It is EXHAUSTING not only being made responsible for coming up with new kinds of assignments for our students; it's also tedious reading op-eds that suggest the core problem is a crisis in teaching. But, as Chris and I lay out here, this isn't a crisis in teaching; it's an attack on learning.

People have no idea what a premium we have enjoyed and what losing it will cost us

Bottomless corruption.

Kids: Study political science to learn about thermostatic backlash (and keep up on polling data if you want to make broad assertions about public opinion)

Every jaw in the room dropped. He had done the unthinkable. He had not only told them his beliefs, but he had done it with the equal degree of certainty that they had employed in telling him theirs. And there's this unspoken rule in America: Only Christians are allowed to do this.

Being well known social media is based purely on capturing attention, by whatever means -- good, bad, and ugly. Social media platforms are the quintessence of the attention economy. There is no merit underlying success. Successfully capturing attention is proof of your ability to capture attention.

My mom will still complain about how bad the violent crime is getting.

This is why the Ellisons paid $150 million to acquire a mediocre Substack blog www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/12/bari...

I don't know how to explain it any better. If the technology is that important (it's not) and becomes ubiquitous (it won't) and it provides value that's undeniable (it can't) there will be an adoption curve that won't leave anyone behind. Computers didn't. Mobile phones didn't.

Politics, like everything else these days, has become another form of entertainment competing for synapses in the attention economy.

I was sitting in the basement computer room of a dorm on the Stanford campus in 1999, when I noticed the guy next to me typing on a site called Google. I asked what it was, he told me it was a search engine that worked really well, so I tried it and kept using it for the next 25 years.

the index of consumer sentiment (current expectations) is at an all time low because trump voters are catching on to the facts the rest of us have been covering for a year

Instead of “this is important, but I can’t afford it” (health insurance, housing close to work, etc.) or “everyone should be able to afford this, especially in such a rich country, and some can’t, which is bad,” many insist “people in the past had it easier.” The (false) comparison matters to them.

🎯 “It’s almost as if the uncritical and naive adoption of AI has made us more credulous and sapped our critical thinking at the precise moment we should be on guard against its evolving harms.” www.rollingstone.com/culture/cult...

Probably an unpopular opinion: I do not enjoy sports that involve deliberately causing people to suffer serious injury (boxing, MMA, American football) and I wish fewer people enjoyed them.

Wells Fargo's economic chart of the year via Myles Udland

Like never before in history, social media platforms have the power to synergistically combine low social trust, conspiratorial thinking, and a Dunning-Kruger level of self-awareness.

I lived in rural Ohio for the first 18 years of my life, surrounded by conservative people. The experience has colored my belief that the U.S. has a deep conservative strain that cannot simply be wished away and is prone to reactionary backlashes after liberal progress.

I will say it again: this Administration is committing national intellectual suicide. It’s akin to the Khmer Rouge, but it’s happening in America.

To be clear, I think it's really stupid to compare one of the two major parties competing to control the government -- with the power to make and enforce laws, to decide foreign policy, to manage the macroeconomy, to appoint officers and run administrative and regulatory agencies -- to the weather.

“.. Trump was inheriting an economy that was on a path toward what he might have called a big, beautiful soft landing.” His tariffs “reversed that momentum.” @bloomberg.com www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

If we can't even identify our enemies then how can we fight them? Trump's National Security Strategy is the longest suicide note in American history www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/1...

Had a conversation the other day with a student who complained that another teacher was very strict about rude language and didn't like students to use "suck" in a pejorative sense. I tried to defend the teacher by noting that those of us from older generations remember offensive meanings now lost.

Out of curiosity, I checked to see what lists I have been added to. According to list makers, I am: a techno-pessimist, a random clown, a reactionary, a Zionist, a transphobe, a hater of the oppressed, anti-inclusive, a reactionary, engaged in follower farming, intolerant, a dangerous extremist...

To the extent that large segments of the working class (especially white, but also Hispanic) identify with the GOP and vote based on cultural issues, then the GOP has already become the party of some of the workers. Those are the workers who are not voting out of economic self-interest.

'In Ukraine, the state itself is investigating the government, the cabinet, the president’s closest advisers. By contrast, it is impossible to imagine Kash Patel’s FBI investigating anyone in Trump’s White House. Any Russian who investigates Putin goes to jail" www.theatlantic.com/internationa...

