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Snow Day
I'm working on a longer essay that I hope to finish up this weekend, but in the meantime, I wanted to send out a list of links to other important stories, essays, podcasts. I say "that I hope to finish up this weekend," but my weekend
The Storm Before the Calm
The Ruffled Mind
There's a scene in the 1927 film Metropolis in which Freder, the son of the city's mayor, is playing in the "pleasure garden" when a young woman named Maria brings the children of the working class up to see how their wealthy brethren live.
This Whole Ordeal
Spot the Difference
"School hasn't changed in hundreds of years." So goes the story invoked by politicians, entrepreneurs, and journalists -- a cliche often followed with an urgent call for school administrators to buy and teachers to adopt the latest technological gadgetry, gadgetry that's poised so these
The Magic Porridge Pot
Un-Listed
I've started and paused and restarted this email several times. I thought I'd send it Monday, then Wednesday, and now look: it's Friday afternoon (my time). We're already a week into the new year. Conventionally, “it’s a bit late to say
Days Gone By
What a terrible year. Good riddance to today being the very last of it. Way back when I used to publish things on Hack Education, I was always proud of my end-of-year stories -- the series of articles I posted annually that tried to chronicle all the incredibly awfulness that
Cereal Killer
Nothing But Flowers
The plan for December was to focus on a big writing project (okay, a book proposal), mostly pausing these weekly emails in order to write other things; but here we are, mid-month and I've accomplished very little towards that end. (You're still getting the odd newsletter,
The Off Season
The Right to Say "No"
A reminder: Second Breakfast is on hiatus until the new year. Well, sort of, as here's a Second Breakfast email in your inbox. There are a couple of weeks' worth of news articles to link to, to be sure – the usual Friday stuff. But I've
Sputnik Deja Vu
I gave this presentation on Monday afternoon at Yale University. The talk was co-sponsored by the Department of Political Science, DOWN Magazine, the Education Studies Program, and The Politic. A huge thank-you to Jennifer Berkshire for inviting me and having me speak to her students. This is the May 1958
AI Grief Observed
These remarks were delivered this evening at the Creatively Critical Tech Speaker Series at Illinois State University. "There is no good way to say this." These are the opening words of Yiyun Li’s latest book Things in Nature Only Grow about life after the death by suicide
The Last Word
The Ketchup
Today's bird is the Adélie penguin; the subject of today's email, the condiment – both attempts to reference Pittsburgh PA, where I'm in town to speak at a technology and ethics conference at Duquesne University. I am still very much in recovery mode from Sunday&
The Marathon
The Run Up
Now Is the Time of Monsters
"AI slop is winning," writes The Atlantic's Charlie Warzel. By volume alone, slop may be the most visible and successful by-product of the generative-AI era to date. It is also a hallmark of what I’ve previously described as a collective delusion around artificial intelligence—where
Unlearning, Unchanged
Political commentator Frank Rich recently wrote a lengthy essay for New York Magazine on the mayoral candidacy of Zohran Mamdani. The headline, "The Power Breaker," is surely a play on the title of Robert Caro's biography of Robert Moses, the man who infamously used his power
Fan Tale
Bad Taste, Unfulfilling
I regret to inform you that certain political pundits and education reformers are calling for the return of "high stakes testing." Or at least David Frum talked to former Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings in a recent podcast published by The Atlantic where this dismal idea was (once
