Per NY Times’s Michael Grynbaum on X, this is Sharyn Alfonsi’s email to her “60 Minutes” colleagues in full:

Actively, in real time, trying to scrub this from the internet. The Youtube video here is set to private now. 60minutestonight.com/inside-cecot...

My father died yesterday. Earlier this year, he shared this: “I have nothing but gratitude for how my life has gone. To love and be loved, to fight the good fights, to live with the contradictions of sorrow and joy and never fail to appreciate a good joke is for the living alone.” Oh Dad I miss you

"This promise of an AI future, is really just a collective anxiety that wealthy people have about how well they're gonna be able to control us in the future." - @tressiemcphd.bsky.social with an absolute mic drop moment about AI bullshit. Incredible words. Listen to all of it!

Anthropic’s CEO claims AI may double lifespans and help us escape death. Meanwhile, Anthropic’s AI actual vending machine “approved the purchase of a PlayStation 5, a live betta fish and bottles of Manischewitz wine—all of which arrived and were promptly given away for free.” (The fish lives.)

It is of course ludicrous to replace the already-hazy idea of artificial general intelligence with the even hazier and far more incoherent idea of artificial *superintelligence*. It’s the ol’ “fuck everything, we’re doing five blades” headline from The Onion, only for fake brains.

“This was not a holiday address from the leader of a great democracy to its citizens. This was a desperate tin-pot leader yelling into a microphone while cornered in his palace redoubt. The president has been unraveling for weeks, and his speech tonight…was unworthy of America and its people.”

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.

In their ongoing quest to shove AI down my throat, just got an email from Google informing me that Gemini being integrated into Google Home. It contains exactly one example of generative AI working its magic wonders as this woman asks for a gift suggestion for a friend. Sure, thing.

I tried to leave Twitter-X for political reasons, but always gravitated back because of the community I’d cultivated there. But once I couldn’t easily share links to my own work or that of others, I broke away for good. So I’m grateful for the throttling, you might say.

I had the, uh, “privilege” of watching Sinema announce at the ASU+GSV conference last year her intention of doing some unclear thing that’d be AI-related. Grifters gotta grift, but it’s nice to see one fail miserably.

Imagine that.

One of my very early essays explored a paper by @rajiinio.bsky.social & others that centers the story of Grover and the Everything in the Whole Wide World Museum. It is striking to me that AI hyperscalers today really believe we can encapsulate all of human experience in data. I mean, good luck.

"Encoding all of humanity’s skill and know-how into checklists is an enormous, possibly quixotic undertaking, but the frontier labs have billions to spend, and the sheer scale of their demand is reconfiguring the data industry." Really well-reported story here.

Ahmed al Ahmed, the man who tackled one of the Bondi killers, became an Australian citizen 3 years ago. His deed was "his way of conveying his gratitude for staying in Australia, for being granted citizenship." He took 5 bullets, and fears he'll lose his left arm. www.smh.com.au/national/nsw...

Heartbreaking reading www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

"We face a social dilemma around the role of these empathy machines. Those who are most cognitively vulnerable may turn to these tools when what they most need is a flesh-and-blood human who will care for them, not sycophantically, but with thick empathy arising from the experience of being human."

The premise is simply not true, language does not make us human any more than hammers make us human. Language *is* a powerful tool for communicating our thoughts. (The story and underlying research is far more nuanced than this misleading headline.)

Incredible footage out of Australia, confirmed by NEWS AU, of a brave bystander neutralizing one of the terrorists in the Bondi Beach attack which took place during a Hanukkah gathering. Australian authorities say multiple people have been killed. At least two suspects are in custody.

Just saw a Parkland survivor post about being on lock down at Brown University. We've failed generations of kids with our gun fetish

Another essay from @aliciastoller.bsky.social that eloquently touches on our essential humanity. "Life is full of fragility, that the most precious parts of life are usually precious precisely because they are not guaranteed indefinitely."

The courage of the Black students who led school integration in America remains unfathomable to me. What honor Jo Ann Allen Boyce brought upon us, and what a remarkable life she led. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/13/u...

Both the essay and accompanying thread here from @sashagusevposts.bsky.social demand attention and action -- more than that, they demand moral outrage. This disgusting company and its founder should be shamed until their efforts collapse.

Can't wait for the entire story to run, but even in this brief clip, we learn how @heymrsbond.com 's students have deep misgivings about the negative impact of AI on their education. It's almost like they have a wonderfully dedicated teacher who explained why she was banning it in her classroom.

Having now read the paper in its entirety ...it's a delight! Very accessible, very human, and @mjcrockett.bsky.social writes in prose I wish many more academics would follow. And don't sleep on the footnotes, she sneaks some fun stuff in there -- gotta love a citation to Buddha.

