via The New York Times:
Teaching in an American University Is Very Strange Right Now
by Frank Bruni
published on April 6, 2026
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Author Archives: Jasper John MacKay
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People like to go to work. They like to interact with humans. Many workers are older and have grown used to certain ways of doing business. That won’t all go away just because Claude is standing outside your office waiting for word to kick you out.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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via the report published by MIT’s Ad Hoc Committee on AI Use in Teaching, Learning, and Research Training:
As a community, we need to keep in mind that although research is central to MIT’s mission, it’s more than an end in itself; on our campus, research is also an apprenticeship, a means of training the next generation of researchers to continue our work and drive our fields of inquiry forward. Using research as an opportunity for learning-by-doing may produce seeming “inefficiencies,” but that’s a feature, not a bug.
Published on August 13, 2026.
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In modern times, every major revolutionary movement has sought to change not just the politics of a single country but the international system itself. Napoleon marched the French Revolution across Europe. Lenin and Trotsky believed that their Bolshevik Revolution would succeed only when the Soviet Union was surrounded by other Communist states. Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors built proxy movements to spread their ideology across the Middle East.
~ Anne Applebaum via The Atlantic
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However strange our new world will become, there will always be a class of people who want to engage with essays and books. Over the long term, writing might enjoy the fate of the opera and the symphony.
~ Dan Wang via his 2025 letter
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Before anyone can credibly claim that they’ve solved an extraordinarily difficult engineering problem, I need to be confident that they have previously solved the many much simpler problems that precede the difficult problem.
~ Ted Chiang via The Atlantic
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