Taking December through March off has always been my only dream. It's what bears do. I am intrigued by Zoroaster's ideas, and would like to subscribe to his newsletter.
Great piece, although having just emerged from the uni environment myself I can say that the “who is the most oppressed minority” Olympics still reins supreme over the “who has the most disabilities to accommodate” Olympics, at least in inter student relations. This was in a British university though and we’re always slightly downstream of whatever bats*** trend is the latest to emerge from our friends across the pond.
I can say though as someone with a pretty substantial medical history with multiple bouts of cancer, diagnosed autism and OCD and a genuine reason to think I *do* have ADHD, having my college take one look at my medical history, s*** itself, and say “Take this nice en-suite ground floor room for three years and don’t sue us”, isn’t exactly something I’m going to complain about.
I am now even more in awe of those Stanford undergrads who ascended to the summit of American higher education and found academic success despite all the many profound struggles, systemic barriers, and limitations caused by disabilities they faced along the way. Truly inspirational!
Because it sounded not entirely dissimilar to other cultural insanities reported in actual "news" sites, I was not sure the post was sarcasm and hilarity-inducing comedy until I got to "sports psychology komodo dragon." And even then, with what I have seen as service animals in airports, I was not too sure.
God it makes me sound ancient, but these kids are absolutely coddled beyond all sanity in a way that vastly exceeds anything I remember, and I was in college in the late 00’s. It strikes me that the verboten ‘social contagion’ theory might well apply here too, not just to girls overidentifying as trans.
I'm gonna be the bad guy here. I thought the satire was too obvious and heavy-handed. Like you're mixing a serious opinion piece "Horowitch’s eye-opening finding is that disability claims have skyrocketed at elite universities: The number of students claiming disability at the University of Chicago has tripled in eight years, and it’s quintupled at UC Berkeley in 15 years. Most of the “disabilities” involve lightly-scrutinized claims ..."
... with some "bits": "He has something called “Sarcastic Bowel Syndrome”, which is apparently when your digestive system responds to certain foods by flooding your brain with sassy put-downs that shatter your self-esteem."
and then an anvil is dropped on the reader: "my second choice was a Ukrainian refugee whose legs were blown off by a Russian landmine — I didn’t know any of that because her application and Zoom interview were all about how she could make I Might Be Wrong a better publication."
I believe the "disability claim explosion" at elite universities is an important topic and should be further investigated. But I would have prefered to keep that discussion on the serious side.
I'm reminded that even a few decades ago, it was noted that the state with the highest average income, Connecticut, was the state with the highest percentage of students with diagnosed learning disabilities. But that was after the "if you've got dyslexia, you get more time on tests" thing, which made a diagnosis really, really valuable if you're competing in the SAT Derby.
Eventually, the ETS counterattacked with a new testing system that didn't give any benefit to unlimited time.
Definitely a trenchant take on what is normally Freddie DeBoer's beat. It was from his blog that I learned of the Hipster Cane phenomenon, and now I see it everywhere. The tells are easy to spot once you know what you're looking for: a younger person, possibly wearing a mask, walking with an unusually stylish cane but not putting any weight on it. I saw a lot of them out and about this Summer!
I guess the trade-off for any accommodation one gets is that you have to walk with a cane for the rest of your life; if you don't need it now you will eventually.
What I've observed is that generally the younger generation's obsession with their own health challenges does not appear to be cynically deployed -- they appear to genuinely see themselves as uniquely afflicted.
As it happens the rates of anxiety and depression are very high among college students because, believe it or not, drinking is really bad for you mind and body!
A lot of these kids would be fine if they just stopped "partying." I know that I should have when I was that age and didn't. Ended badly.
Also, restless leg syndrome is real, and I get it sometimes, as a (permanent) side effect from medication I used to take. It's annoying but I would never call it a "disability" (what "ability" don't you have?) and you can usually fix your symptoms by, y'know. Getting up and walking around a little.
