Abigail Marsh

@Harvard @Georgetown @jasonfurman nytimes.com/2026/05/21/opi… @nytimes

One reason I'm happy about @harvard's decision and hope others like @georgetown will follow suit: Grade inflation forces students into 20+ hrs/week of extracurriculars to distinguish themselves, which reduces focus on academics and benefits the most privileged. @jasonfurman

@sonyasupposedly Was just talking with someone about how kids' books no longer feature real peril, but still want to have high emotional stakes, so they just depict extremely high emotional stakes of everyday life. But this is probably not the ideal model to hand kids

🎙️What do we know about happiness? In the newest @PePsyPodcast episode, @Shige_Oishi, Felix Cheung and @lisannedemoor discuss individual, social, and societal influences on well-being, the limits of personal agency, and how research can help improve quality of life. #Psychology

@J_HumanResource jhr.uwpress.org/content/early/…

Dear managers: Stop dumping extra tasks on people who love their jobs. 5 studies: Managers mistakenly assume that if you're intrinsically motivated, you'll happily do more without burning out or expecting more pay. Joy shouldn't come at a cost. It's time to end the passion tax.

you have a responsibility to the kids you teach, as individuals, to offer them challenging and interesting material. intentionally trying to stunt their education so that the high-performer/low-performer gaps are small is wrong.

it’s funny because this is genuinely the best approach Simply not thinking about stressful situations makes you less stressed

AI chatbots have become increasingly human-like, with more users seeking emotional support and companionship from them. New research founds that higher daily usage with chatbots—across all modalities and conversation types—was linked to higher loneliness, dependence, problematic use, and lower socialization with real people. People with stronger emotional attachment tendencies and higher trust in the AI chatbot also tended to experience greater loneliness and emotional dependence, respectively. People are increasing using AI for companionship, relationship advice and emotional support. But there may be serious downsides to these types of interactions. arxiv.org/html/2503.1747…

Access to broadband mobile phone networks radically decreased in-person socializing among teens and led to a decrease in teen fertility and an increase in teen suicide. papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cf…

Some of the worst damage in your life came from people who love you, in the form of a poisonous sentence wrapped in good intentions: “You're perfect just the way you are.” The reason it landed as damage rather than kindness is that you didn't believe it. And how could you? Nobody actually believes they’re perfect. So, when we’re told something that contradicts what we know to be true about ourselves, our brains try to resolve that conflict. There are only two ways to resolve this one — and both are bad. The first resolution goes like this: I feel terrible, and I've been told I'm as good as I can possibly be, so this must be what life amounts to — grim, static, with nothing to fix and therefore nothing to improve. That's despair: the conviction that this is what life is, and that nothing you can do will change it. The second goes the other way. I've been told I'm perfect and my life still isn't working, so the problem must be out there — in other people, in the system, in the generation that came before me. That's bitterness: the conviction that everything wrong in your life is somebody else's fault, and that there's nothing for you to do but wait for the world to change. Neither of these is what the well-meaning person had in mind when they told you you're perfect. But these are the two places it ends up. You can see both play out at scale right now. Depression has roughly tripled among adolescents and young adults; anxiety has roughly doubled. The angry activism of the last decade — the belief that previous generations robbed me, that the system is rigged, that I'm fine and everything around me is broken — is the second resolution lived out in public. The world is in fact unjust in many ways; I'm not arguing otherwise. But the resolution that leaves you with no agency over your own life is not the one that lets you live it. There is a plausible connection between telling kids, in a state of high synaptic plasticity, again and again, that they are perfect just the way they are, and what we are now measuring in those same kids ten years later. We lied to them when they were young. And the lie metastasized. The truth is you are not perfect, and that is incredibly good news. If you accept the reality of your imperfection, you have somewhere to go. The kindest thing anyone can say to a child (or to themselves) is not that they are perfect: it’s that they are not — and that in the gap between who they are and who they could be lies the meaning of their lives.

If anyone has any information about the individual who threw a beer keg through our window tonight, please contact the DC police anonymous tip line at (202) 727-9099.

"You will have so many opportunities to do the wrong thing: To gossip, to lie, to cut corners, to take short cuts. It’s never worth it, because then it makes it harder to like yourself. No amount of money or fame will make you feel good if you aren’t proud of how you’ve acted."

This is dystopian

I mean really, how could smart phones not be a contributing factor to the decline in coupling and fertility? The digital landscape has changed the way we socialize (or not), engage with other people, view the world and ourselves. Another thoughtful essay on fertility decline from @jburnmurdoch @FT -

New preprint! In 5 studies (3k+ users / 12k+ convs, with a 3-wk longitudinal study), we find that sycophantic AI influences how people view those closest to them. It affects how effortful human interaction seems, how satisfying it is, & who people want to turn to for advice 🧵

Among outpatients with #BorderlinePersonalityDisorder, dialectical behavior therapy and schema therapy produced similar and substantial improvements in symptoms, functioning, and quality of life, with no significant differences in treatment retention. ja.ma/4d8tXty

@DCWard7teacher @RANDCorporation Link to source: rand.org/pubs/research_…

@DCWard7teacher The top source of stress for teachers is managing students' behavior, according to a @RANDCorporation study. It's unfortunate there is no mention of coming up with better solutions for this problem, which is a major source of burnout and poor retention among teachers:

We have a comprehension issue here. Less days on testing = more time on instruction. Not less overall days at school. Perhaps something he could have benefited from. Also any teacher eval that leads to less than 40% of the workforce lasting 7+ years in DCPS is abject failure.

wsj.com/us-news/educat… @lindsayaellis @IgorChirikov @ChelseaSchein