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The Unstealable Education: Why the University Will Bury Its Undertakers

The undertakers are circulating again, and this time they have given the university five years to live. The argument runs like this: when a machine can answer any question in any field at any hour, why would anyone pay tuition, or sit four years for a credential a chatbot renders quaint? Close the campuses, the prophets say. Sell the quads for condominiums. The library is now a login. I have been hearing this prophecy, in one costume or another, for my entire working life, and the prophecy is older than the university itself. In the Phaedrus, written around 370 BC, Socrates warns that the new technology of writing will plant forgetfulness in the soul, because men who trust marks on papyrus will stop exercising memory and will carry the appearance of wisdom rather than the thing itself. He was describing the alphabet. He might as well have been describing a data center.

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The Angle of Attack: What a Hunting Pack Knows About Geometry and What a Machine is Learning to do with It.

A wolf does not charge a moose head-on. It runs toward the place the moose will be, and it arrives there beside other wolves who each compute that same future from a different spot on the field. When the kill comes, it comes as geometry. The prey has one body and a small set of directions it can break toward, and the pack has arranged itself so that whichever direction the animal chooses already has a wolf folding into it. This is among the oldest forms of coordinated violence, wired into mammal nervous systems millions of years before anyone built a machine that could copy it. A certain kind of artificial intelligence has begun to learn the same lesson, badly at first and then with a competence that should make us uneasy.

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Take Your Children Offline NOW: Twenty-One Years Later

In July of 2005, I published Take Your Children Offline NOW on this blog, and the comments arrived in two distinct waves. The first wave came from parents who said the article forced them to think, and several of them removed every photograph of their children from their websites within hours of reading it. The second wave came from parents and bloggers who told me, with varying degrees of contempt, that I was hysterical, paranoid, anti-celebration, and ill-positioned to speak on parenting because I was married without children. One commenter wrote that if he lived in fear of someone furtively masturbating to pictures of his kids, he would never get anything done. The post was held up by a few critics as a case study in childless people moralizing at parents.

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The Old Fears, Faster

The fears about artificial intelligence are the fears about the internet, rerun at twice the speed. When the public internet arrived in the mid-1990s, four anxieties traveled with it. One concerned human contact, a sense that conversation would erode as it migrated to screens. Another concerned regional culture, a worry that local identity would flatten under a single global signal. A third concerned the limits of knowing, the prospect that anyone, anywhere, could learn anything with no curator to vet the source. The last concerned gatekeeping, the dread that quality would dissolve once newspapers, publishers, and broadcasters lost their grip.

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The Unfathered: A Short Story for a Long World

There is a part of the Book of Genesis that almost no one reads aloud. It sits between the famous scenes, the garden and the flood, and it is only a list. Adam lived a number of years and begat Seth. Seth lived and begat Enosh. The text walks down the page through nine generations of fathers and sons, each man reduced to two facts, that he lived and that he made another like himself, until the line reaches Noah and the world is ready to drown. I used to skip those passages. I read one again last night, on a laptop in an apartment I am about to leave, and I understood for the first time that a genealogy is a horror story told slowly enough to be survived.

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Magnifica Humanitas: The Pope Writes Like the Machine He Fears

On 15 May 2026, Pope Leo XIV released Magnifica Humanitas, an encyclical letter “On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.” The document runs roughly 35,000 words across five chapters and a conclusion. It positions itself as the 135th-anniversary successor to Leo XIII’s 1891 Rerum Novarum, recasting that founding labor encyclical for the age of machine intelligence. The framing image is biblical and Manichean. Humanity is presented with a choice between two ancient construction sites. One is the Tower of Babel, where collective effort produces dominance and dehumanization. The other is the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, where shared responsibility under God produces communion.

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The Cognitive Bargain Has Ended: A Generation Born Without Comparative Advantage

The claim circulating in policy papers, venture capital essays, and parental anxiety threads runs like this: no child born this year will grow up to be smarter than artificial intelligence. The line gets used as a slogan, which is the first sign it deserves examination. Slogans that move easily through dinner parties usually carry hidden machinery. The machinery here is a definition of intelligence narrow enough to fit on a benchmark and broad enough to terrify a parent. Both functions are intentional, and both deserve to be unbundled before the consequences can be argued honestly.

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