Cisterns & Vibrations

If it was simply due to Britney he would not stay relevant

his solo career kicked off because him and his publicists used his break up with britney spears to promote himself throughout his promotion for the justified album. you can look at the barbara walters 20/20 interview and the cry me a river music video for examples. the early 2000s was full of britney spears slander because of the breakup which in turn brought major publicity for timberlake. you think he wouldn’t take advantage of that, with arguably the most famous woman at the time? the woman that sold more than 30 million copies for one (1) album?

what’s funny is that for years he would use britney spears name in magazines interviews whatever to get sales and, as you’ve said, relevancy. the ellen show, that radio interview where he talked about oral sex with her literally years after they broke up. he would even bring her up again just when it came to promote futuresex/lovesounds. even 6 years after his solo began he embarrassed her by calling her a madonna wannabe. the guy even brought her up in 2013 always rehashing that one stupid breakup that everybody has moved on from conveniently when it was time to promote whatever recycled music he was promoting

They dated in 2012, and then after One Direction split up in 2016, Styles just happened to publicly open up about their 5-second-long "relationship" for the first time in 2017, at the beginning of his solo career.

And, just like Timberlake, this relationship has been a touchstone of Styles' career that he returns to every time he needs a lil career boost.

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?

Anyone who can't get through King Lear, for that matter, without reference materials has serious literacy issues. What do you mean you can't read the most foundational authors of your native tongue?

Professors need to flunk these people.

If colleges and universities truly want to take on illiterate students, instead of expecting them to take basic literacy classes in night school/ at junior colleges beforehand, then the institutions can provide such classes and make them an actual prerequisite. We all know there are plenty of teachers looking to work with students who are serious about their education.

The reason college professors are under pressure to "dumb down" their courses has nothing to do with catering to their students. In no world is this reaction a principled educator's response.

Professors are dumbing down their coursework so that their goddamn overlords can take money from the illiterate fucking masses.

The board of governors, regents, trustees, provosts, whatever the fuck, do not care about anything besides financial gain, least of all the educational health of the general public. The people who actually own institutions of higher learning know full well that applications will drop the minute that the labor of literacy is actually required, no matter how many remedial courses they offer, no matter at what sort of discounted price.

But the greed and corruption of the 1% is constant and comes as no surprise. The real issue, at the end of the day, is that people are willing to abdicate their intellectual capacities for momentary convenience.

Education is power; the only way to galvanize the public towards achieving and maintaining this power is to show them how valuable it is.

Colleges and universities need to keep their standards, hold the line, and only reward students with degrees if and when they truly earn them. If students can't achieve the requirements of a program, they can't achieve the degree. If they don't like that, then they can, oh I don't know, make the effort to learn to fucking read.

Like, shall we make all races consist of a 2-minute walk? Academics, just as much as athletes, deserve the right to have the full scope of our capabilities and accomplishments acknowledged and rewarded.

More importantly, every single human being deserves to be able to achieve the heights of what we are intellectually capable of. That's a basic human right, and one that institutions of higher learning have a sacred fucking obligation, imo, to foster and protect.

Above all else, people live and die by the faith we all entrust in the knowledge and understanding that these degrees and academic achievements signify. There's no more room to fuck around; we've spent enough of human history finding out.