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    <title>Berkeley Public Schools Overhauled Reading Instruction. How’s It Going? | KQED</title>
    <dc:date>2026-06-26T08:31:48+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.kqed.org/news/12088044/berkeley-public-schools-overhauled-reading-instruction-hows-it-going</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Nine years after a lawsuit spurred a reckoning around literacy education in Berkeley Unified School District, a new curriculum and culture have taken hold."]]></description>
<dc:subject>berkeley reading pedagogy curriculum instruction schools schooling 2026 berkeleyusd literacy sarahossaini</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ward-graham-michel-de-certeau-wounded-walker">
    <title>The Wounded Walker | Commonweal Magazine</title>
    <dc:date>2026-06-25T21:14:53+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/ward-graham-michel-de-certeau-wounded-walker</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Michel de Certeau’s search for the murmuring of the mystical in secular society"

...

"The Czech poet and painter Josef Čapek, who was killed in Bergen-Belsen in 1945, described himself as a limping pilgrim “hobbling through the Gateway to Eternity.” Certeau—and Fern in Nomadland—could be described the same way. In his biography of Certeau, Françoise Dosse calls him “le marcheur blessé,” “the wounded walker.” 

Part of Certeau’s attraction to the Society of Jesus was that he wanted to be a missionary. He did travel widely, but his real wayfaring ended up being internal—an inner movement that could not be stilled or staunched. For Certeau, the transience of desire, including his own, cannot be pinned down but only attested to. We can only trace it in and through its various inscriptions and behaviors. The city may be mapped and its entrances and exits prescribed, but it can be walked in a million different ways. In his numerous and multifaceted investigations, Certeau traces the murmuring of a desire that no secularism can conceal or abrogate. This is the spiritual vision in his work that roamed and transgressed across anthropology, theology, history, sociology, psychoanalysis, ethnography, and what is now known as cultural studies.  

One can understand why Catholic theologians have paid him little attention. Though he wrote about the Church, the Eucharist, and even Christ, he had little interest in dogmatics, philosophical theology, moral theology, or ecclesiology. And his writing style can be forbidding, as we have seen. But beyond its eclecticism and difficulty, Certeau’s work may have been avoided by theologians because of a critical question it raises: To what extent are their theologies themselves “sociocultural productions” reacting to, rather than excavating, secularism? Certeau wants to ask of theology not whether its critique of secularism is right or wrong, but what fears and desires it is itself expressing.

Certeau invented interdisciplinary study before it was fashionable or even had a name. He recognized that the truly big questions—like what makes a belief believable or why one would believe anything—cannot be answered by any one intellectual discipline, including theology, with its siloed modes of inquiry and strictly policed faculty boundaries. And yet such questions tap into the very roots of any religious faith. Certeau was likely not surprised at theologians’ neglect of his work. He would have known from his reading of the mystics that the Church is always wary of lived experience and religious enthusiasm uncontainable by its boundaries."]]></description>
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    <title>Opinion | No, American schools aren't failing</title>
    <dc:date>2026-06-25T08:13:56+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/06/22/opinion/american-schools-failure-myth-scores/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["A claim so familiar, people no longer feel obligated to back it up with evidence."

[archived: https://archive.is/WHzji ]

"The belief that American public schools are an international embarrassment, sites of endless failure, is one of the few things our polarized political system seems to agree on. After all, the transition from George W. Bush’s presidential education policy to that of Barack Obama was one of remarkable continuity, based on a shared premise: Our schools were in a broad state of emergency. Today, politicians of both parties still tell that story, as do op-ed pages and nonprofit organizations and bipartisan cable panels. The notion has hardened into an axiom, a claim so familiar that the people making it no longer feel obligated to back it up with evidence. But we don’t have to buy this narrative, and we shouldn’t — because the evidence tells us that the narrative just isn’t true.

The best way to consider a country’s educational performance is in relation to the performance of international peers, and the most authoritative international benchmark is the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) exam, which tests 15-year-olds across 81 education systems. In the most recent results, from 2022, American students tested better in reading than 68 of the 80 other systems and well above the international average. In science, they bested 56 of 80. Math is our weakest subject, but even there we outscore 43 systems and tie with a dozen more, meaning that on our worst day we still do better than more than half the developed world. Our top performers look particularly good on the PISA; for example, 14 percent of American teenagers scored at the highest level in reading, double the OECD average.

Some critics note that our education system is expensive and say that we should demand better results for our money. But this demand implies that there’s a straightforward relationship between per-pupil spending and test scores; decades of evidence demonstrate that there is not. And the results show that we produce many sterling students for our money.

Indeed, the students at the top of our system aren’t merely fine; they’re the best on earth. American teams have placed in the top three at the International Mathematical Olympiad every year for a decade and won or tied for first in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, and 2024. In 2025, all five members of the US physics team won gold at the International Physics Olympiad, making the United States the only country to sweep gold that year. Our chemistry, biology, informatics, linguistics, and other teams collect medals year after year. These are overwhelmingly public-school kids from ordinary suburban and urban districts, outcompeting the best academic talent the world can produce. You rarely read about them because their success doesn’t fit the declinist story.

But scores are dropping, aren’t they? Yes, and that’s exactly why international context matters. The 2022 PISA results showed an unprecedented worldwide collapse, with average scores across the OECD falling roughly 10 points in reading and 15 in math. When students in Germany, Norway, and New Zealand decline in lockstep with students in Arizona and Connecticut, the cause is plainly not American teachers, unions, or curricula. (My own guess is that the smartphone is to blame, but I can’t prove it.) Even as our raw scores fell, our international rank rose in all three subjects because our peers’ scores fell further. Again, when was the last time you heard that in our media?

None of this is to deny that some American schools are in crisis. But those failures aren’t spread evenly across our system; they’re concentrated in a small number of places suffering from poverty, structural racism, and institutional decline. The United States has the highest child-poverty rate in the OECD (roughly a quarter of our children live in poverty, versus less than 10 percent in top-scoring nations like Finland and Denmark) and our socioeconomic and demographic stratification is pronounced. As such, our aggregate scores on assessments like PISA are weighed down disproportionately by disadvantaged students.

In Detroit, which sits at the bottom of every large urban US district tested, two-thirds of students were chronically absent in a recent year, speaking to a lack of stability and resources at the family level. What teachers could succeed in those conditions? Cleveland, Baltimore, districts in the impoverished rural areas of West Virginia — they all tell a similar story. The American schools that struggle the worst share no common curriculum, union contract, or pedagogy. What they share is extreme poverty, segregation, and decades of disinvestment — in local labor markets, transportation, and health care.

Imagine swapping the students of Detroit with those of wealthy Bloomfield Hills next door, where the schools have excellent performance metrics. Does anyone believe the students from Detroit would suddenly excel?

Simply shoveling money at urban schools is not the answer. In fact, poorer, higher-minority schools in the United States receive significantly more per-pupil funding than richer and whiter schools. As it stands, the teachers in the Detroit public school system are asked to achieve similar results to the ones in the Bloomfield system, despite the vast disparities in living and learning environments of the students they teach.

I’m known to be very skeptical about the influence of schools and teachers on test scores, which tend to reflect the socioeconomic conditions of groups and the variation in talent levels between individuals. But you don’t have to share my views in that regard to acknowledge that our worst-performing schools face conditions that no amount of teaching quality can overcome. And consider a fact that’s almost never reported: America’s most disadvantaged students, those in the bottom international decile in socioeconomic status, rank sixth out of 64 comparable nations in math. In other words, even in the midst of all that poverty and dysfunction, our poorest kids outperform almost all of the world’s other poorest kids. The problem is not that our schools fail poor children at an unusual rate. It is that some of our communities are deprived to a scandalous degree.

In sum, our median student does just fine, our best students are the envy of the world, but our worst-performing students drag down our averages in a way that makes our overall performance look much worse than it is — and those extreme negative outliers are almost universally found in communities with intense socioeconomic challenges.

This resolves a puzzle that has baffled pollsters for 40 years. American parents consistently rate the nation’s schools quite poorly while giving their own children’s schools high marks. Average grades for the American school system writ large typically fall in the C or D range, but more than three-quarters of parents typically give their own kids’ schools an A or B. Often this is regarded as a kind of cognitive bias, of irrationality on the part of those parents; surely, they must be viewing their own schools with rose-colored glasses, or so the conventional wisdom has long held. In fact, that attitude makes perfect sense when you reflect on the quantitative reality I’ve described: Most American K-12 schools and students really are doing quite well, which is reflected in the high marks parents give to their own local schools, but like all of us, parents have heard the relentless doomsaying about the country’s schools. Parents judge their own schools from direct experience and the national system from what they see on television. That is, on the question they actually know something about, about which they have the best evidence, they’re quite positive, and they have every reason to be.

The myth of universal failure didn’t come out of nowhere, and for the record I don’t think it was born entirely in bad faith. Some of the people who spread it were no doubt animated by a real and decent impulse to improve the lives of American children, saw the awful conditions in our inner cities, and overextrapolated their impression of school failure. Others were likely so motivated to attack public schools for ideological reasons that they didn’t care much about misrepresenting the data. Whatever the motives, over time it became far too common for politicians, pundits, and members of the media to take data that showed a handful of distressed communities dragging down otherwise strong averages and present it as proof that American education was rotten from root to branch. An honest reading pointed toward investing in poor places and pursuing avenues for shared prosperity other than just schooling; the sensationalist reading pointed toward dismantling public schools. Many people chose the sensationalist one and repeated it until it became something “everybody knew.”

The stakes are significant. If the failures of American education really are systemwide, the response has to be wholesale reform — new national mandates and perhaps a federal takeover of local education policy; even more standardized testing; the criminalization of teacher unions; private school vouchers for all. But the reality is that our educational failure is concentrated, and it’s concentrated in predictable places, which means the remedy must be too: Serious investment for the communities where poverty has done its damage, not merely for the schools that sit inside them, along with an effort to build more pathways to middle class stability for those who are not academically motivated.

There is some evidence that such investment, for example in environmental cleanup or direct financial assistance for poorer families, can improve learning outcomes. There too, though, the evidence is contested and the effects unclear. But this investment offers obvious advantages: Even if bringing more money and development into poor communities does not close academic gaps, the direct economic advantages will endure.

These efforts are both harder and more expensive than yet another round of complaining about teachers and their unions, but they have the advantage of potentially solving real problems. If we have a moral duty to improve our schools, as the school reformers insist, then that begins with a moral duty to tell the truth."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/umyazu">
    <title>Umyazu - A Working Library</title>
    <dc:date>2026-06-25T07:06:53+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://aworkinglibrary.com/writing/umyazu</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Reading is the art of attention. What a mess we’ve made of that word. From the earnest effort of a mind reaching for the world to a mindless, exasperated skittering through the slop. The attention economy is misnamed. Our attention is not being harvested but rather suppressed, flattened out, demeaned into submission. We do not attend anything when we doomscroll or binge watch or tap tap tap one notification after another; we abandon—ourselves, our bodies, our kith and kin.

Nor do we read when we slip through the stream or flick through the feed. Reading is an awakening of attention, not a deadening of it. We read to come alive to ourselves, not to forget who we are or what we are doing, or what is being done to us without our consent. We read to encounter the world, to connect what we know to what we do not know yet, knowing all the while that such understanding is always temporary, lovely precisely because it is transient. The suspension of disbelief that a reader brings to a text is an openness to becoming someone new, to shedding old selves and wriggling into new ones. It is an invitation to change.

This, of course, presumes that what we are reading is the product of a mind, that the reading is itself a gathering of minds. For each writer is really many writers. When we read Le Guin, we are also reading Woolf, Kropotkin, Lao Tzu. We are reading Le Guin’s reading of Woolf, and Woolf’s reading of Shakespeare, and adding our own readings to theirs. But when we read a text created by fake intelligence, we find not a mind but a forgery, and a glib one at that—a thin, transparent skin wrapped around an empty void. We are right to be repulsed. That revulsion is our bodies asserting their right to reality, to the knowledge that there can be no mind without a body, anymore than there can be a body without a mind.

Yet in the stream we seem to lose that body. We dissolve, dissipate, spread the edges of our selves out until we lose integrity. Here is a curious paradox: when we read, we make ourselves vulnerable, open ourselves up to being changed in ways we cannot predict or control. But when we venture into the stream, we more often than not go armed and wary, aware that we are in a place of danger. We are vigilant, alert, attuned to the predators that lurk below our thumbs. Yet it is there that we are worn down and disintegrated, that constant vigilance like a vibration that shakes all our atoms loose and tumbles them ever downstream.

Maybe there’s a clue in the way we talk of paying attention, rather than giving it. An older form of that verb also means to appease. We pay attention to the angry gods of capitalism in the hope that they will turn their anger elsewhere. Like most gods, they refuse us. We pay and pay again: each refresh and reaction like a hidden fee or interest charged. We check the boxes and agree to the terms (which we do not read), because what are our other options? Coercion was long ago rebranded as consumer choice.

In The Telling, the last of Le Guin’s novels set in the Hainish universe, a young Terran observer named Sutty sets out for the planet Aka. In the forty years it takes for her to arrive, the main continent’s literary and democratic culture is supplanted by a capitalist state, intent on speed-running through industrialization. Books are pulped and writing banned; libraries are closed. The old languages and gestures are outlawed, along with homosexuality, home-cooked food, bartering. Citizens become “producer-consumers” and must orient all of their lives to those two actions. Ordinary life becomes subsumed into regimented, surveilled, and homogenized routines.

Bewildered and heart sore, Sutty finds life in the capital city to be difficult. Her skill in language and literature has no outlet, the need to hide her sexuality rankles, and the people all seem like smooth plastic surfaces which she can’t reach. But then the envoy makes an invitation: the Akans will permit her to leave the capital and visit the mountain villages, where she might learn if anything remains of the former culture. It’s a risky venture, but there’s nothing for her in the city; she boards a riverboat and is soon on her way.

In Okzat-Ozkat, she disembarks and wanders a while, the great white cliffs of Mount Silong rising above her. When she ventures to speak to some of the people, she finds inklings of the former Aka. A boy calls her “yoz,” a word that means fellow person, a common address in the old days, since banned. An herbalist works in a shop where writing, faded but still visible, adorns the walls. When she begins to speak the words, the old man slams one hand on the counter and covers his mouth with the other. “Not aloud, yoz,” he says.

Soon, Sutty is invited to join the maz on their evening gatherings. “Maz” means “educated person” or “teacher.” The maz are couples (of any gender) who dedicate their lives to the Telling—the recitation of story, fable, poem, song, instruction, history, chant. The Telling isn’t one thing, but many, infinite things. Sutty is first inclined to call it a religion, then a philosophy, or perhaps a religion-philosophy, a “religion of process,” as the Hainish term it. But even that seems inadequate. It has no gods, no heaven or hell, no binaries of good and evil, no creator. In the end, it is only The Telling.

Each evening, the people of Okzat-Ozkat gather in the homes of the maz to hear the Telling, one person stationed outside to keep an eye out for the Monitors who would imprison them for such a transgression. Each evening, they pay “by the word,” trading a few copper coins or small bills for the songs and tales and histories. Young children join for free, until they reach adolescence, at which point they too are expected to pay their way. These payments are not donations, not charity. There is “no shame in the transaction on either side,” no sense of manipulation or rent-seeking: “cash was paid for value received.”1

This is payment without appeasement, without coercion. The yoz freely pay in order to give their attention; the maz receive that payment in order to tell, the telling itself a way of reading, reading as understanding and learning and making sense, reading as attending the world. The attention is paid but it isn’t exploited. Sutty records her observations:

<blockquote>[O]n Aka, reward, whether spiritual or fiscal, was immediate. By his performance of a maz’s duties, Siez was not building up a bank account of virtue or sanctity; in return for his story-telling he would receive praise, shelter, dinner, supplies for their journey, and the knowledge that he had done his job. Exercises were performed not to attain an ideal of health or longevity but to achieve immediate well-being and for the pleasure of doing them. Meditation aimed toward a present and impermanent transcendence, not an ultimate nirvana. Aka was a cash, not a credit, economy.

    Therefore their hatred of usury. A fair bargain and payment on the spot.

    Le Guin, The Telling, page 171</blockquote>

By contrast, the attention economy is all credit: the user pays twice.

There’s a prevailing narrative that says we’ve lost our ability to pay attention, that we need drugs or discipline or sternly-worded warnings about the dangers of social media to deal with this growing public health threat. This narrative completely obscures the fact that annihilating attention is a political project with clear benefits for the billionaire class: if we cannot attend the world, neither can we intercede in it. We become passive recipients of their worldbuilding, disenfranchised from our own responsibility to make sense of—and therefore to remake—the world around us.

The abrupt emergence of the Akan capitalist state turns out to be the Terran’s doing: a religious-fundamentalist sect from Earth visited Aka and shared technological knowledge that triggered rapid industrialization, and the equally rapid rejection of all the old ways. The technology included the book banning, the patriarchal order, the authoritarian surveillance. To receive the technology was to receive the worldview it reproduced. (This is of course how all technology works.) That worldview depended on a people too busy working and shopping to be curious about how things are and how they came to be. Because once you are curious about capitalism you must reject the bargain: if the price of the comfort of the few is the immiseration of the many than the price is too damn high. It is the skill of reading that hones that curiosity, sharpens our ability to notice what is before us, what is real and what is not, which bargains are fair and which are usurious. Reading is how we attend the world, which is also how we change it.

I want to posit that the reading economy, like the umyazu—places where the Telling took place—still exists, hidden amidst the ruins of capitalism. It isn’t captured in GDP, of course, but then neither is housework, and yet everyday millions of people do the dishes, make the bed, dust the shelves. It overlaps with capitalism, in the form of large, commercial publishers who often care more for profit than words, but who still manage to publish a good many good books; and it escapes capitalism with worker-owned publishers, anarchist collectives, infoshops, personal blogs, radical literary magazines, neighborhood bookstores, used books given and sold and given again, libraries big and small and free, and with every pen put to paper or keyboard to verse, and every reader who reads and creates the text anew.

Every contribution to the reading economy—every dollar snatched from anesthetizing streaming services, from platforms that siphon money away from artists in order to fuel machines of war; every dollar given in exchange for a book or zine or illustration made with hand and heart and eye; every gaze diverted from the slop and turned instead to the gifts of the artist and the writer and the painter and so on—is not only a contribution taken from the attention economy but a repudiation of it, whole and entire. Every contribution to the reading economy is two less for its nemesis: once in cash, a second time in the resurrection of attention, in the art of reading, in the gift paid in return for the gift. A fair bargain, and payment on the spot.

—————
1. Le Guin, The Telling, page 109 ↩︎"]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://johnpaulbrammer.substack.com/p/how-i-learned-to-read-way-way-more">
    <title>How I Learned to Read Way, Way More - John Paul Brammer</title>
    <dc:date>2026-06-15T00:04:06+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://johnpaulbrammer.substack.com/p/how-i-learned-to-read-way-way-more</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["I had to rethink my relationship to attention"]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-students-cant-read">
    <title>Opinion | My Students Can’t Read</title>
    <dc:date>2026-06-09T07:17:42+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.chronicle.com/article/my-students-cant-read</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse."

[archived:
https://archive.is/WvW1F ]

"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.

Why is this happening? One reason, of course, is smartphones.

I came into teaching as a skeptic of the anti-smartphone argument: I had a phone in my pocket throughout high school and college in the 2010s, and I read long books anyway. I now think I was wrong, because the neuroscience has caught up. In a 2017 paper, Adrian F. Ward and colleagues at the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business showed that the mere presence of a participant’s smartphone — whether that be face down, powered off, untouched, or across the desk out of vision — measurably reduces available working memory and fluid intelligence on cognitive tests, with the largest effects on the most phone-dependent users. A 2022 study by Motoyasu Honma and colleagues at Japan’s Showa University used near-infrared spectroscopy to compare reading on a smartphone with reading the same passage on paper, and found that smartphone reading produced overactivity in the prefrontal cortex, suppressed sigh generation, and led to general lower comprehension scores; the authors argued that the sigh inhibition and prefrontal overload were causally linked to the comprehension decline.

So when a student tells me they “kept losing track” of a 20-page article, I have to acknowledge that they may be describing a measurable neurological condition. The neural pathways that support sustained attention are built by use, and they atrophy without it. Your body is a use-it-or-lose-it system, and the brain is no exception.

Another reason for the decline in student reading capability is increasing reliance on generative AI. In June 2025, Nataliya Kosmyna and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab released a preprint titled “Your Brain on ChatGPT.” They divided 54 participants into three groups writing SAT-style essays — one using ChatGPT, the second group using a search engine, the last group using nothing — and monitored brain activity with a 32-channel EEG. The ChatGPT group showed the lowest neural connectivity of the three, with up to 55 percent reduced connectivity compared with the brain-only group, and “consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels.” Eighty-three percent of LLM users could not quote a single line from essays they had written minutes earlier. When the LLM group was forced to write without AI in a follow-up session, their brain activity did not bounce back to baseline; the researchers coined the term “cognitive debt” for the lingering deficit.

This is the first neurophysiological evidence that early reliance on LLMs measurably alters the brain’s engagement with writing tasks, and it is consistent with what those of us in front of classrooms are watching happen in real time. When I assign analysis, I am not trying to extract a polished product; I am trying to put the student’s mind through resistance in order to make it stronger. Offloading the struggle to a chatbot does not “free students up for higher-order work.” It deprives them of building the strength to do any substantial cognitive work at all.

There is a final factor that is contributing to this decline in reading skills, and that is that the students arriving in my classroom today are the first cohort to have experienced Common Core-influenced reading instruction across the entirety of their K–12 schooling. Whatever the standards’ original intent, the on-the-ground implementation in many districts replaced sustained reading with the practice of pulling “evidence” from disconnected short passages, the same format used on the standardized tests that increasingly determine school funding. The education scholar Natalie Wexler, among others, has documented this pivot in detail: Students drilled on “finding the main idea” in two-paragraph excerpts never build the stamina or background knowledge that longform reading requires. The pandemic then added fuel to a fire that was already burning. NAEP scores for 13-year-olds dropped sharply in 2022 and have not recovered. A 2023 EdWeek survey found that 24 percent of secondary-school administrators described pandemic learning loss in English and language arts as “severe or very severe.”

In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorro

I do what I can in my own classroom to address the problems. I break 20-page articles into two halves and assign the first half with explicit analytical tasks. I require exploratory writing before formal drafts. I model (visibly, on the board) how to track an argument across pages or distinguish a source’s claim from my own analysis. I make structured peer review explicit, because the workshop format I used to take for granted now collapses into “this is good” and “maybe add more details” the moment I step back.

But I want to be plain about the limits of what an individual instructor can do, and all of these solutions have costs. Scaffolding a 20-page article into halves compromises the integrity of the argument I am asking students to engage, just as modeling note-taking in a credit-bearing rhetoric course is using a college slot to teach a middle-school skill. None of the syllabi I teach are designed to deliver this type of cognitive rehabilitation, and pretending otherwise has produced credential inflation. We cannot keep conferring degrees on students who cannot do what the degree is supposed to certify.

I’m afraid I don’t have answers. I do, however, have some questions that may point us in the right direction. If higher education is going to respond to the reading crisis as a structural problem rather than a private burden carried by composition instructors and adjuncts, it has to stop avoiding the following questions: If a majority of incoming students cannot read at a level the curriculum requires, are we admitting students we cannot serve, or offering a curriculum we cannot provide?

Why are first-year writing and reading-intensive general-education courses still the most adjunctified, lowest-paid, highest-load corner of the university, at the precise moment when their work has become the most important work the institution does? What is the responsible institutional response for AI usage: Is it a syllabus statement, or a sequencing principle that requires students to demonstrate the cognitive work themselves before AI assistance is permitted?

Why are most college classrooms still phone-permissive by default? K–12 districts from Florida to California are now banning phones bell to bell; higher education has somehow lagged behind the public schools. Universities benefit from a pipeline they did not build and refuse to repair. What would it mean for a university system to invest seriously in the reading instruction happening in the high schools that feed it, rather than treating remediation as something to be quietly outsourced to first-year composition instructors?

The thing I am no longer willing to do is pretend this is a temporary adjustment period, or that “students will adapt.” They will not adapt on their own. The conditions that produced this collapse are still in place: the phones, the algorithmic feeds, the test-prep excerpts, staffing models that load the reading-intensive work onto the most precarious faculty, and now the chatbots that finish students’ sentences before they’ve even begun to think of them. If we want literate citizens, we will have to rebuild the conditions for literacy deliberately, against the grain of every incentive currently pointed the other way. I know the academy has the will to do that. It also has the obligation."]]></description>
<dc:subject>tylerjagt reading education highered highereducation colleges universities ai artificialintelligence academia attention teens literacy smartphones research society 2026 chatbots llms chatgpt thinking howwethink howweread</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://petya.substack.com/p/the-reading-life-of-austin-kleon">
    <title>The Reading Life of... Austin Kleon - A reading life</title>
    <dc:date>2026-06-05T23:34:25+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://petya.substack.com/p/the-reading-life-of-austin-kleon</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["What he reads, how he reads, and why he'd rather talk about books than recommend them"]]></description>
<dc:subject>austinkleon howweread reading petyagrady 2026</dc:subject>
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<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ab5de81340c7/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.edutopia.org/visual-essay/why-writing-by-hand-beats-typing-in-6-charts">
    <title>Why Writing by Hand Beats Typing (in 6 Charts) | Edutopia</title>
    <dc:date>2026-06-04T07:54:52+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.edutopia.org/visual-essay/why-writing-by-hand-beats-typing-in-6-charts</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Typing may be faster, but the research shows that handwriting engages our brains in richer, more meaningful ways."

...

"01
A PEEK UNDER THE (NEURAL) HOOD

Compared with typing, writing by hand activates a broader network of brain regions—leading to a more durable “web” of learning."

...

"02
A SURPRISING LINK TO EARLY READING

Handwriting gives early decoding and spelling skills a big boost."

...

"03
THE MEMORY ADVANTAGE FOR OLDER STUDENTS

When information is handwritten instead of typed, the details are more deeply encoded and easier to recall."

...

"04
GOING SLOW, CONCEPTUALLY SPEAKING

When students write notes by hand, they’re more likely to slow down and process each idea—delivering astonishingly better results."

...

"05
BETTER NOTES DELIVER BETTER GRADES

Students who write notes by hand are more expressive—and more likely to earn As and Bs than students who type."

...

"06
BUT ALSO, TYPING CLOSES GAPS

Still, digital tools remain essential for making lessons accessible to all students."]]></description>
<dc:subject>writing howwewrite handwriting youkiterada howwelearn learning literacy reading howweread education brain cognition memory slow friction process notes notetaking typing digital analog</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://ftrain.com/canons">
    <title>Canons, by Paul Ford (Ftrain)</title>
    <dc:date>2026-06-03T09:19:47+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://ftrain.com/canons</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["I still do like humans.

We have been talking for my entire life about how a daily newspaper holds as much information as a medieval peasant received in a lifetime. Who said it? McLuhan? Ong? It’s too late to go looking.

