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  • New York Students Presented with Excerpts Read Fewer Novels, Go Figure

    New York Students Presented with Excerpts Read Fewer Novels, Go Figure

    Another week, another hand-wringing session about how children can’t read.

    New York Focus, as shared to me via Chalkbeat, interviewed several New York area teachers about children and reading and brought up two of the most conventionally feared boogeymen when it comes to child literacy. One of them I believe should be scrutinized and the other is overblown.

    NYF’s Melissa Manno frames the issue a lot through the lens of the New York state and city curriculums which prioritize getting kids to learn excerpts of full works and then, per my impression, relentlessly quiz them on it using stupid online tests.

    But they also brings up the spectre of social media and technology, a popular Jonathan Haidt style narrative when it comes to attention spans.

    The article does this point of comparison regarding the number of novels English classes work through these days. It opens with these examples: The Giver, Wonder, and Freak the Mighty. At one point, Manno quotes a high school teacher who can’t get through three novels with her juniors and seniors after teaching “five novels and a Shakespeare play” in the 1990s.

    But this kind of sounds like a self-degrading concept – the more teachers believe kids can’t get through five novels, the fewer novels they’ll bother with, especially when competing with must-read textbook excerpts for the standardized tests.

    My position on the “tech is ruining kid’s ability to read” is that we’ve been going through this song and dance for generations. Music television and Total Request Live were allegedly what high schoolers in my era were interested in rather than reading. The teachers assigned five-plus novels a year, but only a minority of us read them and even fewer of us understood them.

    I maintain that at the very least, kids on social networks have to exercise *some* reading and writing interaction in a way that kids just watching Carson Daly at home did not. Social networking apps and the dominance of short-form video are two of several problems, but our fallacy is thinking of past generations as completely literate, when in fact, Americans in particular usually learn how to fake reading comprehension.

  • An expert talks about the history of autocracy

    An expert talks about the history of autocracy

    This came on my desk through my Scientific American RSS feed. It’s an interview framed by Tim Vernimmen and it originally came from Knowable Magazine.

    Source: This Guy

    Gary Feinman, archaeologist and MacArthur Curator of Mesoamerican, Central American, and East Asian Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. He’s done a lot of research of civilizations in southeastern Mexico.

    Summary as I understand it

    We are being taught this popular narrative that the development of agriculture in humanity’s history was deterministic and that with the rise of farming came a lot of the inequality of our world. Essentially the idea that centralized and location-based human civilizations can’t be free in an anarchist sense.

    The interview introduction feints to the narrative that many people see agriculture as the source of autocracy. In this narrative, democracy as practiced by the Greeks was sort of an antidote and the model upon which organized and settled nation-states can resist autocracy, even when prominent successors like the Roman Empire fell to it regardless.

    Feinman says the archaeological record gives evidence for settled civilizations that were not autocratic by nature and instead had thriving bureaucracies that distributed sources more equally. He draws from findings in Mexico and China.

    (more…)
  • After Me Comes the Flood

    After Me Comes the Flood

    Regina Spektor – “Après Moi” – Begin to Hope (2006)

    Be afraid of the lame
    They’ll inherit your legs
    Be afraid of the old
    They’ll inherit your souls
    Be afraid of the cold
    They’ll inherit your blood
    Après moi, le déluge
    After me comes the flood

    The phrase “Après moi, le déluge” is supposedly something Louis XV said, interpreted to mean “I am rich and important and everybody else can drown once I’m gone for all I care.” But I’m sure some historian out there would tell me that I’m being uncharitable.

    Regina Spektor was introduced to me by my friend Alexis somehow in our first summer back from college (and she always had good taste in music). It was songs from this album, Begin to Hope, with my favorite “On the Radio.” She would pop up again here and there throughout my college music days. I eventually saw her in concert with Ben Folds at Wolf Trap on an early date with Erin.

    You’ll hear her use Russian fluently in the song above. She was born in the actual to goodness Soviet Union and grew up for nine years there but her parents brought her to New York when I was in diapers.

