TIRANA — The College of Europe’s Tirana office was among the latest casualties of escalating student protests gripping the Albanian capital.

The office for the school, which serves as a training ground for future EU civil servants, was broken into, looted and set on fire on Wednesday evening.

“Until yesterday, this was the office of the College of Europe,” Albanian Prime Minister Edi Rama said in an Instagram video delivered from the burned-out shell of the office. Rama’s own workplace is a stone’s throw from the Pyramid complex housing the College of Europe.

Rama said he did not believe the damage was down to the students. “Students are the future, they are the ones who look ahead, who want to go further and faster,” he said.

Instead, he accused his political opponents of being behind the destruction, claiming that they were attempting to undermine Albania’s progress. The opposition parties deny any wrongdoing.

The College of Europe in Tirana refused to comment.

Protests in Albania have been ongoing since late May against the proposed development of a luxury resort linked to U.S. President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and alleged government corruption. But the situation escalated on Tuesday and Wednesday as students from around the country clashed with police, set fire to government buildings and businesses linked to powerful businessmen, and damaged traffic lights, bus stops, and the city’s roads.

The Delegation of the European Union to Albania released a statement Thursday morning, condemning the destruction of private and public property and asking protesters to exercise restraint. “Violence has no place in democracies,” they wrote.`

Large swathes of the city were damaged during over 14 hours of protests Wednesday. The Ministry of Justice, Ministry of Education and Ministry of Finance, as well as a number of government institutions, banks, and private businesses, were broken into and set on fire. In centrally located Skanderbeg Square, protesters torched a large under-construction tower block, with flames reaching several floors.

With the destruction came many reports of police brutality, including against regular citizens and journalists. Several media workers were prevented from filming or had their equipment confiscated. On Tuesday, a young man required emergency surgery for a severely broken leg following an altercation with police.

At least 89 people required hospital treatment, including about 51 police officers, while many more protesters have reported minor injuries.

On Thursday, protests began again at 8 a.m., as students across Tirana boycotted lessons and marched toward the Ministry of Education. Police immediately dispersed demonstrators with tear gas and water cannons, while the unrest continued to spread to other parts of the capital, particularly near government institutions and the headquarters of Rama’s Socialist Party.

A parliamentary session for Thursday was canceled after students said they would not allow any deputies to access the assembly.

Protests also spread to other parts of Albania. Masked protesters clashed with police in multiple cities, with damage, fires, and violence reported across the country.

Many businesses throughout the capital were shuttered for the day, with owners putting up signs saying “we are with you, please don’t burn our businesses.”

The students and the so-called “Flamingo Revolution” protestors are demanding the resignation of Rama and the entire government, and a new start for Albania — including economic, educational, government, electoral and legal reform.

Rama told Reuters on Thursday that he has no intention of resigning.

BRUSSELS — Slovakia is reviving a dormant cooperation forum with Moscow, putting Russia’s gas and oil supplies, nuclear fuel and the treatment of Russian athletes high on the agenda of their first such meeting in five years, according to a Russian government note obtained by POLITICO.

The note, written by Russian Science and Higher Education Minister Valery Falkov, says Slovak Foreign Minister Juraj Blanár agreed during an Aug. 20 video call to hold a meeting of the Russian-Slovak Intergovernmental Commission in Moscow.

Slovakia’s Prime Minister Robert Fico said Wednesday the meeting is scheduled for Nov. 25. The Russian note — which is dated Sept. 10 — initially set the date of the meeting as Oct. 26-27.

The IGC, which covers economic, scientific and technical cooperation, has been dormant since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. The last meeting was the commission’s 21st session, held in Bratislava on Nov. 12, 2021.

The meeting comes as Moscow finds openings in other international arenas. The U.S. has invited Vladimir Putin to December’s G20 summit in Miami, while the International Olympic Committee has provisionally lifted its suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee and urged sports bodies to ease restrictions on Russian athletes.

Asked about the purported agenda for the IGC, the Slovak foreign ministry directed POLITICO to Blanár’s public statements after the Aug. 20 call. “We pursue a policy in all directions and maintain dialogue with all countries that are interested in pragmatic cooperation with us for the benefit of the Slovak Republic’s national interests,” Blanár said at the time.

The Russian foreign ministry did not respond to a request for comment.

The renewed push for warmer Slovak-Russian relations follows Fico’s May 9 visit to Moscow, where he met Russia’s President Vladimir Putin during Victory Day commemorations. It comes after Viktor Orbán’s defeat in Hungary’s April election, which cost Putin one of his closest partners in Europe and forced him to look elsewhere for EU allies.

Months before losing the election to Péter Magyar, Orbán rebooted the Russian-Hungarian Intergovernmental Commission on Economic Cooperation, which had been suspended for several years after the 2022 invasion. Magyar’s government did not confirm to POLITICO whether the commission would go ahead next year.

EU leaders, including Fico, will gather in Brussels on Thursday for a two-day summit focused on issues including energy prices and support for Ukraine, with the country’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy expected to join them for a conversation on Friday.

Oil imports and cultural integration

In the August video call, Blanár raised Slovakia’s opposition to the EU’s phaseout of Russian gas imports and asked to discuss supplies at the Moscow meeting, according to the document, which POLITICO could not independently verify but bears the hallmarks of a legitimate Russian ministerial note. Slovak representatives also stressed the importance of continued Russian oil deliveries through the Druzhba pipeline and welcomed regular shipments of nuclear fuel for Slovak power plants, according to the note.

