We’ll likely never know the reason why the show was pulled, even if it does return. However, I can’t think of a time when media that makes people think is more important than the current time we’re living in.
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More students (and teachers) should grasp this concept. School is a great thing, to be sure, but so is learning on your own. If we can bring that type of learning into our schools… oh, what a time we could have.
But it’s like Jim Henson said: “Your kids… don’t remember what you try to teach them. They remember what you are.”
One of the things we’ve tried hard to do in our house is to make it a place of learning while also making it as unlike school as possible. What this shakes out to, essentially, is thinking about the house as a library.
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Trump’s Truth Social comment on slavery was unsettling for me not only because I am the descendant of enslaved people, and not only because I was born and raised in New Orleans, which was once the center of the domestic slave trade, but also because I am an American who believes that the only way to understand this country—the only way to love this country—is to tell the truth about it. Part of that truth is that chattel slavery, which lasted in the British American colonies and then the American nation for nearly 250 years, was indeed quite bad.
No matter how you decide to spin events, slavery was bad. Like, for real. Really bad. Always has been. Don’t forget that.
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What a guy like James Dobson does, and what James Dobson did for his whole adult life, is offer people—white men primarily, but not exclusively—a rhetorical framework for doing evil and feeling good about it. Stand right here and look exactly there, he said, and psychology says it’s OK for you to beat your children, that when they cry for more than two minutes of the beating, it is because they are bad and not because you are hurting them; you should beat them harder for crying until they stop. Stand right here and look exactly there, and tradition says your wife should have no will of her own. Stand right here and look exactly there, and love of country says society should press its boot onto the poor and marginalized and crush them until they die. Didn’t you always hate them? Sure you did. Religion says right here that you are right to. He blew softly on a stupid and seething population’s resentments, its will to power, its lust to punish those who complicate their desires by having lives of their own, and watched those appetites stick up like the hairs on your arm, or glow like charcoal in a fire. It feels good. He tempts you with the promise that every cruel, fearful, punitive impulse you have aligns with The Way Things Are Supposed To Be, and that it is even your grim duty is to indulge them. In this respect, James Dobson was very much like Satan.
We’re two weeks into the school year, and I’ve already seen some incredible examples of authentic learning in action. It’s a good reminder of Steve Wozniak’s advice: keep the main thing the main thing—and don’t sell out for something that only looks better.
This week’s newsletter rounds up 10 links worth your time, from AI and education to remote learning, punk archives, and why cell phone bans never work.
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I see myself as a writer; I’m a professional liar.
– Harlan Ellison, 1976
Every now and then, we need a little reminder of our need to be antagonistic toward the establishment and really break things open that need to be broken.
In this interview from British television in 1976 (sorry, it won’t let me embed here), Harlan Ellison speaks about a bit of his life and his consistent efforts to be a thorn in the side of those in power.
The world might be a better place if we could stir up a little trouble as teachers and students by being a little more contrarian.
Interviewer: “I’ve read your stories and I was quite disturbed. There’s a lot of violence sometimes.
HE: “There’s a lot of violence in the world.”
Truth.
Interviewer: “I would call you a science fiction writer. Now, is that exactly what you are?”
HE: “No, that is exactly what I am not… I take contemporary events and look at them through the lens of fantasy and see what they really mean in mythic terms.”
Critiquing the world as it is through stories has been the primary mode of improving society since societies first formed.
On why he owns a gun (after describing taking out a sniper outside his home):
I own a gun because as much as I’d like to believe the world is a soft, pink & white bunny story, it isn’t. I deal with reality; I’m a pragmatist.
I still miss Harlan.
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Posy takes us on a grand adventure into the world of the incredibly small and ridiculously close.
Prepare to sit in awe of everyday objects from an entirely new perspective.
Funny, we should probably try to look at the world from different perspectives more often…
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My life’s mission has been to create safe and beneficial AI that will make the world a better place. Today at Microsoft AI we build AI to empower people, and I’m focused on making products like Copilot responsible technologies that enable people to achieve far more than they ever thought possible, be more creative, and feel more supported.
I want to create AI that makes us more human, that deepens our trust and understanding of one another, and that strengthens our connections to the real world. Copilot creates millions of positive, even life-changing, interactions every single day. This involves a lot of careful design choices to ensure it truly delivers an incredible experience. We won’t always get it right, but this humanist frame provides us with a clear north star to keep working towards.
Some thoughts from Mustafa Suleyman on building AI that doesn’t convince people that AI is a human, or needs rights. Or is a god.
Sadly, we’re already having those discussions.
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You do not need the strongest powers of observation to see that crime is a pretext — and not the main reason — for the military occupation of Washington by federal agents and troops from the National Guard.
I was at a leadership group and people were telling me “We think that with AI we can replace all of our junior people in our company.” I was like, “That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. They’re probably the least expensive employees you have, they’re the most leaned into your AI tools, and how’s that going to work when you go 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?
So says Matt Garman, CEO of Amazon Web Services. A better question to ask: What do you mean, you don’t want to teach your high school students how to use AI to help them write code and solve problems more efficiently?
We live in weird times when people constantly retreat to what came before and avoid any intention of moving on.
Life is the future, not the past.
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![Family on Smith's Plantation, Beaufort, South Carolina, circa 1862. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress and learnnc.org. [1]](https://mikepaul.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/family-of-african-american-slaves-on-smiths-plantation-beaufort-south-carolina-e835a0.jpg)