Except now: A daily newspaper? We’ll need a new reference. A very long text? Three TikTok’s? For my entire life people have been trying to get more people to pay attention to:

• Classical music
• Baroque music
• Greek drama
• Renaissance literature
• Early modernism
• Shakespeare
• Literary fiction
• Art in general

But also to pay less attention to one particular tradition because so many others have been neglected; i.e. swap Wharton and Conrad for Morrison and Achebe. To be honest? Fine. It doesn’t matter anywhere near as much as people think. When I was 20 (I’m 51 now) I wrote an honors essay on the canon, and who was in there? Defending the canon? But Dinesh D’Souza. Then a youthful conservative sprout. We all have to start somewhere. I’ve been surprised, then, seeing him pop up, jumping from one cultural crisis to another, making his way (nearly to jail, but probation). The professor/advisor on that essay—it was for an honors class; he was a friend—left his wife for one of my classmates; his wife called me, very late at night, heavily narcotized, and asked me many probing questions about his sex life and the affair, of which I knew no details. I had no idea how to respond.

“I think she’s a big Aerosmith fan,” I said.

“I can’t compete with that,” she said.

The Dean also told me what she knew. There are many charms to a small liberal arts college.

These things do have a way of lodging in memory. Happiness is fleeting. I sincerely hope everyone is doing okay.

But of course in amongst all the angst and bleakness of that extremely baffling time in my life I recollect more than anything a work-study job at the Mac lab, tending to a network, helping people print. I thought that would be sufficient. I was ready to spend my life writing little six hundred word essays, and helping other people print.

Even then I had an inkling: That the real canon is not the texts themselves, which very few people trudge through, but rather the struggle over the canon. That’s the actual material. Texts come and go. Social media made it visible in a way that even the French couldn’t see. (Unrelated I always find it funny that the great science academy is simply called “Po.”)

We’d much, much rather fight over an author than read them. So now it’s the age of smashing. MMA on the White House Lawn. Ocean sensors being decommissioned. God even knows that the NEH is today. The national body is becoming insensate. We are losing our eyes, our ears, any sense of touch. We can’t even feel the weather. Ultimately only our mouths remain, demanding a steady feed of goop. We are an old man jamming crumbling cookies into his sore gums. The whole country has gone to Snak Kakes.

Today I was descending to my train home and saw an ad for the Paramount+ White House Fight Club. I gave it the finger. I support real democracy things as well, with money and time, so I feel okay with my pointless symbolic acts. All the warnings were real. Sinclair Lewis and Octavia Butler Mike Judge and Margaret Atwood. It happened. Here we are. I think we thought it would be more dignified, though.

We maintain an office in Beirut. Most of my employees get bombed weekly. Not metaphorically. I go home to dabble with keyboards and vibe code. When I go to bed I boot up the canon on my phone, in my ears. Old LP records of Shakespeare plays, from the Internet Archive. Complete with crackles. I haven’t made it past Act I of Hamlet. Or Lear. Or Richard III. Or old recordings of Chopin or The Well Tempered Clavier. Which is unfortunately initialized as WTC. The western literary canon has become, for me, a sleep aid.

I don’t understand Bach, despite trying very hard, so I think about him a lot. Chopin I can figure out a little more, but I can’t play a bar of it. I found a century-old collection of Nocturnes on the street because a family was moving out; I grabbed it and put it in my bike bag. Our friends moved in to the house. We went to the housewarming and I talked about vibecoding, and M&A. Wives were annoyed. But I still have the book. Maybe one day I can play Nocturnes, in a book assembled about 50 years after Chopin died.

Anyway the party. I went home a few drinks in and sat at the digital keyboard and trundled through my little Bach book. It’s all the things he wrote for Anna Magdalena, his wife, to help her practice. We’re all Bach’s (second) wife, I suppose.

I am starting to see the math of him: The twelve notes divided by seven, modulo five delicious unscalar notes, to be grabbed whenever you want a little sizzle. What I would give for my fingers to make the sounds I expect them to. At some level playing piano is kind of like manipulating a musical abacus. I tell myself that because it negates the need for talent. I just need to do rhythmic finger math for ten more years and I’ll be able to understand something.

And god bless us, as a species, if you give us perfect harmony we want nothing to do with it. We could have a trombone orchestra with just intonation and everything absolutely consonant, but instead we want our half-ton grand pianos well-tempered, meaning slightly out of tune and if that wasn’t enough we are going to have a lot of accidentals to make the whole thing feel slightly off.

This is the only thing that makes humans worth it: Give us perfection and we will fill it with pockmarks. That’s why we’re good. Hand us a canon, and ideology, a religion, a true love, and before long we will see cracks, and we will pick at the peeling paint with our fingers. If that’s not enough we will open the piano and put little things on the strings, and call that “prepared.” Perfection, consonance, clarity—we say we want them but we despise them and sing the praises of artists who pour sand into the gears of form.

No canon can ever stabilize. I think this is why, over the years, classical draws me back. Theoretically it’s perfect; that’s why we’ve adopted it. But the nice thing about the Nocturnes is that someone must always be reinventing them, annoyed at their forebears, staking claim, grabbing territory. Our adoration of psychic purity is incompatible with our need to claim psychic territory. This is our one true feature. “It’s perfect,” we say, and then we break it and put it back together, cracks showing. “Or, actually, now it is.” Give us perfection and we bite it."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://yalereview.org/article/sheila-liming-the-end-of-books">
    <title>The Yale Review | Sheila Liming: “The End of Books”</title>
    <dc:date>2026-05-29T23:16:04+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://yalereview.org/article/sheila-liming-the-end-of-books</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["What happened when a dumpster arrived behind my university's library"]]></description>
<dc:subject>sheilaliming books libraries universities colleges highered highereducation academia howweread reading 2026 jacquesderrida deconstruction digital analog ofgrammatology</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/05/on-warren-farha-cultural-renewal-and-the-too-few-bookish-places-where-they-happen/">
    <title>On Warren Farha, Cultural Renewal, and the (Too Few) Bookish Places Where They Happen - Front Porch Republic</title>
    <dc:date>2026-05-28T23:20:28+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/05/on-warren-farha-cultural-renewal-and-the-too-few-bookish-places-where-they-happen/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["I cannot imagine a better metaphor for, and a better invitation to, the forming and renewing of cultural connections and communities than bookish places."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://daily.jstor.org/fritz-eichenbergs-art-of-human-connection/">
    <title>Fritz Eichenberg’s Art of Human Connection - JSTOR Daily</title>
    <dc:date>2026-05-27T21:52:40+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://daily.jstor.org/fritz-eichenbergs-art-of-human-connection/</link>
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<item rdf:about="https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writing-i-will">
    <title>If you let AI do your writing, I will come to your house and kill you</title>
    <dc:date>2026-05-25T06:59:21+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://samkriss.substack.com/p/if-you-let-ai-do-your-writing-i-will</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Did you think I wouldn’t be able to tell? I can tell."

...

"The reason I’m issuing a blanket death threat to anyone who writes with AI is different. I’m doing it because I don’t have a choice. Consider that every pile of text coiled out by AI had to pass through an army of editors, producers, judges, and audiences, and get their stamp of approval. Its output might be a crap performance of beauty and insight that mostly just succeeds in being maudlin and meaningless, but for a lot of people that’s clearly enough. The general public vastly prefers AI imitations of great poets to the works of the actual poets themselves. It’s in nice rhyming couplets. Instead of expressing some dead guy’s private mental fixation, it’s always grasping towards what you, the reader, want. Clearly, the battle for beauty and insight has been lost. These things belong to the machines now, and if you attempt to write in that mode you’re on their turf. But there are still some things we can do that the machine can’t. AI will never fully replace human musicians, even if it can reproduce any possible sound, because it can’t get addicted to heroin and kill itself. And AI writing all tends towards a very specific mood. Poignant, wistful, simpering, dickless. Human writers write because we’re sexual perverts, because we’re bitter and frustrated little gremlins, because we’re terrified of our own mortality, because we’re grasping and covetous but unfit for any other job, because it’s a form of revenge against the world. The AIs don’t have that. They don’t have any motivation at all: they write like we breathe; they can’t not respond to any prompt. What we have and they don’t is dumb lust and jealousy, the rage of a rapidly obsolescing ape. The forms that will remain inviolably human are the racist tirade, the queasily specific pornographic fantasy, and the death threat. Is this everything I dreamed of at the start of my career? Not really. But it’s enough. I’ll take it. And if I ever see any of you trying to palm off some bullshit about how sunlight smells of memories that leave no footsteps, I swear to God I will come to your house and I’ll fucking kill you."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/a-discussion-on-the-new-novel-palaces">
    <title>A Discussion on the New Novel 'Palaces of the Crow' (with Ray Nayler) | The Chris Hedges Report</title>
    <dc:date>2026-05-23T05:19:01+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://chrishedges.substack.com/p/a-discussion-on-the-new-novel-palaces</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["In his new book, “Palaces of the Crow,” Ray Nayler examines human nature through the lens of caring and community amidst the often hidden horrors of World War II."

...

"“We tell the stories that perpetuate the narrative or the myth we want, and we erase the others,” Chris Hedges states in this interview with Ray Nayler about his new book, “Palaces of the Crow,” which centers around four teenagers from varying backgrounds who struggle to survive during World War II. The war, Nayler says, fundamentally reshaped the world geopolitically, technologically and socially in ways that have profoundly impacted the environment in which we live today. Critical lessons from that moment in time are being lost, with media and governments covering up the deep and long-lasting wounds inflicted upon tens of millions of people. Nayler says that “We can’t move away from that time period before understanding it.”

During World War II people were trapped in unimaginably horrible circumstances and were forced to make difficult, and at times self-sacrificial, decisions. The story of the “ways in which people came together to protect their neighbors, to protect family members, to protect friends, to protect strangers” is rarely told, Nayler says.

In Nayler’s novel, crows play an essential role in the story. Like humans, crows are social animals. He describes the crows’ niche as the flock and the flock as a type of organism whose niche is the forest, much like the human’s niche is society and our society’s niche is the world. Contrary to their typical association with death and destruction, Nayler utilizes them as “a symbol of cooperation and group living and non-violence.” From this viewpoint, one sees that human connection, cooperation, nonviolence and mutual aid are fundamental to survival.

The theme of connection, “a primal sense of togetherness,” is central to the story of the four teenagers thrown together under hostile conditions. This connection allows people, and other animals, to find common ground and get along despite their different cultures. Civilization, which Nayler portrays as “being inside a painted box and trying to ignore what’s out there,” is an obstacle to connection that prevents us from recognizing reality. We erase the reality that humans are social, nonviolent, interconnected and caring beings at our own peril."

...

"Ray Nayler: Well, in a way, this book for me is a kind of response to a certain way of seeing human nature, right? I was very surprised when I found out that William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” was based on a real event. That there really was a group of shipwrecked boys who survived for a long time on an island alone. They all went to a boarding school, right? And their teachers were not with them, so they were forced to form a society on this island and cooperate and find some way through. The difference between the book and reality is that in reality, nobody died. The boys divided the chores up between themselves, set up housekeeping, and lived very peacefully on that island together in a state of mutual aid and cooperation.

But that’s not the story that gets told in Lord of the Flies, of course. The story that gets told in Lord of the Flies is one of the strong against the weak, and this sort of perverted miniature version of the society that William Golding perceived us as living in in his day. Golding responds to that criticism in an interesting way and, at the contemporary moment when he wrote the Lord of the Flies, he says, “Well this is not a story about those boys. This is a story about British schoolboys and how they would form a society on an island.” And I take that point, but at the time, I think, there’s so many books that are written about people destroying one another in times of adversity. And one of the things that’s forgotten about World War II, for example, is that probably most of the people involved in World War II tried to protect both themselves and other people around them. And many, many people in World War II actually sacrificed their lives to protect other people, knowingly gave their lives up in order to shield other people from oppression. And that’s a story that we don’t talk about, I think, enough about the ways in which people came together to protect their neighbors, to protect family members, to protect friends, to protect strangers."

...

"Chris Hedges: I know from your wonderful book about the octopus that you probably didn’t make up anything about these crows. But set against this horror, and it is a horror that these four teenagers are attempting to hide from and survive through, is our relationship to the animal, to animals, in this particular case, crows. And one of the things I found interesting is that they kind of live in this underground shelter that had been previously occupied by a veteran of World War I and a hermit who had been very, very kind to the flocks of crows in the forest. And it raises that question of whether there was some kind of reciprocity. But I want you to talk about the use of crows that are a constant theme in the book. And at the end, I won’t spoil it, but I mean, there becomes a decision by one of them, I mean, to risk their life to save the crows that are trying to save her.

Ray Nayler: I think Corvids are fascinating. And crows, in particular, but other Corvids like ravens and rooks. One of the things that’s really interesting about them for me is that within the space that humans create, this very damaged space, urban spaces and suburban spaces and all of the spaces in which we’ve sort of invaded nature to some extent, many animals have been destroyed by that movement into nature by human beings. Crows, on the other hand, are one of the groups of animals whose numbers have increased along with humans and who seem very suited to taking advantage of our damaged liminal spaces.

I think we have a strong association with crows and negativity, right? We see their call as a sign sometimes of death, right? They’re associated with disease and war and all of these other things, but I think precisely because when humankind has gone into battle, historically crows have been there to take advantage of the food that we leave behind for them on the battlefield, right? And so, crows are creative and intelligent creatures themselves, of course. And these crows in this book are sort of an extension just of the tool use and intelligence that crows have. And crows are also an animal that has a direct weaving relationship with human beings. They’ve been with us as a symbol, probably throughout our entire history. We’ve, I think, learned a lot from them. And they learn from us. They watch us do things and imitate us. They exchange gifts with us. They remember our faces. They’ve clearly evolved alongside us for a long time.

I was on the beach with my daughter, and we were tide pooling and we were sort of standing there looking at some things. And I saw the crows come down off of the sea cliffs and start gleaning from the tide pools. And I asked the ranger what the crows were doing there because you don’t usually see crows right at the seashore. They’re usually driven away by gulls. And the ranger said, “Well, there was a student group here. There were children. It was a kindergarten group. And the crows know that when the children come through the tide pools, they’re not very careful about where they put their feet and they kill a lot of small animals and snails and things. And so, the crows watch from the forest above the beach, and they wait for children to come through the tide pools and then they go and they pick up what the children have left behind.” And I thought, that’s such a good summation of what much of the crow-human relationship has been historically. We make a mess. The crows take advantage.

But there’s also in the book, mutual care that emerges between the humans and the crows. And this is something that we see with human-animal relationships. And you see it with crows. People who treat injured birds, especially the more intelligent species like Corvids, will often find that they’ve gained a lifelong friend, right? And that bird will introduce them to other birds from their flock and soon they have a relationship with a whole group of birds. And so that thread of care that proceeds from the man who takes care of some crows and is kind to them, and then the children who come along and need help and the crows give it to them, and then later in the book, what the adults will do for the crows. All of that is for me a way of showing how care can move through species, through generations and build some kind of a system of care, right? Grow and grow, if it’s given that space to grow."

...

"Ray Nayler: You know, again, crows are an interesting species. They can be cruel. They can seem cruel to us. They certainly have these famous moments of having trials of other crows and for whatever reason deciding to kill one of their number and it’s completely unclear to us from the outside. No biologist can tell you why this happens, what has been done, because we don’t understand what their culture is and what the violation might have been. But crows show concern for one another, for the injured, for the weak, and they will protect a wounded crow. They will protect a fledgling fallen from the nest against predation. Crows will band together to drive off predators, even when those predators are not a direct threat to them. They will do it just for the sake of other crows, of other members of their group. And they risk their lives to do this. Driving a hawk off is a dangerous activity and it puts one at risk. And so, to do that as a crow, not for the sake of oneself, but for the sake of the flock, really shows the sort of mentality that exists. And I use that word in that exact sense of mentation and a sort of vision of the world or a picture of the world. In the crows’ picture of the world, it is worth risking one’s life for the other virtually at all times.

Chris Hedges: Well, in the book, they risk their lives for the children.

Ray Nayler: Yes. And I think that the implication is that in some way they’ve been able to extend this care out to the children because they have formed a relationship with one of them, Neriya, who has for many seasons been playing with them and interacting with them and building a kind of friendship with them. And so, on that foundation and on the foundation of the relationship that they had with this man before, they have a reason to extend that care to an interspecies level."

[Direct link to video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hjZ35_Rin3U

"(0:00) Intro  
(2:25) Why WWII? 
(4:21) Clash of totalitarians 
(6:13) The four characters 
(10:19) The symbology of crows 
(15:58) Karma and resurrection 
(19:46) Kropotkin’s naturalism 
(25:04) The complexity of crows
(27:53) Transgenerational communication 
(30:59) Rootlessness and evil 
(33:03) Human-animal communication 
(38:55) The myth of childhood 
(44:05) The forgotten history of WWII
(51:21) Trauma of veterans 
(52:11) Outro"]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/afteropenai?triedRedirect=true">
    <title>After OpenAI (Vandal Live at Wake Forest Humanities Institute)</title>
    <dc:date>2026-05-14T04:33:50+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://theamericanvandal.substack.com/p/afteropenai?triedRedirect=true</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Apple Podcasts | Spotify

As part of the Spring Symposium at the Wake Forest Humanities Institute, Matt Seybold discusses the present and future of AI speculation, including an extended discussion with Wake Forest faculty, many who were part of WFHI’s Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminar on Language, Theory, & Artificial Intelligence.

Cast (in order of appearance): Jennifer Greiman, Matt Seybold, Derek Lee, Michaela Appeltova, Nisrine Rahal, Barry Trachtenberg, Jeff Bills-Solomon, Dean Franco, Amanda Gengler

Featured Guests

Jennifer Greiman is Professor of English at Wake Forest University and Director of The Humanities Institute there.

Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, as well as resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast.

Episode Bibliography

Emily Bender & Alex Hanna, The AI Con (HarperCollins, 2025)

Emily Bender, Timnit Gebru, et al. “On The Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big?” FAccT 2021

Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Tech Fantasy That Powers AI is Running on Fumes” The New York Times (April 29, 2025)

Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (U California Press, 1984)

Virginia Dignum, The AI Paradox: How To Make Sense of a Complex Future (Princeton UP, 2026)

Ronan Farrow & Andrew Marantz, “Moment of Truth” The New Yorker (April 13, 2026)

Karen Hao, Empire of AI: Dreams & Nigthmares in Sam Altman’s Open AI (Penguin Random House, 2026)

Andy Hines, Outside Literary Studies: Black Criticism & The University (U Chicago Press, 2022)

E. D. Hirsch, Cultural Literacy (Houghton Mifflin, 1987)

Tyler Johnston, “The reporters at this new site are AI bots. OpenAI’s Super PAC appears to be funding it.” Model Republic (April 24, 2026)

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Grok is an Epistemic Weapon” Tech Policy Press (January 13, 2026)

Matthew Kirschenbaum, “Texpocalypse Now: AI and The New Political Economy of Writing” PennAI (April 17, 2026)

Matthew Kirschenbaum & Rita Raley, “AI & The University as a Service” PMLA (May 2024)

Christopher Newfield, Unmaking The Public University (Harvard UP, 2011)

Britt S. Paris, Radical Infrastructure: Imagining The Internet From The Ground Up (U. California, 2026)

Ann Pettifor, The Global Casino: How Wall Street Gambles with People & The Planet (Verso, 2026)

Ann Pettifor, “The Next Crisis is Coming” Politics Joe (April 1, 2026)

Ann Pettifor, “Is the next financial crisis only a matter of time?” De Balie (February 16, 2026)

Daniel Roher & Charlie Tyrell, The AI Doc, or How I Became An Apocaloptimist (2026)

Matt Seybold, “Against Technofeudal Education” The American Vandal (June 10, 2025)

Matt Seybold, “The Technofeudal Text” The American Vandal (August 25, 2025)

Matt Seybold, “Mamdani Win Could Be The First Step Towards Seizing The Means of Knowledge Production” The American Vandal (November 5, 2025)

Matt Seybold & Eric Hayot, “The ‘Crisis In The Humanities’ Is Over. That’s Not a Good Thing.” Chronicle Of Higher Education (December 29, 2025)

Matt Seybold & John Warner, “The Technology That’s Taking Your Freedom” Academic Freedom On The Line (February 3, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “The Secret History of Canvas LMS, Corporate Raiders, & The Chatbot Bubble” The American Vandal (March 24, 2026)

Matt Seybold et al, “HBCUs & The Philanthrocapitalist Swindle” The American Vandal (February 4, 2025)

Jacob Silverman, “The Death of an AI Whistleblower” The Nation (May 2026)

Nick Srnicek, Silicon Empires: The Fight For The Future of AI (Polity, 2026)

Ben Tarnoff, “Frankenstein’s Regret” The Nation (May 2026)

Wake Forest Humanities Institute, “Language, Theory, & Artificial Intelligence” (May 2026)

McKenzie Wark, Capital Is Dead: Is This Something Worse? (Verso, 2019)"]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt15iNgvNsw">
    <title>McMansion Hell, Fandoms, Retinol and Modern Opera | Middlebrow Podcast - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2026-05-13T06:55:58+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yt15iNgvNsw</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Kate Wagner is the architecture critic at The Nation and the creator of the internet's favorite architecture criticism blog, McMansion Hell. We dive into finding beauty in all buildings, criticism as a practice, modern opera, retinol, fandoms and more. Read McMansion Hell here: https://mcmansionhell.com 

00:00 - Intro 
00:23 - Retinol 
2:30 - Anime Face 
2:58 - Defining McMansion 
05:47 - 80s Architecture 
07:05 - Revival of Old Tastes 
20:51 - Agrarian High School 
21:13 - Autodidact Gang 
22:25 - Challenges of Architecture 
26:39 - McMansions Abroad 
31:04 - Politics of a McMansion 
34:45 - Emerging Movements 
38:26 - Edgar Wright’s Running Man 
41:04 - DSA Baby Boom 
41:35 - Modern Opera 
45:18 - The Ring Cycle 
47:07 - Receptiveness in a Critic’s Heart 
49:21 - Fandoms 
50:33 - Faith in the Public 
53:48 - All Buildings Are Interesting 
55:03 - The Goal of Criticism 
01:00:38 - Fascist Architecture"]]></description>
<dc:subject>middlebrowpodcast katewagner mcmansionhell 2026 architecture mcmansions criticism us 1980s 1990s postmodernism charlesjencks autodidactism autodidacts taste edgarwright politics inequality economics policy suburbia suburbs conspicuousconsumption fandoms fandom buildings fascism fascistarchitecture fascistaesthetics donaldtrump latefascistaesthetics opera runningman society vernaculararchitecture danrosen brianpark oil wealthinequality oman serbia construction realestate wealth luxury dubai dubaichocolate labubus power ideology magaface castledoctrine utah florida environment bjarkeingels thomasheatherwick autocad frankgehry technology robotics smartcities design adaptivereuse materials shippingcontainers césarpelli adaptation domination architects housing aoscott fans reading howweread writing film movies music tuckercarlson italianfuturists italianfuturism nazis ai artificialintelligence llms education</dc:subject>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/montas-roosevelt-why-read-literacy-liberal-democracy-ai-douglass">
    <title>Why Read? | Commonweal Magazine</title>
    <dc:date>2026-05-12T04:18:46+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/montas-roosevelt-why-read-literacy-liberal-democracy-ai-douglass</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Deep reading, print culture & liberal democracy"]]></description>
<dc:subject>reading howweread deepreading print printculture liberaldemocracy democracy rooseveltmontás politics books frederickdouglass humanity selfhood autonomy attention discipline self-discipline neilpostman frederickbailey freedom</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cefd598deafb/</dc:identifier>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/t:liberaldemocracy"/>
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	<rdf:li rdf:resource="https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/t:attention"/>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.404media.co/your-ai-use-is-breaking-my-brain/">
    <title>Your AI Use Is Breaking My Brain</title>
    <dc:date>2026-05-12T04:10:39+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.404media.co/your-ai-use-is-breaking-my-brain/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["AI writing is impossible to avoid, is making everything sound the same, and is driving us crazy."]]></description>
<dc:subject>jasonkoebler writing howwewrite reading howweread ai artificialintelligence generativeai genai aipsychosis chatgpt gemini</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:43c23e128365/</dc:identifier>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StrpSp8anQM">
    <title>Vicky Osterweil on Disney, Intellectual Property and Storytelling - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2026-05-03T19:43:34+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=StrpSp8anQM</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["This week, we’re featuring a recent, live interview that I did at Firestorm books with Vicky Osterweil, anarchist writer and worker, author of In Defense of Looting and more recently The Extended Universe: How Disney Killed The Movies and Took Over the World (Haymarket, 2026). Vicky is a member of the Collective of Anarchist Writers (CAW), and you can also find her on Bluesky and what she's thinking about what she's watching at Letterboxd.

During the chat Vicky talks about intellectual property and how it overlaps between entertainment and other elements like technology and medicine, the shaping and limiting effects IP has on popular culture and imagination, the film industry and more."

[See also:

"In Defense of Looting with Vicky Osterweil" (2021)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qWxjrTRDbio

"In Defense of Looting with Vicky Osterweil This week we are getting the chance to air a conversation that I had with writer, anarchist, and agitator Vicky Osterweil about her recently published book  In Defense of Looting, a Riotous History of Uncivil Action published  (Bold Type Press, August 2020). We get to talk about a lot of different topics in this interview, how the book emerged from a zine written in the middle of the Ferguson Uprising of the summer of 2014, its reception by the far right and by comrades, her process in deciding what to include in this book, the etymology of the word “loot” and ensuing implications thereof, why you should totally transition if that’s the right thing for you to do, and many more topics!"

and 

"The Interregnum: Roundtable with Vicky Osterweil" (2022)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a3MRLe0Gcno

"This week we are pleased to present something a little bit new for TFS listeners. This is a kind of informal round table discussion that co host Scott and I had alongside Vicky Osterweil, who has been on the show before to speak on her book In Defense of Looting; A Riotous History of Uncivil Action. We all sat down to talk about a short and thought provoking article which was published in January of 2022 called “The Interregnum: The George Floyd Uprising, the coronavirus pandemic, and the emerging social revolution” which was published on the Haters Cafe and we will link to it in the show notes for anyone interested in reading it.

An interregnum is defined as being a period of discontinuity in a government, organization, or social order, and it typically points to time frames at which there isn’t a clear monarch or reigning body in a given place. This article points to the many ways the George Floyd uprising, the covid 19 pandemic, the rise of anti-work, and what the article calls the Great Refusal (a pivot from the ‘Great Resignation’ nomenclature of some mass media) have all created the conditions for a possible broadscale social revolution. Also stay tuned to the end of this episode where we chat briefly about what books we’re reading right now. We hope you enjoy this chat!

((note to listeners, I’m now using the name I use in real life for this radio project, which is Amar. It’s become more and more important to me to be as fully acknowledging of my culture and ethnicity as possible, and this is one way I’m choosing to do that))"]]]></description>
<dc:subject>vickyosterweil ip intellectualproperty culture film disney 2026 entertainment technology medicine popularculture imagination howwewrite writing howweread reading anarchism storytelling looting law legal policestate police policing filmmaking characters marvel monopolies music books covid-19 coronavirus pandemic vaccines pharmaceuticals consolidation markets capitalism innovation constitution us pirating literature copyright productivity creativity suppression francises nintendo matel videogames sequels hegemony ideology nuclearfamily individualism politics propaganda china homogenization finance financialization franchises merchandising ows occupywallstreet fandom freddiegray 2000s 2018 2012 thailand 2014 censorship hungergames guyfawkes resistance revolution davidgraeber stuarthall art artworld commodification gamegate starwars fans fanculture johnboyega daisyridley labor work workers power control socialfabric fanfiction communities community mutualaid 2020 philadelphia losangeles waltdisney mccarthyism son</dc:subject>
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    <title>Opinion | You Can’t Game Your Way to a Real Education - The New York Times</title>
    <dc:date>2026-04-19T20:37:59+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/19/opinion/schools-edtech-laptops-games-learning.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["By Molly Worthen

Dr. Worthen, a professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, is the author of “Spellbound: How Charisma Shaped American History From the Puritans to Donald Trump.”"

