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Discrimination Day: How a Classroom Stunt Trained Children to Obey and Called It Empathy

At Brownell Elementary School in Lincoln, Nebraska, around 1973, my teachers ran a famous experiment on my class, and by the standard they set, I failed it. They split the room in two. The children with brown eyes were told they could command the children with blue eyes, and the blue-eyed children had to obey. I have grey eyes, so the teachers folded me in with the blue group, the way they folded in the hazel-eyed and anyone else who refused to fit the clean binary they wanted. For a day I watched classmates order other classmates to do push-ups, to fetch coats, to answer to the word “master.” The teacher delivered the moral with a satisfied smile: “Now you know how it feels to be Black.” We had, at most, one or two Black students in the entire school.

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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 Number on the Wall: Why Physicists Call 137 Magic

I came to 137 the way most people come to it, by hearing it called a magic number and wanting to know whether the word was earned. My instinct with a claim like that is suspicion, because a working life spent around language and persuasion teaches you how easily a large word gets draped over a small thing. This time the suspicion did not survive the facts. The number turned out to be real in a way I had not expected, and the people most gripped by it have been some of the hardest-headed physicists who ever lived.

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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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Sontag’s Two Doors, Campbell’s Underworld

In a television interview that has circulated for years, Susan Sontag offers a small theory of storytelling. She points out that the English word “story” carries a double valence. We say “tell me the real story” to demand truth, and we say “that’s only a story” to dismiss invention. Stories, she argues, face two directions at once, toward fact and toward fantasy, and this doubleness sits at the center of what stories do.

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Cry Later: The Culture That Taught You Not to Grieve

The commands arrive early. They arrive in childhood, in the voices of parents and teachers and coaches and older relatives, and they are delivered with the same authority as instructions about traffic and hot stoves. Cry later. Hold it in. Do not show your emotions. Do not embarrass us. Be strong. Be brave. Be a man. There will be time for that later. Not here. Not now. Not in front of people.

Content Note: This book contains accounts of suicide, suicidal crisis, and the deaths of family members, friends, and companion animals. Part Five includes detailed accounts of suicidal ideation and completed suicide. If you or someone you know is experiencing a mental health crisis, the 988 Suicide and Crisis Lifeline is available 24/7 by phone or text at 988. The Crisis Text Line is available by texting HOME to 741741.

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Postmodernism and Christianity

A lot of people think that postmodernism is always the enemy of Christianity, but that is an oversimplified scenario. Postmodernism has many ideas that can be combined with Christianity. One may view it as a problem, but it can be a resource for Christian philosophy, Christian mysticism, Christian apologetics, and even for the understanding of the Bible.

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