Ampzilla

@LizWolfeReason “Every hour I’m not bogged down with the doing is time I get to show up fully present for my kids” 🙁 It’s the “doing” that means you are showing up & present. It’s the doing that matters.

Unintentionally heartbreaking. Doing it *to this degree* is reserved for the ultra-wealthy, but *plenty* of upper-middle-class families in big cities like New York do a version of this. When so much of parenting & household-management is professionalized: -the standards ratchet upwards (naturally, parenting/taking care of children is more intensive when it's the *sole* thing someone is tasked w doing, as opposed to the traditional SAHM model where the mom is tackling like seven things at once) -community becomes fragmented or nonexistent (because everything is transactional, and every function of the family is outsourced, so swapping watching one another's kids or cooking dinner for another family that just drops in no longer happens) -kids don't necessarily learn how to manage their future households and learn critical life skills (like how to do their own laundry, clean their own bathrooms, or––yes––take care of younger siblings) We have replaced "the village" we so deeply crave with a professionalized advice economy (sleep consultants, lactation consultants, night nannies, day nannies, nannies you take on vacation with you, postpartum doulas, parenting coaches, bike-riding consultants) and then wonder why we're lonely and spiritually undernourished.

@hubermanlab I hate DLS so much I’d rather shift than have it permanently.

Lots of people asking about the shift to permanent daylight savings. The data clearly show locking to standard is best. For mental and physical health. That am sunlight is key, But if not, then locking to daylight savings second best. Shifting back-and-forth is the worst choice.

@SusanWiseBauer They think they “are here” for credentials. They have been told their whole lives college grads earn more money, have higher status, and get more opportunities. Education has been made to be beside the point.

I'm continually interested in how university lecturers are dealing with the easy access of AI. This, from Brown University via the Washington Post. I think my favorite line in this is, "Why are you here?" In the end, it always comes down to the individual soul. But we've got to do everything we can to make sure that unearned credits are *not* awarded. That's a matter of justice. ** Roberto Serrano was shocked when he saw the results of the midterm exam in his advanced mathematical economics class at Brown University last semester: The average score was 96, when in the past, it had ranged from the 60s to the 80s. Nearly half of the students this year got a perfect score of 100. When he and his teaching assistants ran the exam through a large language model, ChatGPT, it gave an odd, convoluted process for solving one problem rather than a straightforward direct proof. So did numerous students. He had decided, after the deadly classroom shooting at the school in December, to allow take-home exams for the first time. And he had just learned that those can no longer be trusted to measure student learning, even at an Ivy League school. “I think it’s basically impossible,” Serrano said, “to come up with an alternative explanation beyond massive cheating to explain the data." ...Serrano, a professor of economics, knows that learning can be a struggle: At 17, while growing up in Madrid, he began to go blind. He considered not continuing his education. Instead, he learned to use a cane and read Braille. In college, his father would help him reconstruct the notes he had scrawled in class so that Serrano could transcribe them into Braille. After earning his doctorate from Harvard University, he began teaching at Brown. Many people face far more difficult circumstances, he said, but “it certainly gave me the clear idea that learning and succeeding doesn’t come without effort.” Serrano was surprised when 86 students signed up for his course this year, about triple the typical enrollment. Now he wonders if that was because the syllabus made clear the midterm and final would be take-home exams. After the midterm, Serrano told his class that it appeared there had been widespread cheating, despite students having signed an academic integrity pledge when taking the test. The response was silence, he said. He also told them he was giving them a chance to prove him wrong. After he switched the final exam to an in-person, three-hour test, 27 students dropped the class, he said. Twenty-two of them had gotten a perfect score on the midterm. The average score on the final was a 48.6. Given the results, he told the class he was voiding the midterm. And he asked them, if they chose to use AI on an exam: “Why are you here? Why are you attending a university?” The happy news, Serrano said, was that the course still had a very strong group of students who showed a good command of the challenging material in the final exam. The highest grade on the final was a 95. That student also got a 95 on the midterm. ** washingtonpost.com/education/2026…

Dear New York Times, Today’s Wordle was awful. Sincerely, Everyone P.S. Is that even a real word?

@alextoussss Now do ticks

Extremely excited to announce our first air-to-air kill of a flying moth by an autonomous micro-drone. This is a big step towards completely eradicating mosquitoes.

@jilltowers Enraging

No spoilers here, but anyone doing WORDLE today…. I mean…. WTF??? Is that even a word??? 😳🤨

@mkhammer @annbauerwriter The way I would have screamed and ripped off all my clothing is sheer panic…

Absolute ice in her veins 👑

I would much prefer year-round standard time, which is sensible and better for our health. But if I can’t have that, then I’d rather the stupid, annoying switch back and forth so at least half the year can be normal.

@RachelMoiselle I know it’s beside the point, but Mary did not go blind from measles.

