Yeah there is a tradition of just war theory. Read some Aquinas:

I like the stripped down versions with the live musicians a lot. I saw her live a couple years ago, and she puts on a great show

Dessa: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert Enjoy the videos and music you love, upload original content, and share it all with friends, family, and the world on YouTube.

Dessa's Tiny Desk Concert: Source: YouTube share.google/xQ8hVy3k3FNy...

And Clipping.'s concert for no one (during the pandemic):
Source: YouTube share.google/CQ1yxnsPYF9H...

(Their recent tiny desk using robots to acoustically create all the samples is also amazing)

It is 100% the case that they did make their essay rubrics easier between those two tests. Is that driving all of the change: maybe, maybe not, but it's absolutely a factor.

Though, the one good thing I'm taking from inflated AP scores - inspired by a teacher at another school I met at a recent conference - is that I don't have to worry about teaching to the test and can do whole units of things I think matter that are outside CED and students will still score well.

Maybe students of US History just become significantly more adept between 2023 and 2024, or maybe - just maybe - they changed the essay rubric to make it easier to score more points. Definitely impossible to tell.

People are always like "How is your early modern history class relevant today?" and well my 9th graders have learned about the Strait of Hormuz and the Avignon Papacy this year, so they're pretty set to understand current events it seems.

I'm not saying that congressional Dems should emulate the Iranian government in every respect, but it does seem that if you openly and defiantly stand up to Trump, he'll back down, agree to your terms, and call it a win.

The man who coined the term genocide, Raphael Lemkin, defined it as a greater atrocity than mass murder explicitly because it involves the intentional killing of a civilization.

New York Times: President Trump issued another grave threat to Iran if it does not strike a deal to avert Mr. Trump’s threat of massive attacks later Tuesday. “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again,” Trump wrote on Truth Social, adding that he hoped “maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen” to avoid the attacks before the Tuesday evening deadline. He continued: “We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World.”

This is genocidal language, and it demands not only the removal of this President but also a fundamental transformation of the presidency: no one should have the power to unilaterally destroy another civilization.

From the new York Times: Here’s the latest. President Trump threatened to wipe out a “whole civilization,” and the United States hit military targets on Iran’s main oil export hub, as he ramped up pressure on Tehran to fully open the Strait of Hormuz or potentially face a wave of strikes on critical infrastructure in the coming hours

I'm fairly confident this meets the definition of genocide under the genocide convention

I hope that when JD Vance joined his congregation on Friday saying "We have no King but Caesar" he realized that John was talking about people like him: those who choose the comforts of complicity with the brutality of empire over the humility, meekness, and unconditional love of the kingdom of God.

"We repent of the evil
that enslaves us, the evil we have done, and the evil done on our behalf."

I can think of few things more blasphemous than calling for wanton violence and destruction against civilian targets (and invoking God to do so) on Christianity's holiest day of the year - a celebration of the victory of life and love over sin and death.

...and what are the broader ethical and political questions these technologies mean (beyond not cheating on your essays)?

What if we defined AI proficiency to mean not the ability effectively prompt a chatbot, but a thorough and deep understanding of what generative AI is, what the human, economic, and ecological infrastructure that supports these systems consists in,...

You might be right in the end. I was at least hoping that some of it was based on a belief in access and equity - because there is an argument to be made in favor of standardization based on these values. But in this case your cynicism is probably warranted.

I think it's part of a broader trend to deprofessionalize teachers, even if that's not the intended goal. We don't need teachers with individual expertise, they just need pedagogic training. They don't need to make judgments about student work, they can outsource that to a rubric and then to an AI.

So I believe the move to standardization had good intentions - equity across teachers and more accessibility for these classes - but it has its real drawbacks. It also exposes the contradictory goals of CB: provide a college level classes for advanced HS students and make those classes universal.

NHL standings, with the Buffalo Sabres in second place in the league with 100 points highlighted, as of 3/31/26

It's so...beautiful

A public school teacher could lose their job for speech in the classroom, but a therapist in their professional capacity, engaging in speech found to be both medically inaccurate and harmful, cannot face sanction because that is viewpoint discrimination.

Just to be clear: this Court has just said (including 2 of its liberal justices) that a health professional dispensing medically discredited information has more free speech protections than most teachers would if they were discussing peer reviewed scholarship on race, gender, or democratic decline.

Just the sheer oddity that the section of the commentariat (and electorate!) most obsessed with American strength also voted for the very obvious Imperial Suicide option, I think basically because Gender convinced them of the dumbest possible theory of what would constitute and project strength.

At some point I'm going to sit down and write an essay titled "Thrasymachus Unbound" on basically the Trump admin siding with the argument that Plato's entire work is organized around defeating.

I have this conversation every year with 9th graders - they somehow get this idea that primary sources are "not biased" because they were there and secondary sources "have a specific point of view." So we have to unlearn this even before we get to "bias" or "point of view" doesn't mean unreliable.

one of my related hot takes is that we should ban news networks from real-time updates of results. they can report results when the votes are counted.

Live Updates: Supreme Court Appears Poised to Reject Mississippi Law on Late-Arriving Ballots

Nothing says restoring faith in elections like fundamentally re-writing state election rules less than 9 months before a general election for obviously partisan purposes. www.nytimes.com/live/2026/03...

shout it from the rooftops

It's similar with questions of climate justice/democracy: we have this sense, because of the phenomena you describe, that climate-based regulation of air travel would be undemocratic paternalism, punishing ordinary people, but something like 50% of Americans/80% worldwide don't fly in a given year.