Well-Rounded Geekery

The fire alarm went off at school today because of a mistake, but your teachers did the right thing to take you outside to be sure it was safe.

Some people use wheelchairs because their legs don’t walk very well. It can happen because they are old and tired, or because they got hurt, or because they were born that way.

Your Uncle Jerod talked to mom and dad, and wants you to call her Aunt Kari now. We will call her Kari too, and we can all practice together if it takes some getting used to.

Anticipate age-appropriate fears the child might have so you can assuage those that are not a threat.

Yes, Kitty died at the vet, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not safe for Puppy to go to the vet.

Yes, Peyton and Jo are getting a divorce, but they are both still part of our family and love you very much.

Yes, Grandma has cancer, but cancer is not contagious, so you are not going to get cancer by visiting her.

Anticipate fears that are realistic, and give the child clear direction about what to do, and what happens next.

If someone asks you to get in their car without permission, find Mom, Mama, or a teacher and tell them right away. We will make sure you are safe.

If Sparky’s sickness makes him hurt very badly, we are going to take him to the vet and she will give him some medicine, and he will die, but then he won’t hurt any more. Because Sparky is very sick, we are going to spend some special time with him over the next few days.

If the fire alarm goes off at school again, follow the teacher’s directions. If the fire alarm goes off and you are somewhere alone, go outside, and ask a grownup to call 911.

Reassure the child that they’re safe and loved, validate their feelings, and see if they have follow-up questions. Give them the option to take space to process, or to stay near you to feel safe.

I’m sad about Sparky too. Do you think we could make his favorite peanut-butter treats, while we are spending special time with him?

I understand why Grandma’s cancer makes you feel angry. It doesn’t seem fair that people we love get sick. Would you like a hug?

JESUS FUCKING CHRIST HELL NO EW EW EW WHY WOULD HE DO THAT ULTRON ALREADY HAS SO MUCH CONFUSING CONVOLUTED BS, KILLING HIS FAMILY AND MAKING HIM ANGST FOR THAT WOULD HAVE ACTUALLY MADE ME *HATE* THAT MOVIE.

a) We know Joss Whedon loves Ults, he’s talked about it fairly frequently and used elements of it (like the Chitauri, who previously didn’t exist in 616) in the first Avengers film. b) In Ults, Clint had a wife and two children that he kept very separate from his work, and they were murdered as part of a “Steve in conflict with SHIELD” arc.  c) We know that Whedon came into conflict with the powers that be at the MCU over the farmhouse. He wanted more farmhouse and to cut the “Thor In The Prophecy Well” arc. They said no, you leave the Thor scenes in or we will make you cut the farmhouse out entirely. Which means that Disney didn’t give a shit about Clint’s surprise family, and Joss Whedon gave way too many shits about it.  d) It’s not proven necessarily, but it’s fairly obvious from context, that this conflict and the lack of creative control it represented is why Whedon left the franchise. In some sense I get that – some directors don’t like someone else having that much control over the narrative – but I think if you sign on for a franchise like the MCU, you have to know going in that your powers will be limited by the larger scope of the multi-film narrative.  

So the speculation comes into it where I believe that the “more farmhouse” Whedon wanted was to kill Clint’s family. Whedon has a long tradition of motivating X character through the senseless death of Y character, stretching back to Jenny and Tara’s deaths in BtVS, including highly climactic moments like Wash’s death in Firefly, and running on up through Coulson’s death in Avengers (Whedon was reportedly livid that they brought him back for AoS and has said in interviews that AoS is TV and therefore “doesn’t count”). Admittedly I haven’t seen Dollhouse, but it seems to me that Whedon has trouble writing stories where someone doesn’t die in a senseless manner in order to motivate their loved ones. (His pissiness over his reputation for killing people, to me, is evidence that he’s embarrassed his writing has stagnated so badly that he has to keep resorting to the same narrative tricks he was using fifteen years ago.) 

We cast her anyway, in a chorus role. Offered her lots of support and encouragement and kindness and grace.