Less than have of GenZ drinks (down 20% from Millennials). Gen Alpha in college now drink even less. Maybe getting up and having a pint with other people in “meat space” would actually help with all that diagnosed iPhone-related anxiety…
It’s very much a “different strokes” situation. Social media and drinking are both perfectly healthy for a lot of people. Maybe even a majority! And some might be well served by more “IRL” activity, while some may be well served to cut back on the sauce. Far from black and white. Thanks for the comment.
Hilarious and spot on. I'm on a budget but will never cancel my I Might Be Wrong subscription. Really appreciate how Jeff shines a light on the absurdities that quietly crept into our culture.
This is a great article to let me know to unfollow. Our country is actively committing blocking the Epstein list and causing mass casualties through US AID cuts but you still want to fight the culture wars of 2020. Jesus dude this is cringe
I've written a lot about the Epstein files and the DOGE cuts but I'm not going to write about those things every day. And the phenomenon I'm making fun in this article of is recent and ongoing, not a relic of 2020.
This is a humor column? You can agree or disagree with Jeff’s opinions, of course, but he was never going to write a blistering takedown on the US Aid cuts anyhow.
If somebody is writing directly about politics then the focus on the shittiness of our current government is pretty mandatory but not everything that is written has to be about politics, and this piece is only indirectly. Don't you want to read about things other than Trump sometimes?
"40% of Stanford students are disabled" is ridiculous on its face and just because we are compassionate liberals who respect disabled people doesn't mean we can't poke fun at it. In fact, if we don't poke fun at it we look like weirdos.
There’s real economic significance to this too. In Britain the number of people age 16 to 34 off work due to a mental health condition rose by 76 per cent between 2019 and 2024. Benefits spending has skyrocketed and these people’s careers are dying before they’ve begun.
Agree with Elisabeth K, this is exactly what I want from Jeff, there are a lot of other substacks covering those other topics, I wouldn't want this one becoming intersectional and losing focus.
This is a great comment to let me know to unfollow. First there was the not making every article about my individual political bugaboos but now you tell me he’s committing time crimes too?!?
Higher Ed is the most destructive perpetrator of "narcissistic corporate decadence," precisely because it clothes itself in goodly virtue and disallows self-critique. The call is coming from inside the house. The very institution that is supposed to demand self-demotion in order to innovate within the constraints of reality and shared knowledge, has instead become a self-promoting dramaturgy of limitless perfection that flatters "proprietary" knowledge and takes offense at the mere existence of constraints. Higher Ed is just as guilty of obfuscation of wrongdoing. And yes, the narcissist corporate decadence of Higher Ed even has very real victims. Just look at impoverished K-12 students who can't read because their schools--run by adults with expert degrees from Higher Ed--were sold a prestigious-PhD-backed program that doesn't actually work...that is the real school-to-prison pipeline. Yes, the authoritarian Right has the Keystone Cops. But the "authoritative" Left has the Keystone Carebears. And they are just as dangerous and antisocial. Maybe even more so because they can hide their antisocial destructive nature, even from themselves. Btw, the origins of disability accommodations are to offset disability-specific constraints that are unrelated to the ESSENTIAL TASK. So, the real tell here is that Higher Ed no longer knows what its essential tasks are. And this is deeply terrifying in a society the relies on Higher Ed for producing a cadre of proficient experts entrusted with forming a strong and effective social safety net.
I didn't like it either, but do you really expect every form of media to write about your preferred topics, presumably from your point of view? That's probably not going to happen. If you want that, you could probably prompt chatgpt for infinite content, catered to your taste.
The article is topical. It's responding to a recent article and cites recent statistics. The people affected by this trend in education are going to be making US AID decisions in 2045. You shouldn't ignore them now.
However, I thought the approach wasn't great and relied on outdated tropes. These "disabled" students aren't super fragile. They've just realized that society is governed by arbitrary rules. This will allow them to be successful in life. The student getting extra time on the LSAT today will be the high-powered lawyer setting up Canary M. Burns as CEO. Complaining about fragile students is like believing that venture capitalists all work in the Cayman islands and other legal fictions used by the ambitious and powerful. They're not actually fragile, it's just that society has adopted slightly different unspoken rules than previous generations. Nowadays you win by citing safety.
