Silicon Valley has forgotten what normal people want Did the tech industry get high on its own supply?

from the annals of getting high on your own supply (gift link) www.theverge.com/tldr/915176/...

It’s interesting that practicing a discipline towards its highest level, even if one never intends to join it, is valued for everything except English

It also shields them from parent pushback about text choice, but the deep skepticism about the value of novels specifically in some quarters shouldn’t be underestimated

Schools are choosing this in large part because many parents think reading novels amounts to “literary appreciation.”

apparent at both individual and collective levels, which is how you know it's got teeth

Precisely!

aaahh I don't have FB what is happening??

Keep thinking that cruel optimism has shifted toward something like cruel inertia—feeling the enshitification of everything but repeatedly choosing the wan comfort of stasis over the minor inconveniences of salutary change

amazing

Just read “lifts the blockade on Iranian ports” as “lifts the blockade on Iranian poets” and what’s weird is it felt a little plausible

"hi friends"

What’s the most abject contemporary genre? I’m going with short-form video, with special shoutout to explainers filmed in cars

Yes, totally agree. and I think people w/ those anxieties often see what is being *taken away* if we diminish tech but not what’s gained—that’s what needs to be made more tangible

yeah, this is true too of my affluent progressive community, but outside it, not so much!

All to say, I think there’s more work to be done to persuade a lot of folks this is the right thing to do, not just politicians

I … agree with the “slow down” stance but I’m not sure how widely it’s felt. I can’t believe how persistent this notion of being “left behind” is among so many parents and I worry that politicians are too ready to throw this one to them

There’s this kind of throwaway line in Szalay’s Flesh about fine dining being something that a couple with very little to say to one another can still enjoy together. Most cultural analysis could never

There’s a high school down the street from me that has a big banner out in front that says something like “a College Board©️Platinum Performance AP school!“ and I know parents love it but wtf

If one thinks of it as selling a product rather than, you know, education, it makes sense … but still hard to convince folks that’s what’s happening when schools keep legitimizing them!

So many decisions in education happen like this—hasty, flailing responses that come from a place of anxiety and a habituated attitude of defense, and people like Khan are so good at exploiting these qualities

“Imagine a world where Microsoft, Google, McKinsey, et al … get to determine what and how you learn from cradle to retirement.”

Khan wants us to marvel that after a reading an assignment, Khanmigo may engage a student by asking "What is your opinion of this essay?" I can testify that this is not an effective way to engage students in a learning experience because this is what I was doing in my earliest days as a TA in graduate school when I knew nothing and had no experience with teaching. My students would look back at me, blank-faced until one of them had mercy on me, raising their hand and saying, "Uhh, it was alright."

OMG too real biblioracle.substack.com/p/an-unserio...

Hampshire College is already everything I would propose for a meaningful education in an AI‘d world and it’s hard not to read its closure as a harbinger of larger defeats…

Trump is dismantling the US Forest Service in his biggest smash-and-grab to date, closing ten regional offices and 57 research facilities and handing control of our national forests to pro-logging pols.

Spread the good word!

Honestly, if academia discovered lunch it might be unstoppable

It's taken me over four decades and three careers, but I finally see the value of "lunch." As in, like, a meal and not a bar you had stashed in your desk or whatever was leftover from that breakfast meeting.

oh christ of course there’s a typo in this one. Anyway. I was also thinking about the pleasure of seeing something in an important new way in my middle age. We are but human!

I have been pretty skeptical of the value of spending money on space stuff but now I see that is is actually not unlike spending money on the humanities—value beyond ”value”

Yeah… this is familiar 🙃