Asteroid Day, June 30, 2026

Asteroid Day, June 30, 2026

Asteroid Day was cofounded in 2014 (the year after the 2013 Chelyabinsk meteor air burst) by physicist Stephen Hawking, B612 Foundation president Danica Remy, Apollo 9 astronaut Rusty Schweickart, filmmaker Grigorij Richters, and Brian May (Queen guitarist and astrophysicist). Remy, Schweickart, Richters, and May initiated Asteroid Day in October 2014, which they announced during a press conference. It was launched on December 3, 2014.

In 2016, the United Nations proclaimed Asteroid Day be observed globally on June 30 every year in its resolution. The event aims to raise awareness about asteroids and what can be done to protect the Earth, its families, communities, and future generations from a catastrophic event. - Wikipedia

See also: Asteroid Day 2026: What Is It and How to Celebrate It?

There are about a million asteroids in the Solar System with the potential to strike Earth and destroy a city. Astronomers have discovered only 1% of them. Asteroid Day is an effort to educate the public and encourage policy makers to fund this important effort.

King Tut may have celebrated an ancient Asteroid Day by asking his assistants to make a dagger out of a broken-off asteroid that landed on Earth. Astronomers discovered that the blade of the knife contained much more nickel than is found in terrestrial iron, an amount consistent with iron meteorites, especially with one found in the year 2000 in the Kharga region in northern Egypt. For more information about the dagger, go to http://goo.gl/BHBivd. (via: Bruce Palmquist, Daily Record)

[ed. Brian May was also an astrophysicist? Wow. A man of many talents. Another one would be Jeff "Skunk" Baxter, guitarist for Steely Dan and US missile defense contractor/consultant.]

June 23, 1988: James Hansen Testified to Senate About Climate Change

Coal is the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet. . . . the dirtiest trick that governments play on their citizens is that they are working for ‘clean coal.’ . . .The trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death. — James Hansen

On June 23, 1988, NASA scientist James Hansen testified to the U.S. Senate stating the greenhouse effect had been detected, indicating that the climate was in fact changing.

Hansen was also arrested on this day in 2009 during a protest against mountaintop removal mining at Massey Energy Company.

Hansen has stated,

Several times in Earth’s long history rapid global warming of several degrees occurred. . . In each case more than half of plant and animal species went extinct. New species came into being over tens and hundreds of thousands of years. But these are time scales and generations that we cannot imagine. If we drive our fellow species to extinction we will leave a far more desolate planet for our descendants than the world that we inherited from our elders.

by Zinn Education Project |  Read more:

Image: uncredited
[ed.  "According to science historian Spencer R. Weart, Hansen's testimony increased public awareness of climate change. According to Richard Besel of California Polytechnic State University, Hansen's testimony "was an important turning point in the history of global climate change." According to Timothy M. O'Donnell of the University of Mary Washington, Hansen's testimony was "pivotal," "ignited public discussion of global warming and moved the controversy from a largely scientific discussion to a full blown science policy debate," and marked "the official beginning of the global warming policy debate." According to Roger A. Pielke of the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Hansen's "call to action" "elevated the subject of global warming and the specter of associated impacts such as more hurricanes, floods, and heat waves, to unprecedented levels of attention from the public, media, and policy makers." - Wikipedia.]

[ed. Which was all it took for climate change skeptics to spring into action, and here we are...]

AI in Biology

If you wind your way through a quiet, wooded suburb outside of The City, you’ll reach a harbor. Situated on a hill overlooking the water, there is a Temple of Science. This Temple is centered around a task of the utmost importance: preserving a magical thread that connects the past, present, and future of the life sciences.

On one end, there is a gentle tug from the ghosts of Barbara McClintock, Martha Chase, and Alfred Hershey, reminding you of their elegant experiments that became part of the canon of genetics. Farther along, figures like Jim Watson grip the thread more fervently as they advocate for the centrality of their discoveries in the birth of molecular biology. If you put one hand in front of the other and continue to follow where it takes you, you’ll pass through the rise of genomics and end up on the frontier of biology.

Of course, I’m talking about Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. For over one hundred years, this little research institute in Long Island, New York has punched well above its weight. CSHL played a critical role in multiple paradigm shifts in biology—including genetics, molecular biology, and genomics—as evidenced by the eight Nobel Prizes awarded to researchers from “The Lab” over the years. When normalizing for size, the Nature Index ranked CSHL as the most prolific biomedical research institution in the world.

I’ll never forget my first visit to The Lab. In February of 2020, I flew from Seattle to interview for the CSHL graduate school program. Famously (among researchers on the grad school interview circuit), they would arrange for each recruit to be picked up in a black car from the airport.

The campus itself, which is a direct physical representation of the magical thread that The Lab preserves, is equally memorable. A cluster of pristinely maintained colonial buildings, each painted white, borders the water. Above them is the Upper Campus, consisting of darker, modern renditions of the same pattern. Scientific art installations—like the Waltz of the Polypeptides or a gazebo with a phage structure on the tip—can be found along the walking trails.

Over the course of three days, I hurried around The Lab for a wide range of activities, including eleven interviews with faculty—two to three times the number that most other graduate school programs typically scheduled. It was wonderful and intense.

Ultimately, I was persuaded to go west for graduate school. Thankfully, there are many reasons to continue coming back to CSHL, which has been described as “the crossroads of biology.” Each year, they host dozens of conferences and courses that draw top researchers from around the world.

But one particular conference stands out in importance. Since 1933, CSHL has hosted an annual Symposium on Quantitative Biology. Reginald Harris, who conceived of the conference, wrote that the “primary motive of the conference symposia is to consider a given biological problem from its chemical, physical and mathematical, as well as from its biological aspects.” In retrospect, this was visionary.

Over the next several decades, chemists and physicists would revolutionize the life sciences. In 1944, Erwin Schrödinger, a leading physicist, wrote What is Life?, a book exploring open questions in biology through a new lens. It inspired many researchers and students, including a young James Watson, to pursue biological research. In 1953, at the 20th annual CSHL Symposium, Watson presented the structure of DNA for the first time in public.

For obvious reasons, this gave the CSHL Symposia a sort of “mythic quality” moving forward. This reputation compounded quickly. Over the next 15 years, the pioneers of molecular genetics would travel each year to present their most important discoveries—such as the central dogma and the genetic code—at CSHL.

The tradition continues to this day. Each year, the Symposium is organized around a topic considered to represent the frontier of life sciences research.

Which brings us to the topic of the 90th Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Symposium on Quantitative Biology: AI in Biology.

Readers of this newsletter are not strangers to the fact that AI is reshaping biology. The tools derived from breakthroughs such as AlphaFold have been adopted by seemingly all biologists at this point. But it was stunning to see these advances celebrated so prominently in this venue. It felt historical.

As Bruce Stillman, CSHL’s current President, pointed out in his opening remarks, this topic connects back to the very origin of the Symposia—as the name suggests. Harris had spotted the emergence of a new quantitative paradigm in biology. Between then and now, molecular genetics did in fact transform biology into an information science.

It’s becoming more clear each day that the next chapter of this story is AI. Sydney Brenner, one of the most central figures of molecular biology, gave one of the most incisive criticisms of the field in his Nobel Prize lecture: “We’re drowning in a sea of data and starving for knowledge.” AI is starting to change that equation.

For five days, top researchers in the field shared updates on their efforts to use machine learning to decipher the mechanisms of DNA, RNA, proteins, cells, tissues, organs (especially the brain), and how information flows between these different biological scales. And there were examples of how AI agents might be able to autonomously carry out some of this research—which was met with a combination of excitement and anxiety from attendees.