I think ignoring this aspect really hurt the satire. Jeff (in the article) is a boss facing off against a well-informed and ambitious employee using a work-to-rule strike.
I agree claims about accommodation can be overused. That said, I was diagnosed with ADD (guess it’s now ADHD) back in the early 90s.
The accommodation of “time and a half” was very helpful for me completing exams (in some cases) in undergrad and grad school.
I’ve also been let go from one position because I didn’t learn on the job quickly enough. Having a learning disability sucks, but you can only use so much.
I now currently work for local government with supervisors who allowed more patience for learning new assignments.
I appreciate your humility and willingness to look in the mirror first, and, with respect to your personal situation, it sounds like you're just who such accommodations are designed for, (and through helping you, all of us have benefitted economically and socially). But what if nearly every other one of your classmates had used similar accommodations? I bet you'd have suspected something was fishy.
>But what if nearly every other one of your classmates had used similar accommodations? I bet you'd have suspected something was fishy.
The “time and a half” request doesn’t necessarily bother me for other classmates. At the same time, I can understand why organizations have tight deadlines and why my learning disability might not be a reasonable accommodation.
I don't have a smart comment to make but this really made me laugh.
Taking December through March off has always been my only dream. It's what bears do. I am intrigued by Zoroaster's ideas, and would like to subscribe to his newsletter.
Great piece, although having just emerged from the uni environment myself I can say that the “who is the most oppressed minority” Olympics still reins supreme over the “who has the most disabilities to accommodate” Olympics, at least in inter student relations. This was in a British university though and we’re always slightly downstream of whatever bats*** trend is the latest to emerge from our friends across the pond.
I can say though as someone with a pretty substantial medical history with multiple bouts of cancer, diagnosed autism and OCD and a genuine reason to think I *do* have ADHD, having my college take one look at my medical history, s*** itself, and say “Take this nice en-suite ground floor room for three years and don’t sue us”, isn’t exactly something I’m going to complain about.
I am now even more in awe of those Stanford undergrads who ascended to the summit of American higher education and found academic success despite all the many profound struggles, systemic barriers, and limitations caused by disabilities they faced along the way. Truly inspirational!
I was under the impression that all these maladies cured themselves upon graduation.
You must not be employed by an organization that hires recent grads of these high-status institutions.
Because it sounded not entirely dissimilar to other cultural insanities reported in actual "news" sites, I was not sure the post was sarcasm and hilarity-inducing comedy until I got to "sports psychology komodo dragon." And even then, with what I have seen as service animals in airports, I was not too sure.
Oh man, I realized I'm late in sending out my Maidyarem cards this year
God it makes me sound ancient, but these kids are absolutely coddled beyond all sanity in a way that vastly exceeds anything I remember, and I was in college in the late 00’s. It strikes me that the verboten ‘social contagion’ theory might well apply here too, not just to girls overidentifying as trans.
My daughter gets extra time for her very real dyslexia. But this is still hilarious.
I'm gonna be the bad guy here. I thought the satire was too obvious and heavy-handed. Like you're mixing a serious opinion piece "Horowitch’s eye-opening finding is that disability claims have skyrocketed at elite universities: The number of students claiming disability at the University of Chicago has tripled in eight years, and it’s quintupled at UC Berkeley in 15 years. Most of the “disabilities” involve lightly-scrutinized claims ..."
... with some "bits": "He has something called “Sarcastic Bowel Syndrome”, which is apparently when your digestive system responds to certain foods by flooding your brain with sassy put-downs that shatter your self-esteem."
and then an anvil is dropped on the reader: "my second choice was a Ukrainian refugee whose legs were blown off by a Russian landmine — I didn’t know any of that because her application and Zoom interview were all about how she could make I Might Be Wrong a better publication."
I believe the "disability claim explosion" at elite universities is an important topic and should be further investigated. But I would have prefered to keep that discussion on the serious side.
I'm reminded that even a few decades ago, it was noted that the state with the highest average income, Connecticut, was the state with the highest percentage of students with diagnosed learning disabilities. But that was after the "if you've got dyslexia, you get more time on tests" thing, which made a diagnosis really, really valuable if you're competing in the SAT Derby.
Eventually, the ETS counterattacked with a new testing system that didn't give any benefit to unlimited time.
Definitely a trenchant take on what is normally Freddie DeBoer's beat. It was from his blog that I learned of the Hipster Cane phenomenon, and now I see it everywhere. The tells are easy to spot once you know what you're looking for: a younger person, possibly wearing a mask, walking with an unusually stylish cane but not putting any weight on it. I saw a lot of them out and about this Summer!
I guess the trade-off for any accommodation one gets is that you have to walk with a cane for the rest of your life; if you don't need it now you will eventually.
What I've observed is that generally the younger generation's obsession with their own health challenges does not appear to be cynically deployed -- they appear to genuinely see themselves as uniquely afflicted.
As it happens the rates of anxiety and depression are very high among college students because, believe it or not, drinking is really bad for you mind and body!
A lot of these kids would be fine if they just stopped "partying." I know that I should have when I was that age and didn't. Ended badly.
Also, restless leg syndrome is real, and I get it sometimes, as a (permanent) side effect from medication I used to take. It's annoying but I would never call it a "disability" (what "ability" don't you have?) and you can usually fix your symptoms by, y'know. Getting up and walking around a little.
Less than have of GenZ drinks (down 20% from Millennials). Gen Alpha in college now drink even less. Maybe getting up and having a pint with other people in “meat space” would actually help with all that diagnosed iPhone-related anxiety…
Fair enough.
It’s very much a “different strokes” situation. Social media and drinking are both perfectly healthy for a lot of people. Maybe even a majority! And some might be well served by more “IRL” activity, while some may be well served to cut back on the sauce. Far from black and white. Thanks for the comment.
I thought the youth of today had turned against alcohol?
> (what "ability" don't you have?) <
A question that should be asked a lot more often. Props on your comment.
The daily cannabis dose a lot of them are taking doesn't help either.
Cannabis is known to cure both Sarcastic Bowel Syndrome and echolocation hypersensititivity.
Don't spread misinformation! Every other case of cannabinoid hyperemesis I see says they're smoking weed because it helps their sarcastic bowel
Hilarious and spot on. I'm on a budget but will never cancel my I Might Be Wrong subscription. Really appreciate how Jeff shines a light on the absurdities that quietly crept into our culture.
This is a great article to let me know to unfollow. Our country is actively committing blocking the Epstein list and causing mass casualties through US AID cuts but you still want to fight the culture wars of 2020. Jesus dude this is cringe
I've written a lot about the Epstein files and the DOGE cuts but I'm not going to write about those things every day. And the phenomenon I'm making fun in this article of is recent and ongoing, not a relic of 2020.
This is a humor column? You can agree or disagree with Jeff’s opinions, of course, but he was never going to write a blistering takedown on the US Aid cuts anyhow.
If somebody is writing directly about politics then the focus on the shittiness of our current government is pretty mandatory but not everything that is written has to be about politics, and this piece is only indirectly. Don't you want to read about things other than Trump sometimes?
"40% of Stanford students are disabled" is ridiculous on its face and just because we are compassionate liberals who respect disabled people doesn't mean we can't poke fun at it. In fact, if we don't poke fun at it we look like weirdos.
Exactly. This is the type of nonsense that needs to be snuffed out if we don't want all legitimate disability accommodation to start melting away.
There’s real economic significance to this too. In Britain the number of people age 16 to 34 off work due to a mental health condition rose by 76 per cent between 2019 and 2024. Benefits spending has skyrocketed and these people’s careers are dying before they’ve begun.
