Scandals require shame, and we’re all out of shame — If I told you that we don’t have any scandals in American politics anymore, you’d probably disagree. What about the Congressman from New York who lied about his entire life story? What about the Supreme Court Justice who has received many hundreds of thousands of dollars from a billionaire political…

Generative AI is going to transform school — but how? — As a teacher who assigns a lot of writing, I haven’t been all that troubled by the rise of AI thus far. My assignments are specific enough to my class that the AIs don’t do a very good job with them, and I don’t think most of my students (who…

A surprisingly optimistic tale! — The French painter Paul Delaroche — famous for his paintings of historical figures like Queen Elizabeth I — saw one of the first daguerreotypes at an 1840 exhibition and immediately proclaimed, “From today, painting is dead!” Delaroche was wrong, but I can understand why he felt this way. His stock…

Is a state a democracy if a majority of voters can’t get what they want? — When I was a teenager, first developing an interest in politics, I was a rules nerd. I loved the minutiae of government. I geeked out on stuff like parliamentary procedure and the intricacies of the Electoral College. It was really satisfying to learn how the government worked, and why. I…

Two millennia of fascination with mythical female warriors — A lot of the best myths start with a simple premise: Somewhere, far away, there’s a society very different from our own. Let’s think about what an ancient Greek person would have known about the world. They’d have some familiarity with nearby cultures like Persia and Egypt; they might have…

Applying Goodhart’s Law to education — Colonial Delhi had a cobra problem. The king cobra, one of the deadliest snakes in the world, is a native of the subcontinent, and snakes were killing people in the city. So the British rulers of India put out a decree — people would get paid for each cobra skin…

Our centuries-long opposition to the powerful and connected — There’s not a lot that’s funny about the scandals swirling around Clarence Thomas — it has been revealed that he received and failed to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gifts, many of which came from conservative-activist billionaire Harlan Crow. But there was one funny bit. In a…

The Alexander Romance turns history into a superhero story — Any way you cut it, Alexander the Great was an important historical figure with a fascinating historical story. He took power while still basically a child, proved to be a ruthless and relentless conqueror, and died at a shockingly young age. Alexander was an inspiration for future leaders like Augustus…

The debt ceiling crisis is profoundly stupid, even for America — All economic crises are, on some level, the result of human stupidity. Capitalists love to praise the “rationality of the market,” but it turns out that the market is made up of human beings. And human beings are not rational. At least, not rational enough, often enough. In the 1630s…