Some time in the coming months, tickets will go on sale for the fall production of Waiting for Godot on Broadway — a new production starring Alex Winter and Keanu Reeves — and I swear to you right now, I am already ready to hit the “buy” button. I first read Samuel
That was when they suspended the Constitution. They said it would be temporary. There wasn't even any rioting in the streets. People stayed home at night, watching television, looking for some direction. There wasn't even an enemy you could put your finger on. – Margaret Atwood, The
“DeepSeek R1,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen declared last week, “is AI’s Sputnik moment.” And as Sputnik – in its original 1957 instantiation and in its subsequent and repeated invocations – has always shaped education policy, particularly in regard to ed-tech, I thought I’d better say something. But one of the
"AI Will Empower Humanity," says Reid Hoffman, venture capitalist, OpenAI funder, co-founder of Linkedin, and member (along with Peter Thiel, David O. Sacks, and Elon Musk) of the "PayPal Mafia." (Related, from The Guardian's Chris McGreal: "How the roots of the ‘PayPal mafia’
Ideally, on Monday mornings, I've got an essay for you. (Schedule of events here at Second Breakfast: Monday’s newsletter: essay, most of it for paid subscribers; Friday’s: the week’s news, yay! the news!, for everyone.) Although the word “essay” comes from the French essayer (to
One of the things I told myself when I decided to return to writing about education technology was that, thanks to therapy (and, no doubt, to leaving social media), I’d learned how to better manage my emotions around the onslaught of very-bad-news. This week has been a real test.
“AI Literacy.” We’re going to be hearing a lot about this in the coming months, I reckon, as various ed-tech consultants and entrepreneurs hustle to capitalize on the generative AI hype – before the next “AI winter” sets in, at least. Tacking the word “literacy” to the tail-end of the
I regret to inform you that Paul Graham, investor and founder of the startup training program Y Combinator, has published a new essay: "The Origins of Wokeness." You can tell the political bent of his screed by the invocation of "woke," no doubt. But at this
Congestion pricing finally went into effect in New York City last week, over 15 years since the idea was first proposed. The new program charges a toll on vehicles (capped at $9/day for passenger vehicles) that drive in the central business district of Manhattan – that is, everything south of
Apparently there’s been an "incident" at PowerSchool. An incident. A breach. A hack. NBD, just one of the largest ed-tech companies in the world, provider of a student information system for about 16,000 schools (75% of districts in the US), the central piece of digital infrastructure
When Rip Van Winkle awakened and stumbled back to his village, everything was different. His house lay in ruins; most of the people he knew, he quickly discovered, were dead. And yet surprisingly little had changed – surprising, considering he’d slept for twenty years, considering there’d been a rather
Happy New Year! Let's all take a deep breath, because 2025 going to be a weird one. "Do not obey in advance," historian Timothy Snyder cautions. "Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a