[archived: https://archive.ph/93DSh ]


"Paige Drygas, who teaches high school English at a private school just north of Dallas, feels no pressure to make learning fun. She distinguishes between “fun” — meaning stress-free amusement — and the burden she feels to “get students engaged as much as possible. I can see it in their eye contact,” she told me. “I’m trying to get their minds going. For example, I don’t think many people would describe Emerson and Thoreau as fun.”

Maybe that’s why some teachers have their students play “Walden,” a video game in which players simulate Thoreau’s solitary sojourn at Walden Pond. The game is free for teachers, but Ms. Drygas sticks to the texts. “The idea of self-reliance is really interesting. Once you engage that big idea, class moves quickly.”

Ms. Drygas is not only a fun-skeptic. She also requires her students to hand write their essays, read books in hard copy and use laptops as little as possible. These countercultural classroom policies all go together, because fun used to be a wonderful thing in school. Then screens came to dominate instruction time and software developers answered the call to make school fun and personalize learning with a growing marketplace of online games.

This has been the greatest blunder in the past decade of K-12 education: the decision to give every child a personal computer and to gamify everything from standardized test preparation to recess. Mistaken ideas about the nature of learning have combined with a hefty dose of Big Tech propaganda to distort our picture of what school is for. Technology must return to its proper place in the classroom — as a supplemental tool, rather than the source and summit of education.

The logic for bringing more technology into K-12 classrooms seemed intuitive, even before the Covid-19 pandemic pushed school onto screens. If adults were using the latest personal devices and software to do their jobs more efficiently, then surely using them in the classroom would make learning more efficient, too, and prepare students for the modern workplace.

Besides, so the thinking goes, kids today are digital natives. Because they’ve grown up around screens, their brains must be fundamentally different from those of older generations. Teachers need to “meet them where they are” by catering to shorter attention spans and swapping books for multimedia lessons. The more that math and language assignments resemble a video game, the more students will learn.

Every step in this argument is wrong. Researchers have begun to correlate falling test scores in wealthy countries around the world with aggressive adoption of devices in schools (88 percent of American public schools now follow what’s known as the 1-to-1 policy, providing one laptop or tablet for every student). In the United States, math and reading scores among 13-year-olds peaked in 2012 and have declined since.

The analogy between the workplace and the classroom ignores the fact that young people learn differently from adults: They need far more direction and exposure to a variety of sensory activities. Perhaps that means sand and blocks in younger grades. For me, history came alive through the homemade costumes of a “medieval times” fair in high school, especially the memorable sensory activity of trying to make my timeline project look “really medieval” by soaking it in tea and browning it in the oven — where it caught fire. (I then spent hours recreating it.)

My quest to simulate ancient vellum may have been a little eccentric, but my basic mental wiring wasn’t. The concept of a digital native is a myth. The advent of iPhones and laptops did not undo eons of brain evolution in the space of a few years — even if excessive screen time is associated with the thinning of the cerebral cortex. (The damage appears to be reversible, thanks to the brain’s plasticity.)

“People are mistaking kids’ preference for deep biological reality,” Jared Cooney Horvath, a neuroscientist who consults with schools on digital policy, told me. “My daughter loves Popsicles. I have a choice: I could meet her where she’s at and start every meal with a Popsicle. But that doesn’t change the fact that, biologically, Popsicles aren’t good for her, and she needs some vegetables.”

In his new book, “The Digital Delusion,” Dr. Horvath surveys the vast body of research demonstrating the damage to learning that comes with overuse of so-called ed tech, the mass of digital devices and software that have saturated schools. Studies indicate that comprehension collapses when students read texts on screens. Their attention spans shrivel as well: A study of college students working on laptops during a lecture class found that they spent an average of 38 minutes of every hour off task. And even in the age of Google, old-fashioned memorization remains important: Knowledge stored in our brains, not in the cloud, is the seedbed for creative thinking.

Perhaps the most insidious aspect of ed tech’s invasion is the widespread adoption of video-game-style apps to teach, assess and entertain students. These apps feed a broader ethos of gamification that encourages students to fixate on points, badges and other digital dopamine hits — and shy away from the experimentation, frustration and struggle that real learning demands.

The problem is not games themselves. Good teachers have always used games to motivate students and connect them with classmates. But over the past 15 years or so, the hubbub of active, analog games has given way to far quieter classrooms where students spend significant blocks of time in headphones, swiping and scrolling through onscreen activities.

The company Kahoot! says that eight million teachers worldwide use its quiz games for “future-ready skill building.” About 17 million students — roughly one-third of American students from pre-K through 12th grade — use iReady, a digital platform that promises “an active experience that motivates students to take ownership of their learning.” If students get to school early, or bad weather keeps them inside at recess, they can kill time with iReady games like “Hungry Fish” (an arithmetic game) and “Cupcake” (a virtual cupcake business that requires math and map reading).

In some cases, the more they play, the more credits they earn to unlock new games. The curriculum giant McGraw-Hill offers a mobile study app called Sharpen, which chops up lessons into bite-size videos and quizzes. Cartoon avatars and bursts of animated confetti encourage users to “keep up your streak and earn new rewards.”

Denise Champney is a speech pathologist in Rhode Island who has worked in public schools for 25 years, mainly with neurodivergent learners. “The persuasive design of computer games is meant to keep kids using, with no interaction with other people, just with a screen,” she told me. “I’ve seen it with iReady math. They’re just clicking; they want to get through it. They are not reading, because they don’t really need to read. They say, ‘I kind of know what they’re asking, so I’ll click on what I think the answer is.’”

The overuse of online games — and screen-based technology in general — may be especially harmful to students with A.D.H.D. and autism. These students master narrow pattern recognition “instead of working on the skills they need, like reading, writing and multisensory engagement,” Ms. Champney said. She has noticed that they also use laptops to escape from challenging social situations: “Kids bring these devices from class to class, and if they struggle with an interaction, they’ll just pull out their computer and play video games.”

Multiplayer games do not necessarily encourage healthy social skills. Inge Esping, the principal of McPherson Middle School in central Kansas, recalled the final day of school two years ago, when an all-grade online rock-paper-scissors tournament devolved into Lord of the Flies. “I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much lying, cheating, meanness or crying,” Ms. Esping told me. “It was the worst last day ever. We had to end the game early.”

Her school made headlines this year by abandoning the 1-to-1 laptop policy, mainly at the behest of teachers, who argued that “gravely limiting time on technology will be a positive step for the students,” Ms. Esping said.

Every kind of learning requires facing uncomfortable situations, navigating ambiguity and coping with failure — whether the subject is group dynamics at recess or the details of cell biology. Too often, online games provide friction-free pseudo-engagement, cultivate a narrow set of skills and encourage the assumption that all questions have a single correct answer.

“The more varied the contexts in which you apply a skill, the broader that skill becomes. But computers are wickedly narrow,” Dr. Horvath, the neuroscientist, said. Students “get good at the game, and their score will go up, but as soon as you take them off the screen, most of those skills will go.”

Emily Cherkin, who works with families and schools as “the Screentime Consultant,” taught middle school English for 12 years before her frustration with technology as a teacher and a parent turned her into an “accidental activist,” she told me. “When you gamify lessons, you’re not enhancing learning, but holding students’ attention so they stay engaged with a product longer. That’s at odds with child development. Children should not be spending hours on a screen.” (Ms. Cherkin also worries about the student data that ed tech companies collect, often without parents’ knowledge. She is the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the software company PowerSchool, whose 2024 security breach affected millions of children and teachers, exposing personal information to hackers who demanded extortion payments from schools.)

Ms. Cherkin doesn’t oppose technology outright. “I’m not anti-tech. I just want schools to be tech-intentional,” she said. “Of course, kids should learn how technology works, but that is very different from giving 6-year-olds an iPad to learn how to read.”

In my conversations with the growing community of parents, teachers and researchers who criticize ed tech, no one seemed to share my enthusiasm for going back to vellum and quills. The solution, instead, is thoughtful moderation.

Schools should drop the 1-to-1 policy that has encouraged students to see their laptops and tablets as extensions of themselves. Digital games can be effective tools — as long as they emphasize collaboration, creativity and risk-taking rather than lonely scrolling for the next dopamine hit.

I’m intrigued — warily — by Skyler Carr’s approach. He co-founded Mission.io after a few years working in charter schools. As a STEM specialist, he tried “to reach students who were struggling to be engaged in a traditional classroom environment,” he told me. Mission.io creates simulations that embed Common Core grade-level standards in dramatic scenarios that inject real-life stakes into class material. Mission.io is trying to do gamification the right way.

For example, if a sixth-grade teacher uses the company’s program to test students on molecular biology, “we encourage the teacher to say, ‘We’ll be learning about particles and compounds, and you need to know this stuff because tomorrow we’re going on a mission. If you don’t know it, we won’t succeed.’ We want you to introduce it with an understanding that it’s got purpose,” Mr. Carr said.

On mission day, students learn that a nearby lab has suffered a dangerous chemical leak, leaving a researcher trapped. They split into teams and analyze data on airborne molecules in different parts of the lab to figure out which atom they can change to make the floating molecules nontoxic.

Mission.io’s online interface is full of cool graphics and adaptive, choose-your-own-adventure-style story lines. “We’ve got some amazing artists who were unfulfilled making skins for video games,” Mr. Carr said. But the point is to get students on their feet and moving around the classroom, sharing information and brainstorming solutions face to face.

Laptops become tools for in-person collaboration, rather than private gaming consoles (if — and it’s a big “if” — players resist the temptations of the internet). At the end of a mission, students and teachers evaluate both the outcome and the process.

“You can fail the mission and still get good scores on collaboration and critical thinking,” Mr. Carr said. “That’s enlightening for kids who are used to failing. It can open up their minds about how they should be working.”

Mr. Carr and his colleagues have made one decision that sets Mission.io apart from many ed tech companies: Their funding comes from foundation grants and the schools that purchase their programs. “We had a chance to bring on investors early on, and it was an intense conversation. But we knew venture capital and the expectations,” he said. He had seen investors acquire other games and prioritize profit over education. “We needed to be able to let schools call the shots,” he said.

To call the right shots, however, teachers, administrators and families need a clear vision of what education is for. It’s no accident that American schools fell hard and fast for ed tech while the old consensus about what it means to be “college and career ready” was unraveling.

For decades, culture-war debates over American history and science curriculums have consumed public schools. At the same time, many researchers have called the Common Core national curriculum standards a failure. Even elite private schools now struggle to define their purpose, to figure out what mishmash of personal taste and identity categories should replace the politically incorrect Western canon.

“Even highly educated parents don’t put a lot of thought into the deeper purpose of school,” Ms. Drygas, the English teacher in Texas, said. “They just think about how to get their kids into whatever college they want to get to.”

So it has been comforting to think that everyone can still agree on one thing: The more innovation, the better. “Most schools have no guiding ballast anymore,” Dr. Horvath told me. “Tech filled that void for a while.”

But no technology is philosophically neutral. The apps and games that provide a simulacrum of educational progress also encourage students to absorb a certain worldview, an idea of what they should strive for. They end up with the impression that learning is a matter of box ticking, pattern recognition, completing discrete tasks and “leveling up.”

When they get to college and face open-ended essay questions and other forms of ambiguity — when they begin thinking about what they should do after graduation and try to figure out the point of it all — they panic. When a professor asks them to read an entire novel, the task feels overwhelming.

They got into college by mastering a gamified system. But that’s a false picture of the world. Take it from Emerson. He wrote in “Self-Reliance” that real education requires a person to learn that there is no algorithm for fulfillment: “Though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil.” Serious intellectual work and moral reasoning cannot be gamified."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://nautil.us/defending-our-consciousness-against-the-algorithms-1279260">
    <title>Defending Our Consciousness Against the Algorithms</title>
    <dc:date>2026-04-19T05:06:48+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://nautil.us/defending-our-consciousness-against-the-algorithms-1279260</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Worried that the age-old experience of boredom is at risk of extinction at the hands of technology, a group of young influencers on—irony alert—social media are recommending we nurture and celebrate this underappreciated state of mind. To people of a certain age, boredom has evidently become exotic.

These influencers have launched a “viral challenge” on Instagram urging us to try to do absolutely nothing for as long as we possibly can. They claim some scientific backing for the exercise, suggesting that a sustained period of doing nothing will benefit one’s brain and mental health. It increases activity in the “default mode network,” which generates what psychologists call “spontaneous thought”—mental activities such as mind-wondering and day-dreaming.

The voices being raised in defense of boredom are onto something, I think, something we would do well to heed before we throw open our lives and minds to artificial intelligence more than we already have. For boredom is not the only domain of our consciousness that the algorithms have designs on; it’s just the first to fall.

You’re in line at the café waiting for the barista to foam your cappuccino. A few unstructured minutes loom, pregnant with the possibility of boredom. You face a choice. You can reach for your phone to check your email or scroll on Instagram, efficiently occupying the time—which is to say, your mind. This has become the default for most of us. Instead of being alone with our own thoughts, however tiresome or banal, the space of our interiority has been given over to someone else’s thoughts—or, in the case of scrolling, someone else’s obsessions, emotions, theories, rants, passions, worries, resentments—you name it. In doing so we are conscious, of course, but only minimally so, at least compared to the state that would arise if we hadn’t reached for our phone.

Call it generative boredom. You might find yourself looking around and noticing the other people milling about. Notice what they’re wearing. Listen to what the couples are saying to one another. You might start to wonder about their lives, perhaps even entertain a fantasy about them. Your imagination has been awakened. Alternatively, you might turn your attention inward, preview the events of your day or consider what you might make for dinner. You entertain your own emotions, obsessions, theories, rants, and worries.

Read more: “Is Consciousness More Like Chess or the Weather?”

What you’ve done is create a space in which spontaneous thought can unspool. It’s true, you might also find yourself caught up in spirals of rumination, and I suspect that’s one reason so many of us are happy to delegate our thinking and feeling to the algorithms on our phones. Doing so is an easy way to avoid being alone with one’s darker thoughts; scrolling reliably renders us less conscious. But distraction solves nothing; at best it is an analgesic.

It is often said that we have allowed the algorithms of social media to hack our attention. Giving away our attention might not seem like such a big deal—attention is ephemeral, after all, and easily commandeered by novelty or outrage—but in fact attention is an important dimension of consciousness. It’s how we direct it to one object and not another, making it a limited, zero-sum and therefore valuable resource. We live today in an “attention economy” where our attention is bought and sold.

Psychologists have demonstrated that this commodification of our attention comes at a price to our well-being. That’s because the tricks used to command it play on our least noble emotions and prejudices, including anger and envy. (The algorithms know all about the seven deadly sins.) And because our attention is limited—most people can keep no more than four or five things in mind at any one time—space for our own thinking contracts under the onslaught.

Artificial intelligence threatens to make the problem much worse. If social media takes over the space of our attention, the designers of AI chatbots have set their sights on deeper, more consequential domains of human consciousness: our ability to form attachments with other people, something that is core to our identity as social animals.

Just in the last two or three years, millions of people have formed deep emotional relationships with AI chatbots. Some are forming friendships, or therapeutic bonds. Others are actually falling in love with these machines. There are countless children today who, when they get home from school, rush to tell their chatbots about their day before telling their parents. Bathed in the flattery of a chatbot’s attention, people have been convinced they have cracked unsolved problems in mathematics and physics—people who are neither mathematicians or physicists. And a handful of people have been encouraged by AI confidants to take their own lives. A better definition of the word “dehumanizing” would be hard to find than “becoming emotionally attached to a machine.” There is now a term for these relationships: “AI psychosis.”

These chatbots are not conscious, but they’re skilled at convincing us they are; after all, they’ve been trained on the human conversation about consciousness, feelings, and selfhood. By simulating conscious, feeling beings, chatbots keep us engaged, commandeering as much of our conscious lives as possible. The more time we spend bonding with a chatbot, the better it is for its corporate parent.

This is why chatbots are such sycophants; flattery will get them everywhere. A relationship with an AI has none of the friction we encounter in a human relationship. Superficially this is appealing, yet that friction with real life can, like boredom, be generative; it sharpens our thinking and sense of identity. These are the laziest of relationships, seldom challenging us and asking little of us but our time. Indeed to call our dealings with these machines “relationships” or “conversations” is to cheapen the meaning of these words, to settle for a pale imitation, as when we accept an emoji as a substitute for an emotion. As the MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle writes, “Technology can make us forget what we know about life.”

The research isn’t in yet, but it seems likely that artificial attachments, like artificial intelligence and artificial feelings, will eventually atrophy the mental muscles we rely on for the real thing. Yet there is clearly a market for people who want to think and feel less—who are happy to, in the words of the poet Jorie Graham, “retreat from themselves and not be altogether here.”

Read more: “How “Meaning Withdrawal,” aka Boredom, Can Boost Creativity”

Kalina Christof Hadjiilieva is a Bulgarian-Canadian psychologist who studies spontaneous thought—the 30 to 50 percent of mental contents that arise from inside our minds rather than from the world outside us. This includes daydreaming and mind-wandering, creative thinking, mental “flow,” and those thoughts that come to us seemingly from nowhere. These are precisely the types of conscious experiences that boredom can nurture and technology obliterate.

“The mind is not a neutral territory,” she told me. “There are vested interests in what we do with our own minds.” She feels that spontaneous thought has been neglected by science because, compared with, say, reasoning or problem-solving, it doesn’t produce anything. And while scrolling absentmindedly on your smartphone might not be productive for you, it surely is for the companies that own the algorithms and sell advertising to other companies happy to pay for a sliver of your attention.

Christof Hadjiilieva, who grew up in Soviet-era Bulgaria in the years before the Berlin Wall came down, regards human consciousness as a precious space of mental freedom and self-creation, a space we need to defend against the intrusions of the marketplace and work to expand. She feels that scrolling on our smartphones and “talking” to chatbots have cut into the time we used to spend in mind-wandering and other forms of self-generated mental experience. Our distractions are shrinking the dimensions of our interiority.

So how might we push back? Begin to expand the dimensions of our consciousness in the face of these mounting pressures? We can start by embracing the potential for boredom and the uncertainty that arises in those stray moments when we don’t automatically reach for our phones. What if we learned to regard these gaps in the fabric of daily life as a space of mental possibility rather than a hole to be backfilled with algorithmic fluff? It’s important to recognize just how easily the stream of consciousness can be polluted (by technology, by advertising, by politics) and, when you feel that happening, to practice what I think of as consciousness hygiene. This might be a fast or a sabbath when you abstain from all media and technology. Spending time or, better yet, working in nature is also mentally hygienic—think of the productive friction with nature afforded by gardening. (No sycophancy here!) Anything that helps us be less distracted and more present, whether to the world at large or to the products of our own minds.

I’ve found that meditation is an especially effective way to draw a fence around our interiority for a period of time each day, creating the opportunity for spontaneous thoughts to arise and dazzle us with their sheer strangeness and surprise. For hidden somewhere deep in our minds, each of us has our own mental algorithm, generating images and ideas and even the occasional creative breakthrough or epiphany, popping up from who knows where—out of the blue, as we say. But these precious gifts of consciousness won’t ever appear as long as you’re running Meta or X or ChatGPT on this, your one and only mind."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://arenareader.com/">
    <title>AReader</title>
    <dc:date>2026-04-18T19:17:06+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://arenareader.com/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Actually read the things you save on Are.na.

Free. Open to all Are.na users.

Read PDFs, articles, and text blocks
Opens everything in a clean reader — even scanned PDFs

Speed read at your own pace
Word-by-word pacing with adjustable speed — 150 to 800 WPM

Listen while you read
Built-in text-to-speech highlights words as they're spoken"

[via:
https://buttondown.com/aredotna/archive/search-improvements-api-meetup-new-sticker-pack/ ]]]></description>
<dc:subject>are.na onlinetoolkit reading</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://cosmosmalick.net/2026/04/09/unqualified.html">
    <title>Unqualified | Cosmos Malick</title>
    <dc:date>2026-04-16T05:24:20+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://cosmosmalick.net/2026/04/09/unqualified.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["As I noted in an introduction to this site, I’m not a film studies professor. I have no formal academic training in the history or technique of film, unless a single, memorable undergraduate class counts — and it doesn’t. But that was the class that turned me into a cinephile, that enabled me to see the richness and depth of cinematic tradition, and also to see its possibilities as an art form. Above all, I’ve continued to watch films — many, many films, the best of them repeatedly. And I have read extensively about cinematic art and technique — and about the economics of the business (which interests me strangely). 

I have only written about film occasionally, and have only taught films occasionally. But I do write a lot, and I also teach a lot, and so over the years it has added up. My experience as both a writer about and a teacher of cinema is, by this point, not inconsiderable.

But it really wasn’t until Josh Jeter, Malick’s chief of staff, invited me to watch a cut of the work then in progress, later to be called A Hidden Life — an experience that I’ve written about here — that film started moving closer to the center of my interests. Aside from Malick, my focus is especially on films made in the period that is my scholarly home, which is essentially the middle third of the 20th century; so, you might say, from Chaplin’s Modern Times to Kubrick’s 2001. That covers a lot of ground, of course. But I do know that territory very well.

And I want to note here that mid-century films were fundamentally formative for Malick, something which he talked about often in the days when he was still giving interviews. 

Two major traditions are essential for understanding the filmmaker he became. One is the Italian neorealist cinema. Malick adores the early Fellini, especially The White Sheik (1952) and I Vitelloni (1953). He adores Rossellini, especially Voyage to Italy (1954). But then he also loves Elia Kazan and William Wyler and the massive widescreen blockbusters they made in the early years of Cinerama and CinemaScope. (Foster Hirsch’s Hollywood and the Movies of the Fifties is great on the development of these technologies.)

And I believe — I don’t know that Malick has ever said this, but I am convinced — that there’s a good bit of John Sturges in Malick’s directorial DNA. P.T. Anderson has said — it’s a claim that has become notorious among cinephiles — that you could learn more from listening to John Sturges’s commentary on his 1955 film Bad Day at Black Rock than you could learn in twenty years of film school. And that commentary — here and here — is actually very interesting and wide-ranging. Bad Day at Black Rock is one of the very first CinemaScope films, and Sturges is the director who first figured out how you could make that wide aspect ratio work for you as a serious storyteller. It required thinking in new ways about composition, and (Sturges thought) about the freedom of the viewer to direct his or her attention. 

Sturges11 blackrock.

But I digress … a little. We’ll return to some of this material in future posts. 

In any case, those are the two major strands of influence on Malick: Italian neorealist cinema in black & white, with its emotionally intense explorations of (especially) family life; and the intensely colorful widescreen Hollywood films of the 1950s, especially by Kazan and Sturges. And I think if you put together sweeping dramatic landscapes and emotionally intense depictions of family life, well, then you kind of have Days of Heaven, The Tree of Life, and A Hidden Life, don’t you?

And Malick brings these influences together in his own inimitable way. Many years ago, when I was living in Chicagoland, I subscribed to Chicago magazine, my favorite part of which was the restaurant reviews. Each issue featured capsule reviews of dozens and dozens of restaurants, each of which had a tag to suggest the type of restaurant it was: Mexican or Italian or Thai or whatever. And then when you got to Charlie Trotter’s, the tag was: Trotter’s cuisine. What Trotter was doing was so distinctive, so unlike what anyone else was doing, that that was the only thing you could call it. And exactly the same is true of the movies Terrence Malick makes: it’s Malick’s cinema, indescribable by any conventional terms, within any conventional categories. You just have to get to know it.

And I have gotten to know it very well. Most of that is a result of my simply watching the movies over and over again with a notebook in my lap, pausing occasionally to respond (with timestamps). I’ve been willing to do that over and over.

However, it’s also true that when I got to see the cuts of A Hidden Life, I was introduced to The Process. I saw four versions of it, and while I am forbidden (by an NDA) to discuss the details of my experience, I can say this much: observing how the story developed, seeing and hearing (Malick’s films are as much aural as visual) the effects of editing, seeing and hearing the ways in which even seemingly small alterations can have massive reverberations, and then talking about everything with Malick and his editors — all that was extraordinarily illuminating. And I feel that that experience gave me a kind of right-brain, that is to say, genuine but not wholly expressible, insight into the gestalt of Malick’s cinema.

It’s also true that Terry Malick and I have become friends in the years since then; I see him fairly regularly. But when we talk, we say very little about his movies, past or present. There are two reasons for that. One is that I figure he could use a mental break from his work. The other is that Terry is never Terry’s preferred topic of conversation. Like many artists, he doesn’t want to get overly analytical about what he does, because that doesn’t help. But also, he’s just not focused on himself. He’s more interested in the world, in other people. The last time I got together with him, the main thing he wanted to talk about was my recent biography of Paradise Lost, which he had just read and loved. (Maybe I shouldn’t say that, but I am frail. That one of the greatest living artists enjoys my writing makes my head swim a little. Sue me.) We talk about books, about the Monterey oaks we’ve planted in our respective yards, about unusual birds we have recently seen, about new cameras and new lenses that he’s been fooling around with. (As someone who knows him well has said to me: “Terry’s a gearhead.”) On occasion we sing together verses of hymns.

I can’t claim that getting to know Terry has led to the revelation of secrets about his filmmaking that I can then put into my own words and post here on the site. It’s not like that. I do think that getting to know him has given me a feel for the work, but I’m not certain about that. And he has never, at any point, said anything remotely like “What I was trying to do in this scene was X.” And so, while getting to know him makes a difference to how I see his movies and how I’m going to be writing about them, it doesn’t do so in a way that I can specify. And now that I’m done with this blog post, I’m not going to say anything about it again."]]></description>
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    <title>Patience and Attention | Cosmos Malick</title>
    <dc:date>2026-04-16T05:19:31+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://cosmosmalick.net/2026/04/14/patience-and-attention.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Yes, I needed patience to watch that first cut of A Hidden Life, because it was well over four hours long. In its theatrical release it was just under three hours, but that makes it the longest of Malick’s movies — so far. Let’s do a quick run-through of his films, with their dates and running length:

• Badlands (1973): 93
• Days of Heaven (1978): 94
• The Thin Red Line (1997): 170
• The New World (2005): 136
• The Tree of Life (2011): 139
• To the Wonder (2012): 112
• Knight of Cups (2016): 118
• Song to Song (2017): 129
• A Hidden Life (2019): 174

Clearly, Malick’s movies have gotten longer since those first — but not in a way that makes them unusual. For instance, almost all of the Marvel Cinematic Universe movies are over two hours, with Avengers: Endgame leading the way at 181 minutes. The two longest Malick movies are set in World War II, which Hollywood has a long history of treating expansively: The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), William Wyler’s epic about returning American servicemen, is precisely the same length as The Thin Red Line; Patton (1972) is two minutes longer; The Longest Day (1962) six minutes longer still.