Agree with Elisabeth K, this is exactly what I want from Jeff, there are a lot of other substacks covering those other topics, I wouldn't want this one becoming intersectional and losing focus.
Sit this is a Wendy’s
You managed to improve on "Sir this is a Wendy's" ... with a typo!?!?
How dare you make fun of my disability
Yes shame on this comedian for not solving these issues with his column as clearly he could have otherwise been the straw that broke the camels back
The article that prompted this column is in the January 2026 issue of the Atlantic. So it’s not about the past; it’s from the future.
This is a great comment to let me know to unfollow. First there was the not making every article about my individual political bugaboos but now you tell me he’s committing time crimes too?!?
Higher Ed is the most destructive perpetrator of "narcissistic corporate decadence," precisely because it clothes itself in goodly virtue and disallows self-critique. The call is coming from inside the house. The very institution that is supposed to demand self-demotion in order to innovate within the constraints of reality and shared knowledge, has instead become a self-promoting dramaturgy of limitless perfection that flatters "proprietary" knowledge and takes offense at the mere existence of constraints. Higher Ed is just as guilty of obfuscation of wrongdoing. And yes, the narcissist corporate decadence of Higher Ed even has very real victims. Just look at impoverished K-12 students who can't read because their schools--run by adults with expert degrees from Higher Ed--were sold a prestigious-PhD-backed program that doesn't actually work...that is the real school-to-prison pipeline. Yes, the authoritarian Right has the Keystone Cops. But the "authoritative" Left has the Keystone Carebears. And they are just as dangerous and antisocial. Maybe even more so because they can hide their antisocial destructive nature, even from themselves. Btw, the origins of disability accommodations are to offset disability-specific constraints that are unrelated to the ESSENTIAL TASK. So, the real tell here is that Higher Ed no longer knows what its essential tasks are. And this is deeply terrifying in a society the relies on Higher Ed for producing a cadre of proficient experts entrusted with forming a strong and effective social safety net.
I didn't like it either, but do you really expect every form of media to write about your preferred topics, presumably from your point of view? That's probably not going to happen. If you want that, you could probably prompt chatgpt for infinite content, catered to your taste.
The article is topical. It's responding to a recent article and cites recent statistics. The people affected by this trend in education are going to be making US AID decisions in 2045. You shouldn't ignore them now.
However, I thought the approach wasn't great and relied on outdated tropes. These "disabled" students aren't super fragile. They've just realized that society is governed by arbitrary rules. This will allow them to be successful in life. The student getting extra time on the LSAT today will be the high-powered lawyer setting up Canary M. Burns as CEO. Complaining about fragile students is like believing that venture capitalists all work in the Cayman islands and other legal fictions used by the ambitious and powerful. They're not actually fragile, it's just that society has adopted slightly different unspoken rules than previous generations. Nowadays you win by citing safety.
I think ignoring this aspect really hurt the satire. Jeff (in the article) is a boss facing off against a well-informed and ambitious employee using a work-to-rule strike.
Ok bye
Felt conflicted about this one.
I agree claims about accommodation can be overused. That said, I was diagnosed with ADD (guess it’s now ADHD) back in the early 90s.
The accommodation of “time and a half” was very helpful for me completing exams (in some cases) in undergrad and grad school.
I’ve also been let go from one position because I didn’t learn on the job quickly enough. Having a learning disability sucks, but you can only use so much.
I now currently work for local government with supervisors who allowed more patience for learning new assignments.
I appreciate your humility and willingness to look in the mirror first, and, with respect to your personal situation, it sounds like you're just who such accommodations are designed for, (and through helping you, all of us have benefitted economically and socially). But what if nearly every other one of your classmates had used similar accommodations? I bet you'd have suspected something was fishy.
>But what if nearly every other one of your classmates had used similar accommodations? I bet you'd have suspected something was fishy.
The “time and a half” request doesn’t necessarily bother me for other classmates. At the same time, I can understand why organizations have tight deadlines and why my learning disability might not be a reasonable accommodation.