Worth reading for lots of reasons, but particularly because it closes with something I see in my work and travels speaking on writing and AI. Many, maybe most students do not want AI-mediated schooling or lives. We can offer them something better. www.currentaffairs.org/news/ai-is-d...

A study on 1.7 million people in Hong Kong shows superior hybrid immunity to Covid in people who got vaccinated before infection vs. people who got infected first. "Our findings are a direct rebuttal to arguments for natural immunity," the authors write. doi.org/10.1016/j.va...

The fact that there’s barely a president is in fact a major national crisis, given who this (further) empowers www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2025/12/the-...

democratic leaders need to make a huge deal about the antivaxx insanity coming from RFK Jr. like, in addition to being fucking insane, immoral, and dangerous, antivaxx is significantly less popular than even the most unpopular dem policies. we need to ceaselessly hammer them for it

The reign of content has spilled into every aspect of our lives and is collapsing distinctions between entertainment, news, politics, art, education, religion, and so forth. Everything is competing in the attention economy, and so everything is becoming a species of entertainment.

They are running the government according to the logic of right-wing grievance media. I cannot emphasize that enough. The point is to create content, and they don't see an actual difference between dunking on Sabrina Carpenter, passing legislation, and bombing other countries.

The Nobel Prize committee should announce the World Cup winner tomorrow

wtf is a FIFA peace prize? that's like being an NFL laureate in physics

Our leader is having repeated trouble staying awake at public events he's hosting; is acting more erratically online and in public; is making decisions that are doing clear material harm to the country & our allies. Simply, his declining health must become a bigger issue. bsky.app/profile/did:...

I know what my answers would be: protect your children by keeping them away from smart phones and social media for as long as possible.

The entire argument still hinges on "It is inevitable" which is less an argument than a sales pitch

In my younger days, the leftists used to aim most of their ire at the likes of Ronald Reagan, Jesse Helmes, Strom Thurmond, Jerry Falwell, Phyllis Schlafly, and other right wingers. In the social media era, they get angrier at Democratic leaders. It is a such a bizarro world of politics.

"Never spread the lie in the headline" should be a hard rule of 21st century journalism. Research shows that repeating lies helps to spread them, and people read headlines more than they read stories.

Tomorrow Nickelback will open for a livestream of perpetual motion influencer Gracyanne Barbosa eating a thousand carrot sticks to determine their effect on tinnitus. Contrapoints and the CEO of CityMapper will be there too.

Although I suspect the OP is either exaggerating heavily or facing an outlier situation, there is something real that is changing. We know that international test scores in reading and math have been declining over the past 15 years; that rates of youth mental health problems have been rising during

The fact doomers have gone from "America is over" to "Dems won't hold anyone responsible when this is over" can actually be read as an optimistic signal imo.

A study by Dayforce shows 87% of executives use AI for work, compared to 57% of managers and just 27% of employees. I think this explains the massive disconnect we see in how CEOs talk about AI versus everyone else. It also raises the question of how useful it truly is for frontline work?

Mad Libs: Tomorrow [washed-up musical act] will [musical action] a livestream of [impossible idea] influencer [obscure internet person] [doing something stupid] to determine its effect on [medical outcome]. [YouTube star] and the CEO of [technology company] will be there too.

A lot of silly replies to this post (in the comments and quote tweets -- most worthy of blocking). People on this site despair that they are never going to turn the Democrats into a leftist party, and they are correct. Most Democrats actually want to win control of the government and wield power.

Ok grandpa let’s take you to the hague

the genAI bubble relies on you conflating the genuinely tremendous potential of using machine learning for e.g. image recognition in radiotherapy, protein folding, simulations in power systems etc with the child abuse image generators and schizophrenic delusions generators

RFK Jr. is neither a joke nor a well-intentioned proponent of public health with a few kooky beliefs. He's a menace, evil even by the standards of Trump's inner circle, and the failure of the political press to convey this is maddening

I would phrase this idea differently. I don't believe there is an innate human need for religion (there are some fascinating books on the question). But there is a drive to find purpose in one's life. Religion used to absorb more of that drive, but its decline leaves many people looking elsewhere.