Public Offering, Public Sacrifice
Despite a last minute call from Senator Elizabeth Warren to delay the IPO, SpaceX is set to go public today, making Elon Musk, already the world’s richest man and surely one of its most unsavory, into the world's first trillionaire. In a letter to the SEC, Warren
Back Step
At What Cost?
I’m a couple of weeks behind on sharing links, so apologies for the length of this email and for the outdatedness of some of the news therein. But I devoted much of last week, as I noted in Saturday’s missive, to reading the Pope’s encyclical letter, and
Sleeping Off Your Demons
Moral Panic, Moral Imagination
It's become quite commonplace to charge those of us who challenge technology – specifically children's use of technology -- with fomenting some sort of "moral panic." To do so invokes a long history of opposition to television and rock-n-roll and video games and comic
Of Course They Booed
Every spring, we get a flood of stories about college graduation ceremonies -- typically full of tut-tutting about inappropriate behavior or inappropriate speech -- always presented as synecdochical of all of higher ed. Oh sure sure, there’s often the odd tale of triumph: someone’s service dog gets a diploma;
Up and Down and Against
Self-Driving School
“The only thing that matters is the future,” he told me after the civil trial was settled. “I don’t even know why we study history. It’s entertaining, I guess -- the dinosaurs and the Neanderthals and the Industrial Revolution, and stuff like that. But what already happened doesn’t
That Damned LMS Dependency
For the second time in less than a year, a major disruption to the learning management system Canvas has prompted cries (and headlines) that “we can’t do school!” In the fall of 2025, an Amazon Web Services outage rendered the LMS inaccessible. At the time, Wired spoke to dozens
Saunter
Broken Record
I often feel like I’m repeating myself here, because in fact I am. I am, in part, because ed-tech entrepreneurs and evangelists keep repackaging the same ideas, desperate to sound innovative instead of stuck in some Cold War science fiction fantasy. “Intelligent tutoring systems” become “adaptive learning” then