    I’m almost sure she’s said something problematic and I want to say it’s concerning Israel. I don’t know specifically what she’s said regarding Gaza in the past few years, but I’m hesitant to look it up because of how much I like her songs.

  • Microposts

    September 4, 2026 10:56 am
    Tried to share my feelings at dinner last night. FS is off for a Labor Day break. We’ve made c …
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    #career #frontpage
    August 31, 2026 9:56 am
    Yesterday was the birthday party for FS’s 3-year-old friend from his old daycare. A pool party …
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    #frontpage #parenting
    August 21, 2026 9:32 am

    Gonna try to watch Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma today.

    #frontpage #movies
    August 4, 2026 9:50 am
    Day one of solo parenting in the books. I went to Costco. I thought I could spend under $200. Ha. Ha …
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    #frontpage
    July 10, 2026 6:32 pm
    Been trying to find a special gift for my upcoming anniversary and I did find what appears to be an …
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    #frontpage
    July 8, 2026 1:50 am
    Hey Microposts. I left you alone for a little bit there, didn’t I? Uh, updates * Our dishwashe …
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    #frontpage

  • ‘Vacation,’ Day Three

    I’m wondering if there’s ever a point where you have your kids and you don’t feel like you need to keep one of your six senses on them at all times. Like, surely some parents just….let their kids exist, secure in the faith that their kids will persist in this reality.

    Sometimes I feel like a fairy tale goblin is just out of sight and looking for an opportunity to steal one of my children. Real Rumpelstiltskin shit. Real David Bowie from Labyrinth vibes.

    (My brain tried to protect me from the memory that his name is Jareth, but alas, here we are with another testament to my inability to do things like schedule a medical procedure, but a slightly damaged reference guide to pop culture).

    This anxiety I have about my kids getting into trouble or getting hurt. I share this with others, right? But before having kids I thought of them as the overly anxious ones. I thought of them as helicopters. I thought when it was my turn, I could just be.

    And when I test a sense of trust, they do things like draw on the couch or crawl up the stairs. The goblin is real. The goblin is everywhere. How do those mythical parents who just veg out and let their kids do whatever exist? I think they exist. Did I make them up entirely?

    We all saw it coming, of course. I have not remade my job searching strategy with the goal of getting out of this alienating employment situation. I have not built an amazing recipe book which will save me thousands of dollars and feed my family nutritiously; deliciously. I have not called my parents, sent a Discord chat to my brother, gotten in touch with old friends.

    I spent $300 at Costco and watched a Spider-Man movie.

    We all saw it coming.

  • Thing I’m Working On

    I walked into the cave, which was decorated in a friendly fashion. A nice quilt draped on the rocks with block lettering that read “I’m here to help.”

    For the past year, I’d been navigating this network of caves. I’d found the first spirit next to a pool of muddy water. I asked it for clay. It gave me slime. The slime was acceptable.

    Then, I found a cave with a goblin in it. The goblin was erratic. Constantly distracted and it peered leerily at me and beyond me as if trying to see what else I had to offer. I asked it for some books and it gave me some scrappy notebooks.

    Now I was in the third cave. And this spirit was large and gregarious. He was over-full. Frankly, his gluttony might have been mirroring mine.

    “Hello, Phil!” The spirit smiled.

    I looked down at my shoes.

    “I would like….a website,” I said.

  • YouTube Videos That Are Better Than the Platform Deserves

    June 2026

    Gregiffer runs the Pop Arena YouTube channel and the Nick Knacks documentary series, which breaks down classic Nickelodeon shows with true behind-the-scenes and history-of content. It’s pretty much tailor made for people who watched this content as 7-10 year olds in the 90’s. Impressive stuff.

    Pop Arena is on:
    Patreon, Ko-fi, Bluesky, Discord, Tumblr, and TVTropes

  • Therapy Check-In

    Therapist was six minutes late. Could’ve been worse, he’s ghosted before.

    I did a lot of talking. So I guess this is the kind of therapy it is, where I’m revealing things to myself and he’s kind of like a sounding board.

    We were talking about the tension between the career I have for money, which itself exists to support the liberal capitalist lifestyle I have set up for myself and my family and the activism work I do for very little money.

    And he did say one thing that helped me. “They say you should talk about your goals.”

    I reflected on the fact that I don’t love talking about my day, because even when it comes to simply putting a post out there on the Internet on behalf of a good organization, that’s not exciting. I bore myself at the thought of talking about that extensively.

    But something I could talk about would be the observation I’ve had – of the past activist organizations I’ve worked with, they’ve been heavily reliant on the corporate web as part of their social media strategies: LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram – all these platforms actively working against the missions of the activist organizations.

    We’ve been monitoring this attempt to break away from the centralized, corporate internet and introduce the world to the decentralized, human internet. Wouldn’t it make sense to work toward platforms that specifically are for activists and people who want to use the Internet without providing DAU metrics for evil tech giants?

    This….this I’m interested in talking about.

  • A Thread from Bluesky About Some Medical Stuff

    Post from one month ago: "Tune in tomorrow morning to find out if I'm going to need surgery for this weird lump on my stomach." Quote-post on April 26: Okay, so update on this. I got a CT scan and it turns out what I have is a 2cm hole in the layer of fat between my skin and my organs. It's a hernia.

    The lump itself is that layer of fat squishing through the hernia hole. I’ve literally got everything plugged up. When I eat poorly enough to trigger something like acid reflux, it gets inflamed and pretty painful.

    I could get it operated on now, but the doctor’s like “with your BMI, there’s a higher chance of recursion.” So I guess the hole could open back up again. And could you guess what the doctor at the “Duke Metabolic and Weight Loss Center” thinks I should do?

    The Doctor recommends a GLP-1 like Ozempic or Zepbound.

    And he’s happy to show me his work. He types in my current weight and target weight and he shows me this custom text file that tells me the percentage success rate with GLP-1’s.

    I’m seeing what’s happening and I’m thinking of asking him. I’m thinking of asking him The Question. But I don’t have to, because he tells me. “Yeah, this is just something I whipped up with ChatGPT.”

    Now my basic stance on GLP-1’s is…okay, that’s interesting. It really seems like they’ve been prescribed with a lot of more frequency in the past five years. But, I’m 38. Wouldn’t it be cool if I could take the resources that would pay for a lifelong medication and direct them toward lifestyle?

    Like, let’s at least try, right? Maybe I can talk to nutritionists. Dieticians. Workout coaches. But my insurance won’t pay for any of that. And the funny part is, given the weirdness with insurance companies and GLP-1’s, there’s no guarantee they’ll pay for this for the rest of my life.

    And also, like, I probably don’t need to get to BMI 30. I have a sense the odds of my surgery would go up if I lost something like 15-20 pounds. But this guy framed it as if I needed to lose 40 and fast. Is that because ChatGPT tells him to or did he have a cool conversation with a pharma rep?

  • 6AM, Good Friday 2026. Just finished “Roofman”

    Because of a joke I made to a Discord server, I am now compelled to listen to Soundgarden’s “Spoonman,” as well.

    I woke up and I really did feel the need to listen to some Jesus Chris Superstar songs, which is eerie, given the timing. When I first started dating Erin, the theater company she worked for was putting on a staging of JCS around Easter time and that’s how I became familiar with the music.

    Anyway, Roofman, the movie, was kind of flat to me. Just like….a straightforward look at how this real-life criminal played by Channing Tatum lived kind of a boring existence while creating felonies against the corporation of Toys ‘R Us. And, hey, I’m sure the shareholders of Toys ‘R Us are not sympathetic victims, but the movie in 2026 doesn’t provide the same righteous defense of noble criminality as if he were ripping off Jeff Bezos. Clearly not what the movie cared about, but it’s how my mind works.

    Said mind wandered and I started looking at Letterboxd before the movie ended, which “spoiled” the fact that “Roofman” is based on a true story.

    They cut out the entire part where the Roofman had to leave the Toys ‘R Us Store and live in an abandoned Circuit City, which I think would have been more of an interesting commentary on our life and times.