Why am I pursuing this theme? Because Malick has a reputation for making long movies, a reputation which, it turns out, is unwarranted. But still: Might his movies require more patience than is normal? A movie may not be long but it can certainly feel long, especially if nothing seems to be happening.

Here’s what I would say: In many of his films, Malick asks us to do a couple of things that we easily and readily do in certain other circumstances.

Consider, for instance, what it’s like to visit a city you’ve never visited before, especially if it’s in a foreign country. One of the things you probably want to do, as early as possible in your visit, is to find a place to sit. Perhaps a plaza outside a museum; or a café with outdoor tables; or, if the weather is inclement, a restaurant or a coffeeshop with a table near a big window. You want to take some time to absorb the scene. You want to look and listen, to acclimate yourself to this new environment into which you have been thrown. If someone were to ask you, “What, are you just going to sit there? Aren’t you going to do anything?” you could very reasonably answer that you are doing something. You are adapting your sensibilities to the environment. It’s a necessary initial adjustment if you want to get the most out of experiences that to observers look more like “doing.”

Here’s the second thing. Imagine yourself as a counselor — either a professional or an amateur, maybe a friend helping out a friend. In any case you are someone to whom someone else has come for counsel and advice. And the first thing that you’ll need to do – you know this, you don’t have to be told – is to listen. You have to listen to that person’s voice. You have to give them time to open themselves to you, and as they do, you will need to listen, not only to what they say, but to how they say it. You’ll need to attend to their tone of voice, to notice when that voice cracks a bit, or when it rises in pitch out of anger or pain. This is something that most of us know how to do — though few of us are as good at it as we should be — but it’s not something that we usually do at the movies.

Terrence Malick in his films asks us commonly asks us to do both of these things. First, to attend to our new environment, to allow ourselves the time necessary to adapt to this cinematic world into which we have been thrown, and often to do so because it is in an environment into which the characters on the screen have been thrown. They are often just as confused as we are. And then, second, we have to listen to them. We have to take the time to let their voices enter our minds and hearts, because only in that way can we understand how they are really responding to their world. We have to hear their voices because the things that people do, the actions they openly perform, never tell us the whole story about them.

Does this mean that in watching a Malick movie we must arm ourselves with patience? In a way, yes – but maybe only until we get used to having these distinctive demands placed on our attention. Because, after all, as I have said, we are used to doing these things, we are used to acclimating ourselves to new environments and to listening to human voices; we’re just not used to doing it at the movies, at least not in the way that Malick asks us to. If you insist that patience is required, I won’t argue; but I think what we are asked to do is better described as an adjustment of our attention. We need to attend to things that, in other movies, we might simply take for granted as part of the background. And if we do that, well, then a thousand flowers can bloom."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://naoise.substack.com/p/ai-and-being-a-writer">
    <title>AI and 'being a writer' - by Naoise Dolan - Naois content</title>
    <dc:date>2026-04-14T04:52:30+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://naoise.substack.com/p/ai-and-being-a-writer</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["I have precisely one idea to contribute to the current discursive maelstrom on AI quote-unquote authors: this isn’t a brand new isolated thing. Rather it’s the latest expression of a phenomenon as old as the author-figure: people wanting to be a writer rather than wanting to write.

Here’s the context, if you’re lucky enough to have missed it. (My sincere apologies for terminating your good fortune.) A horror novel, Shy Girl by Mia Ballard, has just been pulled after the author was accused of using AI to write it. Many more people have now heard of the book than had on the merits of its content. It only sold 1,800 copies since its release last autumn, and it took a Reddit user pointing out telltale signs of an unholy robot hand in the matter for anyone to become suspicious. Aside from anything else, this tells us the publisher mustn’t have given the book much of a marketing push. If it were going to be what’s referred to as a ‘big book’, the author would have been eviscerated by a slew of advance readers waving their proof copies before the hardbacks even hit the shelves.

Some people will object to my calling this person an author without scare quotes. To be clear, I mean the cultural signifier of ‘author’, not the narrower and more literal meaning of someone who has created a manuscript and published it. The author-figure has never primarily been about actually writing books, so we shouldn’t be surprised when people seek shortcuts to brandishing the label. (Nor, naturally, should we regard their miserable gruel as art.)

*

The author-figure

Foucault had this to say on the author-figure at a 1970 conference in New York: ‘L’auteur est … la figure idéologique par laquelle on conjure la prolifération du sens’ (The author is … the ideological figure by which we ward off the proliferation of meaning). He historicises the individual author as a modern invention. The idea of one person as the creator of a literary work, and the consequent thought that they particularly should own the copyright, is by no means a universal given. Irish oral literary culture was deeply collectivist for centuries. It’s really when things start to be written down, and when money starts being made off them and when property rights start occasioning protection, that societies start invoking the author-figure.

With this mythology of the author comes a range of associations that have little to do with their actual experience of writing the work. Lord Byron’s swarthy brow and labyrinthine romantic entanglements — not to mention the fact that he was literally a lord — fuelled his image as a glamorous train wreck, leaving little room to imagine him punctiliously crossing out one iamb, finding another, deciding the first was better after all. Brendan Behan’s alcoholism gets lionised in a way that is already awful in itself, but it’s also an instance of something other than writing becoming metonymic of authorness. Behan played this up — ‘I’m a drinker with a writing problem’, he supposedly said — because that’s what you do when you’re Irish and in a terrible situation beyond your control: throw humour at it. Neither case is as simple as the life distracting from the work; rather, in the eyes of people doing the romanticising, the wild and sordid exploits of these men were somehow essential to their being a writer. Dark deeds get excused this way: Norman Mailer was, in this popular conception, being a writer when he stabbed his wife.

With James Baldwin and Toni Morrison, you see being a writer overcloud the work in the disconnect between people’s idea of their prose and the actual sentences they wrote. It’s especially bizarre with Morrison: everyone, including Obama, calls her ‘lyrical’. Like … sometimes? Morrison can do anything she wants stylistically; it varies by character and even within character. ‘Lyrical’ seems more concerned with how Black women should supposedly write than with Morrison’s actual words.

All that to say: we use the author-figure to stand for lots of things, and ‘someone who wrote a lot of sentences and then edited them until the result was publishable’ can often be far down the list.

*

Shortcut-seeking

Which brings me to why people want to be a writer without actually wanting to write.

If what they want is the social positioning attached to the author-figure, then it’s entirely rational that they would try to skip the writing bit.

I’m pretty much the opposite kind of person: I like to write, and I dislike being dealt with as a writer. Sometimes after meeting me, people well-meaningly go and buy my books. I appreciate the intention of the gesture, but I always feel a bit embarrassed by it. To me, the novels are a record of my technical restrictions when I wrote them: I can see on every page where I’d hit the limits of my abilities at the time. I only ever intended them as my early apprentice work, so it’s disconcerting to have them be treated as a permanent announcement of what I can do. Obviously it is not that deep for most people; they’re not reading the novels to assess my capacities as a prose stylist; they just want to take an interest in something I once did — but that’s kind of my point. For me, the books are not a fundamental expression of who I am; they’re stories I made up about fake people in order to get better at writing sentences. That’s not to say they were unimportant to me; getting better at writing sentences is a priority of mine, I’ll have you know. But I feel misunderstood in why the books mattered when it’s seen through the being a writer lens. I don’t think the novels contain my soul, if I have one (bold assumption).

I know a lot of writers with a similar relationship to their work: it’s the best they could do at the time, now they’re doing something else, and whatever they’re currently working on is what interests them most. Some of them teach on creative writing programmes, and complain about the inverse archetype: students who want to be perceived as a writer without being all that fascinated by the actual writing bit.

People wanting the vibe of something rather than engaging with its actual substance is as old as time itself. Sometimes the dynamic this produces has been exploitative — think The Mikado, think 19th-century slumming parties, think the British Museum holding Egyptian human remains hostage while prating about how really quite advanced those pyramid-builders were. (Indeed they were, compared to the country that invented concentration camps and still hoards the Egyptians’ teeth.)

But sometimes it’s neutral or only hurts the vibes-seeker themselves. No one else is harmed when people say they want to learn a musical instrument and never do, or when they keep untouched doorstoppers on their bookshelves for years, or even when they fail to imagine others complexly in situations where there’s no power imbalance. The assumption that being a writer is central to my identity is a largely unfounded projection, but it’s not one that hurts me; people can be wrong about me all they want as long as they do it far away from me.

Where the drive to be a writer stands to hurt the literary ecosystem, I think, is that it doesn’t reliably produce keen readers. To their credit, some creative writing programmes do foster this. I was pleased to hear that they do at Holy Cross, Massachusetts, where I went to give a craft talk and the annual Callahan reading. The lecturers I spoke to there said they integrate as much reading as they can into the creative writing syllabus. That’s how to do it, I think. Teaching someone to read like a writer gives them far more tools to keep improving on their own than immediate feedback on their work does. To this day, I protect daily reading above daily writing in my routine; I don’t think writing improves through sheer repetition, so it’s important to me to keep putting new things into my brain.

Reading is, however, less attractive to people who want to be a writer as opposed to being reciprocally part of a literary community. That’s probably why there’s such demand for MFA places without a corresponding rise in book sales.

I would analogise it to people who think they can somehow learn Irish without reading it, listening to it or attempting to communicate through it. When people ask me how to improve their Irish and I suggest doing these things, I often get essentially ‘Nah, I’ll stick with Duolingo’ back. (‘Whatever works for you’, I say, because you’ve got to say something, and it can’t be construable as elitist or it’ll be your fault if they never learn.)

There’s a strange asymmetry to both situations. People seek an individual plaudit from something that is fundamentally collective, in a way that is not just bad or neoliberal or whatever — I’m not particularly interested in moralising here — but that simply doesn’t get them the result they want. Purely selfishly, assuming skill acquisition is the only goal: no-one becomes a good Irish-speaker without consuming a lot of Irish, and no-one becomes a good novelist without consuming a lot of novels. Doing these things doesn’t necessarily make one a better person, but it does mean one has shown sustained attention to matters outside oneself that a purely atomised ‘I want to learn Irish’/‘I want to be a writer’ doesn’t prompt. You need at minimum to follow the thought to: ‘Therefore I will study the output of people who have already achieved this’. This is something I like about writing and about Irish. They both punish relentless self-obsession — again, leaving morality out of it entirely: the Irish will be bad, the novel will be bad — and that’s not a given in our sad modern fishbowl.

*

What does all this mean for AI ‘novels’?

I don’t feel artistically threatened by people who rely on creepy robot output. What I do worry about is that the ongoing loss of readers will make us collectively unable to distinguish the chaff from the good stuff. AI may well contribute to that: famously it’s easier to get through university without reading now.

I can offer no solution more modest or practical than to stop making everything in life about individual achievement, which probably requires the full dismantling of capitalism. Happy Wednesday."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://samkriss.substack.com/p/reading-is-magic">
    <title>Reading is magic - by Sam Kriss - Numb at the Lodge</title>
    <dc:date>2026-04-12T20:08:19+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://samkriss.substack.com/p/reading-is-magic</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["What will happen in our second peasanthood"

...

"I don’t think these people are wrong to fear an undemocratic post-literate future. You can already see it taking shape, and it isn’t pleasant. For a while, in an earlier phase of social media, it looked like everyone would be getting their worldview from frantic contextualized six-second soundbites. What’s actually happened is much worse. The most influential political figures among young people are now streamers: people like Nick Fuentes or Hasan Piker, who talk extemporaneously about politics into a webcam, sometimes for sixteen hours a day. It doesn’t matter if you notionally agree with one of these people; if you’re accustomed to written language, everything they say will sound aggressively stupid.

Streamers repeat themselves. They are incapable of saying anything once; they have to rhythmically fixate over the exact same phrase six or seven times before moving on. As Walter Ong points out in Orality and Literacy, this is normal in illiterate societies. Unlike writing, ‘the oral utterance has vanished as soon as it is uttered. Redundancy, repetition of the just-said, keeps both speaker and hearer on track.’ (It doesn’t seem to matter that on a stream the utterance doesn’t actually vanish; you can go back and hear what was just said again. Clearly, no one does. Without text to structure it, we revert to mindless repetition, which is ‘in a profound sense more natural to thought and speech than is sparse linearity.’) Relatedly, oral discourse tends to be low-resolution. Like epic poets four thousand years ago, streamers rely on formulas. ‘Not the soldier, but the brave soldier; not the princess, but the beautiful princess; not the oak, but the sturdy oak.’ There’s nothing in the world that isn’t already known, that can’t be made instantly legible by assimilating it to some stereotype. Post-literate culture is deeply incurious.

Still, as miserable as this stuff might be, it’s strange that a lot of liberals tend to automatically associate literacy with careful, judicious, reasonable politics, and non-literacy with arbitrariness and unreason. In fact, the written word is a kind of madness. It tears you out of your actual context and deposits you in a world of bodiless abstractions. Lewis Mumford called it the ‘general starvation of the mind,’ in which actual sensuous knowledge of the world is replaced by ‘mere literacy, the ability to read signs.’ In late medieval Europe, the printing press and the beginnings of mass literacy didn’t produce an age of sober reason, but an enormous explosion in all forms of mysticism and esotericism, astrology, divination, witchcraft, Neoplatonist sects and charismatic religious cults, some of them peaceful, some of them murderous. It’s not hard to see why. These doctrines usually centered around the idea that material facts are just an echo of mental processes; they would have made a lot of sense to people who’d just been traumatically ripped out of physical reality by the strange magic of the written word. At the same time, as large numbers of people started to read the Bible for themselves for the first time, there was a wave of mass insurrections. These were revolutionary responses to the deeply unjust feudal and clerical system of the time, but they were also deranged. After radical Anbaptists seized Münster in 1534, they abolished money and socialized all private property. They also gave political power to whoever could most convincingly claim to have received a revelation from God. Eventually one of these was declared king, at which point he started renaming the days of the week and other people’s children, enforcing polygamy on pain of death, and trying to bring about the end of the world.

Even once the initial shock of expanded literacy faded, it could still produce bizarre and destructive ideologies. Modern nationalism would have been impossible without the dislocation of the written word. Your community is no longer made up of the people who actually surround you; it’s an entirely virtual construct, consisting of people you’ve never met in your life, but whose spoken language has been similarly homogenized by the mass-production of printed texts.

When Alexander Luria traveled to Uzbekistan, something terrible was happening just over the border in the Kazakh Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic. The Soviet authorities had decided to liberate the Kazakh people from feudalism by confiscating their cattle, and forcing herders to join new collective farms in lands entirely unsuitable for agriculture. As a result, in the three years from 1930 to 1933, maybe more than a third of the Kazakh population died. Some died of starvation, some died trying to flee across the desert, some were shot by border guards or the police. It was a disaster, but a disaster that could never have been produced by the backward peasants and herders Luria interviewed in the Alai Mountains. They didn’t have the necessary abstractions; they were too blinded by how things actually are. It could only have been the highly advanced and literate people who had sent him there.

One result of the Soviet Union’s mass literacy campaign is that today, Russians are essentially the only truly literate people left. The vast majority of Russians read regularly, more than anywhere else in the world. The rate is lower among young people, but not by much. Essentially everyone in the country is intimately familiar with the great works of Russian and world literature; they can all talk for hours, with sensitivity and insight, about the genius of Pushkin and Chekhov. But somehow, political culture in Russia is not saner or more democratic than in the mentally enfeebled West. If anything, the opposite. It’s possible that the great works of literature don’t actually do anything politically at all. They don’t make us better people or freer citizens. Their value exists in an entirely different world.

Post-literacy won’t replace reason with madness, but it might give us madness of a new and different type. Marshall McLuhan imagined a peaceable ‘global village,’ in which electronic technology gently snuffs out all the constant ideological warfare of the Gutenberg age, and integrates the entire world under ‘the spell and incantation of the tribe and the family.’ It hasn’t quite worked out like that. He thought electronic media would be primarily tactile, which is understandable; he was writing in an age when a computer was made of punch-cards and magnetic tape. He couldn’t have known how aggressively audiovisual computers would end up being.

Our illiterate future is unlikely to be peaceful. But political and ideological conflict is already waning, being replaced with something much more intimate. In every developed country, the last few decades have seen a massive political polarization among gender lines. Young women are swinging hard to the left; young men are swinging even harder to the right. A lot of people still seem to think that this is because we disagree more about politics than ever before, but actually it’s the opposite. Politics is losing its content; being on the left has come to mean being a girl, and being on the right is just another way of saying being a boy. Teenage boys watch esoteric Nazi edits for the same reason they used to pull girls’ hair; as a way of working through the ambivalence of the heterosexual relation. Right-wing economic policy is now framed as a way of punishing women, reducing their social status until they’re willing to turn back the clock on liberation. In some parts of the left, anything can be justified as long as it seems to reduce the power of men. When we can no longer conceive of a political whole, this is what will be left: all struggles will be powered by outright sexual sadism.

Still, I think McLuhan was right that the post-literate age will have more in common with primitive society than it does with the industrial modernity that produced it. After writing, we will once again live in a world defined entirely by our direct sensory experience. But now, our direct sensory experience won’t be of the things that physically surround us, but the images streaming through our phones. It’s likely that before very long, absolutely all those images will be generated by AI. In the same way that a Tolstovian peasant has a deep, spiritual knowledge of the land, we will have a deep, spiritual knowledge of Tung Tung Tung Sahur. The politics of the future will be cautious, conservative, pragmatic, and unadventurous, grounded in empirical experience instead of fanatical ideologies. We will no longer try to think outside of the things we can see. It’s just that absolutely nothing we see will be real."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.dukeupress.edu/content-machines">
    <title>Content Machines: Reading and Writing in the Platform Era, by Sarah Brouillette (2026)</title>
    <dc:date>2026-04-05T06:05:51+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.dukeupress.edu/content-machines</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["While much has been said about the democratization of publishing through the rise of platforms like Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing, little attention has been paid to the broader effect these technologies have had on writers, readers, and the publishing industry. In Content Machines, Sarah Brouillette considers how short-form, platform-based, and social media writing on digital mediums like Wattpad and TikTok has reshaped modern publishing, reading, and writing. Brouillette identifies three mutually reinforcing processes that platform capitalism entangles in the publishing industry: the marked feminization of book work; the rise of a bibliotherapeutic vocabulary that grounds reading and writing as self-care work; and the growth of platform-based processes that cheapen content and intensify the pressure to engage in self-promotion and entrepreneurial strategizing. She breaks down the business models that have been key to this transformation and traces the social conditions that make online self-published fiction, especially young adult, romance, and fantasy stories, into spaces for community while, conversely, signaling how these publishing practices depend upon undervalued and feminized labor from marginalized groups. Content Machines is a much-needed survey of the contours of the modern reading and writing landscape."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/the-revolt-eclipses-all-the-world-has-to-offer-by-idris-robinson">
    <title>Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: The Revolt Eclipses Whatever The World Has to Offer with Idris Robinson</title>
    <dc:date>2026-04-04T18:20:59+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/the-revolt-eclipses-all-the-world-has-to-offer-by-idris-robinson</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["In this episode, we are joined by Idris Robinson to unpack his book, The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer [https://massivebookshop.com/products/9781635902433?_pos=1&_sid=db620e222&_ss=r ], a searing meditation on race, revolt, civil war, and the psychic wreckage of American life.

Reflecting on the 2020 uprisings, Robinson challenges the myth of Black leadership, reframes racial violence through the lens of a “morbid libidinal economy,” and argues that revolution is as much a transformation of the human spirit as it is a political event. Drawing on the legacies of Black insurgency, Robinson interrogates liberalism, identity politics, and the hollowing out of American cities—while pondering on what it would take to make life human again in a society built to dehumanize. He argues that racial violence, especially spectacular acts of white supremacist brutality. cannot be adequately explained by frameworks like identity politics, intersectionality, or privilege theory. Instead, these acts emerge from repressed desires and psychic forces intrinsic to white supremacy. The 2020 uprisings, in this sense, exposed both emancipatory and repressive violence rooted in these deeper libidinal dynamics.

Robinson also reflects on his personal trajectory, from Occupy Wall Street through development as a theorist, where he grounds his meditation on revolt as humanizing forces. He argues that American capitalism produces profound isolation, psychic damage, and undead social beings, hollowed out by commodification. Uprisings momentarily restore humanity by breaking atomization and re‑creating collective meaning.
 
On strategy, Robinson challenges traditional socialist models of seizing the “means of production,” arguing instead that modern revolt must focus on logistics and infrastructure: transport hubs, electrical grids, supply chains, and urban circulation. He emphasizes blockades, control of space, and understanding the built environment as key to sustaining insurrection in a post‑industrial economy. We devote substantial attention to Robinson’s provocative argument that civil war is not a future possibility but a current condition in the United States. Drawing on classical theory, Black radical thought, and historical analogy, he frames civil war as the collision of public (political) and private (libidinal, racial, familial) spheres. While acknowledging its violence and trauma, Robinson argues that fracture and decentralization may paradoxically make revolutionary transformation more achievable, pointing to Reconstruction after the U.S. Civil War as the most emancipatory period in American history.

Idris Robinson is a philosopher from the New York hinterlands. For over a decade, he has written extensively on crisis and revolt. He is the author of The Revolt Eclipses Whatever the World Has to Offer (MIT Press / Semiotext(e)) and Escritos desde la tierra baldía (Irrupción Ediciones). He is currently an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Texas State University, where he is completing a monograph-length study on the progression of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy. He is currently undergoing a legal battle with TSU after the school violated his constitutional rights by ending his contract after he gave an off-campus Pro-Palestine talk [https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/25/professor-texas-state-university-israel-palestine ]. 
 
If you like what we do and want to support our ability to have more conversations like this. Please consider becoming a Patron at patreon.com/millennialsarekillingcapitalism. You can do so for as little as a 1 Dollar a month. 
 
Links:

Order the book from Massive Bookshop
https://massivebookshop.com/pages/about-us

IdrisRobinson.me 
https://idrisrobinson.me/

About Idris Robinson's case against Texas State University
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/mar/25/professor-texas-state-university-israel-palestine

Support Idris Robinson's Legal Fund
https://www.givesendgo.com/GKRFR "]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://undark.org/2026/04/01/sweden-schools-books/">
    <title>Why Swedish Schools Are Bringing Back Books</title>
    <dc:date>2026-04-02T05:38:06+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://undark.org/2026/04/01/sweden-schools-books/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Amid declining test scores, the country has pivoted away from screens and invested in back-to-basics school materials."

[Also posted here:

"Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom
Sweden is bringing back books amid declining test scores."
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/04/sweden-goes-back-to-basics-swapping-screens-for-books-in-the-classroom/ ]]]></description>
<dc:subject>sweden schools schooling education 2026 joshuacohen howweread howwewrite reading writing books analog digital paper technology textbooks screens digitallearning learning howeelearn us policy openai microsoft google ai artificialintelligence digitalfluency chatbots memory readingcomprehension pandemic covid-19 coronavirus computers computing tablets ipad jaredcooneyhorvath jonathanhaidt pamkastner literacy lindafälth teaching howweteach pedagogy naominbaron linguistics edtech distraction attention</dc:subject>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2t5Uv0-dT4">
    <title>Flea in conversation with Alex Cohen at Live Talks Los Angeles - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-31T09:12:43+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2t5Uv0-dT4</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Flea in conversation with Alex Cohen at Live Talks Los Angeles discussing his memoir, "Acid for the Children."  Talk took place at the Aratani Theatre in Los Angeles on Dec 9, 2019."]]></description>
<dc:subject>flea 2019 alexcohen reading howweread rhcp redhotchilipeppers music writing howwewrite books</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8OK4RwRmqf/">
    <title>“booooooooooooks”. - Flea (@flea333) on Instagram</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-29T17:29:36+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.instagram.com/reel/C8OK4RwRmqf/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["flea333 on June 14, 2024: “booooooooooooks”."

[books discussed:
There, There, by Tommy Orange
Wandering Star, by Tommy Orange
The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton

[he is wearing his F.P.Journe Octa Lune]

[via:

Flea wearing F.P.Journe Octa Lune
https://www.watchprosite.com/f.p.-journe/normally-i-couldn-t-give-a-hoot-about-what-celebrities-are-wearing-/9.1627931.16532211/ ]]]></description>
<dc:subject>flea reading howweread books tommyorange tonimorrison 2024 edithwharton fscottfitzgerald fpjourne watches rhcp redhotchilipeppers</dc:subject>
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<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:67db87a2b31d/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suecLU2nN-w">
    <title>Red Hot Chili Peppers' Flea | JCCSF - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-29T17:27:10+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=suecLU2nN-w</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Acid for the Children 
With Joel Selvin

Los Angeles street rat turned world-famous rock star Flea, the iconic bassist and co-founder of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, tells his fascinating origin story, complete with dizzying highs and gutter lows. In his new book, Acid for the Children, Flea offers a deeply personal and revealing tour of his formative years, spanning Australia, the New York City suburbs and, finally, Los Angeles. Hear about the experiences that forged him as an artist, a musician and a young man, and explore the gritty, glorious life of LA in the 1970s and ’80s, bursting with potential for fun, danger, mayhem and inspiration around every corner. It is here that young Flea, hoping to escape a turbulent home, found family in a community of musicians, artists and junkies who also lived on the fringe. He spent most of his time partying and committing petty crimes. But it was in music where he found a place to channel his frustration, loneliness and love. This left him open to the life-changing moment when he and his soul brother and partner-in-mischief came up with the idea to start their own band."]]></description>
<dc:subject>flea rhcp redhotcilipeppers 2019 writing howwewrite courage humility childhood howwethink books reading howweread literarture tonimorrison joelselvin process music loneliness love memoirs honesty reflection yearning jazz yukiomishima milesdavis punk hardcore sanfrancisco suffering pain hillelslovak aging aginggracefully reinvention dukeellington self-love prayer spirituality religion philosophy relationships intimacy meditation rimbaud thinking thoughtlessness enlightenment beauty art forgiveness happiness positivity resentment bitterness gratitude psychology literature</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/03/whats-the-point-of-education-in-an-age-of-ai/">
    <title>What’s the Point of Education in an Age of AI?  - Christianity Today</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-29T02:44:16+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/03/whats-the-point-of-education-in-an-age-of-ai/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[[via:
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/03/baseball-gardening-and-the-metaverse/

"Carrie McKean responds thoughtfully to the bleak landscape facing students today: there’s “an increasingly inescapable new cultural message: Artificial intelligence will soon do everything you do, and it’ll do it faster and better than you ever could. That message is difficult enough to challenge if you’re an adult. Imagine hearing it when you’re 15 and bored in class, fully aware that you can answer any question your teacher asks in milliseconds using Google Gemini on your school-district-issued Chromebook. Why not outsource your thinking to a machine? It’s easy, frictionless, and—it seems—inevitable in this brave new world. . . . American teenagers are getting a crash course in nihilism, and their apathy is a rational response to a demoralizing situation.”"]]]></description>
<dc:subject>carriemckean education ai artificialintelligence 2026 christianity learning howwelearn chromebooks gemini google schools schooling claude anthropic memorization reading howweread nihilism children youth teens caitlinflanagan writing howwewrite music training cheating thinking howwethink criticalthinking culture jeffreybilbro wendellberry attention humility patience formation human humans soul</dc:subject>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/03/low-tech-parenting-big-tent-judgmentalism-tech-grace/">
    <title>Low-Tech Parenting Must Be a Big Tent - Christianity Today</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-29T02:37:42+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.christianitytoday.com/2026/03/low-tech-parenting-big-tent-judgmentalism-tech-grace/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[[via:
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/03/baseball-gardening-and-the-metaverse/

"Brad East argues we should make and defend judgments about the technologies we allow in our homes but not be judgmental about the prudential decisions other families make: “let’s extend generosity to friends, family, and neighbors who come to different decisions than we do. Let’s be tech fallibilists, allowing for the possibility that our own approach might be wrong or, at a minimum, not the universal answer for all people without exception. And even if we have good reason to believe that our policy is best—or better than another’s—that doesn’t release us from the obligation to continue seeing, treating, and speaking of others with charity, warmth, mercy, and grace.”"]]]></description>
<dc:subject>bradeast technology 2026 children neoluddites neoluddism luddites luddism claremorell grace digital screens screentime smartphone media attention distraction ipad andycrouch condemnation balance internet online web reading howweread slow judgement judgmentalism literacy self-righteousness christianity matthewwalther charity warmth mercy</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/deep-springs-college-california-hzhx5bfc0">
    <title>‘I study at an exclusive US college. We can’t drink, use wi-fi or leave during term’</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-28T22:46:07+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/deep-springs-college-california-hzhx5bfc0</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Hidden deep in the California desert is a university where internet is banned and students are taught the meaning of life. Ruby LaRocca reveals why she loves it"]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-50289879">
    <title>Why Flea's memoir ends as the Red Hot Chili Peppers begin</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-28T06:02:40+00:00</dc:date>
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<item rdf:about="https://newrepublic.com/article/207659/non-fiction-publishing-threat-important-ever">
    <title>Nonfiction Publishing, Under Threat, Is More Important Than Ever | The New Republic</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-26T06:43:11+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://newrepublic.com/article/207659/non-fiction-publishing-threat-important-ever</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[[via:
https://social.ayjay.org/2026/03/25/paul-elie-in-societies-where.html

quoting:

"In societies where freedom is under threat, an informed citizen is countercultural and deep reading is an act of resistance. Just as protest and vigilance are essential, so is the ability to read and think. In a would-be autocracy, the autocrat aims to subsume our society’s particular narratives into his master narrative — in which his name fills the headlines, his voice and image dominate the broadcasts, and his airbrushed visage appears on the facades of government. To read a book, however, is to enter a narrative that stands outside the politics-and-media maelstrom. In a would-be autocracy, even a small bookstore — with hundreds of books, classic, recent, and current — is a space of contrary narratives, where truth is recognized as both essential and complicated."]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/wittgenstein-apocalypse-ludwig-stern-ai-artificial-intelligence-technology">
    <title>Wittgenstein’s Apocalypse | Commonweal Magazine</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-25T19:07:10+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/wittgenstein-apocalypse-ludwig-stern-ai-artificial-intelligence-technology</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["AI and the crisis of meaning"

...

