I Am A Gremlin And I Can Not Be Contained

None of us are very into astronomy so at first everyone was like oh we’re gonna lose but there were three of us at the table that night who were either former classics majors or otherwise super well read on Roman mythology and the three of us were like give us that paper right now and we just took turns writing down all of the lovers of Jupiter from mythology that we could.

A DEEP-SEA ANEMONE BUILDS A HOME FOR ITS HERMIT CRAB HOST

Japan researchers have identified a new species of sea anemone, Paracalliactis tsukisome, which engages in a sophisticated symbiotic relationship with the hermit crab Oncopagurus monstrosus, collected at 300 m depth, in the Sea of Kumano. Unlike typical anemones, this soft-bodied animal performs an astonishing feat of bio-engineering: it secretes a hard, shell-like structure named carcinoecium.

-Enlarged view of the column of Paracalliactis tsukisome, indicating the tubercles forming a weak corona.

This relationship is mutualism, where both partners reap significant benefits. Stable isotope analyses revealed the anemone feeding strategy: it consumes suspended organic particles from the water and, remarkably, recycles the host crab's faeces. This efficient use of available nutrients is a key adaptation to the deep sea. In return, the hermit crab gains a substantial survival advantage. Data shows that crabs in this partnership grow larger than their relatives, a direct indicator of improved fitness and health, all thanks to the superior housing provided by their symbiotic partner.

3D micro-computed tomography scans showed that the anemone attaches to the shell in a consistent, unidirectional pattern, always positioned near the aperture. It is likely adaptation to optimize access to food resources and facilitate the precise secretion of the hermit crab. The discovery provides the first quantitative evidence for mutualism in such shell-forming associations.

The specific name ‘tsukisome’ is a classical Japanese word referring to a pale pink color, historically associated with the hue of the Japanese crested ibis. It appears in a poem within the Man'yōshū, the oldest surviving anthology of Japanese poetry. In this poem, a kimono dyed in ‘tsukisome’ symbolizes half-hearted or fickle affection, with the poet declaring, ‘I won’t meet you with a half-hearted affection like the pale pink hue of a kimono’. This name aptly reflects the new species’ pale pink coloration while ingeniously inverting the poem's original meaning. Rather than symbolizing fleeting feelings, the name evokes the deep, faithful, and species-specific symbiotic bond between the anemone and its hermit crab host.

Did you know that I, award-winning speculative fiction author Natalie H. Ironside, have written like a real book that you can buy and hold physically in your hands?  Exciting!

The Last Girl Scout is a dystopian adventure story about queer hillbillies going on a big adventure in the irradiated ruins of Old America.  If you liked Fallout or S.T.A.L.K.E.R. or all things American Gothic then I got five bucks says you’ll like this.  Plus it’s got lesbians in it &and they are in love & they even hold hands.

The past lies like a nightmare over the world. Two hundred years after the War when atomic fire rained from the skies and burned the world to cinders, human civilization has had time to rebuild within the burned-out husk of Old America.  But the old terrors of the past still persist, and while some work to build a better world, others still dream of reclaiming the glory of the Old World. In southern Appalachia, political commissar Magnolia Blackadder is sent on a mission into the irradiated Exclusion Zone of Old DC, where an evil that humanity thought it had vanquished centuries ago is waking up and rebuilding its strength.  Along the way, she meets a strange woman with terrible secrets and an unspeakable past, and as they forge a bond and brave the terrors of the wasteland together, she learns that some demons are not so easily exorcised, and that some stones are better left unturned. In this her debut novel, award-winning author Natalie Ironside delivers a new vision of the post-apocalypse, a tale of adventure, terror, love, and that most basic and most powerful of all human desires:  Freedom. 

“But Natalie,” you say, “of course I want to support queer fiction and read this post-apocalyptic wasteland adventure transbian romance story, but how can I become a part of this true and amazing way?”  Well, I’ll tell you!

Buy on Amazon

Buy on Gumroad

Cashapp five bucks to $NatalieIronside and include an email address and preferred ebook file type

Subscribe to my Patreon for a download link (and that’s only $2; call that a bargain.  You’ll also get access to all sorts of other shit including my worldbuilding notes and the Christmas special)

Or message me an email address and your X number and I’ll send you an ebook for free; I call that Big Bill’s five-finger discount

***

If you wanna know what other people have said about this amazing and very good hit new novel, fantasy author Dan Shepherd penned this lovely review:

And here’s an interview where I sat down with Fellow Worker Bundnik from the IWW’s Upstate New York GMB to talk about my very cool book in particular and leftist speculative fiction in general:

https://upstatenyiww.wordpress.com/2021/02/21/interview-of-fw-natalie-ironside-regarding-her-recent-novel/

Come check it out!  & I hate to be that asshole who begs for reblogs but my blog got deleted recently and I lost all my followers the which is how I primarily promote my work the which is like 1/3 of our household income I need for such extravagances as “food” and “rent so if u could reblog this post that would be very cool and sexy of you

In both the personal and political, Natalie repeatedly echoes the theme that while the ghosts of the past may shape the present, they do not define the future- only our choices to move forward do. But those choices are not made in a vacuum, and ultimately moving forward to a future worth having can only come from acknowledging the past, owning up to your sins and making a conscious effort to make amends for the harm you’ve caused.

• RedBubble • TeePublic • INPRNT • Spoonflower • Wallpapers

Sure! The rock is hollow and covers a small container of oil. There's a hole bored through his hand, leg, ass, and the rock with a wick that dangles into the oil container and feeds fuel into the flame. The wick is in a little glass tube to help regulate burn.

this is actually my favorite notification on this post because genuinely do you know how hard it is to sculpt a butt that is like. proportional but also if it's too flat you can tell that there's major muscles missing under the skin but also it needs to not be too caked or it gets weird, and it is actually a major anatomical landmark and if you mess it up the whole legs are off.

barely even visible

but im proud of it.

That is, when an official told you, a rice farmer, that you owed more taxes than you really did, it was very useful if you were good enough at math to know he was lying (and could prove it) and if you were good enough at writing to write a letter to your government defending your case.

guy who kept the coffin of the buried in his living room and used it as a coffee table

walked out of the spiral because his dog needed dinner

the plumber who was so inattentive that the stranger put on a whole spectacle for him and he straight-up missed it all

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"