It was one of the most compelling conferences I’ve ever attended, so I want to share some of what I saw. Before jumping in, this requires a few quick notes on the format of the event.

First, attending a Symposium feels like drinking from a scientific firehose—by design. CSHL is truly a Temple, or maybe even a monastery. Most attendees stay on campus and don’t leave for the duration of the conference. Talks are back-to-back all day in the main auditorium, followed by communal meals and poster sessions that run throughout the evening. It’s non-stop. My goal isn’t to give an exhaustive blow-by-blow, but to highlight some of the themes and topics I found most exciting.

Second, following in the tradition of Watson, many researchers share more new and unpublished data than is typical at other conferences. To respect this tradition, I’m going to focus on the data shared that has already been published, with more high-level descriptions of new research directions and results.

With all that said, let’s get into it! [...]

Agents, Agents, Agents

Maybe I’m in a bubble in San Francisco, but it’s hard not to constantly hear about AI agents in the year 2026. It’s strange to think, but it’s been three and a half years since ChatGPT was first released. That’s long enough for many humans to feel frustrated by the shortcomings of what was once magic. Now, we want these models to do work for us, and to carry out longer, more complex projects that require reasoning.

There are now many efforts to develop systems for “agentic science,” where AI models are able to autonomously develop new hypotheses, design experiments, and analyze results. This concept was another recurring theme at the symposium.

Pushmeet Kohli hit on this the first evening. The last third of his talk focused on DeepMind’s efforts to build an AI Co-Scientist, which they published a new paper on last month. Given a research goal by a human scientist, this system develops a research plan and then kicks off a “tournament” of agents competing to develop new hypotheses. Agents within this system have different tasks. Some are designed to “reflect” on the ideas being generated. Others are tasked with “evolving” them.

While the goal is hypothesis generation, the AI Co-Scientist itself is no longer just a hypothetical. DeepMind has already given early access to academic researchers working in a wide variety of biomedical domains. Kohli highlighted a high profile example where the Co-Scientist was able to predict a new mechanism of bacterial gene transfer before the result was published in the literature.

by Elliot Hershberg, The Century of Biology | Read more:
Image: uncredited/CSHL

[ed. See also: What’s new in biology: June 2026 (Works in Progress).]

Students Are Using a ‘Backdoor’ to Attend Their Dream Schools

Justin Helman didn’t get his dream acceptance from the University of Florida. But that isn’t stopping him from pursuing the classic college experience there.

The recent high-school graduate from Park Ridge, N.J., is set to move into a private apartment right by campus. He is enrolling in a UF online program for the first few semesters and paying an extra fee package to access services like the campus gym and student-section football-game tickets. He plans to study at the library, join clubs and might rush a fraternity.

“I’m going to get almost the entire same experience, and the only thing I’m really missing is going into class and dorming,” he said. “To me, it was just almost a no-brainer.”

More students like Helman are discovering there is another way into their dream schools.

Students who don’t get into major public flagships the traditional way are still participating in the social life of these campuses. The small-but-mighty group is moving to college towns, enrolling in online programs or nearby community colleges, living in private housing, joining Greek life, and attending game-day tailgates. The approach is sanctioned by the universities, which are expanding alternative-enrollment programs. [...]

Helman’s UF offer was to the school’s Pathway to Campus Enrollment program, which requires students to start online before transitioning to full in-person status. The program has exploded from about 250 students in 2015 to nearly 3,000 in fall 2024, according to the school’s website.

Helman will share a Gainesville, Fla., apartment with three other PaCE students who are moving from out-of-state, and said he has spoken to many others planning to relocate. He chose the program over traditional acceptances, some with scholarships and honors, including at the University of South Carolina, Seton Hall and University of Tennessee.

“This was his dream school,” said his mother, Maria Debowska-Helman. She added that his tuition would be cheaper than a traditional UF student’s. The optional fee package will cost around $550 for a semester, depending on the number of course credits. [...]

It is also controversial. Some students view these alternative pathways as “a cheat code,” Kraemer said. Some consultants agree, at times pointing to limited major-transfer options and instead pushing students to traditional paths.

by Roshan Fernandez, Wall Street Journal | Read more:
Image: Maria Debowska-Helman

The One Surprising Mistake Everyone Makes With Pancakes

The secret to consistently perfect pancakes lies in a few simple but crucial moves. And sometimes the biggest mistakes are not the things you did, but the things you didn’t do. Here is a primary culprit, with a few others to consider:

You’re not resting your batter

You know the old chestnut that the first pancake you fry is for the dog? That’s because if you haven’t let the batter rest, those first few pancakes will turn out too thin, with the batter running all over the pan. Letting the batter rest fixes this, giving the flour time to hydrate and the batter a chance to thicken. It also lets the leaveners (baking soda and baking powder) fully dissolve and disperse, so you get an even rise.

Pancakes made with a batter that has been rested for 10 minutes

The sweet spot is 10 to 30 minutes on the counter, but the batter will keep in the fridge for up to 48 hours. A longer rest actually deepens the flavor: The buttermilk has more time to work on the flour, yielding something slightly more complex. Pancakes made from an overnight batter won’t rise as much. If you know you’re going to keep the batter overnight, you can wait to add the leavener until just before frying, which helps with the rise. (The batter will be very thick by morning — that’s fine, don’t thin it out — and need a touch more time in the pan to cook through.)

One more thing to note: Lumps are not only OK; they’re expected. The goal when mixing is to combine the wet and dry ingredients until there are no streaks of dry flour — that’s it. A lumpy batter is a properly mixed batter. Those lumps will hydrate and smooth out as the batter rests. Overmixed batter, on the other hand, develops too much gluten, and the result is a flat, dense, rubbery pancake that no amount of syrup can save.

More common mistakes

If your batter is rested but still isn’t yielding a fluffy result, you may want to consider these popular pitfalls:

You’re not using an acid (like buttermilk)

A great pancake batter is a chemistry equation: Acid (buttermilk, lemon juice or vinegar) plus a base (baking soda) equals lift. When baking soda comes into contact with an acidic ingredient, it produces carbon dioxide bubbles. Those bubbles are what make your pancakes light and fluffy. Without acid in the batter, the baking soda is inert, and you’re left wondering why your pancakes came out dense.

The best source of that acid is a liquid like buttermilk, which adds a gentle tang and the right texture to make a nicely pourable batter. If buttermilk isn’t in your fridge, you have more options. Plain yogurt, sour cream or kefir also contain the right acidity — just thin them with regular milk or water so the batter stays pourable. Or use this classic trick: Stir a tablespoon of lemon juice or white vinegar into a cup of whole milk, let it sit for five minutes, and you’ve got a reasonable stand-in.

If you have any buttermilk left over, freeze it. It will lose a little potency over time, but it still works fine for your next batch.

And yes, you can make pancakes with water instead of milk. But don’t. The fat and protein in milk (and also, the butter and the eggs) is part of what makes a pancake a pancake. If you’re cooking for someone who can’t have dairy or eggs, use a dedicated vegan pancake recipe rather than trying to substitute your way through a conventional one.

Your baking soda and baking powder are old

Most pancake recipes call for baking soda and baking powder: Each does something specific. Baking soda is the more powerful of the two, reacting with the buttermilk to produce a fast, vigorous rise and give pancakes their deep golden brown color. Baking powder has the acid already built in, activating on its own once when the liquid hits it, and again when exposed to heat (this is what “double acting” means). Together, baking soda and powder give you pancakes that are well risen, nicely bronzed and tender.

Baking powder and soda do go stale, so be sure to check the expiration date. If you’re unsure, test them to see if they’re still active. For baking soda, drop a pinch into a small amount of vinegar or lemon juice — it should bubble vigorously. For baking powder, stir a teaspoon into hot water, which should cause it to fizz. If nothing happens, consider toast and eggs for breakfast instead.

Your pan is too hot or too cold

Pan temperature is another important variable in pancake cooking, and one that doesn’t get enough attention. Cook on a heat that’s too low, and your pancakes will be pale and doughy; too high, and the outside will scorch before the inside has a chance to set.

Start by heating your pan over medium-high heat for two to three minutes — longer if you’re using cast iron, which takes time to come up to an even temperature. Hold off on adding fat until the pan is hot enough. Here’s how to tell: Flick in a few drops of water. If they sizzle and evaporate on contact, you’re in the right range. If the drops skitter and dance around the surface, the pan is too hot. Pull it off the heat for 30 seconds before proceeding.

Once the temperature feels right, add your fat. A mix of butter and a neutral oil works best. Butter contributes flavor and browning, while oil raises the smoke point so that the butter won’t burn. For the crispiest edges, don’t be stingy. You want enough fat to swirl if you tilt the pan, not just a thin sheen. Then reduce the heat to medium and give the fat a moment to get hot before you pour in the batter.

Your first pancake is a test run. It will tell you whether your heat is right, whether your batter is the right consistency and whether you need more fat. If it comes out great, you’re a pancake master. If it doesn’t, eat it in the kitchen and adjust the heat. Be sure to add more fat between batches. And if the butter starts to blacken and smell burned, wipe out the pan with a paper towel before continuing.

Pan choice also has an impact. Cast iron, carbon steel and stainless steel all produce pancakes with crispy edges and caramelized bottoms. Nonstick is more forgiving and makes flipping easier, but the color will be paler and the edges not quite as crunchy.

You’re making them too big

The instinct is to fry big, diner-style pancakes, the kind you’d see people waiting in line for on social media. But smaller pancakes are almost always better pancakes. A smaller pancake has more surface area relative to its interior, which means it has crispier edges and is easier to flip. Use a ⅓-cup dry measure or a large ice cream scoop to portion your batter. Be sure to space the pancakes a couple of inches apart, since they’ll spread a bit.

by Melissa Clark, NY Times |  Read more:

Images: Julia Gartland for The New York Times. Food Stylist: Monica Pierini.

Qian Xuesen: "Father of Chinese Rocketry"; Deported Illegal Immigrant

Qian Xuesen (Chinese: 钱学森; December 11, 1911 – October 31, 2009; also spelled as Tsien Hsue-shen) was a Chinese aerospace engineer and cyberneticist who made significant contributions to the field of aerodynamics and established engineering cybernetics. He achieved recognition as one of America's leading experts in rockets and high-speed flight theory prior to his deportation to China in 1955.

Qian received his undergraduate education in mechanical engineering at National Chiao Tung University in Shanghai in 1934. He traveled to the United States in 1935 and attained a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. Afterward, he joined Theodore von Kármán's group at the California Institute of Technology in 1936, received a doctorate in aeronautics and mathematics there in 1939, and became an associate professor at Caltech in 1943. While at Caltech, he co-founded NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. He was recruited by the United States Department of Defense and the Department of War to serve in various positions, including as an expert consultant with a rank of colonel in 1945. He became an associate professor at MIT in 1946, a full professor at MIT in 1947, and a full professor at Caltech in 1949.

During the Second Red Scare in the 1950s, the United States federal government accused him of communist sympathies. In 1950, despite protests by his colleagues and without any evidence of the allegations, he was stripped of his security clearance. He was given a deferred deportation order by the Immigration and Naturalization Service, and for the following five years, he and his family were subjected to partial house arrest and government surveillance in an effort to gradually make his technical knowledge obsolete. After spending five years under house arrest, he was released in 1955 in exchange for the repatriation of American pilots who had been captured during the Korean War. He left the United States in September 1955 on the American President Lines passenger liner SS President Cleveland, arriving in mainland China via Hong Kong.

Upon his return, he helped lead development of the Dongfeng ballistic missile and the Chinese space program. He also played a significant part in the construction and development of China's defense industry, higher education and research system, rocket force, and a key technology university. For his contributions, he became known as the "Father of Chinese Rocketry" and was nicknamed the "King of Rocketry". He is recognized as one of the founding fathers of Two Bombs, One Satellite.

In 1957, Qian was elected an academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He served as a Vice Chairman of the National Committee of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference from 1987 to 1998.

He was the cousin of engineer Hsue-Chu Tsien, who was involved in the aerospace industries of both China and the United States. He is a cousin of the father of Roger Y. Tsien, the 2008 winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. [...]

Outside of rocketry, Qian had a presence in numerous areas of study. He was among the creators of systematics, and made contributions to science and technology systems, somatic science, engineering science, military science, social science, the natural sciences, geography, philosophy, literature and art, and education. His advancements in the concepts, theories, and methods of the system science field include studying the open complex giant system. Additionally, he helped establish the Chinese school of complexity science. His research advanced the discipline of engineering cybernetics, which emphasized the importance of design principles in practical engineering.

via: Wikipedia |  Read more:

Image: unknown

[ed. Prelude to the post that follows (re: Gov. vs. Anthropic's Fable).]

Ocean Observatory Will Go Dark Under Trump Funding Cuts

A portion of one of the most ambitious ocean monitoring networks ever built will go dark this month when scientists board a research vessel and motor off the Oregon coast to pull a research buoy from deep out of the Pacific.

The buoy 80 meters (260 feet) below the water’s surface will be removed June 16 from the Ocean Observatories Initiative — a network of more than 900 ocean sensors built at a cost of $386 million that has continuously collected real-time data for more than a decade. But last month, the National Science Foundation announced it would dismantle most of the system, pulling instruments from waters off Oregon, Washington, Alaska, North Carolina and Greenland by 2027.

Funded by the foundation, the observatories have tracked everything from ocean circulation and marine ecosystems to climate change and extreme weather. Its data has been freely available and has informed more than 500 scientific publications. The project was slated to run for another 15 to 20 years.

In an emailed statement, the foundation said the decision is not a cancellation, but a “descoping” aligned with a “wider strategy of a nimbler approach to prioritize support for evolving scientific priorities and emerging technologies, as well as smart lifecycle management within its research infrastructure portfolio.” The foundation added that its decision drew in part on a 2025 National Academies report on the future of ocean science. [ed. There has to be some kind of annual award for worst word salad example. This would certainly qualify.]

But for the scientists who built and operated the system — and the researchers, educators and students who rely on its data — the timing feels particularly punishing.

An El Nino event, which disrupts weather patterns and supercharges marine heat waves, is predicted to arrive along the Pacific coast this summer. One marine heat wave is already pushing unusually warm water off California.

Without the Oregon and Washington moorings and the network of underwater gliders the Ocean Observatories Initiative operated in the region, researchers say they’ll lose much of their ability to measure what’s happening below the surface, which is precisely where the most significant oceanographic signals are.

“It’s a crippling loss of information,” Ed Dever, a professor at Oregon State University who helped lead the initiative’s Pacific Northwest operations, told The Associated Press Tuesday. Scientists can get some data from the surface, such as temperature and the distribution of chlorophyll, which drives photosynthesis in plants, but information below cannot be gathered from satellites alone, including low oxygen zones. [...]

The initiative operated on roughly $48 million a year, not including the cost of research vessels, which adds substantially to the overall price. Prior to budget cuts, which began in 2025, around 60 to 70 people worked directly on the project across its partner institutions, Dever said.

“What’s happening with the Ocean Observatories Initiative is not unique,” he said. “This is just one of a number of science facilities that is being dismantled at the present time. It seems to really mark the end of a federal commitment to basic scientific research — a commitment that has served this nation very well for the last 70 years.”

by Annika Hammerschlag, AP |  Read more:
Image: Darlene Trew Crist/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution via AP

[ed. See also: How the 19th-Century Know Nothing Party Reshaped American Politics (Smithsonian):]

***

Like Fight Club, there were rules about joining the secret society known as the Order of the Star Spangled Banner (OSSB). An initiation rite called “Seeing Sam.” The memorization of passwords and hand signs. A solemn pledge never to betray the order. A pureblooded pedigree of Protestant Anglo-Saxon stock and the rejection of all Catholics. And above all, members of the secret society weren’t allowed to talk about the secret society. If asked anything by outsiders, they would respond with, “I know nothing.”

So went the rules of this secret fraternity that rose to prominence in 1853 and transformed into the powerful political party known as the Know Nothings. At its height in the 1850s, the Know Nothing party, originally called the American Party, included more than 100 elected congressmen, eight governors, a controlling share of half-a-dozen state legislatures from Massachusetts to California, and thousands of local politicians. Party members supported deportation of foreign beggars and criminals; a 21-year naturalization period for immigrants; mandatory Bible reading in schools; and the elimination of all Catholics from public office. They wanted to restore their vision of what America should look like with temperance, Protestantism, self-reliance, with American nationality and work ethic enshrined as the nation's highest values.

The Loneliness of the Competitive Quizzer

Facts are funny things. It was a fact, for instance, that in the spring of 2024 I won $132,000 playing trivia. That May, I’d flown from Oxford, where I was a graduate student, across the Atlantic to a soundstage in Los Angeles, and played for eight good days on Jeopardy!

 

It was also a fact—one I liked to tastefully overlook when asked at holidays or on trips home—that I was unemployed, that I’d gone to Oxford for a master’s degree in large part to escape further unemployment. But I had been decent on Jeopardy!, and I knew that decent trivia players were often invited back for a second chance at more money. Returning to the show, however—for something like the Tournament of Champions or the Jeopardy! Invitational—meant facing tougher questions against better players. And it was a fact that, to prepare for this possibility, I would need to throw myself into the world of competitive trivia, or quiz.

Quiz is many things to the disciple. It is not simply trivia. It is not simply a hobby. It verges, for the believer, on a way of life. Originating out of Depression-era American radio quiz shows and really taking root in the UK in the 1970s, quiz is a species of especially rigorous trivia, with regimented online competitions and questions that tilt toward the obscure. Elite quizzers are known to prep for, at minimum, two or three hours a day, thumbing through hundreds of thousands of flashcards at rapid-fire pace. They participate in four or five leagues a week. This can be all-consuming, but it can also vault the elite quizzer into a rarefied echelon of erudition. These players have spent decades in the ceaseless memorization of facts and are nearer, maybe than anyone else in history, to the sum total of human knowledge.

Each year, the greatest quizzers from around the globe assemble at the International Quizzing Championships (IQC) to vie for glory. IQC is perhaps the most prestigious—and difficult—trivia tournament in the world. It features a battery of individual competitions, testing general and specialized knowledge, as well as an Olympic-style contest for national teams. The weekend-long event culminates with the Individual Quiz and Nations Cup finals, but also includes specialist quizzes (designed to test aptitude in specific subjects) and an Aspirational Cup (for those teams which didn’t make playoffs, but one day, perhaps, might). IQC might function as a social mecca for the obsessively curious, but it’s also armed with a caliber of brainpower that’d outgun much of the Ivy League. I wanted to meet these elite quizzers, to learn from them. And deep down, I wanted to win.

by Drew Basile, The Baffler |  Read more:

Image: © Arnaud Aubry

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

This is the edited transcript of an intewiew with Feynman made for the BBC television program Horizon in 1981, shown in the United States as an episode of Nova. Feynman had most of his I$ behind him by this time (3e died in 1988), so he could reflect on his experiences and accomplishments with the perspective not often attainable by a younger person. The result is a candid, relaxed, and very personal discussion on many topics close to Feynman's heart: why knowing merely the name of something is the same as not knowing anything at all about it; how he and his fellow atomic scientists of the Manhattan Project could drink and revel in the success of the terrible weapon they had created while on the other side of the world in Hiroshima thousands of their fellow human beings were dead or dying from it; and why Feynman could just as well have gotten along without a Nobel Prize.

The Beauty of a Flower 

I have a friend who’s an artist and he’s sometimes taken a view which I don’t agree with very well. He’ll hold up a flower and say, “Look how beautiful it is,” and I’ll agree, I think. And he says - “you see, I as an artist can see how beautiful this is, but you as a scientist, oh, take this all apart and it becomes a dull thing.” And I think that he’s kind of nutty. First of all, the beauty that he sees is available to other people and to me, too, I believe, although I might not be quite as refined aesthetically as he is; but I can appreciate the beauty of a flower. At the same time I see much more about the flower than he sees. I can imagine the cells in there, the complicated actions inside which also have a beauty. I mean it’s not just beauty at this dimension of one centimeter, there is also beauty at a smaller dimension, the inner structure. Also the processes, the fact that the colors in the flower evolved in order to attract insects to pollinate it is interesting - it means that insects can see the color. It adds a question: Does this aesthetic sense also exist in the lower forms? Why is it aesthetic? All kinds of interesting questions which shows that a science knowledge only adds to the excitement and mystery and the awe of a flower. It only adds; I don’t understind how it subtracts. 

Avoiding Humanities 

I’ve always been very one-sided about science and when I was younger I concentrated almost all my effort on it. I didn’t have time to learn and I didn’t have much patience with what’s called the humanities, even though in the university there were humanities that you had to take. I tried my best to avoid somehow learning anything and working at it. It was only afterwards, when I got older, that I got more relaxed, that I’ve spread out a little bit. I’ve learned to draw and I read a little bit, but I’m really still a very one-sided person and I don’t know a great deal. I have a limited intelligence and I use it in a particular direction.

Tyrannosaurus in the Window 

We had the Encyclopaedia Britannica at home and even when I was a small boy [my father] used to sit me on his lap and read to me from the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and we would read, say, about dinosaurs and maybe it would be talking about the brontosaurus or something, or the tyrannosaurus rex, and it would say something like, “This thing is twenty five feet high and the head is six feet across,” you see, and so he’d stop all this and say, “Let’s see what that means. That would mean that if he stood in our front yard he would be high enough to put his head through the window but not quite because the head is a little bit too wide and it would break the window as it came by.” 

Everything we’d read would be translated as best we could into some reality and so I learned to do that - everything that I read I try to figure out what it really means, what it’s really saying by translating and so (LAUGHS) I used to read the Encyclopaedia when I was a boy but with translation, you see, so it was very exciting and interesting to think there were animals of such magnitude - I wasn’t frightened that there would be one coming in my window as a consequence of this, I don’t think, but I thought that it was very, very interesting, that they all died out and at that time nobody knew why. 

We used to go to the Catskill Mountains. We lived in New York and the Catskill Mountains was the place where people went in the summer; and the fathers - there was a big group of people there but the fathers would all go back to New York to work during the week and only come back on the weekends. When my father came he would take me for walks in the woods and tell me various interesting things that were going on in the woods - which I’ll explain in a minute - but the other mothers seeing this, of course, thought this was wonderful and that the other fathers should take their sons for walks, and they tried to work on them but they didn’t get anywhere at first and they wanted my father to take all the kids, but he didn’t want to because he had a special relationship with me - we had a personal thing together - so it ended up that the other fathers had to take their children for walks the next weekend, and the next Monday when they were all back to work, all the kids were playing in the field and one kid said to me, “See that bird, what kind of a bird is that?” And I said, “I haven’t the slightest idea what kind of a bird it is.” He says, “It’s a brown throated thrush,” or something, “Your father doesn’t tell you anything.” But it was the opposite: my father had taught me. Looking at a bird he says, “Do you know what that bird is? It’s a brown throated thrush; but in Portuguese it’s a . . . in Italian a . . . ,” he says “in Chinese it’s a . . . , in Japanese a . . . ,” etcetera. “Now,” he says, “you know in all the languages you want to know what the name of that bird is and when you’ve finished with all that,” he says, “you’ll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You only know about humans in different places and what they call the bird. Now,” he says, “let’s look at the bird.”

He had taught me to notice things and one day when I was playing with what we call an express wagon, which is a little wagon which has a railing around it for children to play with that they can pull around. It had a ball in it - I remember this - it had a ball in it, and I pulled the wagon and I noticed something about the way the ball moved, so I went to my father and I said, “Say, Pop, I noticed something: When I pull the wagon the ball rolls to the back of the wagon, and when I’m pulling it along and I suddenly stop, the ball rolls to the front of the wagon,” and I says, “why is that?” And he said, “That nobody knows,” he said. “The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep on moving and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard.” And he says, “This tendency is called inertia but nobody knows why it’s true.” Now that’s a deep understanding - he doesn’t give me a name, he knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learnt very early. He went on to say, “If you look close you’ll find the ball does not rush to the back of the wagon, but it’s the back of the wagon that you’re pulling against the ball; that the ball stands still or as a matter of fact from the friction starts to move forward really and doesn’t move back.” So I ran back to the little wagon and set the ball up again and pulled the wagon from under it and looking sideways and seeing indeed he was right - the ball never moved backwards in the wagon when I pulled the wagon forward. It moved backward relative to the wagon, but relative to the sidewalk it was moved forward a little bit, it’s just [that] the wagon caught up with it. So that’s the way I was educated by my father, with those kinds of examples and discussions, no pressure, just lovely interesting discussions.

by Richard Feynman, Learning Media MIT.edu |  Read more: (pdf)
Image: uncredited

Childhood And Education: Letting Kids Be Kids

I cannot emphasize enough the need to let kids be kids. In Childhood and Education #16: Letting Kids be Kids, I went over exactly how insane we have gotten about destroying the lives of children and along with them the lives of parents and others forced to devote endless hours to actively destructive supervision.

I’ll go over a refresher of that, some related new anecdotes, and then some other related questions.

People Don’t Let Kids Do Things

As a refresher, here are some quotes and statistics from last time, because I really do think exposure to this type of thing needs to involve spaced repetition to sink in:

1. A third of people, both parents and non-parents, responded in a survey that it is not appropriate to leave a 13 year old at home for an hour or two, as opposed to when we used to be 11 year olds babysitting for other neighborhood kids.

2. A third of people said in that same survey that if a 10-year-old is allowed to play alone in the park, there needs to be an investigation by CPS.

Harris Poll: More than half of the kids surveyed have not experienced many real-life experiences on their own. According to the kids surveyed aged 8 to 12 years old:

• 45% have not walked in a different aisle than their parents at a store

• 56% have not talked with a neighbor without their parents

• 61% have not made plans with friends without adults helping them

• 62% have not walked/biked somewhere (a store, park, school) without an adult

• 63% have not built a structure outside (for example, a fort or treehouse)

• 67% have not done work that they’ve been paid for (e.g., mowing lawns, shoveling snow, babysitting)

• 71% have not used a sharp knife

Lenore Skenazy: During that visit, I was told that children could never be left alone, inside or outside the home—EVEN IN THEIR OWN BEDROOMS—until they were 13 years old. Social Services said specifically that I had to be in each room with them at all times until they were 13. That investigation ended without incident. …

When I asked what constitutes supervision, she said that I had to be visible to my neighbors when the kids were outside, regardless of whether or not I could see the children. I asked where that was found in the Virginia law. She replied that it isn’t in the Virginia law, but that Social Services has its own set of rules.

Bethany: I just sent my 12 year old in to go get a dozen donuts while I waited in the car.

“Mom they will wonder why I’m alone.”

Polimath: My kids used to love walking to Target until the local Target changed their policy to “no unaccompanied kids under 18”

There are 72,000,000 kids in America and about 100 non-governmental kidnappings by strangers a year. If you left your child unattended, the original claim is that they would get kidnapped once every 750,000 years.

Maxwell Tabarrok: 37% of all American children are investigated by CPS. 2 million investigations, 530k substantiated cases, and 200k family separations every year. [...]

Let Your Children Play

Yes, it is actively good for children to learn to entertain themselves, at the earliest age possible. As a bonus, it is also excellent for you the parent, but it’s great for them too.

We used to know this. Now we need to be reminded. Last time I emphasized the general argument, here I will follow up with an example of the paranoia we instill about how this might somehow be bad, actually.

Girl about something: Is it ACTUALLY true that it’s good for me to let my baby entertain himself, or is it just selfishness because I can be doing something else while he plays? Tell the truth.

Based Sipper Wife | Mrs. Tomasone | Already sipped: It’s good for him! You know how people suffer from short attention spans and always needing to be entertained? Every time you let him play uninterrupted, you’re holding off that problem and helping him sustain focus

shiloh.: it’s so good, please teach your baby to play independently. if he were unhappy or lonely he’d cry & come to you. development of independent play is SO good for them (or course balanced with showing / talking / engaging)

is for baby whisperer: actually, seriously, a fantastic gift you can offer your child.

The problem, of course, is not any threat other than CPS.

Don’t Fear The CPS

And yet, somehow, even with direct observation many people think you shouldn’t be able to go two doors down.

And by shouldn’t, some of them say (I hope she means only if they actually do it, not because they simply think it was okay in theory, but I’m not sure):

MNBonnie: Over 54% of you need a visit from CPS. Holy shit.

Romy: wow yeah the logical conclusion here is that over half of all parents should have their kids taken away.

This behavior is obviously fine except insofar as someone might call CPS, but even if it wasn’t fine, it’s crazy to think about what that call implies.

Kelsey Piper: I don’t think that it’s a good idea to take peoples’ children away because they do a completely safe thing that is slightly different than the completely safe thing you do.

It is a bad outcome when CPS conducts an inspection of a family that is doing a great job raising kids in a lovely home but doing something slightly unusual. It is a way to terrorize those parents into compliance with standards that would never be the law and make no sense.

… I have had friends who have had their homes inspected because of stuff on the scale of ‘toddler fell at the playground and got a bruise’, yes. It was super stressful and probably made them inclined to be more safetyist and terrified of normal childhood falls!

Andrew Rettek: Yep. It sucks.

Romy: the number of people invoking cps every time they hear about a parenting choice that they wouldn’t make is really disturbing.

do you understand what claim you’re making when you say someone should have cps called on them? you’re saying that you believe their child would be better off ripped from the only home they’ve ever known and put in the care of strangers. moreover, you’re saying you believe the median foster parent is a better parent than their current parents.

you’re also saying you think we should dedicate state resources to carrying out this process. social workers already have caseloads too big to manage dealing with kids in homes with serious drug addiction, abuse, neglect and often fail to successfully intervene when it’s desperately needed.

you want these same social workers to spend time taking kids away from parents who leave them in a locked and air conditioned car for 2 minutes while they run into the store, or who watch them on the baby monitor while they catch up with the neighbors? really? if you were in charge of society this is what you’d do?

yep, in every case i’ve ever seen this raised for on twitter it would be infinitely worse than the home the kid is already in, even without accounting for the trauma of the kid being taken from their parents.

Mason: We also don’t actually want a society of traumatized and cowed parents

One function of CPS is to serve as a “wake up call” for bad parents. But you do not want a huge % of good parents making all of their parenting decisions under some abject terror that they may look negligent.

One problem with allowing any idiot to use the state as their cudgel is that a lot of people lack the imagination to anticipate the immediate consequences of their actions for other people, asking them to consider second-order effects is a total lost cause.

This is why a lot of older story arcs involve a “nosy neighbor” character who comes to embody something like the banality of evil or malicious ignorance. There used to be very strong norms against even *suggesting* that you might report people to the state for minor infractions.

Romy: the vast majority of babies ever born were raised by parents who would consider live video monitoring of a sleeping baby so excessive they’d be confused by the concept.

having a baby is hard in a bunch of ways, but a whole lot of parents are making it much harder than it needs to be. they’re doing their best to shame everyone else into having a harder time than necessary too.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, Don't Worry About the Vase |  Read more:

Image: X

Gen Z Is Pioneering a New Understanding of Truth

Previous generations inherited relatively stable systems for determining what was real: newspapers, universities, scientific institutions, courts, and professional journalism. Those systems were imperfect and often exclusionary, but they provided shared reference points. Gen Z has inherited something fundamentally different: an information ecosystem where truth is increasingly shaped socially, emotionally, algorithmically, and now synthetically through AI.

As journalist Maria Ressa warned in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, "Without facts, you can't have truth. Without truth, you can't have trust. Without trust, we have no shared reality, no democracy."

But Gen Z may already be building something to replace what's been lost. Not institutions. Not gatekeepers. A distributed, socially negotiated sense of who earns the right to be believed. They're not abandoning truth. They're auditing who gets to deliver it.

That verdict, built by millions of young people navigating this system together, is already in.

by Steven Rosenbaum, Wired |  Read more:

Image: Darrell Jackson; Getty Images

Something Big Is Happening on Campus

I get to visit about two dozen campuses every year, and I meet at least a few teachers like Montás at each of them. I can generally spot the ones with the pure disease, the ones with that raw teacher-fire. Usually, they had some experience early in life when they fell in love with learning. This love then became a ruling passion, and now they fervently seek to share it with their students in the classroom. You can find them at Ivies and at community colleges, at big state schools and small liberal-arts colleges. They are a part of what’s going right in American higher education, the part that critics (like me) don’t write about enough.

These teachers talk of their vocation in lofty terms. They are not there merely to download information into students’ brains, or to steer them toward that job at McKinsey. True humanistic study, they believe, has the power to change lives. They want to walk with students through the biggest questions: Who am I? What might I become? What is this world I find myself in? If you don’t ask yourself these questions, these teachers say, you risk wasting your life on trivial pursuits, following the conventional path, doing what others want you to do instead of what is truly in your nature. If society doesn’t offer this kind of deep humanistic education, where people learn to seek truth and cultivate a capacity for citizenship, then democracy begins to crumble. “What I’m giving the students is tools for a life of freedom,” Montás says.

These great teachers are the latest inheritors of the humanist tradition. Humanism is a worldview based on an accurate conception of human nature—that we are both deeply broken and wonderfully made. At our worst, humans are capable of cruelty, fascism, and barbarism that no other mammal can match. On the other hand, deep inside of us we possess fundamental longings for beauty, justice, love, and truth, which, when cultivated, can produce spiritual values and human accomplishments breathtaking in their scope.

Life is essentially a battle between our noblest aspirations and our natural egotism. Humanistic education prepares people for this struggle. Yes, schooling also has a practical purpose—to help students make a living and contribute to the economy. But that practical training works best when it is enmeshed within the larger process of forming a fully functioning grown-up—a person armed with knowledge, strength of judgment, force of character, and a thorough familiarity with the spiritual heritage of our civilization. Preprofessional education treats people solely as economic animals; humanistic education also treats them as social and moral animals.

Humanistic teachers do this by ushering students into the Great Conversation—the debate, stretching back centuries, that constitutes the best of what wise people have thought and expressed. These teachers help students encounter real human beings facing the vital challenges of life: Socrates confronting death, Sun Tzu on how to manage conflict, Dante in love, Zadie Smith on living in the boundary between different identities. The Great Conversation represents each generation’s attempt to navigate the dialectics of life, the tension between autonomy and belonging, freedom and order, intimacy and solitude, diversity and cohesion, achievement and equality. The Great Conversation never ends, because there are no final answers to these tensions, just a temporary balance that works for a particular person or culture in a particular context.

By introducing students to rival traditions of thought—Stoicism, Catholic social teaching, conservatism, critical race theory—colleges help students cultivate the beliefs, worldviews, and philosophies that will help them answer the elemental question of adulthood: What should I do next? By introducing them to history and literature, colleges arm students with wisdom about how humans operate, which is handy knowledge to have. They offer them not only life options but also, more importantly, the ability to choose among them. “Any serious human problem is a hard problem,” Andrew Delbanco, who teaches at Columbia, told me. “The fundamental obligation of a humanities teacher is to try to develop in students an allergy to ideology and certainty. To acknowledge self-doubt.”

But humanistic education is no mere intellectual enterprise. Its primary purpose is not to produce learned people but good people. When teachers do their job, they arouse in their students not only a passion for learning but also a passion to lead a life of generosity and purpose. “The correct analogy for the mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting—no more—and then it motivates one towards originality and instills the desire for truth,” Plutarch observed many centuries ago.

Teachers do this by making excellence attractive to the young—excellent lives, excellent ideas, excellent works of art, commerce, and science, and, above all, excellent ideals. The students who are captivated by these ideals find some cause to advance, some social problem to address, some business to start. When confronted by inspiring ideals, many students say: I care intensely about this, I want to orient my life around this. It’s not only their minds that have been refined but also their desires and ambitions. In a true humanistic education, the French philosopher Jacques Maritain wrote, “the shaping of the will is thoroughly more important to man than the shaping of the intellect.”

Preprofessional education is individualistic and selfish. Such students learn to ask: How can I outcompete my peers and beat them up the ladder to success? In a humanistic program, by contrast, groups of people gather to form communities of truth, to reason together, to explore life together, to pool their desires and seek the common good.

I find that students flock to humanistic teachers who radiate a sense of urgency. They tell students: We are doing something important here. College is not just frat parties and internships; it’s potentially the most important four years of your life. You can emerge either an anesthetized drone or a person fully curious, fully committed, and fully alive.

I know this kind of education can have this effect because it is the education I got decades ago at the University of Chicago. I knew I could never be as learned as the professors I encountered, but their passion for large topics and great books seemed so impressive to me. I yearned with all my soul to understand the world as best I could, to embark on a lifelong journey of growth. Whatever my ample failings, that yearning, kindled in those classrooms with those books and those teachers, has never gone away. I stumbled unknowingly into a humanistic education, because it was the only college I got into, but I can tell you, it totally worked on me.

Today, the teachers I’m talking about tend to feel like dissidents within the academy, like they are doing something countercultural. That’s because at most schools, humanistic education has been pushed into the remote corners of academic life. It’s not that people woke up one morning and decided to renounce the humanistic ideal, it’s just that other goals popped up. It was easier to fundraise for them, easier to sell them to tuition-paying parents. The idea of forming students into the best version of themselves sort of got left behind. [...]

Mark Edmundson also grew up in a working-class family, in Medford, Massachusetts. He got into college, something no one else in his family had done, and told his father that he might study prelaw, because you could make a decent living as a lawyer. His father, who had barely graduated high school, “detonated,” Edmundson later recalled. You only go to college once, his father roared, you better study what genuinely interests you. The rich kids get to study what they want, and you are just as good as any rich kids.

Edmundson soon encountered Sigmund Freud and Ralph Waldo Emerson. “They gave words to thoughts and feelings that I had never been able to render myself,” he wrote in his book, Why Teach? “They shone a light onto the world, and what they saw, suddenly I saw, too.” Edmundson now teaches poetry and literature at the University of Virginia.

“To get an education, you’re probably going to have to fight against the institution you find yourself in—no matter how prestigious it might be,” Edmundson once told an audience of students. “In fact, the more prestigious the school, the more you’ll probably have to push.”

The forces arrayed against humanistic learning are many:

by David Brooks, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: The Atlantic: Source: Laurie Michaels/Bridgeman Images
[ed. Contrast this with someone (below), who believes that colleges should be modeled after OnlyFans, and that hyper-specialization ("edge" degrees where AI will supposedly be less adept) are the future. I know which curriculum I'd choose.]

Why the Future of College Could Look Like OnlyFans

Last week, I asked whether, as a forty-six-year-old father of two, I should keep contributing to my children’s college funds, or if perhaps some combination of anti-establishment fervor, A.I., and a shifting economy could save me some money. I don’t have a particularly good answer yet, at least not one good enough to inspire the purchase of a midlife-crisis car, my son’s and daughter’s futures be damned. But, after wrestling with that query in Part 1 of what will be a series of articles, I think there may be a better one to ask. The question is not, I think, “How will A.I. change higher education?” but rather “What irreversible changes have already taken place, and how will colleges and universities respond to them?”

I wanted to talk with someone who stood outside the polite consensus which holds that college as we know it will survive, if only because, as I wrote last week, humans will always want to differentiate their children from other people’s children. Hollis Robbins, a professor of English and a special adviser in the humanities at the University of Utah, and the former dean of arts and humanities at Sonoma State University, has been writing about A.I. and higher education for years on her Substack, “Anecdotal Value.” Through her writing on the subject, her own experiments with A.I., and her experience at both élite private and regional public universities, she has hashed out a theory of sorts. In Robbins’s opinion, an excessively bureaucratic, increasingly generic, and poorly taught version of higher education has taken hold around the country, and that has made the modern university seriously vulnerable to an A.I. takeover.

What can academics do about this? College, Robbins believes, should be more bespoke; schools should cultivate their own character based on the charisma of professors, the novelty of their inquiries, and the quality of their instruction. Today, thanks in part to the Common Application and to the always increasing pressure for students to go simply to the most prestigious college they can, even élite schools are becoming interchangeable. Brown and the University of Chicago have roughly the same pool of students as, say, Vanderbilt, or Georgia Tech. And, once the unique essence of a school has been lost, and the curricula have been standardized for maximum friendliness to students, who are treated as customer kings, A.I. may come to seem like a plausible alternative. In this view, rampant A.I.-assisted cheating, rapidly declining faith in the value of a college education, and general agita on the part of the nation’s faculty are all symptoms of a larger sickness: an academy that has been stripped of everything that once made it special. [...]

In a widely discussed Substack post from last year, titled “It’s Later Than You Think,” Robbins argued that artificial general intelligence would require a culling of sixty to seventy per cent of the country’s professors, and that every professor who wanted to keep their job should write a memo answering the question “What specific knowledge do I possess that AGI does not?” Faculty members who could not produce a compelling memo “with concrete defensible answers,” she wrote, “have no place in the institution.” The university in the age of A.I. will be leaner, odder, and more differentiated from its peers, she maintains, because “students cannot be expected to continue paying for information transfer that AGI provides freely.” Instead, they will “pay to learn from faculty whose expertise surpasses AI, offering mentorship, inspiration, and meaningful access to AGI-era careers and networks.” Any institution that does not adapt will die. “This isn’t a mere transformation but a brutal winnowing,” Robbins writes. “Most institutions will fail, and those that remain will be unrecognizable by today’s standards.”

I recently asked Robbins about how she came to this conclusion, and what, exactly, those surviving institutions might look like. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

You’ve written a lot about how the modern university has primed itself for an A.I. takeover. How did that happen?

... The first two years of a college education are now more or less the same, regardless of where you go to school. Courses now need to be equivalent to one another, so that a student at one school will be learning something similar to a student at a different school. What that has done over time is created a system where it doesn’t really matter who is teaching the classes. We tell the student, “You’re special,” and we tell the faculty, “You’re not special.” This is the tension and the problem that is plaguing higher education and what’s made it so vulnerable to A.I. Everything else—whether Trump, the enrollment cliff, or whatever—is secondary to this tension. [...]

I’m not a car person, but I have friends who have fancy BMWs, and they have to go to their fancy BMW place to fix their car, because BMW parts are often very specific to BMWs. So what does it mean for higher ed when all the parts are interchangeable? Almost forty per cent of students transfer at least once from institution to institution, and that places additional pressure to make everything the same. What happens is that colleges make it easier for their students to transfer, because parents want to have some backup plan. The high number of transfers leads to more fungibility and commodification.

In a Substack post from last year, you suggested that sixty to seventy per cent of faculty will ultimately lose their jobs once generative A.I. starts to hit the classroom, and that those who survive will need to explain why they’re still needed. How do you think they should be proving their worthiness?

Higher education and professors can differentiate themselves from all this sameness by teaching at the edges of knowledge. My expertise, for example, is in the African American sonnet tradition. There are probably three people on the entire planet who know as much as I do about this tiny little thing, and so I’ve spent a lot of my time experimenting with these large language models to just see what they know about my field, and where the edges are. Specialists are going to be key to selling education as something the A.I. can’t do. When your daughter is going to go to school, in eight years, you are not going to want, for any money, to have her learn standard educational product that A.I. knows—and A.I. will know so much, right?

I’m not sure about that, because I do think that there’s value in her learning things that a computer knows. Human beings still play chess, even though a human being hasn’t beaten the best chess computers in twenty years—and I would think there’s still value in her understanding the basic theories and foundations of, say, chemistry. Even if A.I. knows all of that, she should probably know it, too, if she wants to understand what those edges of knowledge are, no?

So, in my ideal vision of the academy, you’re going to be in class with a mentor who isn’t going to have to teach you Chemistry 101 but will want to quickly move to where the edges are, to do something new. Maybe they would decide together to 3-D-print some new material that has never been printed before, or what have you. Whatever they decide together will not be something every university is going to be able to do. It will be what’s particular at this place. [...]

Does that lead to a kind of obscurity? It would seem to encourage the esoteric sort of inquiry that the public sometimes resists.

Well, I won’t use the word “obscurity.” I would say “specialization.”

Let me make a couple of predictions and distinctions. Social science is going to matter so much less when your daughter goes to college. It is already on its way out. A.I. can do it. And here’s an example of the type of inquiry I’m talking about: I have a weird, funny Twitter group about life on Mars. Someone will ask, for instance, if it’s true that you’re going to need kidney dialysis on the way back from Mars. Another person is theorizing about a 3-D printer that’s going to use Mars soil, which will allow people to build on Mars using its materials instead of shipping everything there. These sorts of inquiries are obscure, specialist, niche, at the edge. [...]

Does that mean kids will be coming to college with a different baseline of knowledge because of A.I.? That a lot of the canon in whatever field they choose will already have been transferred to their brains? I can’t help but remember my own experience as a freshman in college, being completely unprepared for an upper-level religion course, much less any edge-of-knowledge inquiry.

They’re going to be coming in with a different baseline. Once upon a time, you walked into class and a hundred per cent of what was delivered to you was through your professor. Now, you go to a class, maybe you’ll do the reading, but you’ll also ask ChatGPT or Claude. And so your course content is already coming from somewhere else. This is a problem that higher ed has not addressed substantially. What does it mean for me to grade you on something where you got all your information from somewhere else and not from my reading list? That is a complicated question. The only thing that works is for us to get to the edge quickly.

