Lifesavers advised people to heed warnings and stay away from the coastline
37th Australian Sikh Games, Sydney, 18-20 April 2025 - Tari
Easter Eggs Are So Expensive Americans Are Dyeing Potatoes
🥚
With costs high and supplies short, people are getting creative with Easter egg traditions
“This is a revolutionary moment,” Dr. Madhusudhan said. “It’s the first time humanity has seen potential biosignatures on a habitable planet.”
Astronomers Detect a Possible Signature of Life on a Distant Planet
Young people won’t, or can’t, read a book. Now democracy is dying. Coincidence?
The Inquirer – Will Bunch: A viral conversation about the near-death of reading by U.S. college students in the iPhone era reveals a threat to democracy. “The notion of Donald Trump — who lived most of his adult life in a gilded penthouse above Fifth Avenue and thinks that he invented the word “groceries” — as the voice for everyday “forgotten Americans” has always felt strained.
But in one key sense, the 45th and 47th president was way out in front of the regular folks who elected him. The man has rarely, if ever, cracked open a book in his life. “I read passages, I read areas, chapters, I don’t have the time.” Trump replied in 2016 to Megyn Kelly when she posed the classic interview question of asking about the last book he’d read. The then-future POTUS was merely confirming the accounts of those who know the billionaire developer, like his ghostwriter Tony Schwartz, who said he never saw a book in either Trump’s home or office.
Those details come from a highly prescient 2017 essay by The New Republic’s Jeet Heer that placed the functional illiteracy of the man behind the Resolute Desk in a deeper context, noting that Trump had reached the political summit with a made-for-television style that captured the ephemeral nature of today’s politics. He quoted the brilliant 20th century media critic Neil Postman, who warned darkly of “a peek-a-boo world, where now this event, now that, pops into view for a moment then vanishes again.” Heer’s piece was titled: “The Post-Literate American Presidency.”
But what’s truly frightening is that eight years later Trump presides over what is rapidly becoming a post-literate America. It’s defined — according to a growing number of college professors — by the unwillingness, and increasing inability of up-and-coming generations of young citizens to read a book, in the age of iPhones. And things are rapidly getting much, much worse.
“The Average College Student Today” — from a self-proclaimed professor at a U.S. regional public university, under the pseudonym Hilarius Bookbinder, has rocked online academia with its claim that the typical modern undergraduate student is functionally illiterate. They essentially argue that smartphone-addled young people — echoing their president — might read passages or ideas, but can’t finish an adult book from cover to cover. “I’m not saying our students just prefer genre books or graphic novels or whatever,” Bookbinder, citing 30 years of classroom teaching experience, wrote. “No, our average graduate literally could not read a serious adult novel cover-to-cover and understand what they read. They just couldn’t do it. They don’t have the desire to try, the vocabulary to grasp what they read, and most certainly not the attention span to finish.” Not surprisingly, the college professor also wrote that the rapid decline of reading is producing students who also struggle mightily to write cogent and useful essays about the classwork they didn’t do— or about anything, really. Bookbinder said student assignments come back in two different ways. Some are on the 8th-grade level: ungrammatical, larded with misspellings (“the correct use of apostrophes is cause for celebration”), and devoid of original thought. Others are bloodlessly cogent — because the student merely plugged the question into an artificial-intelligence program like ChatGPT, before presumably racing back to watch 20-second TikTok videos. These “checked-out, phone-addicted zombies” are tied to chronic absenteeism in class, a fidgety struggle to focus for an entire 50-minute class, and increasing indifference over missed tests or assignments. Bookbinder stresses: “I don’t blame K-12 teachers. This is not an educational system problem, this is a societal problem.” Indeed. It’s a big one.
Yes, there are still young people who read books, some even voraciously. I know some of them, but there’s no question these are increasingly rare birds. Bookbinder’s much-discussed essay was merely the exclamation point on a conversation that exploded last fall when The Atlantic’s Rose Horowitch wrote that the majority of 33 college professors she’d interviewed agreed that “students no longer arrive at college — even at highly selective, elite colleges — prepared to read books.”
Her piece began with a Columbia University literature professor’s jaw-dropping discovery that one of his first-year students at the Ivy League school had never been asked to read an entire book during four years of high school. It’s important for boomers and Gen X folks — especially college grads who went to school in an era in which you had to read at least a few classic or provocative books in order to get a degree — to both understand how the world has changed but also come to terms with the major implications for American society…”
