researched and wrote her landmark three-volume series: Women Scientists in America. She examined letters, institutional policies, individual careers. She gathered undeniable evidence that women in science had been consistently under-credited and structurally excluded.

Her work faced resistance. Many dismissed women's history as political rather than academic. Others insisted she was exaggerating.

Margaret didn't argue emotionally. She presented data. Documented cases. Patterns repeated across decades and institutions.

Eventually, the evidence became undeniable.

Her research helped restore recognition to scientists who had been erased:

Rosalind Franklin, whose X-ray work revealed DNA's structure—credit went to Watson and Crick.

Lise Meitner, who explained nuclear fission—omitted from the Nobel Prize.

Nettie Stevens, who discovered sex chromosomes—received little credit.

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin, who discovered stars are made of hydrogen—initially dismissed.

And countless others whose names had nearly vanished.

Margaret changed the narrative. Science was no longer just the story of solitary male geniuses. It became a story of collaboration that included women who had been written out.

Virgin of Solitude - Luisa Roldán (1688)

Luisa Roldán, known as La Roldana (1652–1706), was one of the greatest sculptors of the Spanish Baroque. She became a court sculptor and amazed her contemporaries with the quality of her work.

A promising apprentice

Like many women artists of her time, Luisa came from an artistic family and learned her craft in the family workshop. Her father, Pedro Roldán, was a sculptor who specialized in polychrome religious sculptures carved from wood. She trained alongside her siblings, including her sisters María and Francisca.

She later fell in love with Luis Antonio de los Arcos, one of her father's apprentices. Determined to marry him despite her father's opposition, Luisa appealed to the church authorities and married him in 1671. With her departure, Pedro lost one of the most gifted artists in his workshop, which was likely the main reason he had opposed the marriage. Luisa and her husband would have seven children, although only two survived infancy.

Court sculptor

In 1677, the couple began receiving commissions of their own and opened their own workshop. Luisa soon emerged as its principal sculptor, eclipsing her husband. Unlike many women from artistic dynasties, she gained recognition under her own name rather than remaining an anonymous assistant in the family business. The couple later moved to Madrid, where Luisa found a broader stage for her talent.

She applied to Charles II of Spain for the position of Escultor de Cámara (Court Sculptor). Four years later, she obtained the appointment and created two magnificent wooden sculptures for the king and his wife. Despite this prestigious position, she struggled both to secure and collect her salary because of the severe financial difficulties affecting Spain at the time. She repeatedly petitioned the monarchs, stressing her need to provide for her children. On one occasion, the queen replied: “Give her twenty-five doubloons this time."The wording suggests that her financial difficulties were an ongoing concern.

After Charles II's death in 1700, Luisa entered the service of his successor, Philip V. To secure his patronage, she presented him with a luxurious work of art intended to adorn one of his residences. She remained his court sculptor until her death in 1706.

Virgo Lactans / Saint Ginés de la Jara / Virgen Peregrina

Author/illustrator Trung Le Nguyen has been live posting reading Pride and Prejudice for the first time on bluesky and just hit the first proposal. The replies are basically the sickos meme