What I find interesting in this piece is that the author makes a moral argument against the politics of Little House on the Prairie while simultaneously admitting she felt a sadistic level of ‘justice’ in a character going blind because she is pretty.

@JillFilipovic Another app founded by Chinese-affiliated bytedance. I’m sure their kids are not allowed to use it, but it’s to their advantage if ours become dumber and more dependent. Why are we stupid enough to allow this?

It's incredible how we've just decided that AI can be everywhere, do everything, destroy anything - including children's minds. This, for example, should not be legal.

@Doug_Lemov I loved Housekeeping.

This book is so so so so good. Embarrassed to say I didn’t even know of Robinson (despite her winning a Pulitzer…yikes) but wow what a reminder of the ways that writing can communicate ideas feelings etc with a depth no other format can. It’s an argument for all the ways books are irreplaceable.

@benryanwriter Was this in Canada?

From a commenter on my Substack, a story of a care system that refuses to believe parents’ assessments of their own children and weaponizes their intuitions against them: “I am also a parent of a trans-identified girl, whose trans ID emerged in 2021 along with a cohort of her friends, at the tail end of COVID. About five or six months into her trans identification, aged 11, we brought her to the local youth mental health assessment centre because she was refusing to go to school and saying she was having suicidal thoughts. The intake clinician immediately reported us to MCFD because my daughter said we wouldn’t buy her a binder or direct the school to change her name and pronouns. My husband had tried to explain some of the background as to why we thought her trans ID might be a maladaptive coping mechanism and he said the worker was becoming increasingly angry at his refering to our daughter as ‘she’ and by her name. In a report which was later sent TO MY CHILD (which we intercepted) we saw that the worker misrepresented that we refused to participate in a safety plan, which along with being ‘insufficiently supportive’ of her gender identity was the pretext for the report to child protection.”

@PsyMattic @gortenheim @christopherrufo $ is the usual motivation for evil deeds & some people can never have enough. I keep thinking of that scene in Breaking Bad where Skylar shows Walt the mountain of $ in their storage unit and asks, How much is enough? How big does this pile have to be?

@gortenheim @christopherrufo “It’s all because of $” is such a boring low energy take though. Her husband is a lord I don’t think she’s trippin on money. It’s way more personal.

The most pathological element of Candace's campaign to destroy Charlie Kirk's family is that she's pretending to do it in his name. There is nothing more evil than betraying a friend after his death—and for something as fleeting and shallow as internet clicks.

@ichbinilya @AgainstTheFeed @DKThomp @rosehorowitch How can the cause be environmental and not social? What do you mean?

I will grant you there's this study (Dworak, Revelle, Condon) that showed a reverse Flynn effect, but it's like a decades' worth of reversal over a decade - basically bringing IQ "back to" the level of the 1990s. That doesn't seem so catastrophic, though, does it? And the paper doesn't say anything about the reason. There's also a widely cited Norwegian study that explicitly argues the cause is environmental, not social or anything else. On the SAT part, the College Board says they changed that section for different reasons, explicitly not because students didn't understand the material. Like I said earlier, I'm strongly in the "people should fucking read more" camp, and I find it very sad and a little scary that reading books might be becoming a niche pursuit, but I think it's seriously overblown to claim this is causing some kind of cognitive crisis.

@EBGresser @DKThomp @rosehorowitch It’s challenging for high school but for Harvard? And I don’t think you need to know Russian. Everything in this passage can be understood via context. Also, college students (especially at Harvard) should know what Old English looks like.

@DKThomp @rosehorowitch "A Clockwork Orange" is legitimately hard to read, though. Even if it isn't actually "Old English", you have to know some basic Russian to understand it. The opening graf also predicts a crash in newspaper-reading:

@S___Elliott @GarettJones Gen X lived experience enters the discourse

@GarettJones lol

Asked Gemini if I could have half a beer with my morphine and got a whole ass lecture.

@S___Elliott When I asked Gemini if a deaf person could get a drivers license, it shamed me 😂

@NameSouthern @MrsCMFrancis @quachelsey Go to a gynecologist who is well-informed on menopause and peri-menopause. She can check your hormone levels along with an overall evaluation.

@MrsCMFrancis @quachelsey Just go to the doc. You need answers quickly.

Soooooooo…for the ladies (of whom my audience is 70%) so guys you can peace out now. My current cycle is sitting at 72 days, so I’ve missed 2 periods. I am not pregnant. I don’t know for sure but my body has signaled it’s ovulated a few times (but obviously hasn’t). Nothing significant has changed, I’m feeling fine and healthy overall. I’m 37. When do I start worrying about this? (Spoiler alert: I am worried).

@benryanwriter @billybinion You are amazing at accidentally posting wild confessions of yourself on here.

@billybinion I didn't realize until after I posted it!

@benryanwriter I was so confused 😵‍💫

PS, I did not write this essay! This woman did: