School Trip
Quote of the Day
”There’s no way around grief and loss: you can dodge all you want, but sooner or later you just have to go into it, through it, and, hopefully, come out the other side. The world you find there will never be the same as the world you left.”
- Johnny Cash
Today sees the funeral of my dear, dear friend Conor Gearty, so you can guess what’s been on my mind.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bach | Cello Suite No. 6, BWV 1012: IV. Sarabande | Abel Selaocoe
Appropriately consoling for a sombre day. YoYo Ma has some very interesting things to say about it here.
Long Read of the Day
Nightmare on Pennsylvania Ave – and Prince Harry’s new Gambit
If you want to see what a great columnist is like on full throttle, then this blast by Tina Brown would be hard to beat.
It can’t be real: A power-engorged president Beta testing martial law by sending troops into made-up emergencies in American cities, a certifiably insane head of Health and Human Services with zero medical background unleashing disease on America, a boatload of Venezuelans whose identities and intent we still don’t know after eight days, blown up by the U.S. military on the unproven premise they were fentanyl-smuggling fiends; ICE agents, like Brownshirts, breaking car windows to extract petrified immigrant. Swimming behind each increasingly fascistic executive order by an intellectually lazy president is the pallid, malevolent face of cartoon villain Stephen Miller, working late in his office on his deportation quotas.
And as morning dawns, we are freshly assailed by the coarsening of American public life, circling the drain. We no longer even blink when the sitting vice president tweets at a citizen who called the Venezuela strike a war crime, “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” or the White House press secretary sneering about a network news anchor, “She’s stupid. You can put that on the record” or the Treasury secretary, who is supposed to be Wall Street’s grown-up in the room, threatening to punch a top housing finance official “in the fucking face.”…
And then there’s this:
We have the morally blank cohort of centibillionaire tech bros and their ilk summoned to a White House dinner celebrating America’s AI dominance. It swiftly turned into an on-camera ring-kissing of their fat-fingered host, who prodded them to declare titanic investments in AI in the U.S., all thanks to DJT. How gratifying that Meta’s slippery salamander Mark Zuckerberg was caught on a hot mic, apologizing to Trump for his hesitant reply pledging $600 billion through 2028. “I wasn’t sure what number you wanted to go with.” What a worm.
Read on. It’s worth it.
My commonplace booklet
The NYT’s Kevin Roose visited an unnamed liberal arts college recently. Here are his takeaways:
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The “students don’t read” meme appears to be real. Profs there don’t assign full books anymore, even to English majors, because nobody will read them. Only chapters/essays, and even that’s pushing it. (Not a literacy issue, per se — more of a focus/time management issue.)
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The job market for computer science grads is as bad as people say. Their top CS student from last year is still looking for work.
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AI adoption is ~100% among students, ~50% among faculty. Still a lot of worries around cheating, but most seem to have moved past denial/anger and into bargaining/acceptance. Some profs are “going medieval” (blue books, oral exams), others are putting it in the curriculum.
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There is a lot of anger at the AI labs for giving out free access during exam periods. (Not from students, of course, they love it.) Nobody buys the “this is for studying” pitch.
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The possibility of near-term AGI is still not on most people’s minds. A lot of “GPT-5 proved scaling is over” reactions, even among fairly AI-pilled folks. Still a little “LLMs are just fancy autocomplete” hanging around, but less than a year or two ago.
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