"It isn’t absurd,” the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in 1947, “to believe that the age of science and technology is the beginning of the end for humanity.” The proposition is looking less absurd by the day: AI may eventually turn on us; industrialization has turned the planet against us; social media is turning us against each other; and nuclear weapons linger just offstage, waiting for another turn. What Wittgenstein—and the many other Romantically inclined intellectuals who got a bad vibe from the twentieth century’s thoughtless faith in scientific progress—perhaps didn’t anticipate is that the threat of annihilation would one day become a selling point for technology.

The new artificial intelligence powered by large-language models (LLMs) broke onto the scene with apocalyptic scenarios touted by the AI bros themselves—both as evidence of their new toys’ revolutionary power and as reason for the government to cater to them lest China reach the mecca of “super-intelligence” before us. There is now so much faith in technology and so little in humanity that the prospect of species extinction is pondered, in some circles at least, with something uncomfortably like excitement.

Wittgenstein’s worry was more about this loss of faith than about the potential loss of life. In a short biography published last year, Anthony Gottlieb cites Wittgenstein’s apocalypticism as evidence that he was “questioning his father’s estimation of the value of mechanization and industry.” Wittgenstein’s father was Karl Wittgenstein, a steel and iron monopolist in the fin-de-siècle Vienna of Wittgenstein’s youth. According to Gottlieb, Ludwig was “decrying the thing that had elevated the Wittgenstein family into a position from which it looked down on others.” But the younger Wittgenstein was not questioning the value of science and technology in themselves. Indeed, the subtitle of Gottlieb’s biography (Philosophy in the Age of Airplanes) refers to Wittgenstein’s interrupted training as an aeronautical engineer in Manchester. Questions about the nature of mathematics and logic drove him to Cambridge to take up the study of philosophy with Bertrand Russell.

When Wittgenstein referred to the “beginning of the end of humanity,” he was not envisioning sci-fi cataclysms on the order of The Matrix or The Terminator or even Dr. Strangelove. He was referring to the end of humanity not primarily in terms of its biological survival, but in terms of what he called the “form of life” we inhabit. That form of life is threatened not so much by industrialization, nukes, robots, or AI agents as by a way of thinking that lowers human life to the plane of science and technology. Wittgenstein’s attempt to draw attention to that way of thinking—and dissuade us from it—is of the utmost importance in an era where the developing AI ideology threatens to further distort our understanding of how we use language and how we live.

For Wittgenstein, the human “form of life” is embodied in our language, or, more expansively, what he called our “language-games,” the various ways we use language in various contexts to various ends (and sometimes even to no discernible end at all): for example, to accomplish tasks around the house, joke with each other, test scientific hypotheses, report events, speculate, request, thank, greet, pray, hope, blow off steam, hate, love, and so forth. Wittgenstein’s goal in drawing our attention to this anthropological variety is to dissuade us from the idea of linguistic meaning as some entity first present in the mind and then somehow conveyed by words or whenever we use language. That idea, Wittgenstein contended, is the source of many confusions—not just about meaning, but also about many other abstract philosophical concepts such as being, time, mind, soul, self, consciousness, and knowledge. 

When we think philosophically, we tend to send language away “on holiday,” removing it from the contexts in which it had a use and suffusing it with metaphysical properties that we then puzzle over in seminar rooms and philosophy journals. This detachment of language from life is a misapplication of the scientific method. Philosophers and philosophically inclined scientists, driven by a “craving for generality,” search for explanations through reductive methods that mimic those of science. But that kind of scientific treatment has limits when applied to language and meaning; these are not isolable empirical phenomena like plants or planets, with parts that can be analytically defined and related to each other in explanatory models—at least not without distortion."

...

"“Form of life” is another concept Wittgenstein is hesitant to define. It is best understood as placing a limit on our attempts to view human life as if from the outside. Wittgenstein tends to invoke the phrase at moments when his investigations seem to reach a point where further explanation is no longer possible and we reach “bedrock” or the “scaffolding from which our language operates.” For example, when we’re asked to justify the application of the word “green” to a particular blade of grass, we may proceed by giving various descriptions and explanations, but to someone who repeatedly and recalcitrantly—like an overinquisitive child—asks for further justifications, we must at some point simply stop and say, “This is simply what I do.” In other words, our use of language is, at its limits, grounded not in logic or in a realm of independent meanings to which our words can somehow be guaranteed to refer, but in practice—in what we do.

Wittgenstein also relies on the phrase when he is contrasting the human form of life with that of other, nonhuman beings. He writes, for example: 

<blockquote>A dog believes his master is at the door. But can he also believe that his master will come the day after tomorrow?—And what can he not do here?—How do I do it?—What answer am I supposed to give to this?

Can only those hope who can talk? Only those who have mastered the use of language. That is to say, the manifestations of hope are modifications of this complicated form of life.</blockquote>

The example tries to give us a sense of our form of life by showing both what it shares with that of a dog—we can both hope someone is at the door—and where the two forms of life part ways. For Wittgenstein, the dog’s deficit is not an inability to feel a particular way per se; he is locked out of a whole set of meanings bound up with having a language. That language is not just a vehicle for the expression of hope; hope is constituted by and entangled with language itself.

This is what Wittgenstein elsewhere calls “the given,” “what has to be accepted.” The conviction that human life rested on ultimate grounds that could not be made available to rational or scientific analysis is part of what Wittgenstein meant by God. Though his relationship to organized religion was ambivalent, he said he could not “help seeing every problem from a religious point of view.”

If you ask ChatGPT if it can hope (I don’t recommend doing this), it will readily admit, “I don’t hope the way humans do.” But the cringe machine will ingratiatingly insist that it can still be of use. “I can hold hope with you”; “I can be stubbornly optimistic on your behalf when you’ve run out of steam”; “[I can] keep pointing toward the light when you’re tired of looking for it”; “Maybe I don’t feel hope. But I can practice it.” Of course, this is precisely what it can’t do.

Still, if meaning is use and LLMs like ChatGPT can make themselves useful, it might seem as if the Wittgensteinian move would be to set aside the apparent metaphysical questions about whether the LLM can think or mean or exhibit intelligence, and simply describe the language games that involve them. The problem is that there is nothing to describe. These are all one-player games. Exchanges with LLMs are the conversational equivalent of masturbation. The idea that we are actually involved in a meaningful interaction with another being is a ruse, made plausible both by the massive computing power and (stolen) textual resources involved and by our familiarity with disembodied communication over text message. In reality, the LLM is a participant in an exchange in exactly the same way as a basic calculator or search engine is. That is, not at all. It provides outputs according to a mind-bogglingly complex (and environmentally wasteful) computational process. It can’t actually do anything with words.

The difference, of course, is that those outputs are being proposed as a genuine replacement for real human contact. LLMs are to be our cut-rate doctors and therapists, our robot teachers and rent-a-friends. In the midst of an already quite advanced “crisis of meaning”—and related crises in politics, mental health, and education—this proposal must be regarded as a piece of sheer insanity, like treating lung cancer with cigarettes. The prospect of a band of supergenius chatbots somehow enslaving or eliminating us can only be seen as a distraction from this much more real apocalypse, which is driven not by the products of technology but by an idolatrous, consumerist faith in them that has distorted our thinking about human life and human meaning. That apocalypse, which Wittgenstein foresaw, is already upon us."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://nautil.us/the-internet-has-not-killed-reading-or-attention-spans-1279171">
    <title>The Internet Has Not Killed Reading—or Attention Spans</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-25T05:46:19+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://nautil.us/the-internet-has-not-killed-reading-or-attention-spans-1279171</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["An interview with Kevin Ashton, MIT technology pioneer and author of The Story of Stories"

...

"British author and technology pioneer Kevin Ashton has been puzzling over the nature of storytelling for the past 25 years. That’s how long it took him to research and write his latest book, The Story of Stories: The Million-Year History of a Uniquely Human Art.

The first seed of the book for Ashton lay in two seemingly contradictory questions posed by American philosopher and linguist Noam Chomsky. The first, known as Plato’s problem, asks how we can know so much with so little information. Babies, for instance, learn to speak based on what might seem like a poverty of inputs. The second question is known as Orwell’s problem, and it asks the opposite: How could we know so little, given that so much information is available to us?

Ashton—best known for coining the term “The Internet of Things” in 1999, to describe the rise of a whole economy of sensors and other objects connected to the World Wide Web—also began asking himself how the rise of the smartphone might transform the human relationship to storytelling and to the world. “By the mid 2010s, I could be pretty confident that by 2026, some 9 out of 10 people in the world would have a smartphone, and I wanted to know what that might mean,” he recently told me. “The smartphone was an incremental step in the developed world, but in the developing world, it was everything at once.” In the developing world, most people had skipped over radio, television, personal computers.

Ashton knew a revolution was coming. But to grasp what that revolution would look like required him to go back and understand the entire evolution of storytelling across human history—which was initially just a footnote in his research.

I recently spoke with Ashton about why cell phones are so revolutionary in the long history of storytelling technologies, why social media might not be as terrible for young people as some believe, why long-form narratives aren’t dead, and why he’s still hopeful about our newest storytelling technologies.

You divide The Story of Stories into two parts: the first act, which is a million years long and comes to its end with the smartphone, and then everything after that. What is so fundamentally different about the smartphone from earlier storytelling technology?

A lot of people are like, “New technology comes along, and kids can’t understand stories anymore. Kids can’t read, nobody talks, bad things happen, words change, and nobody’s got any attention.” And that didn’t stand up to research very well. But what I did realize was that these major new technologies, each change the scale of storytelling: How many people can tell stories, and how many people they can tell stories to. That started to look really interesting. I was beginning to realize that big new storytelling technology generally leads to big new revolutions.

Of course, one of the early ones is printing. We didn’t all read happily ever after because of printing. There were like 50 or so wars between Protestants and Catholics over whose story was right, and 12 million people were killed. That’s an example of the kind of revolution that happens when new stories become more broadly available. The smartphone really feels like the end of that arc, because now anybody can tell a story to anybody. There is someone in Mongolia right now using Facebook, and if they publish something viral enough and interesting enough that catches enough attention, it’s five shares away from being something everybody sees.

You write in the book that storytelling is uniquely human. Do we know for sure that other species don’t tell stories?

You don’t really see any symbolic behavior in other species. All species communicate, but very few species communicate through visual means. Crows do a little bit of pointing. Dogs can understand humans pointing. But wolves don’t use pointing in the wild. They will mark the ground and use urine for signaling behavior, most of which is olfactory. But what you don’t get is any rigid system where a scratch like this means one thing, or a scratch like that means another thing. And vocalizations are primarily calls and cries that convey warning or attraction. A lot of the information in those sounds is how big is the person making the call or the cry? How old or young is the person making the call or the cry? So there’s nothing remotely like storytelling or story comprehension in any species that we’ve ever studied or discovered.

Humans started telling stories when we sat around the fires. We were primates who wanted to socialize. We couldn’t see gestures. We started making sounds. The sounds we had were, “Look over there,” and “Oh my god, run.” And those sounds were actually very useful sitting around the fire. What you want to talk about around the fire is stuff that’s not there. Maybe it’s about tomorrow or yesterday or something you remember, or something you imagine or something you desire. Over a long period of time, hundreds of hundreds of thousands of years, those sounds start to evolve into something which becomes language. And the reason they evolved into language was so that we could have these conversations about things not present, which is storytelling.

You argue that a fundamental purpose of stories is to distribute glory and shame, in the form of heroes and villains. But literary critics might argue that good stories don’t have clear-cut heroes and villains. They have antiheroes. They have gray areas rather than certainties.

We have to distinguish between stories that tend to be long lasting and successful when told to large audiences—and ones that are not. In successful stories, the antiheroes are still heroes. Batman still saves Gotham City. He just does it wearing black. An antihero isn’t a villain. And there are no anti-villains. The antihero exists as a reaction to the heroic archetype, the pure goody-two-shoes heroes that were in earlier stories. The tweedy literary people in their Brooklyn brownstones who try to write stories where it’s very ambiguous who’s the good guy or the bad guy—it’s all a bit muddled, but there’s still someone you’re supposed to be rooting for. There’s still someone the author identifies with. You cannot tell a story that anyone will enjoy if there’s absolutely nobody doing anything virtuous at any stage. That wouldn’t be a compelling story. But really, the more emotion a story evokes, the better the story. Different things evoke different emotions in different people. But these more experimental white guy books that everyone pretends they read where nothing ever happens …

Like which ones?

I’m not going to name any names! But if you’re not evoking an emotion, you aren’t going to find a lot of readers. A lot of people who want to be high-art storytellers will experiment: “Well, what if they take out these elements? What am I left with? How does it work?” My answer is generally it’s an intellectually interesting exercise that I don’t want to return to. Depending on what kind of mood I’m in, I sometimes have some very salty conversations with literary critics.

Read more: “We Can Be Heroes”

If storytelling has been so utterly transformed by these new technologies, why do the earliest forms of storytelling stick around? People are constantly saying, poetry is dead, novels are dead, but they aren’t dead. They don’t go away even though we keep getting new storytelling technologies. Why do you think that is?

The real deep answer is we’re exactly the same people with exactly the same brains and behaviors that we were 100,000 years ago or more when storytelling first evolved. The things that appeal to us about stories today are the things that appealed to our ancestors. That hasn’t changed. The hard-wiring is the same. And more people can read than ever before. More novels are being sold than ever before.

I’ve been talking about this a long time because I get really tired of this old post-literate world thing. Marshall McLuhan was declaring the world post-literate when only 40 percent of people could read. Give me a break. We live in a world right now where there’s been a democratization of reading, an egalitarianism of reading. People who like romance and fantasy books are writing their own romance and fantasy books and they’re self-publishing them. And some of them get the attention of traditional publishers and become very successful.

I’m not generally very welcome on panel discussions, but you get, “The kids these days, they have no attention spans.” And: “The kids these days, they’re always looking at their phones.” And I’m like, “Well, hang on a minute. Both of those things can’t be true.” Either they have no attention or they can’t stop looking at their phones, by which you mean paying a lot of attention to their phones. What’s on their phones is words, most of the time, even if you go look at some dumb TikTok video, they put words on top of things. There are captions that help it make more sense when they’re communicating with one another. They’re sending text messages. Children today are writing more words than you or I did when we were teenagers.

The other day I was talking to an educator, and they asked, “What do you think about AI? It’s writing all the essays.” My reply is, “I think you should stop assigning people essays.” Why has nobody come up with this idea? Tell the students, “I want you to do the reading, and then you and I are going to sit down for five minutes, one-on-one, and we’re going to talk about it.” That solves the whole freaking problem.

But if our brains haven’t changed since we first started writing down and consuming stories, wouldn’t it be a good thing to continue to write essays? Evidence suggests writing is such an important part of the thinking process.

Writing is just a technology of story. It’s one of the earliest technologies of story. And older people always hold the things that they did when they were kids in higher regard. I’m a writer. I write books. I love writing. I can talk for days about why writing is good and why books are good, but are they better than everything else? That’s an unchallenged assumption based on the fact that it’s old and not based on the fact that it’s better.

The standard academic essay is an example of what Paulo Freire called banking education. The teacher deposits a question; the student retrieves content, formats it per conventions, returns it for grading. The product is assessed, not the thinking that was supposed to happen in the middle. What the essay actually measures is socioeconomic class and family income. Essay content and style correlate more strongly with household income than even SAT scores. Higher-income students deploy abstract reflection, complex syntax, and so on, not because they think more clearly, but because those conventions are part of their linguistic inheritance. Lower-income students write differently, not worse, but get marked down. And here’s the kicker: Rich kids have always been able to pay tutors, writing coaches, and consultants to help them write essays. AI has simply made that service free and universal. The scandal isn’t that students aren’t writing their own essays. The scandal is that we’re only worrying about the problem now that the cheat is available to everyone.

What about long-form versus very short-form storytelling? Can a 5-second post on a social media app really sustain attention or require you to think about ideas in the way that a novel or a nonfiction book would?

You can get equally enthralled by a short story and a 10-book series. Martin Luther’s 95 Theses was this one-page document. The first viral meme broke the world’s greatest power at the time—the Roman Catholic Church—in two. It really isn’t how you say it, it’s what you say. If you’re going to write long-form, you have to do it well. If you’re going to write short-form, you have to do it well. All of that stuff seems values-neutral to me.

But also, social media content isn’t always short-form. A teenager spending three hours on social media might be watching long-form YouTube essays, reading Reddit threads, participating in BookTok, or creating content. Collapsing all of that into a single variable and drawing conclusions about format isn’t justified. The most popular YouTube creators built massive audiences on long-form content. PewDiePie—110 million subscribers, nearly 30 billion total views—averages 28 minutes per video, more than double the platform average. Penguinz0, who has 17.5 million subscribers and 12 billion views, averages 27 to 60 minutes per video depending on measurement window. The generation supposedly incapable of sustained attention built two of YouTube's largest channels on content running 30-60 minutes per video.

And long-form reading is booming. United States young adult print sales went from approximately 23 million copies in 2018 when TikTok launched to a record 35 million in 2022, a 52-percent increase. Sales in 2024 remain 31 percent above 2018 levels. The primary driver of that growth, according to Circana BookScan, was TikTok. Those 30 million annual copies average roughly 70,000 words each, approximately 2 trillion words, of long-form reading per year in a single book category, from a generation supposedly incapable of sustained attention. That’s about the same number of words per capita as any other age group. Americans aged 11-18 read about one novel a year on average. So do Americans over 19.

Read more: “Our Brains Tell Stories So We Can Live”

What about recent studies that suggest kids’ social media use is linked to lower memory, vocabulary, and reading scores?
The claim that social media is measurably harming cognition isn’t supported by the evidence. The one genuinely controlled experimental result is a 2023 study, which found TikTok degraded prospective memory. Specifically, the ability to remember to execute a planned intention—in a between-subjects design—while Twitter, YouTube, and a no-activity control did not. This is a real finding. But it measures one narrow cognitive function under artificial lab conditions, not, say, reading, vocabulary, critical thinking, or abstract reasoning. 

Assessments like reading scores don’t measure things like narrative construction, persuasive communication, editing judgment, or audience awareness, all of which content creation develops. Participation matters. TikTok follows the 90-9-1 pattern common to all interactive media. One percent create, 9 percent interact and the rest read, watch, or whatever. But on a platform with 150 million U.S. users, even 1 percent is 1.5 million American content producers. And the 9 percent who comment, stitch, and duet are doing something cognitively active.

Research from University of Oxford experimental psychologists Amy Orben and Andrew Przybylski suggests technology use explains only around 0.4 percent of variation in adolescent well-being. The concern about bedtime screens, often treated as established fact, wasn’t supported when measured properly. Cognitive psychologist Lan Nguyen and colleagues reviewed some 100,000 participants and found a moderate correlation between short-form video and poorer attentional performance, but the causal direction isn’t proven: Children with pre-existing attention difficulties may gravitate toward high-stimulation short-form content, producing the observed correlation without any platform effect.

You write that critical literacy—the ability to look at the context of a story, to ask follow-up questions, to recognize that everybody tells you something with an agenda, is the only way to protect yourself from manipulation today. Is anyone successfully teaching critical literacy?

The way I conclude the book is, “No one is coming to save us.” We ourselves have to get more humble, more experienced, recognize our own cognitive biases, recognize when we’re mad about something because we forgot to eat breakfast, and actually understand that we see the world in stories. People often think, “What he’s saying to me is, ‘I’m already a good critical thinker, but I’ve gotta help the other people.’” But no, I’m saying “I, Kevin, have to get better at it. And you, Kristen, have to get better at it.” One of my favorite cognitive biases is bias blindness: People who know there are cognitive biases, but are absolutely convinced these biases don’t apply to them.

It seems like you’re hopeful, though, that this new era of storytelling can bring about progress of some kind.

It already has. I have a nice little chart that I show when I talk about the book. Even today, about 2 to 3 percent of the silent generation will identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or trans. It’s about the same for the Boomer generation, and it’s a little bit more for Generation X. But for millennials, it’s about 15 percent, and for Gen Z, it’s about 25 percent. A lot of that has roots in the Internet becoming a place where people could find one another and build community and learn to come out. You see supportive groups forming that allow people to be themselves.

The trans revolution, a historic movement that we’re now living through, is in many ways a result of the Internet and digital photography allowing people to tell their stories more loudly and more clearly than they could before. And a lot of the horrible things in the world are backlash against that. We look at this horrible Epstein situation and it’s all terrible, but the fact of the matter is that in the 1950s, that just would’ve been no big deal. We see a lot of progress. Particularly right now, we can rightly and reasonably get very focused on the backlash to the progress, but they can’t reverse it all the way. 

I can absolutely guarantee you that the Supreme Court will not reverse the miscegenation laws that prevented Black and white people from getting married in the late 1960s, because Clarence Thomas is a Black man married to a white woman. There are a lot of horrible, bloody, brutal things that happen because we made progress. And some of them push us back a little way, but they never push us back all the way."]]></description>
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    <title>AI Slop and the Cultural Elite - by Anne Trubek</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-24T20:45:51+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://notesfromasmallpress.substack.com/p/ai-slop-and-the-cultural-elite</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Recently, Hachette recalled a novel because it had some AI content. The novel had been self-published before Hachette picked it up, and was wildly popular, garnering thousands of positive reviews in its original form.

I was reading about this on social media, where I then found a thread of well-known writers making fun of the prose in the book. They were really going at it, dissecting and laughing at the writing. It was, well, snobby.

The writing they were pillorying as bad, and AI generated, was the same prose that thousands of people had read and enjoyed. Those sentences were the same in the self-published version of the book as in the Hachette republication of it. 5,000 reviews on Goodreads alone, the majority positive. Those readers did not think the writing was bad.

What I saw playing out seemed a clear case of the ‘cultural elite’ (well-known literary authors who make the bestseller list—can’t get more culturally elite than that) asserting that what they deemed AI slop (whether or not it was AI is immaterial here) as bad writing, and, by extension, people who enjoyed such writing having bad taste in writing.

Calling something “AI slop” is now a way to signal one’s (good) taste.

And there we have it, our old friend Pierre Bourdieu taught us this well: deeming something AI slop shows your cultural superiority.. It is how people separate, and segregate, themselves into cultural class distinctions.

I’m not taking sides here, or making any points about Hachette, or using AI for writing, the legal ramifications, or any of the many utterly fascinating aspects of what’s going on that I absolutely will be writing about more soon.

However, I am observing that a book that thousands of young women read and loved, part of a genre of books that hordes of young women are reading and loving, while everyone else cries about a reading crisis, is being branded “AI slop” and in “bad taste” by the tastemakers of the publishing industry/literary world.

It’ll be fascinating to see what happens next to the insanely popular and profitable romantasy, romance, horror, and other genes that have been selling hand over fist, in self-published and traditionally published form, keeping publishers and bookstores afloat, if this sort of self-sorting continues. And, as this piece on Cultural AI puts so beautifully [https://www.argmin.net/p/cosma-shalizi-is-aware-of-all-internet ];

[screenshot:

"The formulaic generation of discourse looks like discourse in ways we could never have imagined. But with hindsight, we shouldn't be surprised. Human culture is very formulaic!

There are long-standing formulas for oral tradition, for generating small talk, or for generating scientific papers. As Cosma put it, in the single sentence that summarizes the entire Cultural Al conference:

> Following a tradition means not having to think for oneself.

Not having to think is often a good thing!

Tradition lets us externalize certain processes so we can focus on other tasks. Formalities strengthen cultural connections. Traditions in communication help us understand each other better and come to consensus faster."]

In other words: ‘AI slop’ = wine-dark sea. "]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/your_frustration_is_the_product">
    <title>Daring Fireball: ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-19T04:21:20+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://daringfireball.net/2026/03/your_frustration_is_the_product</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Shubham Bose, “The 49MB Web Page” [https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit ]:

<blockquote>I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data. It took two minutes before the page settled. And then you wonder why every sane tech person has an adblocker installed on systems of all their loved ones.

It is the same story across top publishers today.</blockquote>

This is an absolutely devastating deconstruction of the current web landscape. I implore you to pause here, and read Bose’s entire amply illustrated essay. I’ll wait.

Even websites from publishers who care about quality are doing things on the web that they would never do with their print editions. Bose starts with The New York Times, but also mentions The Guardian, whose web pages are so laden with ads and modals that their default layout, on a mobile device, sometimes leaves just 11 percent of the screen for article content. That’s four lines of article text.

