NYtimes headlines sounding like Aristotle's "Problems"

"Trump is not the architect of the Iran war, only its vehicle." On who's really in charge: sarahkendzior.substack.com/p/the-no-wor...

Instead of banning use of the One Ring, why doesn't Gandalf teach Frodo to use it critically?

The firebombing of Tehran is unfathomably evil.

The evil in this country right now is so thick you can practically cut it with a knife.

this made me cackle all the way through

Putin-Trump alliance going the way of the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact? www.msn.com/en-us/news/w...

And just like that we’re back to “Department of Defense”

'Executive summaries' are intrinsically problematic. They assume that the article being summarized contains a perfect alignment of evidence, reasoning, and conclusions. In fact, most reports don't (otherwise, all truths would have been revealed long ago). Learning comes from id-ing the mismatches.

This, from Ezra Klein, matches up with my experience. There are far too many journalists for whom this applies. Or to put it another way: I sometimes say my sole advantage, as a journalist, is that I am willing to go to the library. howiwrite.substack.com/p/ezra-klein...

I wonder what's on the agenda for the next Board of Peace meeting?

Did private equity buy Tai Chi? I keep seeing adds for it everywhere.

The Dow is now under 48,000, which according to the Constitution allows us to talk about the Epstein Files.

In a faculty meeting on student AI & holy f the situation is just grim. Basically, it's on its to totally revise our assignment structure & pedagogy, but uni will start opening up computer lab testing centers bc students can't be trusted to take exams on computers they own without using agentic AI.

"Here are the proofs it took us two years to create. Please look over them carefully and get back to us about any changes in 48 hours."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Had my attention drawn to Camus' Nobel acceptance speech

At least we're in a recognizable pattern. It's the same war-economic crisis doom loop that we had under Bush I and II.

I have seen a lot of cursed stuff in my time in academia but this is among the *most* cursed. Grammarly is generating miniature LLMs based on academic work so that users can have their writing ‘reviewed’ by experts like David Abulafia, who died less than two months ago.

Fish rots from the head down. www.msn.com/en-us/health...

GW‘s student newspaper appears to have broken the story that the institution has sold a satellite campus to Amazon to be turned into a data center, which is just about chef’s kiss for the state of American higher education rn

And BOOM goes the dynamite. To all the AI Bros who have slid into my mentions to tell me that you CAN in fact copyright AI materials, the Supreme Court has told you to go suck rocks. A prompt is not authorship. And if there is no author, there is no valid copyright. www.engadget.com/ai/the-supre...

complete insanity

Iran is about the size of the American West, and we are trying to subdue it with a dwindling stock of bombs that have a destructive radius about the size of a football field.

You can't vibe code your way to peace and freedom in the Middle East.

How's President Bush III doing?

I'm addicted to these videos from a bakery in Uzbekistan this bread is beautiful

Yeeesssss!!!! (This will always be the defining image for me of the “evidence” against Columbia students)

One of my favorite objects from ISAC in Chicago? A school tablet with bite marks found during the late nineteenth-century excavations at Nippur. Loaned by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology a few years ago (image by me). 🦷 School stress is universal.

Today I was listening to a priest distinguish his church's version of Christian faith and practice from others and I felt like I was listening to the head of a Pink Floyd fan club spelling out the very specific reasons why everything went downhill after Gilmour replaced Syd Barrett.

Has anyone done a graphic novel of Plato's Symposium? Several dialogues would lend themselves to that kind of treatment, but Symposium would be the coolest choice, I think.

Just beautiful.

Fine profile of Stewart Brand, going over his whole remarkable life but occasioned by his terrific new book, "Maintenance: Of Everything (Part 1)." “'It’s harder to imagine how something might go well than go badly,' he says. But 'that’s how you negotiate your way into a future you were glad of.'"

Cutting students off from that friction snd the self-actualizing feeling of mastering a skill is doing them a disservice. It’s more about convenience for the admins & profit for the AI companies than it is about the students’ needs & best interests.

Funny because the original AI developed by a young Matthew Broderick learned that global thermonuclear war was "a strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

This beautiful image was created from data taken by different telescopes in space and on the ground. It shows the thousand-year-old remnant of the brilliant SN 1006 supernova, as seen in radio (red), X-ray (blue) and visible light (yellow).

HACKER USED ANTHROPIC’S CLAUDE TO STEAL SENSITIVE MEXICAN DATA A HACKER USED ANTHROPIC’S CLAUDE CHATBOT TO BREACH MEXICAN GOVERNMENT SYSTEMS, STEALING 150GB OF SENSITIVE DATA, INCLUDING TAXPAYER AND VOTER RECORDS. RESEARCHERS AT GAMBIT SECURITY SAY THE ATTACKER USED AI TO FIND

A tax economist put his entire life savings into a prediction market bet that DOGE wouldn’t cut spending. His wife read the Kalshi comments from the people on the other side and grew *more* confident because “they didn’t seem to understand what they were buying.” He made a 37% return

Good example of what in the old days used to be called 'computing' repackaged as AI: www.npr.org/2026/02/23/n...

Ancient #polychromy is rarely more vibrant than this type of Greek painted pottery from Centuripe, Sicily. Both vases here are funerary and have architectural elements at top, looking like small tholos-shaped temples (lion head waterspouts!). The colors are blazingly vivid. 🏺 1/ 📸 me

New York got their Mamdani. When do the rest of us get to have a Mamdani-type leader?

Sad that I wasn't smart enough to invent a universal plagiarism machine that would inspire other universal plagiarism machines to plagiarize its entire contents.

Relevant to today's conversation about AI's inherent sexism, here's an email from cognitive psychologist and early AI theorist Roger Schank, arguing to Epstein that women can't be truly intelligent, because they care too much about what other people think.

Just thought of something and got hit with a flash of anger at the whole learning tech hype cycle. The MOOC revolution, microcredentials (which are coming back?), teaching machines, NFT crap. But you know what did silently hit critical mass and genuinely change how ged ed classes are built? OER.

A tariff “refund” mostly goes to whoever wrote the tariff check: the importer of record. That’s not the same person who paid more at the register. So refunds -- if they're offered -- might sound like consumer relief, but in reality, they're corporate windfalls.

Now THAT's a headline. "The U.S. spent $30 billion to ditch textbooks for laptops and tablets: The result is the first generation less cognitively capable than their parents" fortune.com/2026/02/21/l...

I gotta believe that the Fight Unlawful Conduct and Keep Individuals and Communities Empowered act, which would secure residents’ rights under state law to sue immigration officials for unconstitutional conduct, has a lot to be said for it. www.nytimes.com/2026/02/21/n...