Thomas D. Howes

Many hats. @VitalCenterMag - Co-Author: @whypostlibfail (2026) - Next book: Beyond Postliberalism.

Lecturer. Politics & Ethics

Vatican II stan.

[Thomas D. Howes @ThomasDHowes]

My two book projects are:

Why Postliberalism Failed

and

Beyond Postliberalism.
---
I am very happy right now with the choice of those titles.

[Thomas D. Howes @ThomasDHowes]

@AgainstClerisy @McGillPatterson Because that's all I was trying to defend.

[Thomas D. Howes @ThomasDHowes]

It has arrived!

[Thomas D. Howes @ThomasDHowes]

@AgainstClerisy @McGillPatterson I guess you're not a big fan of George Washington and the founding fathers then.

[Legion Hoops @LegionHoops]

BREAKING: Jalen Brunson headed to locker room after tweaking his knee. No no no.

[Thomas D. Howes @ThomasDHowes]

First review is brutal.

[Robert @AgainstClerisy]

@ThomasDHowes @McGillPatterson No one cares nor do we know who you are. Deneen’s book, on the other hand, was the best read of 2018

[Thomas D. Howes @ThomasDHowes]

It has arrived!

[Archbishop Ronald Hicks @AbpNewYork]

Like everyone else here, I am rooting for the Knicks! I have a friendly wager with my friend Archbishop Gustavo García-Siller, and I look forward to what he's going to send my way from San Antonio. Go Knicks!

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

But I was told people were so much happier under an integral moral order dedicated to the Aristotelian conception of the highest good. People wrote books and stuff.

[Thomas D. Howes @ThomasDHowes]

Yes

[Rob Henderson @robkhenderson]

"For most of recorded history, the average infant mortality rate was 27 percent, while childhood mortality was about 46 percent. In other words, only about half of all people who were born made it to adulthood." https://t.co/ypRizJc75g

[Kevin Clarke🍺 @ClarkeAtAmerica]

Your Catholic Guide to the 2026 N.B.A. Finals: Spurs Sisters vs. Villanova Knicks https://t.co/k4vPIzVz60

[Thomas D. Howes @ThomasDHowes]

My followers are not sports fans.

[Thomas D. Howes @ThomasDHowes]

Are you watching the NBA Finals tonight?

[Jonah Goldberg @JonahDispatch]

@ThomasDHowes https://t.co/rJBHe6mwv9

[Thomas D. Howes @ThomasDHowes]

Are you watching the NBA Finals tonight?

[Zena Hitz @zenahitz]

I fear the same.

[Karen Vaites @karenvaites]

“We are admitting a cohort that cannot read at a college level and are pretending otherwise.”

Another college professor adds to the chorus of concern about student capacity.

In @chronicle:

“Six weeks into the term, I assigned my rhetoric and writing students a 20-page article. It was the same length I had assigned for five years and the same length I had read without complaint as an undergraduate a decade ago. Not one student finished it.

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.”

[Steve Stewart-Williams @SteveStuWill]

Non-replicable research gets cited more than replicable research. This is consistent with what I call Steve’s Law: Boring findings and non-PC findings are more replicable than interesting or PC ones.

https://t.co/PNnu2ZzVky

[The Atlantic @TheAtlantic]

Pope Leo and other Christian thinkers have captured the gravity of the AI revolution in a way that many secular thinkers have not, @Tyler_A_Harper argues. https://t.co/peimmklXj7

[New York Post @nypost]

Own a piece of Knicks history with our framed cover https://t.co/vmKaUmkSGF

[Thomas D. Howes @ThomasDHowes]

@zenahitz Peirce was certainly the more creative of the two, though certainly not the clearer of the two.

[void. @iBuild]

microsoft has banned employees from using claude code.

we're so back, baby!