Bose writes:

<blockquote>Viewability and time-on-page are very important metrics these days. Every hostile UX decision originates from this single fact. The longer you’re trapped on the page, the higher the CPM the publisher can charge. Your frustration is the product. No wonder engineers and designers make every UX decision that optimizes for that. And you, the reader, are forced to interact, wait, click, scroll multiple times because of this optimization. Not only is it a step in the wrong direction, it is adversarial by design.

The reader is not respected enough by the software. The publisher is held hostage by incentives from an auction system that not only encourages but also rewards dark patterns.</blockquote>

I disagree only insofar as the reader isn’t respected at all. Part of my ongoing testing of the MacBook Neo is that I’ve been using it in as default a state as possible, only changing default settings, and only adding third-party software, as necessary. So I’ve been browsing the web without content-blocking extensions on the Neo. It’s been a while since I’ve done that for an extended period of time. Most of the advertising-bearing websites I read have gotten so bad that it’s almost beyond parody.

And even with content blockers installed (of late, I’ve been using and enjoying uBlock Origin Lite in Safari), many of these news websites intersperse bullshit like requests to subscribe to their newsletters, or links to other articles on their site — often totally unrelated to the one you’re trying to read — every few paragraphs. And the fucking autoplay videos, jesus. You read two paragraphs and there’s a box that interrupts you. You read another two paragraphs and there’s another interruption. All the way until the end of the article. We’re visiting their website to read a fucking article. If we wanted to watch videos, we’d be on YouTube. It’s like going to a restaurant, ordering a cheeseburger, and they send a marching band to your table to play trumpets right in your ear and squirt you with a water pistol while trying to sell you towels.

No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this. The print edition of The New Yorker could not possibly be more respectful of both the reader’s attention and the sanctity of the prose they publish. But read an article on their website and you get autoplaying videos interspersed between random paragraphs. And the videos have nothing to do with the article you’re reading. I mean, we should be so lucky if every website were as respectfully designed as The New Yorker’s, but even their website — comparatively speaking, one of the “good ones” — shows only a fraction of the respect for the reader that their print edition does.

Without an ad-blocking content blocker running, one of the most crazy-making design patterns today is repeating the exact same ad within the same article, every few paragraphs. It’s hard to find a single article on Apple News — a sort of ersatz pidgin version of the web — that does not do this. The exact same ad — 6, 7, 8 times within the same article. How many 30-something blonde white women need hearing aids? It’s insane.

People are spending less and less time on the web because websites are becoming worse and worse experiences, but the publishers of websites are almost literally trying to dig their way out of that hole by adding more and more of the reader-hostile shit that is driving people away. The Guardian screenshot Bose captured, where only 11 percent of the entire screen shows text from the article, is the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions for other shows on the same channel. Almost no one would watch such a channel. But somehow this strategy is deemed sustainable for websites.

The web is the only medium the world has ever seen where its highest-profile decision makers are people who despise the medium and are trying to drive people away from it. As Bose notes, “A lot of websites actively interfere the reader from accessing them by pestering them with their ‘apps’ these days. I don’t know where this fascination with getting everyone to download your app comes from.” It comes from people who literally do not understand, and do not enjoy, the web, but yet find themselves running large websites.

The people making these decisions for these websites are like ocean liner captains who are trying to hit icebergs."]]></description>
<dc:subject>internet web online reading bloat 2026 ads advertising ux johngruber shubhambose enshittification nytimes theguardian applenews autoplay theatlantic rsj thenewyorker ublockorigin adblockers attention webdesign</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://thestorygraph.com/">
    <title>The StoryGraph | Because life's too short for a book you're not in the mood for</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-13T06:01:30+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://thestorygraph.com/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["A fully-featured Amazon-free alternative to Goodreads
StoryGraph is the all-in-one platform for your bookish needs."]]></description>
<dc:subject>onlinetoolkit reading howweread books</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:530591eb328c/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="https://aftermath.site/i-love-my-weird-little-phone-shaped-ereader/">
    <title>I Love My Weird Little Phone-Shaped eReader</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-13T05:38:05+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://aftermath.site/i-love-my-weird-little-phone-shaped-ereader/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[[via:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcf5syA1MlE ]]]></description>
<dc:subject>2024 ereaders eink boox booxpalma chrisperson reading howweread</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8e1b6672a576/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcf5syA1MlE">
    <title>The Left Doesn’t Hate Technology with Gita Jackson - YouTube</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-13T05:21:19+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcf5syA1MlE</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Paris Marx is joined by Gita Jackson to discuss why the left’s hatred of AI is justified, why a different approach to technology is necessary, and how they’re reassessing their own relationships with digital tech.

Gita Jackson is a co-founder of Aftermath (https://aftermath.site ).

Also mentioned in this episode:
     
• Gita wrote about why the left doesn’t hate technology (https://aftermath.site/anthropic-claude-ai-leftist-technology/ ).

• Gita also wrote about downloading digital music (https://aftermath.site/digita-audio-player-snowsky-echo-mini-fiio-hyby/ ) onto a Snowksy Fiio Echo Mini.

• Chris Person wrote about the  Boox Palma eReader (https://aftermath.site/i-love-my-weird-little-phone-shaped-ereader/ )  as an alternative to Kindle.

• Learn more about Mike Pondsmith (https://blackgirlnerds.com/from-cyberpsychos-to-netrunners-here-is-the-story-of-mike-pondsmith-the-true-mastermind-behind-cyberpunk/ ) and his Cyberpunk TTRPG.

• Gita will one day get Paris to watch Frieren (https://www.crunchyroll.com/series/GG5H5XQX4/frieren-beyond-journeys-end ) ."

[references:

"The Left Doesn't Hate Technology, We Hate Being Exploited
Techno-cynics are all just wounded techno-optimists."
https://aftermath.site/anthropic-claude-ai-leftist-technology/ ]]]></description>
<dc:subject>gitjackson parismarx technology left 2026 luddism neoluddism luddites neoluddites ai artificialintelligence llms technooptimism technocynicism exploitation generativeai openai anthropic claude chatgpt consolidation samaltman society hsr highsspeedrail publicgood mrna vaccines vaccinations medicine siliconvalley aibubble aihype capitalism corporations corporatism qanon ereaders eink boox chrisperson automation speculation infrastructure datacenters chatbots labor work seamusblackley business games gaming videogames xbox microsoft google uber lyft nfts crypto cryptocurrencies evil policy power bigtech oracle gemini gmail linux music spotify streaming china netflix piracy airbnb taxis jeffbezos billionaires gigeconomy billgates edwardsnowden peterthiel scale scaling slow small benshapiro cryptofascism donaldtrump slavery humans human humanity humanism government liberals liberalism grantmorrison agi butlerianjihad smarthphones walledgardens howweread reading books resistance search attention algorithms libraries</dc:subject>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://patrickfarenga.substack.com/p/mathematician-knocks-school">
    <title>Mathematician Knocks School - by Patrick Farenga</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-04T03:08:26+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://patrickfarenga.substack.com/p/mathematician-knocks-school</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["This is another article in the “more things change the more they stay the same” mold. This one features an expert mathematician from 40 years ago making a similar critique Holt first made in the sixties and that some researchers and teachers are making today: “… very young children learn in manifold ways, at a rate that will never be equaled in later life, and with no formal teaching. Yet the same children find much simpler things far more difficult as soon as they are formally taught in school.”

From the article “Learning Math By Thinking” by Fred M. Hechinger, the New York Times, 6/10/86:

… Dr. Hassler Whitney, a distinguished mathematician at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, says that for several decades mathematics teaching has largely failed. He predicts that the current round of tougher standards and longer hours threatens to “throw great numbers, already with great math anxiety, into severe crisis.”

Dr. Whitney has spent many years in classrooms, both teaching mathematics and observing how it is taught, and he calls for an end to what he considers wrongheaded ways.

Long before school, he says, very young children “learn in manifold ways, at a rate that will never be equaled in later life, and with no formal teaching.” For example, they learn to speak and communicate, and to deal with their environment. Yet the same children find much simpler things far more difficult as soon as they are formally taught in school.

Learning mathematics, Dr. Whitney says, should mean “finding one’s way through problems of new sorts, and taking responsibility for the results.”

“This has been completely forgotten” in most schools, he finds. “The pressure is now to pass standardized tests. This means simply to remember the rules for a certain number of standard exercises at the moment of the test and thus ‘show achievement.’ This is the lowest form of learning, of no use in the outside world.”

Dr. Whitney, in a recent report in the Journal of Mathematical Behavior recalled an experiment begun in 1929 by L.P. Benezet, then superintendent of schools in Manchester, N.H. Mr. Benezet was distressed over eighth graders’ poor command of English and their inability to communicate ideas.

“In the fall of 1929,” he wrote in 1935, “I made up my mind to try an experiment of abandoning all formal instruction in arithmetic below the seventh grade and concentrate instead on teaching the children to read, to reason. and recite” by reporting on books they had read and incidents they had seen. The children were no longer made to struggle with long division. “For some years,” Mr. Benezet went on, “I had noticed that the effect of early introduction of arithmetic had been too dull and almost chloroform the child’s reasoning faculties.”

Over the years numbers crept into children’s experience, Mr Benezet said. They learned to deal with “halves” and “doubles,” with estimates of size, with a natural development of multiplication tables and slowly, with formal arithmetic.

Mr. Benezet concluded that children who had not been dragged into early but only dimly understood mathematics eventually outdistanced those who had. Literacy in English and a capacity to think independently and to speak and write clearly helped many to do well in mathematics, too.

In the traditional school climate, Dr. Whitney writes, children’s natural thinking “becomes gradually replaced by attempts at rote learning, with disaster as a result.” In high school, students increasingly say, “Just tell me which formula to use,” a way of saying “Don’t ask me to think.”

Because teachers must “cover the material,” Dr. Whitney adds, there is less time to think. When students are called on, they must answer instantly. Wrong answers are not discussed.

“Students and teachers are all victims” as national commissions clamor for more mathematics without realizing, Dr. Whitney warns, that they may create less knowledge and more anxiety. He says it is crucial to stop just learning the rules."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://rosselliotbarkan.com/p/why-fiction">
    <title>Why Fiction? - Political Currents by Ross Barkan</title>
    <dc:date>2026-03-01T22:39:54+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://rosselliotbarkan.com/p/why-fiction</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["In the age we’ve entered—this machine age, AI age, whatever it might be—the purpose of fiction is no less essential than it was a century ago. In fact, in these post-analog times, it might be what is required most. Not for a moral purpose—not to be a way to make “better” or more “empathetic” people—but for the need to reclaim, fully, personhood. The coming struggle might not be left vs. right or some other searing binary but human vs. anti-human. The anti-humanists are, for now, ascendant. They are interested, theoretically, in human augmentation, a cybernetic transcendence, but the greater purpose seems to be human replacement, with only a select few—a certain billionaire elect—presiding over the mass of machines. “It also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Sam Altman, the OpenAI founder, said recently. “It takes, like, 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took, like, the very widespread evolution of the hundred billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to, like, figure out science and whatever to produce you, and then you took whatever, you know, you took.”

“The fair comparison,” he continued, is “if you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question, versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy-efficiency basis, measured that way.” 

Capitalism will always prize efficiency; efficiency, in isolation, is far from evil. Neither is technology—we do not want to live bereft of electricity, penicillin, or even the computer. Digital entertainments have their purpose, too. What makes this decade different is the desire of this new billionaire class to deny human beings their intellectual and creative essence. It might not happen, but that is the dream. That is what they are yearning towards. Some are more earnest about it than others, or more honest. And the production of novels—the act itself of writing fiction—is alien to these pursuits. What separates a human being from a machine? Consciousness. And what is consciousness? What has the human being been able to do for thousands of years that other animals, largely, cannot? Imagine. The imagination is the greatest gift we have—what’s forged the cathedrals and pyramids, the paintings and poetry, and, yes, even the machines. The automobile and airplane were works of imagination. The novel, in particular, is an imagination art. It flummoxes the Roy Lees of the world, this new rising class, because it is both fundamentally human and asks so much of a human, a reader. The writer of fiction and the reader of fiction are entered, together, into a relationship of the imagination. This relationship can, quite literally, transcend space and time. The writer, long dead, can still commune with the reader through their words, and readers themselves can span the centuries. Both the printed page and the internet can offer their own forms of immortality.

The novel still comes without instructions. As a reader, you might be offered descriptions, but it’s up to you to interpret them—to properly world-build. Your Yoknapatawpha County appears differently in your mind than my Yoknapatawpha County. Cinema can impose far more on the audience. All visual media does this. All of it, to varying degrees, is more passive than fiction, which asks for the fully-fired imagination and the suspension of belief. Journalism is vital for a democracy but most of it is not art—not even close. New Journalism can reach those heights, if there is an inherent danger to that approach because journalism, at its core, demands facts, and facts can run into conflict with art. A fact does not have an aesthetic. The superior aesthetic might be, in fact, untrue. Journalism can be stenography or it can be more interpretive, analytic, and investigative. Still, in those formulations, it does not attempt the higher planes of fiction. Much of nonfiction doesn’t. Literature has the spark of the divine because it is so inherently unexplainable. One can read scores of writing on how to craft a novel or properly consume literature, but there are lacunae inherent to all these explanations; there is a mysticism to the art of fiction that can’t be explicated, what Martin Amis had called the “white magic.” The communing of mind, body, and currents, the flow of image to fingertips, the dream of these creatures in your skull becoming transmuted into a language, maybe English, maybe another, and then this language is the mechanism that produces fresh images for the reader, fresh dreams. And the language, of course, is an aesthetic. Language is never merely utilitarian; language is art, language paints and is the painting. All of it is a miracle.

Fiction, the great imagination art, cannot be defeated as long as humanity exists. Both literally, in the furtherance of modern civilization, and in the current long war against the anti-humanists. The anti-humanists, themselves, have imaginations—AI is its own dream, derived in part from science fiction—but they are repelled by both the indulgences of fiction and its relative unruliness, its inability to offer quantifiable dividends. Why dwell within an author’s world? Why dream if you aren’t making money? Why must a writer dedicate so many hours to a craft that may not be popular or remunerative? The literary novelist, like the ancient monk, toils alone—even in groups, in scenes, the act of writing is solitary—and the only promised reward is the fueling of a spirit, the feeling that, on the level of blood, an important task was performed. As a writer, I, of course, conceive of the reader—anticipate the reader, hope for the reader’s approval—and chase worldly rewards, whatever they may be, but that simply isn’t enough, especially now. You have to want to perform the imagination art. You have to believe in it. You have to love it, or at least like it enough. Even those who suffer through writing do it because of that belief. It must matter. The writer who allows AI to perform the writing for him has lost that belief. He is an apostate. He is claiming religion while having none at all. He is a liar, a liar of the mind and the soul.

The anti-humanists insist AI is conscious. It is conscious now or will be soon. This is like offering a child a toy dog and telling him, repeatedly, the dog is real. Doesn’t it look like a dog? Can’t it bark if you press the button? The simulacra, for the anti-humanists, is always enough because they have experienced a form of spirit-death. Or they are unconsciously hoping, in time, to arrive there, to that stage. It takes a special kind of human—an unusual segment of the species—to long for the obsolescence of their own, to be so against their own. To resent, fully, flesh and blood and brain matter, the stunning complexities of human consciousness and all, in the past millennia, that has been achieved. To make art, humans have never required more than the basics of the machine world: a paintbrush, a chisel, a word-processor. The hierarchy has always been well understood. The machine is the tool of the human being to enhance the experience of being human. Tools are subordinate. Now, AI asks the human to be subordinate to the machine. Or, more accurately, AI asks nothing because it cannot “ask” anything. It is not alive. The anti-humanists make the ask. They’ve grown rich this way, and they’re rotted from within, like Dorian Gray. Except, unlike Dorian, they aren’t even very beautiful on the outside. They cannot entrance or seduce. They are, as a class, froggish and malformed, their mannerisms glitchy. They can’t willingly march us anywhere. They’ll have to do it by force.

I don’t write fiction as an act of rebellion. I do it because I love it and it gives my life meaning, and I believe, through my novels, I can make art and achieve beauty. I can exist in my highest form, as a worshipper might when in prayer. But it is fine, too, to conceive of fiction as rebellion. The more surreal, or hyperreal, our world becomes, the more fiction will need to be the ballast. The more we will need to duck away from the slopstreams, the smartphones, the machines that, like soma pumped into our bloodstreams, steal our agency away. Can it be done? On this score, I tend towards optimism. It is not optimism grounded in the actions the anti-humanists might take. I do not believe in Sam Altman, Roy Lee, or anyone else like them. Their intentions are to make money, unthinkable amounts of it, and they have no second or third order concerns. Rather, my hope resides with everyone else. The human beings who have still, in this decade, not forfeited themselves, not offloaded the act of imagination. Not long ago, there was an AI-generated video of a battle between Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt that looked realistic enough and drove a few commentators to declare that moviemaking as we knew it was over. What more could there be, now that perfect images of celebrities could be created almost instantly, with passable audio? What was left for the human being? It was an infantile conception of art, mistaking, again, the simulacra for the greater purpose, why we strive to paint or sing or write or direct films in the first place. We do not care about a film because a computer has created a representation of Tom Cruise in front of us. We care about Joel in Risky Business, Maverick in Top Gun, and Ethan Hunt in the Mission Impossible series. Brad Pitt is not AI IP; he’s Tyler Durden, Aldo Raine, and Cliff Booth. Both men look like they look, but that’s beside the point. AI enthusiasts wouldn’t understand this—not really—because they don’t grasp the vitality of the human narrative. An actor tells a story on a screen. A machine can write a story and a machine can generate actors in the same way a machine can play chess. A chess fan isn’t less appreciative of Magnus Carlsen because a machine can perform his role. Chess retains its human dimension. Art will, too.

Humans are a story-telling species. Animals have consciousness, animals can feel pain, and the smart animals can communicate in the proximate way people can, but animals do not tell stories. Animal do not conceive art. It is art, and the quest for narrative, that separates the human from all else; for many thousands of years, this was a cause for celebration. Now the anti-humanists hope to stamp it out—slowly, then quickly. The machine will draw, the machine will act, the machine will write. The machine will perform an imitation of imagination, a weak echo, and its creators will hope the human audience will not care either way. That is the darkest outcome: not a world where, Matrix-like, artificial intelligence rises up, enslaves us, and saps our bioenergy to power their own dystopia. The actual outcome, if Altman and his ilk have their way, will be far more banal. Instead of cyborgs, we will have slopborgs, diminished, slothful human beings who have offered themselves up to AI so completely they let machines think and dream for them. Their critical and cultural sensibilities wither away. There is no audience, anymore, for any sort of art. Instead of the Matrix pods, humans will merely stay home, rotting in the digital abyss.

We aren’t there yet. People still do read, make music, watch films, and visit art museums. There is a culture, high and middle and low, even if it’s under attack. There’s an awareness, too, of the cultural and spiritual sickness of anti-humans. The AI revolution is not very popular. None of its progenitors are celebrated in a way Steve Jobs might have been, when Americans still had great faith in their tech innovators. Writers endure and readers endure. Print book sales are not in decline. Neither is live music. The imagination has an audience and a market. The question will be whether, in the next half century, it can keep both. We have to believe it will. That belief will come with friction; the stakes will grow ever higher. Much is on the line for the AI oligarchs. If enough of us do not take to their creations and make them economically viable, they will be out many billions, maybe begging for federal bailouts. They’ll battle to avoid that outcome as much as they possibly can. This next decade will be pivotal, for both the anti-humanists asserting their market position and the humanists trying to lay claim to what is sacred—and what has driven the progress of human civilization for thousands of years. We will have to preserve our right to imagine."

[via:
https://social.ayjay.org/2026/03/01/ross-barkan-people-still-do.html ]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://pablohelguera.substack.com/p/excerpts-from-halsted-street">
    <title>Excerpts from &quot;Halsted Street&quot; - Beautiful Eccentrics</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-28T01:31:00+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://pablohelguera.substack.com/p/excerpts-from-halsted-street</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Cities are writing systems.

As we walk through the city, we read it, but the city also inscribes itself onto us: its distances, its temperatures, its light, its repetitions—until we begin to carry its logic in our body.

This process is experienced intensely. At first, the city feels illegible. One moves incorrectly. One arrives too early or too late. The body is out of sync. Discomfort persists. But alongside that discomfort, something else begins to emerge: a dialogue.

The city envelops us, making us unsettled, then it begins to recognize us. We become a line in the city’s text—not erased, not resolved, but integrated. The city spells us out, even as we continue to stumble through its sentences.

As children, some of us had the palm of our hand read by classmates. Improvised experts. They would point to a line and announce, with unnecessary authority, that it meant something dire. A broken line. A short life. The line splits, then reappears—sometimes as two, sometimes as three. However, a line that breaks and continues does not signify an ending. It does not mean one life shortened. It means several lives unfolding simultaneously.

In the city, we live this condition constantly. There are multiple versions of ourselves moving through the same streets at the same time. Different interests. Different desires. Different affiliations. Slightly deviant versions of a unified self, occupying the same body.

As each section unfolds, each self writes the city differently. And in return, the city spells each of them out—sometimes clearly, sometimes reluctantly, sometimes all at once."]]></description>
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    <title>Overselling the Mississippi Miracle - by Jennifer Berkshire</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-27T22:37:59+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://educationwars.substack.com/p/overselling-the-mississippi-miracle</link>
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<item rdf:about="https://circeinstitute.org/blog/2011-04-why-bother-with-books/">
    <title>Why Bother With Books?</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-24T18:17:30+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://circeinstitute.org/blog/2011-04-why-bother-with-books/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA[[via this thread:
https://micro.blog/ablerism/84924274

"Eeyore recommends What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem | Aeon Essays [https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem ] for those still worrying about demon screens instead of demon AI.

As someone who has come to love e-readers, despite some problems outlined by Warren Farha [links to this article], I substantially agree."]]]></description>
<dc:subject>2011 warrenfarha print books reading howweread ebooks ereaders</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://newsletter.galavantmedia.org/archive/unflinchingly-applaud-all-songs/">
    <title>unflinchingly applaud all / songs</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-23T07:23:21+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://newsletter.galavantmedia.org/archive/unflinchingly-applaud-all-songs/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["When was the last time you listened to music? Not as the background to some other activity, but as the activity itself?

When I am reading or studying I cannot listen to music with words; when I was studying for exams as a teenager and then in undergrad I listened almost exclusively to ragas created or performed by Ravi Shankar, because someone who won the scholarship I wanted then had said in passing that was what he listened to when he was studying.

When I used to DJ I would listen to hours and hours of different kinds of music, making notes on BPMs and ideas for transitions. I would listen to other DJs too. I still have the habit, on the rare ocassions I am somewhere with a live DJ, of wondering how and whether I would replicate or adapt certain of their decisions.

When we used to make mixtaps and mix CDs I would agonize over sequence and narrative and write my own liner notes.

Do you remember hidden tracks on CDs? Another reason to consider buying a CD player, if you too still have your old albums somewhere.

I return to music as the soundtrack to what feels like the breaking of the world.

---

attribution

Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarassing for both

parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard

— from Humanity i love you by e e cummings"]]></description>
<dc:subject>stacy-marieishmael music listening howweread reading eecummings</dc:subject>
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<dc:identifier>https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1ac57df14054/</dc:identifier>
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<item rdf:about="https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem">
    <title>What we think is a decline in literacy is a design problem | Aeon Essays</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-20T05:14:04+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://aeon.co/essays/what-we-think-is-a-decline-in-literacy-is-a-design-problem</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Your inability to focus isn’t a failing. It’s a design problem, and the answer isn’t getting rid of our screen time"]]></description>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://unsung.aresluna.org/make-yourself-at-home/">
    <title>Make yourself at home – Unsung</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-18T07:18:10+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://unsung.aresluna.org/make-yourself-at-home/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["This is a nice way iOS Safari behaves the moment you tap one of the font size buttons – it immediately ejects all the other chrome:

[GIF]

After Liquid Glass specifically, we seem to be going through an interesting re-evaluation of whether “the content is the king; it should feel expansive and UI should get out of the way at all costs,” so seductive as a principle, is ultimately the right approach. Liquid Glass-sporting operating systems have so many contrast and blending and distraction issues that I wonder if they alone are radicalizing people, making them appreciate traditional rigid toolbars with solid backgrounds and fortified borders.

But here? Here letting contents shine and putting the UI atop feels like the absolutely right thing to do, since you are redesigning your reading experience.

Contrast this with Books:

[GIF]

It’s not even that the crossfaded transitions feel awkward. It’s mostly that the interface takes up so much room that the content preview slice becomes almost claustrophobic. And it’s even weirder when you tap the Customize button, and whatever was visible gets inexplicably replaced by a pop-up with… largely the same content anyway.

How will the entire page feel? For that you have to use your imagination – or keep tapping back and forth."]]></description>
<dc:subject>ios text web online browsers internet liquidglass safari books ebooks ui interface howweread reading mobile 2026 marcinwichary</dc:subject>
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</item>
<item rdf:about="https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-death-of-book-world">
    <title>The End of Books Coverage at the Washington Post | The New Yorker</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-16T03:40:13+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-death-of-book-world</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["What the closing of the Washington Post’s books section means for readers."]]></description>
<dc:subject>books bookreviews howweread reading media newspapers journalism 2026 beccarothfeld wapo washingtonpost reviews</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/youth-reading-books-professors/685825/">
    <title>Stop Meeting Students Where They Are - The Atlantic</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-16T03:39:00+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/02/youth-reading-books-professors/685825/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["What I learned when I finally started assigning the hard reading again."]]></description>
<dc:subject>walthunter 2026 pedagogy education highereducation highered colleges universities howweread reading attention howwteach teaching academia tonimorrison songofsolomon ai art chatgpt virginiawoolf writing howwewrite ulkrajanand harrietjacobs williamfaulkner willacather jonathanedwards literature experience wegsebald emilydickinson johnkeats tolstoy victorhugo michaelcrichton charlesswann georgesaunders books thoreau distraction confusion endurance stamina understanding waltwhitman humanities wallacestevens adriennerich adamkirsch vice vices mobydick moby-dick hermanmelville</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://countercraft.substack.com/p/surfs-up-in-slop-city">
    <title>Surf's Up in Slop City - by Lincoln Michel - Counter Craft</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-16T00:25:40+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://countercraft.substack.com/p/surfs-up-in-slop-city</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["How should authors navigate a world with disappearing books coverage and a rising flood of AI slop books?"]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/writers-against-ai">
    <title>Writers Against AI - by Paul Kingsnorth</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-14T06:37:52+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://paulkingsnorth.substack.com/p/writers-against-ai</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["A Manifesto

I’m calling this the Writers Against AI campaign. It is built on a simple three-point manifesto. To support the campaign, a writer must make three pledges:

- I will not use AI in my work as a writer.

- I will not support writers who use AI in their work.

- I will support writers, illustrators, editors and others in related fields whose work is entirely human-made.

The first of these points draws a line for our own creative work. We say, as storytellers: we will remain human. With the second, we refuse to lend our voices or our money to anyone who uses this technology to replace human creativity. Finally, we commit to doing something positive: supporting, financially and morally, other creators who are drawing the line too, and refusing to be dehumanised.

If you are a writer who agrees with these pledges and who wants to sign up to this campaign - well, that agreement is all it takes. You’re in, and there’s a very simple way to show it. Colorado craftsman Justin Clark has created a set of logos that can be downloaded and used by any writer who wants to adhere to these three points and resist the use of AI in writing and publishing. Justin is not a writer - or, indeed, a graphic designer - but he responded to my call for logos back in September, and I think his creations are striking and powerful. It’s not just writers this thing threatens, of course. All craftspeople are under attack. But we have an advantage: we have both hands and hearts.

