.webp?h=10 "Merry Fistmas!")
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University's required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they're assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames's students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
the future is r-slurred 
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You'd be shocked how many people decide they want to not only be lit majors, but writers, and decline to read.
R-slurs. R-slurs everywhere.
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I have read so much self-published trash. People really
think 
they do something 
these days when they put out 100 pages of absolute garbage 
that has no plot or character 
development.
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But think of all the world building!!!
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I read an article a while back by a lit-loving prospective ladywriter that kinda covered how all the fem-slop writers of today (ie, any anglophone foid writer alive today and winning awards) just reads fluffy femslop, and have barely even HEARD of Conrad or Joyce or James. They've read assigned reading in high school like A Midsummer Night's Dream, a recent translation of a single chapter of Don Quixote, Oliver Twist (the longest and hardest book ever), and have heard of Hemingway enough to hate him (ew, I am not reading any toxic masculinity fanfic like omg); and this is sufficient enough now to train the experience-driven lit of the todays.
If you're reading some 2025 book called, like, Daughterhouse Jive, about a transblack foid with an addiction to peanutbutter cookies, and her weight's totally her mom's fault, but also health at any size--if you're reading this kind of subliterate dreck and wondering how it's related to Vonnegut and if this b-word has any comprehension of plot or character or focus or imagination: the answer is the modern age never gave her a chance.
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I think humanity is pretty much hardlocked its IQ to 100 at today's standards and getting any smarter just means you die out over time and getting any dumber means you cannot create any further advanced technology.
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More like cliterature imma be all up in that kitty amirite
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