There’s a growing idea I’ve seen in some circles that college could be replaced by conversations between an A.I. tutor and a student. When I think about your model, I wonder why college even needs to exist. If I can just seek out a tutor, somebody that I like, and they just charge me a little bit, and we go through these edge-knowledge cases together, what’s the degree for? Couldn’t you, as Hollis Robbins—not only a specialist in African American sonnet traditions but also an idiosyncratic thinker on the subject of A.I. and the future of the academy—just set up your own shop?

I was in Austin, Texas, a couple of times in March with a bunch of twenty-five-year-old billionaires. This is what they’re looking at. Instead of having the credential from the institution, why not have the credential from the professor? If you have a Hollis Robbins education, what would that signal? What would that credential mean as opposed to a degree from a university? There was some conversation about what that would look like, and one guy at the end of the dinner said, “Instead of OnlyFans, it’s like OnlyProfessors.”

Do you think an OnlyProfessors model would be good? That the dissolution of the vast majority of the higher-education infrastructure, with this replacing it, would be a good outcome?

I worry about where the great middle of America is going to go. I do think students are going to have to withdraw enrollment from schools unless things change. And I don’t think institutions are going to change themselves. They’re caught up in this bureaucratic system, this transfer system, these standardization agreements across state lines, so that anybody can move anywhere. The idea of delivering a standard education product is so embedded within the current structure that it will never change unless students say, “This is not what I want from going to college.” So, yes, OnlyProfessors is an alternative. [...]

And the death of our current universities? What does that look like?

I think there’s contraction. The big flagships are going to stay the same, because they have the football players and all the other things. I’m at the University of Utah—I think it’s going to be fine. We’re going to pick up the lifeboats from the places that crumble. But, ultimately, at the very top, presidents and provosts are going to have to understand that expertise is their mission. Yale, even, went back to making their mission statement about knowledge, not about making a better world. We’re not in the making-a-better-world game anymore. We’re in the knowledge game, and that means getting rid of some of the feel-good stuff. [ed. Like humanities, civics, history, philosophy, logic...] 

by Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: David Rowland/Getty

[ed. Couldn't disagree more. Started writing all the reasons why but then just figured 'eh... what's the use'. This really is a bizarre interview with... whoever this person is. I will say that if having ready information at your fingertips (or some personal estoteric knowledge) were all it took to be educated, Google would've put universities out of business a long time ago. There's a reason (with all the instructional videos on YouTube) that people still go to teachers.]

Fix Everything Switch

Ask Claude: 'There's a meme called the "fix everything easily switch". What policies do you think are the best candidates for being a real fix everything switch in the US? Give me your top ten, your confidence, your reasoning, and why a given policy has not been implemented.'

Claude is asked for the top 10 Fix Everything Now buttons. Its answers:

1. Legalize housing.
2. Land value tax.
3. Permitting and NEPA reform.
4. Carbon taxes.
5. Repeal the Jones Act.
6. Compensate kidney donors.
7. Expand high-skilled immigration.
8. Reciprocal drug and device approval with peer regulators (e.g. EU/UK/JP/AU).
9. Occupational licensing reform.
10. Approval or ranked choice voting.
11. Honorable mentions: Child allowance, congestion pricing, replacing corporate income tax with a VAT or DBCFT, ending the home mortgage interest deduction, federal preemption of telehealth and medical licensing, and letting Pell Grants pay for vocational programs.

10/10, no notes, no seriously that’s 10/10 and no notes. 16/16 if you count the others.

There is also a UK version, which also seems like a very good list at first glance.

via: Zvi

***

[ed. 'Legalize housing' might be confusing to some. It's mostly about allowing more housing in every neighborhood, especially historically affluent and exclusionary neighborhoods, removing barriers to both subsidized affordable and market rate housing. 

Reciprocal approval is FDA approval for drugs and devices already approved in other trusted countries like the UK, European Union member countries, Israel, Australia, Canada, and Japan, etc. 

VAT/DBCFT - revenue from sales to nonresidents would not be taxable, and the cost of goods purchased from nonresidents would not be deductible. So if a business purchases $100 million in goods from a supplier overseas, the cost of those goods would not be deductible against the corporate income tax. Likewise, if a business sells a good to a foreign person, the revenues attributed to that sale would not be added to taxable income. Another way to think about the border adjustment is that the corporate tax would ignore revenues and costs associated with cross-border transactions. The tax would be solely focused on raising revenue from business transactions from sales of goods in the United States. (via)]

Italian Brainrot

Italian brainrot (Wikipedia)

Italian brainrot is characterized by absurd images or videos created using generative artificial intelligence. It typically features hybrid figures combining animals with everyday objects, foods, and weapons. They are given Italianized names or incorporate stereotypical Italian cultural markers and are accompanied by AI-generated audio narration in Italian, which is often nonsensical. The names of these characters often have Italian suffixes, such as -ini or -ello.

The term brain rot was named Oxford Word of the Year in 2024, and refers to the deteriorating effect on one's mental state when overconsuming "trivial or unchallenging content" online. The term can also refer to the content itself. Online users often use this label to acknowledge the ridiculousness of Italian brainrot, while recognising the growing amount of AI slop present online.

Images: DevonRex368; alexey_pigeon

[ed. Presented here for no other reason than to highlight another example of the decline of western civilization. I'm beginning to think that if AI is inclined to wipe us all out it'll be a mercy killing. See also: Reading is magic (Sam Kriss):]

***

"The kids can’t read. I don’t mean that they’re incapable of sounding out letters and forming them into words, although an increasing proportion of them can’t do that either. In the US, literacy peaked around 2014 and has been sliding since. 40% of fourth-graders have ‘below basic’ reading abilities, which means they struggle to extract any meaning from a written text; the number of illiterate students has been rising every year since 2014. But even when students can perform the mechanics of reading, it no longer seems to make their minds start working in textlike ways. It’s an entirely different set of technologies producing their mental processes, and when they come to the written word they come to it from the outside. [...]

Probably the most alarming index of this was a study in which a group of English majors at two well-regarded public universities in Kansas were asked to read the first seven paragraphs of Bleak House by Charles Dickens, and explain after every sentence what they thought was happening. Only 5% of the students could produce a ‘detailed, literal understanding’ of the text. The rest were either patching together vague impressions from a bunch of half-understood phrases, or could not comprehend anything at all.

One particular stumbling block was the novel’s third sentence, which describes London in December: ‘As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.’ The students found this figurative language impossible; they could only read the sentence with the assumption that Dickens was describing the presence of an actual prehistoric reptile in Victorian London. One respondent glossed it like this: ‘It’s probably some kind of an animal or something or another. So, yup, I think we’ve encountered some kind of an animal these characters have met in the street.’ The study assessed this person as a ‘competent’ rather than a ‘problematic’ reader, because they’d at least managed to form an idea of what the text meant, even if it was wrong.

Bleak House is not an elitist text; not so long ago, it was mass entertainment. When Dickens visited America in 1867, over 100,000 people paid to see him speak. Delighted crowds mobbed him in the streets. Today, a person studying English literature at degree level responds to his work in essentially the same way as an illiterate Uzbek peasant in the 1930s, incapable of thinking outside of immediate sensory reality. [...]

This is not a world we’re prepared for. All democratic politics assume a literate population; people who are willing to think in abstract terms about the kind of world they want to live in. Without that, democracy becomes a kind of tribal headcount, or a struggle for state resources between competing patronage networks... A population that can no longer think for itself will end up voluntarily ceding power to strongmen or demagogues. The end of literacy is the end of public reason. A post-literate world will be unreasonable, irrational, full of anger and madness, and people eating each other in the streets."