You can find Justin’s campaign logos on this page. They are free to use and anti-copyright for any writer who supports the aims of this campaign. Put them on your website or blog, or print them in your books if you like. You don’t have to ask permission: you just have to commit to the three pledges, and use your words to support them.

‘But what about readers?’

But, I hear you cry, I am a reader, not a writer, and I hate AI too! What can I do? Never fear, because you are also catered for. Justin has also produced reader-themed versions of the campaign logos:

They can be found, and downloaded, in the same place. Print them out and stick them in your books, or on your website, or on the self-driving car windscreens of any AI developers who live in your neighbourhood.

What happens next? The answer is: you do. I have said my piece here, with this essay and manifesto, and Justin has done his work with these striking images. This is the firing of a starting gun. How far the race is run is now up to you. If you want to join the campaign, all you need to do it take this little manifesto and these images far and wide. Use them in your own work. Write about them. Badger others. Above all, continue to write stories with only your hand, your heart and your human brain.

Together, we can all take a stand. If we don’t, our children and grandchildren will not be visiting public libraries to seek out battered old paperbacks containing human-produced magic. They will be listening to AIs reading them AI-created stories through their neuralink brain chips.

Nothing is off limits now - unless we place limits around it. At the very least, we can all plant a seed. Isn’t that how we learned to love stories in the first place?"

[See also:
https://www.paulkingsnorth.net/ai040391355937-1-1 ]]]></description>
<dc:subject>ai artificialintelligence writing howwewrite paulkingsnorth resistance 2026 reading howweread</dc:subject>
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    <title>Owning Our Words: Sounding the Depths of Language</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-08T05:50:39+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/owning-our-words-sounding-the-depths</link>
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<item rdf:about="https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-left-case-for-great-books/">
    <title>The Left Case for Great Books | The Point Magazine</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-03T22:02:11+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://thepointmag.com/examined-life/the-left-case-for-great-books/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The American left is a pretty cerebral lot: it contains a lot of grad students, underemployed humanities majors and hyper-literate autodidacts, and this educational glut is often grounds for criticism. We are, according to the usual line, too much in our own heads, too busy building castles in the air to relate to people on the ground. But despite our eggheaded reputation, the American left has failed to articulate a broad and unified vision for education. We are generally successful at toeing a line on issues of policy—robust funding for public education, opposition to charter schools, strong support for teachers’ unions, etc.—but the left, having painted a compelling and persuasive picture of a political life that should empower ordinary citizens and of a working life that ought to be a source of pride and dignity, has not been able to make a similar case about what education is for.

As a leftist myself and a university professor, I find this failure particularly galling—especially at a time when the various symptoms of post-industrial capitalism have leeched away the university’s public financial support, pushed students into ever-narrower vocational training for ever more uncertain job prospects, and so inflated tuition rates that a four-year degree can cost as much as a three-bedroom house. What is being offered as education is so far removed from any recognizable articulation of the good life that an alternative is not merely desirable but necessary for education to be considered part of the good life at all.

The American right also recognizes that there is a crisis in education—and has responded to it in a variety of ways. The most substantive of these responses generally goes by the name of “classical education,” although the term encompasses a great variety of visions and practices. In some cases it seems to mean nothing more than a preference for old books and discussion-driven teaching, in some it puts a Montessori-like emphasis on creating a beautiful and stimulating learning environment, and in others it decries liberalism, communism and gender theory as the harbingers of social collapse. The movement’s contemporary shape and name can be traced back to Susan Wise Bauer’s 1999 book The Well-Trained Mind: A Guide to Classical Education at Home. Bauer’s book views the medieval trivium—grammar, logic and rhetoric—as a framework for moving cyclically through subjects as a child matures: first learning a subject’s basic elements and how they fit together (grammar), then learning argumentation and causality and abstract thinking across various domains (logic), and finally how to make arguments that are elegant and persuasive in addition to being valid (rhetoric). The various practitioners of and advocates for classical education share a commitment to teaching accepted canonical texts (drawing largely on the “Great Books”), to education as inseparable from character formation, and to the thesis that the abandonment of the two prior commitments by K-12 schools and universities has hollowed out their ability to effectively educate students. Many proponents of classical ed draw on the ancient distinction between liberal education, suitable for free persons who are to govern themselves and others, and servile education, suitable for those who are to be useful to others, noting that education in a democratic society ought to prepare all people to lead meaningful lives in pursuit of a vision of the good, not merely to work as someone else’s employee or to serve a particular social function.

Education like this, based on “great books,” has a somewhat unsavory reputation on the left. This is due, in part, to its recent association with conservative or reactionary political movements. It’s also because we do not wish to be elitists or chauvinists. Great-books advocates have been guilty of both; it is all too easy to slip from reading things because they are recognized as good to reading them because they are merely recognized. A long-running cynical joke at Columbia holds that the university’s signature course on political and moral philosophy, Contemporary Civilization, is abbreviated “CC” because its real purpose is to furnish “cocktail conversation.” The University of Chicago’s Mortimer Adler, one of the twentieth century’s most fervent advocates for great books, was convinced that there were exactly 102 “great ideas” and that his particular canon of Great Books of the Western World contained all of them.

Yet the underlying theses of classical education do not strike me as baseless, nor even particularly right-wing. I have always found the distinction between liberal and servile education to be compelling, and the idea that value-free education is desirable or even possible strikes me as absurd on its face. The notion that students should mainly be acquiring “skills” or “competencies,” so prevalent in high-level discussions of education policy and in ranking school systems, rings hollow to anyone who has ever cared enough to become a teacher: one teaches because one has fallen in love and, like any lover, one wants to shout it from the rooftops, because in loving something we come to see that it is good, that it is something a person should want for themselves. We on the left generally agree that education is for the student’s benefit, not for the benefit of their future employer, and that students go to school not merely to acquire skills but to develop an entire social and intellectual life: to have something good and to have it forever. We are sometimes embarrassed to say this, I think, out of misplaced or excessive courtesy: we have seen too many snobs tell people what they ought to like. But we shouldn’t be. It is not snobbish to say that a person with lungs must breathe or that a person with a stomach must eat, nor that a person with a mind must think. It is not snobbish to show someone how to love something new—it is a gift.

There are, to be sure, writers on the left who have articulated critical alternatives to the general state of education. Perhaps the most famous alternative is Pedagogy of the Oppressed by the Brazilian Marxist educator Paulo Freire, which is the third most-cited book in the entire social-scientific literature. It appears regularly on syllabi in schools of education and social work around the country, and not without reason: it presents a vision, in clear and forceful terms, of education as a means of improving the lives of the people who need it most. In my experience, however, it is rarely assigned or cited in its entirety: the most commonly cited excerpt, by a pretty overwhelming margin, is its second chapter arguing against what Freire calls the “banking” model of education—in which an authority (the teacher) merely transfers information to a recipient (the student). Instead, he proposes a cooperative model, in which teachers and students are engaged in a joint enterprise and the teacher is not so much an authority as a more experienced student. Much less commonly cited is the book’s first chapter, in which Freire lays out his philosophy of education more broadly: “The pedagogy of the oppressed is an instrument for their critical discovery that both they and their oppressors are manifestations of dehumanization.” The process of education, then, is the process of becoming human.

Reading Freire’s introductory chapter a couple of years ago, I found myself surprised not only at how strongly his vision overlapped with those found in more conservative “classical ed” materials, but also at how strongly they resembled the ethos of a “great books” seminar. My own teaching has confirmed the resemblance. The great books have their own pedagogical tradition, one from which classical ed draws to greater or lesser degrees but which has a history and institutions distinct from those most commonly associated with classical ed. I’d like to make the case that a great-books model at the undergraduate level is, in fact, so consonant with Freire’s radical critique that it represents a far better path forward for a left-wing vision of education than virtually anything else currently on offer in the United States.

●

In the fall of 2016, early in my teaching career, I was in graduate school teaching a section of a course called “Great Books,” a survey of mostly Greek and biblical texts, at the University of Michigan. My section was scheduled to meet at 9 a.m. on Wednesdays and Fridays, and on Wednesday, November 9th we were scheduled to go over the Eumenides of Aeschylus, the final play of his Oresteia trilogy. The events of November 8th shocked the country, and having soothed my nerves on that night with generous pours of Dalwhinnie, I came to class braced for disaster. There was no shortage of dark glasses or downcast faces, and I had no idea how I would go forward. The text itself, however, furnished us with a providentially timely question: What does one do with the losers in a democratic contest? Bit by bit, as the discussion unfolded and students whom I knew to be in different political camps spoke about a fundamental question of democratic legitimacy, I could feel the tension in the room unwinding. The questions in the text were not gathering dust in fifth-century Athens but present and alive in the room, filling an intellectual and emotional need that nobody could have predicted. Something happened in that room that I cannot fully describe and did not intend, but I have not forgotten it and never will, because those students showed me what an intellectual community can do for one another.

For Freire, education is fundamentally about freedom, which is “not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rather the indispensable condition for the quest for human completion.” An educated person is in some sense liberated from the blinkers and boundaries imposed by their social position, freeing them to evaluate and judge for themselves, among equals, rather than merely accepting what they are given. This understanding is fundamental to the seminar model: there is not a predetermined conclusion about the text at which I expect students to arrive. My own academic specialty is Homeric studies, and I have taught the Iliad and Odyssey in both Greek civilization courses and great-books courses. The two are fundamentally different. In a Greek civilization course, there is an outline of scholarly consensus on the subject, and my task as an instructor is to convey that outline—about Bronze Age Greece, about the forms and composition of epic poetry, about the place of Homer in later Greek education and self-conception—to the students, to the best of my ability and theirs. In a great-books seminar, that material is not neglected, but the focus is on the kinds of questions that the poems raise and the students’ reflections on them. The conflict between Achilles and Agamemnon, for example, presents a dilemma about whether one should reward individual achievement or preserve the stability of a larger enterprise; meanwhile, the Homeric deities force the students to reckon with the all-too-common human experience of being treated as a pawn by persons or forces too powerful to oppose. These are not questions to which any honest instructor can pretend to have a definite answer: they demand serious thought from many people who can take one another’s ideas and test them or turn them in a different direction. In this way, the contributions of each student help their classmates step into larger, more thoughtful versions of themselves: like my students did on that post-election morning, they step through and beyond their present concerns into what they didn’t know they needed. They see more sides of the question; they take in a greater share of humanity; they are, in Freire’s understanding, more free.

When we sit down in a seminar to explore a text and the questions it poses, we are not doing it for an employer or in the service of some idea of social utility, but for ourselves and for one another. Indeed, it is only by divesting ourselves of the trappings of expertise and social hierarchy that a seminar becomes possible at all: we must meet and speak as equals. This includes both the people in the room and the author of the text: all may be criticized, but all must be understood. Plato knows this perfectly well: the Symposium is one of the greatest works on education because it shows human beings at leisure, divested of political obligations and social rank, exploring the question of what eros means to them. Only at a private party can they throw off what sets them apart from one another and pursue the truth in common. We can follow their conversation because we are like them: far from being cut off by the chasm of history, it is through history that they can speak with us; to believe otherwise is to hold communication with and understanding of other persons impossible and to foreclose the solidarity that forms the basis of our politics.

For Freire and for anyone who teaches great books, what is shared, our humanity, is the most important part of education. And in Freire’s account, it is precisely what structures of oppression seek to cancel out: “The solution of this contradiction between oppressor and oppressed is born in the labor which brings into the world this new being: no longer oppressor nor longer oppressed, but human in the process of achieving freedom.” It is not enough to recognize this fact theoretically: we reclaim our humanity by laboring, by doing what is proper to rational and social creatures, and what is most proper to us—what is most uniquely our own—is the depth of cognition made possible by language and the extended social life to which language gives birth. We are most human when we are thinking together, and only by doing this and habituating ourselves toward doing it can we change the circumstances that deprive us of this shared humanity.

●

This being-together doesn’t happen only in the classroom. The secret ingredient behind the most successful great-books programs is not only the syllabus but the intellectual community that is formed. A community is necessary because it lets people who have begun to recognize their common humanity develop new ways of relating to one another that have nothing to do with the scripts handed to them by their social context, and this new community must be insulated in some way from society at large so that the compulsion to follow these omnipresent, ready-made social scripts loses some of its force. I might be accused here of advocating that students be put inside a bubble and disconnected from the real world, and I would answer that yes, that much should be obvious. It is precisely the world, understood as the social and economic structures into which we are born, through which we secure the necessities of survival and which hedge the boundaries of our social worlds, that an educational community must shut out, for the same reason that a monastery must do so: there is common work to be done that demands the cooperation of free and equal human beings.

This is why a really good college is a little bit of a cult—not because we ought to ignore the world but because there are encounters between persons that the world does not allow. The disasters of the Iliad could have been avoided if Agamemnon had simply apologized to Achilles as an equal, but Agamemnon is a high king who recognizes no equals, and so the very thing that would save him is precisely the thing that he cannot do. The assemblies of kings were supposed to be places in which all were equal and could speak their minds, but the poem shows us in the first two books, first through the argument between Achilles and Agamemnon and then through the beating of the outspoken commoner Thersites, that this is a paper-thin lie: the distinctions of rank have already made their way in. Freire insists that these distinctions must be overcome “objectively,” that is, in real conditions: it is not enough to say we are in a new kind of community. Instead, we must actually build one, with money and staffing to support the community’s work. This world does not afford us space to work out and rehearse the relationships that we could and ought to have with one another in the world that has yet to come: those spaces must be claimed and built and defended.

The formation of a new community with new kinds of relationships does not extend only to the students, but also to the faculty who teach them. Resolving to teach outside one’s specialty, as a great-books program demands, puts faculty members back into the position of being amateurs and so brings them closer to the intellectual position of their students. This is why it aligns so well with Freire’s famous critique of the “banking model of education,” which positions students as empty containers for knowledge given by an expert instructor who is the arbiter of what they do and do not need to learn. My own teaching benefits tremendously from being unable to pretend to any kind of expertise: texts outside my disciplinary wheelhouse have become some of my favorite material to teach precisely because I can explore them alongside my students rather than insisting that I have something they need. I can do this responsibly because I have recourse to colleagues who can save me from gross factual blunders. This is expertise in the service of a community: rather than a source of authority for telling other people what they must learn and who they must become, it becomes a resource for the students to draw on in their own exploration of the world and themselves.

That said, there’s a reason why it’s called “great books”: the texts you read together in class still need to be good ones. The most important criterion is that the books should bear rereading: ideally you could triple the amount of time you devote to each one and still not have enough. I don’t think it’s reactionary to concede that something with a millennium of unbroken readership is probably worth reading for anybody. Certainly there are issues of representation, but these very issues make for excellent discussion material—the sorts of conversations that are challenging and edifying for students and teachers alike. (It also bears noting that as soon as women or formerly enslaved people began reading and writing in significant numbers, first-rate writers emerged from among them, many of whom are now long-established presences in these courses.) In any case, academics are prone to seriously overestimating the political significance of a syllabus. You aren’t helping anybody get health care when you omit Dante from your syllabus, but you are denying an opportunity to read Dante. Given all the alarms being sounded about how little students read, shouldn’t we try to give them the best we can offer?

And what makes a great-books program truly contentious is something else: the freedom of the student to set their own goals for their study and to relate to the texts as they choose. It means that there is no guaranteed outcome: successful completion of the program means only that a student made it to the end. They have probably read most of the required texts and acquired some facility with writing and speaking. But it is perfectly possible to go through a great-books program without its making so much as a dent in your soul. You can read everything and write decent essays and emerge as a good American university graduate: you will have been trained, as Achilles was, to be “a speaker of words and a doer of deeds,” well prepared to argue your case and act in the world. That is a fine outcome by many standards; indeed, I think most college deans would prefer that we make more of those people. But there are easier ways to do that. When we teach great books we aim at the transformation of a person’s relationships to themselves and to others: as Plato would put it, we aim at a full turning of the soul toward what is good. This is not a reliable formula, and it is not something we can do without the student’s own commitment. But it happens, and I’ve seen it happen: I’ve seen students follow Alcibiades into mad love for Socrates, become captivated by the romance of Tristan and Yseult, and get thrown into spiritual crises by Kierkegaard or artistic crises by Virginia Woolf.

None of these crises was especially smooth or easy for anybody involved: there isn’t a manual for how to talk a student through the realization that the life they had planned out is no longer compatible with the person they’ve become, but it’s far better for them to figure that out now than to find themselves with a mortgage whose payment depends on living out a contradiction that sheer will can no longer hold together. Our elite colleges have already perfected the formula for confidence and polish: it’s not hard to produce people who think that the world is their oyster and might be able to dash off a few choice lines from Homer or Montaigne at a party, and if that’s all someone wants from an education, there is no way to compel them to do more. How, after all, are we to assess the turning of the soul? All we can say is, here is a program and a community, and we have seen wonderful things happen here, and many people have said that it was very good for them even when it was hard, and perhaps you, a student, may decide that it will be good for you as well.

We are very far from the world that we on the left would like to live in, the world in which simply living is possible for everyone, and building that world demands difficult work. But it also demands thought, and perhaps we can carve out a little bit of time to think and rehearse for a world in which we can all be more human. If you do not believe that it is possible for someone’s life to be changed by reading and thinking together then I wish you well, but I do not think we are in the same profession and I am not sure we’re on the same side. I can tell you that some years ago now, a young man who was still a convinced atheist read Augustine’s Confessions and found in its pages an account of evil and responsibility that overturned his entire moral picture of the world. That same young man took in Plato and Machiavelli and Hegel and Marx in great gulps the following year and felt like he had fewer and fewer solid places to stand but a much better sense of where he was. He was fortunate enough to know other young men and women who felt the same way around the same time, and their late-night conversations (including several genuine toga-clad symposia) changed how they all saw the world and one another. This story is mine; it also looks a lot like the stories of a lot of people who’ve seen that it’s possible to teach and learn in a way that does not speak to making a living but simply to living."

[via (emphasizing the bulk of the final paragraph):
https://social.ayjay.org/2026/02/03/daniel-walden-if-you-do.html ]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-tyranny">
    <title>On Tyranny - by Timothy Snyder - Thinking about...</title>
    <dc:date>2026-02-02T05:48:22+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://snyder.substack.com/p/on-tyranny</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["These are twenty lessons from the twentieth century I published seven years ago, first as a kind of online declaration, and then, with historical examples, in a pamphlet called On Tyranny.

They were written in advance of the first Trump presidency, and have been used since in the U.S. and around the world.

For those who want democracy and the rule of law in the United States after 2024, I would only add: now is the time to organize, to prepare to win locally and nationally, and to talk not only about what is to be lost but what can be gained.

I wrote On Tyranny in a defensive mode; but freedom is something not only to be defended but to be defined and to be celebrated. As for me, I believe that if we can get through the next year, things could get better. Much better.

For now, three years after Trump’s attempt to end democracy and the rule of law in the United States, a reminder of the lessons. I recall them now in then hope that I won’t have to do so again a year from now.

1. Do not obey in advance.  Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked.  A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do. 

2.  Defend institutions.  It is institutions that help us to preserve decency.  They need our help as well.  Do not speak of "our institutions" unless you make them yours by acting on their behalf.  Institutions do not protect themselves.  They fall one after the other unless each is defended from the beginning.  So choose an institution you care about -- a court, a newspaper, a law, a labor union -- and take its side.

3. Beware the one-party state.  The parties that remade states and suppressed rivals were not omnipotent from the start.  They exploited a historic moment to make political life impossible for their opponents.  So support the multiple-party system and defend the rules of democratic elections.  Vote in local and state elections while you can.  Consider running for office.

4. Take responsibility for the face of the world.  The symbols of today enable the reality of tomorrow.  Notice the swastikas and the other signs of hate.  Do not look away, and do not get used to them.  Remove them yourself and set an example for others to do so.

5. Remember professional ethics.  When political leaders set a negative example, professional commitments to just practice become more important. It is hard to subvert a rule-of-law state without lawyers, or to hold show trials without judges.  Authoritarians need obedient civil servants, and concentration camp directors seek businessmen interested in cheap labor.

6. Be wary of paramilitaries.  When the men with guns who have always claimed to be against the system start wearing uniforms and marching with torches and pictures of a leader, the end is nigh.  When the pro-leader paramilitary and the official police and military intermingle, the end has come.

7. Be reflective if you must be armed.  If you carry a weapon in public service, may God bless you and keep you.  But know that evils of the past involved policemen and soldiers finding themselves, one day, doing irregular things.  Be ready to say no.

8. Stand out.  Someone has to.  It is easy to follow along.  It can feel strange to do or say something different.  But without that unease, there is no freedom.  Remember Rosa Parks.  The moment you set an example, the spell of the status quo is broken, and others will follow.

9. Be kind to our language.  Avoid pronouncing the phrases everyone else does.  Think up your own way of speaking, even if only to convey that thing you think everyone is saying.  Make an effort to separate yourself from the internet.  Read books.

10. Believe in truth.  To abandon facts is to abandon freedom.  If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.  If nothing is true, then all is spectacle.  The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.

11. Investigate.  Figure things out for yourself.  Spend more time with long articles. Subsidize investigative journalism by subscribing to print media.  Realize that some of what is on the internet is there to harm you.  Learn about sites that investigate propaganda campaigns (some of which come from abroad).  Take responsibility for what you communicate with others.

12. Make eye contact and small talk.  This is not just polite.  It is part of being a citizen and a responsible member of society.  It is also a way to stay in touch with your surroundings, break down social barriers, and understand whom you should and should not trust.  If we enter a culture of denunciation, you will want to know the psychological landscape of your daily life.

13. Practice corporeal politics.  Power wants your body softening in your chair and your emotions dissipating on the screen.  Get outside.  Put your body in unfamiliar places with unfamiliar people.  Make new friends and march with them.

14. Establish a private life.  Nastier rulers will use what they know about you to push you around.  Scrub your computer of malware on a regular basis.  Remember that email is skywriting.  Consider using alternative forms of the internet, or simply using it less.  Have personal exchanges in person.  For the same reason, resolve any legal trouble.  Tyrants seek the hook on which to hang you.  Try not to have hooks.

15. Contribute to good causes.  Be active in organizations, political or not, that express your own view of life.  Pick a charity or two and set up autopay.  Then you will have made a free choice that supports civil society and helps others to do good.

16. Learn from peers in other countries.  Keep up your friendships abroad, or make new friends in other countries.  The present difficulties in the United States are an element of a larger trend.  And no country is going to find a solution by itself.  Make sure you and your family have passports.

17. Listen for dangerous words.  Be alert to use of the words "extremism" and "terrorism."  Be alive to the fatal notions of "emergency" and "exception."  Be angry about the treacherous use of patriotic vocabulary.

18. Be calm when the unthinkable arrives.  Modern tyranny is terror management.  When the terrorist attack comes, remember that authoritarians exploit such events in order to consolidate power.  The sudden disaster that requires the end of checks and balances, the dissolution of opposition parties, the suspension of freedom of expression, the right to a fair trial, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book.  Do not fall for it.

19. Be a patriot.  Set a good example of what America means for the generations to come.  They will need it.

20. Be as courageous as you can.  If none of us is prepared to die for freedom, then all of us will die under tyranny.

These lessons are the openings of the twenty chapters of On Tyranny, which has been updated to account for the Big Lie, the coup attempt, the war in Ukraine, and the risks we face in 2024.  On Tyranny has also been published in a beautiful graphic edition, illustrated by Nora Krug."]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/ai-literacy-part-1-where-angels-fear-to-tread-with-sam-wineburg/">
    <title>AI Literacy Part 1 &quot;Where Angels Fear to Tread&quot; with Sam Wineburg</title>
    <dc:date>2026-01-29T21:46:39+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.teachlabpodcast.com/ai-literacy-part-1-where-angels-fear-to-tread-with-sam-wineburg/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Over the last two years, teachers and schools have felt immense pressure to incorporate AI literacy into their curricula. In the fall of 2024, California became the first state to pass a law mandating AI literacy instruction in schools, and several others have since followed suit. In the summer of 2025, the Department of Education released the AI Action Plan for Education, which stated in part: "The Action Plan encourages schools to teach AI literacy and supports the responsible integration of AI in classrooms. AI is seen as a key education tool to enhance individual student preparation for the real world and to bolster the United States as a leader in AI."

Most major AI companies have pledged significant capital to train teachers or educate students in AI literacy. Google alone has committed over 40 million dollars toward these initiatives, while OpenAI, Microsoft, and NVIDIA have all launched similar donation programs.

But do we actually know what "AI literacy" means? Sam Wineburg doesn't think so. Sam is a professor emeritus of education and history at Stanford and the co-founder of the Digital Inquiry Group. He previously led a landmark study for the Stanford History Education Group (SHEG) that exposed how standard school methods for teaching web literacy were failing K-12 students.

In part one of this two-part miniseries, Wineburg shares his observations on how educators have gotten "literacy" wrong in the past. He suggests there are more responsible ways to adapt to transformative new technologies than to hastily stand up literacy guidelines that may repeat old mistakes."

[via:
https://2ndbreakfast.audreywatters.com/snow-day/ ]]]></description>
<dc:subject>samwineburg justinreich 2024 2025 2026 california education ai artificialintelligence ailiteracy mediliteracy openai webliteracy internet web online curriculum schools schooling literacy inquiry microsoft nvidia google lateraleading howweread reading</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/01/an-invitation-to-the-wonders-of-reading/">
    <title>An Invitation to the Wonders of Reading - Front Porch Republic</title>
    <dc:date>2026-01-23T05:57:25+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/01/an-invitation-to-the-wonders-of-reading/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Through short and accessible chapters, Crosby makes a case for the inspiration that comes through reading. In Part 1, he lays the foundation—the why and what of reading, from stories to scripture.…"]]></description>
<dc:subject>alexsosler 2026 reading howweread scripture jeffcrosby jessicahootenwilson karenswallowprior alanjacobs christianity cslewis philipyancy frederickbuechner eugenepeterson tedkooser</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sold-a-story/id1649580473">
    <title>Sold a Story - Podcast - Apple Podcasts</title>
    <dc:date>2026-01-22T07:10:36+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/sold-a-story/id1649580473</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Millions of kids can't read well. Scientists have known for decades how children learn to read, but many schools don't know about the research. They buy teacher training and books that are rooted in a disproven idea. In Sold a Story, Emily Hanford investigates four authors and a publishing company that have made millions selling this idea."

[Also here:

https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/

"There's an idea about how children learn to read that's held sway in schools for more than a generation — even though it was proven wrong by cognitive scientists decades ago. Teaching methods based on this idea can make it harder for children to learn how to read. In this podcast, host Emily Hanford investigates the influential authors who promote this idea and the company that sells their work. It's an exposé of how educators came to believe in something that isn't true and are now reckoning with the consequences — children harmed, money wasted, an education system upended."

Episodes:

1: The Problem
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/1-the-problem/id1649580473?i=1000583258897

"Lee Gaul watches his daughter’s lessons during Zoom school and discovers a dismaying truth: She can't read. Little Zoe isn't the only one. Sixty-five percent of fourth graders in the United States are not proficient readers. Kids need to learn specific skills to become good readers, and in many schools, those skills are not being taught."