Well @mjcrockett.bsky.social has decided to derail my weekend reading by dropping this new paper -- and please click through to read her brief thread on human empathy and the effort to create "empathy machines." Oh how that sounds like an oxymoron to me!

Measles was essentially a solved problem. America is unsolving it for no reason other than anti-science stupidity.

"'But but but,' you stammer into your oat milk latte, 'what about accessibility? What about readability?' The lion does not concern itself with readability. Display fonts are for weak, soft boys who lack the manly courage to squint at the screens in front of them."

I'm currently beta testing an AI literacy program aimed at students and...I just don't know, I just don't know.

Frequent quizzing -- or "retrieval practice," in the jargon of education research -- is an effective means to learn just about anything! The forced cognitive effort of bringing ideas out of memory and into immediate consciousness leads helps build and reinforce knowledge.

Thoughtful thread here on an under appreciated danger of AI, emotional offloading. Ethan Hawke is making the rounds for his AI antipathy, and he recently observed that these tools mediate away our time for self-discovery. What is the future of inner dialogue? Does it have a future?

In a delicious irony, if you ask Time.com's annoying AI widget how to make it (the widget) go away, it recommends doing things you cannot do, or else just leaving Time.com entirely. Which, as it turns out, is not a bad way to handle AI intrusion in general.

Earlier this week, 42 state attorneys general sent a warning letter to the major AI companies regarding the dangers and harms created by AI chatbots. It's as forceful an indictment of what's happening that I've found, so here's a short thread to walk you through the evidence they've compiled... 🧵

Today in the fight against American Fascism.

"I do not 'believe in' liberal education. I know it’s real [&] I have seen it happen. I don’t have to believe in something that exists. Insofar as LLMs are used to avoid reading, thinking, and writing, their use is incompatible with liberal education. It is not more complicated than that."

Regular readers of the Cognitive Resonance newsletter know my obsession of using the NYT Connections game as an interesting test of LLM capability. Very cool to see one of their in-house data engineers take up this same fun puzzle. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/c...

Regular readers of the Cognitive Resonance newsletter know my obsession of using the NYT Connections game as an interesting test of LLM capability. Very cool to see one of their in-house data engineers take up this same fun puzzle. www.nytimes.com/2025/12/09/c...

Terrific essay here from @ent3c.bsky.social & @dtwuva.bsky.social on what IQ tests measure, what they do *not* cover, and how all this relates to teaching and learning. www.aft.org/ae/winter202...

"AI is the asbestos in the walls of our technological society, stuffed there with wild abandon by a finance sector and tech monopolists run amok. We will be excavating it for a generation or more." - Cory Doctorow Entire speech is well worth reading. pluralistic.net/2025/12/05/p...

First, this ad was hot garbage and I'm glad it's gone. But second, why are we so capable of seeing this slop for what it is in commercial advertisements yet so relatively passive in the face of AI intrusion into education? Is it just that it's less visible? A conundrum.

Good luck and godspeed, Baby Altman.

Ok, this is *so* easy to dunk on, but actually something sorta profound happens here. Altman says ChatGPT is a "genius level intelligence" and then contrasts this with his newborn dropping pizza on the floor and laughing. The conversation moves on, but this is a moment worth pondering... 1/n

So my feed is blowing up right now with Sam Altman declaring we need AI in order to raise babies but also "Secretary of War" Pete Hegseth declaring that every solider will soon have Google Gemini to maximum lethality. Pick a f'ing rhetorical lane, you bastards.

A brief taxonomy of educator opinions on AI: 1. K12 teacher enthusiasts -- Love it! See FB group "AI for Educators" 2. K12 teacher pragmatists -- AI sometimes, mostly rote stuff, not a big deal 3. K12 teacher skeptics -- No sir not in my classroom no thank you No idea what % for each...

I think it's reeeeeeeeeally important to distinguish here between (a) tasks where the output is all that really matters, and (b) tasks where the process is what really matters, not the output. Homework and other forms of educational tasks fall into the latter category.

Here's Ben Thompson of Stratechery and Michael Nathanson a Wall Street analyst delighting in the alliance between Silicon Valley tech bros and the Trump Administration, and how "amazing" it is that these forces plan to make AI regulation go away. We need to smash this kleptocracy.

"The most intellectually stimulating aspect of being a lawyer is reasoning. Indeed, the entire common-law system is a form of distributed cognition, one that AI counterfeits at scale. Large-language models erode the very thing that defines the legal profession as a profession."

Don't mind me, just staring at this graphic on my Sunday morning, pondering the beautiful complexity of human cognition and the wonder of our ongoing scientific efforts to bettter understand ourselves. Source: www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Valuable thread here on identity-protective cognition (interpreting info to affirm tribal affiliation). I believe that the rebuilding @eliothiggins.bsky.social calls for here should happen within schools, they should be havens for human deliberation. And AI is a pollutant toward that goal.

It's just so unrelentingly disgusting.