At the next audition she whispered. Anyone who had never seen her before would have thought she was the most nervous kid there. But the directing team was abuzz afterward. Did you see? She did it! Once or twice I could actually almost hear her! Amazing.

Got cast again, in a chorus role. She’d been making friends with the other kids, and they offered her encouragement too.

And the next audition we said wow I can hear her! She’s speaking! Let’s give her a handful of lines! She can do it!

In Europe: I see you supported Trump as late as 2026, after he made comments about annexing Greenland and disparaging Ukraine. Have you been sent here to help destabilize the European Union and support foreign incursion into European holdings? Prove it. Wait here for ten hours while we search all of your bags.

Central and South America: Were you personally involved in bombing fishing boats, kidnapping Venezuela's president, and running concentration camps for migrants on American soil? Are you here to identify targets, or get revenge on specific individuals who spoke up against this treatment and were deported? Prove that you aren't. Wait here for ten hours while we search all of your bags.

It's the Royal Academy of Art Young Artist's Summer Show. One of my favourite exhibitions of the year. Like. Not only are the older kids insanely talented, the younger ones' artist statements will just punch you right in the face.

Jeffrey is my cat and he feels like my heart

Making friends as an adult is so fucking hard already and isolating yourself from other people is a very common symptom of depression, anxiety, burnout, ocd, trauma, grief, etc. Which means that someone will do the hard work of recovery/healing and resurface back into a world where their previous friends have written them off because they stopped showing up.

I have a gift for falling in love with random objects. One time, my aunt got me a little rubber chicken, and whenever I squoze it, a little egg thing popped out. Very silly. Except that chicken became something like my best friend. I carried it with me to school, and I kept it with me in my pocket, and whatever social hazards there were about Being The Guy Who Got Stressed Whenever His Rubber Chicken Was Missing were far outweighed by being The Guy Who ALWAYS Had a Rubber Chicken On Him. There's a lot of comedic opportunity that comes with always having a good prop on your person.

Of course, the chicken did eventually. Explode. And such was my grief that I did not eat for 36 hours. This was very stressful for many people. Mostly my mom. I was a very strange child to work with. She took parenting so incredibly seriously, and then I'd pitch her these curve balls like refusing to eat for a day and a half because my rubber chicken died. No parenting book tells you what to do when that happens. You just have to feel it in your heart.

A less tragic story of an object that I fell in love with was a large, foam toad that I found in a trinket shop. The toad was the size of a very large grapefruit. Much too large to carry with me to school (thank god) but enough that I could move it around the house, to keep me company during my solitary pursuits. If I was reading, the toad was there, and if I was tinkering with legos, the toad was there, and even when I slept, I would wrap the toad up in layers and layers of blankets, and then spoon it. I did this until the rubber coating on the foam started to wear out, and the foam started to get brittle and break down and leak this repulsive yellow powder. Then I simply put the toad in the playroom and would consult it on matters of great importance. Eventually I stopped doing that, and someone took the opportunity to dispose of it. Not sure who. By the time I noticed its absence, too much time had passed for me to actually be sad. As an adult, part of me thinks I would have maybe liked burying the toad, but part of me also thinks I might have refused to part with the toad, which would have resulted in it leaking more repulsive yellow powder into the house. So I understand why that decision was made. 

I want to state that this does not happen often, and it does not happen on purpose. I don't choose to fall in love with random objects. And it's always a little bit embarrassing when it happens. 

Which brings me to my wife. 

United Front: Breasts Without the Airbrush

The shocking thing about Laura Dodsworth’s pictures of 100 women’s breasts isn’t the flesh on show, or the many shapes and sizes, but the realisation that images of unairbrushed, non-uniform breasts seem to be so rare. “We see images of breasts everywhere,” says the 41-year-old photographer, “but they’re unreal. They create an unflattering comparison but also an unobtainable ideal. I wanted to rehumanise women through honest photography.”

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Source (non Aboriginal)

And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history

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 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.