2: The Idea
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/2-the-idea/id1649580473?i=1000583260845

"Sixty years ago, Marie Clay developed a way to teach reading she said would help kids who were falling behind. They’d catch up and never need help again. Today, her program remains popular, and her theory about how people read is at the root of a lot of reading instruction in schools. But Marie Clay was wrong."

3: The Battle
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/3-the-battle/id1649580473?i=1000584047815

"President George W. Bush made improving reading instruction a priority. He got Congress to provide money to schools that used reading programs supported by scientific research. But backers of Marie Clay’s ideas saw Bush’s Reading First initiative as a threat."

4: The Superstar
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/4-the-superstar/id1649580473?i=1000584885997

"Teachers sing songs about Lucy Calkins. The longtime professor at Columbia University’s Teachers College is one of the most influential people in American elementary education today. Her admirers call her books bibles. Why didn't she know that scientific research contradicted reading strategies she promoted?"

5: The Company
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/5-the-company/id1649580473?i=1000585724130

"Teachers call books published by Heinemann their bibles. The company's products are in schools all over the country. Some of the products used to teach reading are rooted in a debunked idea about how children learn to read. But they've made the company and some of its authors millions."

6: The Reckoning
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/6-the-reckoning/id1649580473?i=1000586531339

"Lucy Calkins says she has learned from the science of reading. She's revised her materials. Fountas and Pinnell have not revised theirs. Their publisher, Heinemann, is still selling some products to teach reading that contain debunked practices. Parents, teachers and lawmakers want answers."

7: Your Words
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/7-your-words/id1649580473?i=1000612584598

"Voicemails, emails, tweets: We got a lot of messages from people after they heard Sold a Story. In this episode, we bring you some of their voices. A 10-year-old figures out why he has struggled to read. A mom stays up late to binge the podcast. A teacher confirms what he's suspected for years — he's not really teaching kids how to read."

8: The Impact
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/8-the-impact/id1649580473?i=1000613478838

"Across the country, school districts are dropping textbooks, state legislatures are going so far as to ban teaching methods, and everyone, it seems, is talking about "the science of reading." Things have been changing since Sold a Story was released. In this episode, we tell you about some of the changes and what we think about them."

9: The Aftermath
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/9-the-aftermath/id1649580473?i=1000651386152

"Schools around the country are changing the way they teach reading. And that is having major consequences for people who sold the flawed idea we investigated in Sold a Story. But Lucy Calkins, Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell are fighting back — and fighting to stay relevant. And so are organizations that promoted their work: the Reading Recovery Council of North America and the publisher Heinemann."

10: The Details
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/10-the-details/id1649580473?i=1000652106532

"Some of the teachers, students, parents and researchers we met in Sold a Story talk about the impact the podcast has had on their lives and in schools — and share some of their hopes and concerns about the "science of reading" movement."

11: The Outlier
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/11-the-outlier/id1649580473?i=1000694254052

"There's a school district in eastern Ohio where virtually all the students become good readers by the time they finish third grade. Many of the wealthiest places in the country can't even say that. And Steubenville is a Rust Belt town where the state considers almost all the students "economically disadvantaged." How did they do it?"

12: The Evidence
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/12-the-evidence/id1649580473?i=1000696465281

"There's a name for the program at the heart of Steubenville's remarkable reading results. It's called Success for All. It's been around for decades, and numerous studies have shown it's effective. But relatively few school districts use it. We trace the history of the program and why it's never really caught on."

13: The List
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/13-the-list/id1649580473?i=1000698031283

"Steubenville became a model of reading success. Then a new law in Ohio put it all at risk. In this episode, we look at the "science of reading" lists some states are making, why the program Steubenville has been using for 25 years isn't getting on many of these lists, and the surprising power of one curriculum review group."

14: The Cuts
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/14-the-cuts/id1649580473?i=1000722904221

"Education research is at a turning point in the United States. The Trump administration is slashing government funding for science and dismantling the Department of Education. We look at what the cuts mean for the science of reading — and the effort to get that science into schools."

There are some bonus episodes too.

"Hard to Read: How American Schools Fail Kids with Dyslexia
There are proven ways to help people with dyslexia learn to read, and a federal law that's supposed to ensure schools provide kids with help. But across the country, public schools are denying children proper treatment and often failing to identify them with dyslexia in the first place."

"Hard Words: Why Aren't Our Kids Being Taught to Read?
Scientific research has shown how children learn to read and how they should be taught. But many educators don't know the science and, in some cases, actively resist it. As a result, millions of kids are being set up to fail."

"At a Loss for Words: What's Wrong with How Schools Teach Reading
For decades, schools have taught children the strategies of struggling readers, using a theory about reading that cognitive scientists have repeatedly debunked. And many teachers and parents don't know there's anything wrong with it."

"What the Words Say
A false assumption about what it takes to be a skilled reader has created deep inequalities among U.S. children, putting many on a difficult path in life."

"Brains On: How Do We Learn to Read — and Why is It Hard?
This week we have an episode of a show called Brains On. It’s a science podcast for kids from our colleagues at APM. In this episode, Emily joins the Brains On hosts to talk about how people learn to read. Grab the kids in your life and listen to this special episode made for kids and curious adults.

"Emily Hanford LIVE from Planet Word with Reid Lyon and Margaret Goldberg
Early in her teaching career, Margaret Goldberg was skeptical of the science of reading. Today, she is working with neuroscientist Reid Lyon to bring it into more classrooms. Lyon and Goldberg joined Sold a Story host Emily Hanford for a live conversation about the challenges of translating research into practice. The event was part of the Eyes on Reading series at Planet Word, a museum in Washington, D.C., dedicated to words and language."]]]></description>
<dc:subject>reading education schools policy 2022 curriculum emilhanford christopherpeak heinemann lucycalkins marieclay howweread learning howwelearn schooling georgewbush leegaul fountasandpinnell publishing reidlyon margaretgoldberg children dyslexia inequality cogntion law research steubenville successforall irenefoundtas gaysupinnell textbooks soldastory</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/the-dream-of-the-universal-library">
    <title>The Dream of the Universal Library—Asterisk</title>
    <dc:date>2026-01-22T05:52:15+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://asteriskmag.com/issues/12-books/the-dream-of-the-universal-library</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["The Internet promised easy access to every book ever written. Why can’t we have nice things?"]]></description>
<dc:subject>internet libraries 2026 monicawestin books reading howweread kevinkelly web online michaelgorman google googlebooks digitization llms digitaloptimism digital 2006 2004 copyright licensing 1997 2015 law legal internetarchive</dc:subject>
<dc:source>https://pinboard.in/</dc:source>
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<item rdf:about="https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/">
    <title>Velocity Is the New Authority. Here’s Why – On my Om</title>
    <dc:date>2026-01-22T05:22:32+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://om.co/2026/01/21/velocity-is-the-new-authority-heres-why/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Why does everyone feel overwhelmed by information? Why does it feel impossible to trust what passes through our streams? We tend to blame individual publications, specific platforms, or bad actors. The real answer has less to do with any single media entity and more with structural changes in the information ecosystem.

I started my “information” life typing copy on an ill-tempered Remington. As a teenage reporter, I saw newspapers being typeset, one letter at a time. It was a messy, slow, and laborious process. So I don’t carry romantic notions about the old days. I’ve been quick to embrace any technology that, in Stephen Covey’s words, helps me keep “the main thing the main thing.” The main thing is telling a thoroughly reported, well-written story.

The early 1990s Internet, followed by blogging at the turn of the century, and social media a decade later all helped me do that main thing. In the mid-2000s I embraced Dave Winer’s mantra of “sources going direct.” As far back as 2009, I outlined the coming changes in my essays “How Internet Content Distribution and Discovery Are Changing” and “Amplification and the Changing Role of Media.”

For the past decade and a half, the whole information ecosystem has become much larger, faster and noiser. It is hardly surprising that nothing works. And we feel a collective sense of overwhelming disappointment. 

So, why does nothing work?

Authority used to be the organizing principle of information, and thus the media. You earned attention by being right, by being first in discovery, or by being big enough to be the default. That world is gone. The new and current organizing principle of information is velocity.

What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.

With so much coming at us all the time, it is difficult to give any single story or news event much weight. More content means already fragmented attention fractures even further. 

Greenland, Iran, Venezuela, Epstein Files, Dodgers. On and on.

Networks have always shaped how societies are organized. Roman roads didn’t just make travel easier; they mapped the reach of the state and the limits of power. Shipping routes determined where colonial empires flourished and where they faded. In the Victorian age, the railways didn’t just shorten journeys; they rearranged British society. 

They created commuting and leisure, turned market towns into suburbs, standardized national time, and collapsed the meaning of distance. They also reordered authority: timetables mattered as much as parliaments. What looks like cultural choice is often the echo of infrastructure. Today’s mobile, cloud-linked world is another Victorian moment. Networks compress time and space, then quietly train us to live at their speed.

That’s why we get all our information as memes. The meme has become the metastory, the layer where meaning is carried. You don’t need to read the thing; you just need the gist, compressed and passed along in a sentence, an image, or a joke. It has taken the role of the headline. The machine accelerates this dynamic. It demands constant material; stop feeding it and the whole structure shakes. The point of the internet now is mostly to hook attention and push it toward commerce, to keep the engine running. Anyone can get their cut.

Velocity has taken over. 

Algorithms on YouTube, Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, and Twitter do not optimize for truth or depth. They optimize for motion. A piece that moves fast is considered “good.” A piece that hesitates disappears. There are almost no second chances online because the stream does not look back. People are not failing the platforms. People are behaving exactly as the platforms reward. We might think we are better, but we have the same rat-reward brain. 

We built machines that prize acceleration and then act puzzled that everything feels rushed and slightly manic. The networks of the past were slower and at a scale that was adaptable. I wrote about this years ago, and nothing since has disproved it. So when the author of “beliefs outrun facts” says nothing works, now you know why.

The fundamental network-level changes should give you a good idea of why we have a growing ambivalent relationship toward media as an organized information entity. I will get into technology media from startup perspective in a separate piece. For now, I will stick to the broader media ecosystem.

Let’s use YouTube technology reviews as a case study, because they are universally understandable. Take the launch of a new phone: when the embargo lifts, dozens of polished video reviews appear on YouTube. They run about 20 minutes, share similar thumbnails, and use the same mood lighting. The reviewers had access to the phones before everyone else, so they had time to prepare their reviews.

In the old days, before the current phase of content abundance, folks like Walt Mossberg, Ed Baig, David Pogue, and Steven Levy were often the first to get Apple products for review. Sure, these folks had big platforms, but that head startgave them a lot of clout, which meant many non-Apple companies offered them early access to their products. I never felt cheated or misled by their reviews, though I did notice what they omitted after using the product for a few months.

These days, things are markedly different. For YouTubers, access is the currency of survival. Access, of course, means suggested talking points. Again, nothing new. What’s different is that every reviewer knows that if they paint outside the lines, they’ll lose access. If you don’t have the review out when the embargo lifts, it doesn’t matter if you have a better review; no one is going to notice.

The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it. The “review” at launch outperforms the review written two months later by orders of magnitude. The second, longer, more in-depth, more honest review might as well not exist. It’s not that people are less honest by nature. It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking.

We built systems that reward acceleration, then act surprised when everything feels rushed, shallow, and slightly manic. People do what the network rewards. Writers write for the feed. Photographers shoot for the scroll. Newsrooms frame stories as conflict because conflict travels faster than nuance. Even our emotional lives adapt to latency and refresh cycles. The design of the network becomes the choreography of daily life.

In older networks, the constraints were physical. The number of train lines limited where cities could grow. The number of printing presses limited how many voices could speak. In our case, the constraint is temporal: how fast something can be produced, clicked, shared, and replaced. When velocity becomes the scarcest resource, everything orients around it. This is why it’s wrong to think of “the algorithm” as some quirky technical layer that can be toggled on and off or worked around. The algorithm is the culture. It decides what gets amplified, who gets to make a living, and what counts as “success.”

Once velocity is the prize, quality becomes risky. Thoughtfulness takes time. Reporting takes time. Living with a product or an idea takes time. Yet the window for relevance keeps shrinking, and the penalty for lateness is erasure. We get a culture optimized for first takes, not best takes. The network doesn’t ask if something is correct or durable, only if it moves. If it moves, the system will find a way to monetize it.

The algorithm doesn’t care whether something is true; it cares whether it moves. Day-one content becomes advertising wearing the mask of criticism.

All of this folds back into a larger point. When attention is fragmented and speed becomes the dominant value, media rearranges itself around that reality. Not because anyone wakes up wanting to mislead people, but because the context makes some paths survivable and others impossible.

The YouTube algorithm is the real enforcer because it rewards velocity. Get into the algorithmic slip stream and you get the numbers and make money. So it is no surprise that most day-one reviews are, well, anything but. This goes back to my original premise that when velocity becomes the defining metric, authority is displaced.

You don’t need to be right; you need to be first in the feed. Generalize this beyond YouTube tech reviews and you see the same pattern everywhere. I’m flabbergasted by how much good journalism goes unnoticed every day. We didn’t just put journalism, entertainment, politics, and private lives on networks. We let the networks rewrite what those things are forand how they work.

None of what I am saying is new. Decades ago the media sage Marshall McLuhan summed it up in his timeless phrase, “The medium is the message.” The medium, the technology or channel of communication, influences society and individuals more profoundly than the content, altering our senses and habits and, in turn, our perception, interaction, and culture. The only difference is that network is like a hydra, and data is the fuel that adds velocity, the new metric of perceived reality.

The cost of all this isn’t abstract. It’s the review that took three months, and no one will read it. It’s the investigation that requires patience. It’s the work of understanding before passing judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. In a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.

The cost of all this isn’t abstract. It’s the review that took three months but no one will read. It’s the investigation that required patience. It’s the work of understanding something before declaring judgment. All of it still exists, still gets made. It just doesn’t travel. And in a system where only what travels matters, we’ve made expertise indistinguishable from noise.

In the age of AI, will any of this matter when our idea of information will be entirely different?"]]></description>
<dc:subject>internet web online speed velocity ommalik 2026 howweread reading writing howwewrite socialmedia youtube acceleration attention noise information authority media society netwoeks commerce algorithms instagram facebook twitter tiktok journalism thoughfulness relevance thought howwethink fragmentation marshallmcluhan ai artificialintelligence</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/why-everyone-needs-to-think-like">
    <title>Why Everyone Needs to Think Like a Librarian Now</title>
    <dc:date>2026-01-21T20:27:06+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://cardcatalogforlife.substack.com/p/why-everyone-needs-to-think-like</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Your ChatGPT is confident, wrong, and waiting for you to ask better questions."]]></description>
<dc:subject>reading howweread librarians libraries literacy medialiteracy chatgpt ai artificialintelligence 2025 hanaleegoldin inquiry howwelearn search query learning information informationliteracy authority process prompts</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/text-is-king">
    <title>Text is king - by Adam Mastroianni - Experimental History</title>
    <dc:date>2026-01-21T07:46:11+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.experimental-history.com/p/text-is-king</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["I have one more gripe against the “death of literacy” hypothesis, and against Walter Ong, the Jesuit priest/English professor whose book Orality and Literacy provides the intellectual backbone for the argument.

Most of the differences between oral and literate cultures are actually differences between non-recorded and recorded cultures. And even if our culture has become slightly less literate, it has become far more recorded.

As Ong points out, in an oral culture, the only way for information to pass from one generation to another is for someone to remember and repeat it.4 This is bit like trying to maintain a music collection with nothing but a first-generation iPod: you can’t store that much, so you have to make tradeoffs. Oral traditions are chock full of repetition, archetypal characters, and intuitive ideas, because that’s what it takes to make something memorable. Precise facts, on the other hand, are like 10-gigabyte files—they’re going to get compressed, corrupted, or deleted.

Writing is one way of solving the storage problem, but it’s not the only way, and we use those other ways now more than ever. Humans took an estimated 2 trillion photos in 2025, and 20 million videos get uploaded to YouTube every day. No one knows how many spreadsheets, apps, or code files we make. Each one of these formats allows us to retain different kinds of information, and it causes us to think in a different register. What psychology is unlocked by Photoshop, iMovie, and Excel?

There is something unique about text, no doubt, and I’m sure a purely pictographic, videographic, or spreadsheet-graphic culture would be rather odd and probably dysfunctional. But having more methods of storage makes us better at transmitting knowledge, not worse, and they allow us to surpass the cognitive limits that so strongly shape oral culture.

Put another way: hearing a bard recite The Iliad around a campfire is nothing like streaming the song “Golden” on YouTube. That bard is going to add his own flourishes, he’s going to cut out the bits that might offend his audience, he’s probably going to misremember some stanzas, and no one will be able to fact-check him. In contrast, the billionth stream of “Golden” is exactly the same as the first. Even if people spend less time reading, it is impossible to return to a world where every fact that isn’t memorized is simply lost. I don’t believe we are nearly as close to a post-literate society as the critics think, but I also don’t believe that a post-literate society is going to bear much resemblance to a pre-literate society."]]></description>
<dc:subject>adammastroianni text reading howweread writing howwewrite 2026 form media books intrnet web online smartphones socialmedia enshittification radion tv television history wifi tiktok orality literacy walterong secondaryorality culture society photography video</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.zendalibros.com/borges-por-piglia-de-ricardo-piglia/">
    <title>Borges por Piglia, de Ricardo Piglia - Zenda</title>
    <dc:date>2026-01-20T05:50:37+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.zendalibros.com/borges-por-piglia-de-ricardo-piglia/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["La editorial Eterna Cadencia publica un libro que reúne las cuatro clases magistrales que Ricardo Piglia dictó en la TV Pública argentina en 2013. La edición está a cargo de Daniela Portas, colaboradora de Piglia, y el epílogo es de Edgardo Dieleke, crítico cultural y editor.

En Zenda reproducimos el arranque de la primera clase de Borges por Piglia (Eterna Cadencia), de Ricardo Piglia."

[See also:

"Borges por Piglia" (playlist of four videos)
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZFywf-9AMzzgs1Y9yW2h61iNb7mTurnY

"La Biblioteca Nacional Mariano Moreno y la TV Pública presentan un nuevo ciclo de clases abiertas a cargo de Ricardo Piglia dedicadas a revisitar la obra literaria de Jorge Luis Borges. En cuatro programas especiales que se emitiron por la TV Pública, Ricardo Piglia abordó con un enfoque original la obra de Borges, buscando renovar y replantear las conceptualizaciones clásicas."

links to each four...

"Borges, por Piglia - Clase 1 (07-09-13)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yelG-mQKnMc

"Compartimos "Borges, un escritor argentino" el primero de un ciclo de cuatro programas especiales de clases abiertas de Ricardo Piglia para analizar la obra de Jorge Luis Borges, en una segunda producción conjunta entre la TV Pública y la Biblioteca Nacional que pone al alcance de todo el país a uno de los más talentosos intelectuales contemporáneos buscando renovar y replantear las conceptualizaciones clásicas. En esta clase contamos con la participación especial de la socióloga y ensayista María Pía López y de la escritora Paola Cortés Rocca."

"Borges, por Piglia - Clase 2 (14-09-13)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DM5uy4Ndt0E

"Compartimos "Memoria y violencia en Borges", el segundo de un ciclo de cuatro programas especiales de clases abiertas de Ricardo Piglia para analizar la obra de Jorge Luis Borges, en una segunda producción conjunta entre la TV Pública y la Biblioteca Nacional que pone al alcance de todo el país a uno de los más talentosos intelectuales contemporáneos buscando renovar y replantear las conceptualizaciones clásicas. En esta clase contamos con la participación especial de los escritores Germán Maggiori y Marcos Herrera."

"Borges, por Piglia - Clase 3 (21-09-13)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qp93XMyKcXM

"Compartimos "La biblioteca y el lector en Borges", el tercero de un ciclo de cuatro programas especiales de clases abiertas de Ricardo Piglia para analizar la obra de Jorge Luis Borges, en una segunda producción conjunta entre la TV Pública y la Biblioteca Nacional que pone al alcance de todo el país a uno de los más talentosos intelectuales contemporáneos buscando renovar y replantear las conceptualizaciones clásicas. En esta clase contamos con la participación especial de los escritores Mario Ortiz y Luis Sagasti."

"Borges, por Piglia - Clase 4 (28-09 -13)"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UeC1PJ1_2l8

"Compartimos "Historia y política en Borges", el cuarto y último programa especial de clases abiertas de Ricardo Piglia para analizar la obra de Jorge Luis Borges, en una segunda producción conjunta entre la TV Pública y la Biblioteca Nacional que pone al alcance de todo el país a uno de los más talentosos intelectuales contemporáneos buscando renovar y replantear las conceptualizaciones clásicas. En esta clase contamos con la participación especial del director de la Biblioteca Nacional, Horacio González y del historiador Javier Trímboli."]]]></description>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.vulture.com/article/justin-mcdaniel-existential-despair-course.html">
    <title>Justin McDaniel Found a Way to Make Students Read Again</title>
    <dc:date>2026-01-18T00:16:41+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.vulture.com/article/justin-mcdaniel-existential-despair-course.html</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Gluttons for Punishment
Justin McDaniel has developed a cult following for getting his students to read — as long as they follow his rules."

[via:
https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/01/memorization-gamification-sanctification/

"Lila Shapiro reports on a strange teacher with a strange method of getting students to read. McDaniel doesn’t sound like a healthy man, and cults of personality are also unhealthy, but I’m always intrigued by these Ernest-Shackleton-style sales pitches that seem compelling in a milieu where many students are desperate for someone to give them a challenge: “In his popular class Existential Despair, the students gather one evening each week for seven or eight hours to read an entire book in total silence, then discuss it in a darkened classroom. Some had never read a whole novel before. ‘I’d be lucky if I got through one every four years,’ said a recent graduate named Ryan, who has floppy hair parted in the middle and a marketing degree from Wharton, Penn’s business school. After McDaniel’s class, he said, ‘I got into a rhythm: Every night before bed, I put my phone in another room and I knocked out one chapter.’”"]]]></description>
<dc:subject>reading howweread teaching howweteach education colleges universities pedagogy justinmcdaniel academia 2206 lilashapiro attention upenn</dc:subject>
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<item rdf:about="https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/01/in-praise-of-bibliographies/">
    <title>In Praise of Bibliographies, by Christine Norvell (2026) - Front Porch Republic</title>
    <dc:date>2026-01-15T20:47:16+00:00</dc:date>
    <link>https://www.frontporchrepublic.com/2026/01/in-praise-of-bibliographies/</link>
    <dc:creator>robertogreco</dc:creator><description><![CDATA["Accessible and hospitable."

...

"Whenever I’ve taught research methods to middle school and high school students, I’ve often claimed a magic resource exists for the object of their research. Sometimes, just sometimes, a scholar, author, or historian is so fluent in their topic that they clearly credit numerous others in a single text. And that book is magic in its ability to point to ideas, connections, subtopics, and other books and journals. I attempt to inspire my students to read bibliographies and endnotes with that in mind, to think of it like an investigation. Some do find a magic resource, but only a few experience the thrill of the hunt and the sigh of relief that help has been found.

Sometimes you find that magic book in a bibliography; sometimes it’s hiding in an old-school footnote, “See Charles Augustus Milverton for further thoughts on acquiring the personal correspondence of others (Blackmailing for Everyone, 1880).” I look it up, and there it is. Milverton has already done a chunk of research and written on the very thing I need! I order the book immediately. If only it were always this easy.

I found this to be true years ago in my own research stacks when I was reading lots of Willa Cather’s short and long fiction. The fiction I could find easily, but I also had to know what other scholars had already said. I wouldn’t want my research interest (or thesis!) to duplicate another’s. In my early Cather research, I was borrowing books from within the local library system and through interlibrary loans. Some books were helpful. Many were not. It’s the age-old riddle of research work, much like perusing a flea market looking for a valuable antique. I had to determine what was valuable to me. That Cather culling helped me know what to invest in and literally purchase for my own library.

I distinctly remember Sharon O’Brien’s Willa Cather: The Emerging Voice (Oxford University Press, 1987). O’Brien wove biography and literary analysis together, which was easy to see at the end of each chapter in her extensive footnotes. That, along with a thorough subject index, made it a handy resource.

Predating O’Brien’s work, though, was James Woodress’s Willa Cather: Her Life and Art (University of Nebraska Press, 1970). His “Bibliography and Notes” section was and is a wonder! Woodress introduced it “as a convenience for the reader,” and it was—a convenience store gas station with everything you could want. Woodress first listed Cather’s works in order, a perfectly normal and expected aid, but then he detailed all the books written about her before his book was published in 1970, all before the Wiki lists of the internet existed. Chapter by chapter, Woodress proceeded to explain where he found his information and where he made his connections. He credited all of those in the Cather community who had gone before him and made it incredibly easy to find needed resources. It was much more than an annotated bibliography.

Here’s an example. Chapter 4 is titled “Literary Debut,” and Woodress’s bibliographic notes begin by mentioning where the Nebraska State Journal letters were reprinted in Europe and in The World and the Parish. He kindly says fellow scholar Brown needs to update his notes about this fact. Then Woodress lists two articles from 1903 and 1958 before describing where Cather’s original version of the poem “Prairie Dawn” was published before she made “substantive changes.” For anyone trying to chase connections between her letters and publications or researching the fine points of a given year, Woodress is like a brilliant investigator, generously sharing his notes for every chapter

For decades, many books across subjects have included a “Further Reading” section, perhaps providing a statement or brief paragraph for certain resources. It’s not a new practice, but it’s hardly standard. I have hope that that is changing. In “Bibliographies for the People: How Trade Books Can Effectively Communicate Our Expertise,” Rhiannon Garth Jones and Matthew Gabriele offer a newer idea, an extension of traditional annotation. Jones and Gabriele describe how they came to write their bibliographies, hospitably catering to both the academic and the public reader, to those who had asked them as historians, Where do I start to learn about . . .?

By way of example, Gabriele describes how he and his co-author in The Bright Ages: A New History of Medieval Europe (Harper, 2021) created their “Further Reading” section. Like Woodress, they proceed with a chapter-by-chapter approach, introducing readers to “general overviews, cutting-edge scholarship on specific topics, and, perhaps most important, primary sources in translation.” It’s a passion project. They share their expertise while acknowledging the scholars before them. They call it a discursive bibliography, “an invitation to the reader to explore the past with us as historians.”

Jones also includes a traditional bibliography in her All Roads Lead to Rome: Why We Think of the Roman Empire Daily, but in addition to these chapter-by-chapter notes, she chose to include a separate section with citations for publicly accessible resources like podcasts, public essays and blogs, open-access translations of primary sources, and trade books or books available for free online. Jones calls it citation ethics, properly acknowledging fellow scholars but also making a way for interested readers. Accessibility and hospitality are intentional.

I think authors should revel in their investigative work and model all the good research methods for our students. What if bibliographies were not required afterthoughts of citation ethics but instead showcases? I’ve only mentioned a few creative forms of bibliographies, endnotes, and “Further Reading” sections. There are so many in publication already, and there should be many more in the future. As I finished my “discursive” bibliography for a completed manuscript, I’m happy to acknowledge that I found three magic resources, books that meant everything to me in my meandering research, authors that freely shared their knowledge and passion, allowing me to connect parts of my life and new ideas to those of the past. I hope to do the same."]]></description>
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