Slovakia remains heavily reliant on Russian oil and gas, and Fico has argued that ending imports would raise costs. When the two leaders met in Moscow on May 9, Putin said Russia would do everything to meet Slovakia’s energy needs.  

The agenda for the meeting next month reaches beyond energy, according to the document. The sides plan to explore working groups on culture, tourism, agriculture and environmental protection, and to discuss the status of the Russian Center for Science and Culture in Bratislava.

Falkov also records Blanár’s opposition to what the note calls the “discrimination against Russian athletes” at international competitions, noting the issue is to be discussed at the IGC meeting.

The International Olympic Committee lifted the suspension of the Russian Olympic Committee in July and said its previous recommendations restricting Russian athletes’ participation no longer applied. World Archery lifted restrictions on Russian athletes and officials in August. FIFA President Gianni Infantino has also called for Russia to be allowed back into international football.

The approach echoes Moscow’s recent effort to lock in closer ties with Orbán’s Hungary. Budapest and Moscow in December agreed on a 12-point plan to expand cooperation in areas including energy, trade and culture. The plan was signed by then Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó and Russian Health Minister Mikhail Murashko after talks in Moscow in December. The Slovak note points to a similar breadth of ambition.

The Kremlin’s outreach to Fico shows how Moscow can use energy ties to pull individual EU countries away from a united stance on Ukraine. Putin made a similar pitch in Washington last weekend: After a call with the Russian leader, President Donald Trump said Russia would supply diesel to U.S. and global markets to bring down fuel prices. The deal would provide revenue to Moscow while weakening efforts to maintain a united front against the Kremlin.

But there are questions over whether Putin can follow through on his pledge to Trump. Ukraine has been stepping up drone strikes on Russian refineries, aiming to disrupt fuel supplies and cut revenue for Moscow’s war effort. Kyiv said this month that strikes had disabled 51 percent of Russia’s oil-refining capacity.

Greg Abbott is worried. After three terms as Texas governor, the Republican had every reason to believe the office was his as long as he wanted it. But Abbott is now seeing his Democratic opponent, state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, get uncomfortably close to him in the polls. Suddenly, the governor has to be mindful of negative press, something he’s lost practice at in the decade-plus he’s been in office. Abbott avoided a recent campaign stop from Donald Trump, lest he be seen in the vicinity of the unpopular president or Ken Paxton, the Texas attorney general who appears to be facing an uphill battle in his own Senate race against state Rep. James Talarico. The governor is so concerned about his re-election prospects that he recently reversed his position on data centers, which have grown increasingly unpopular, and is now calling for moratoriums and restrictions on their construction. But one issue Abbott hasn’t budged on is his all-out war on public education.

Schools in Texas are wildly underfunded, with hundreds having to reduce students to four days a week. This is very much by Abbott’s design. As Jessica Grose of the New York Times explained on Oct. 7, the governor signed into law a voucher program whose entire purpose is paying parents to take kids out of school and put them into unregulated “alternatives” — such as private schools or homeschooling — that have no real requirements to offer children an actual education. Since local school funding is tied to student head count, this has created a backdoor way to funnel money out of already-struggling public schools. 

Even in deeply conservative rural and suburban areas, Abbott’s policy is unpopular; a June 2026 University of Texas/Texas Politics Project poll found that only 33% of Texans approve of his performance on education. As Grose notes, public schools are the heart of many Texas communities, especially when it comes to high school football. (As a native Texan, I can attest that the “Friday Night Lights” lifestyle is real.) Watching the governor concoct elaborate schemes to siphon money from beloved local institutions into unregulated religious programs and homeschooling is enraging people, so much so that some lifelong Republican leaders are announcing they will be voting for a Democrat for the first time ever. It helps that Hinojosa, whose entrance into holding office was being on the Austin school board, has made saving Texas schools the centerpiece of her campaign. 

Considering education is the issue that could sink Abbott, it raises the question: Why not back down? After all, he shifted gears on data centers. But when it comes to this policy, which is undermining and could even start closing beloved local schools, the governor will not budge. To the contrary, he has burned a lot of bridges within the GOP in his war on public schools, backing primary opponents of anti-voucher Republicans in the legislature until he’d tilted the scales to get this done. 

Money is the likeliest answer. As Grose notes, Abbott’s war on education is backed by three powerful Texas billionaires — and major conservative donors — Tim Dunn and a pair of brothers, Farris and Dan Wilks. The trio made their fortunes in oil. But their single-minded hatred of public schools is rooted in evangelical Christianity.

“If you ever wonder why state laws and policies are more radical than most Texans would prefer, the answer has a lot to do with Dunn and his checkbook,” Russell Gold wrote in Texas Monthly in 2024. The same is true of the Filks brothers, who share Dunn’s dream of turning Texas into a far-right Christian theocracy.

When not throwing money at Republican politicians willing to back their Christian nationalist agenda, both Dunn and Farris Wilks preach from the pulpit, pushing religious views that are far right of even most evangelicals. Wilks led the Assembly of Yahweh 7th Day Church in Eastland County for 31 years, a congregation where women are apparently forbidden to speak in church. In 2010, he delivered a sermon where he said “our country died” when Barack Obama was elected. “I do believe we live in a nation that will start to vomit some of its people out,” he said of LGBTQ people the following year. Wilks has also preached that all gay people live a “predatorial lifestyle” and “want your children.” 

Dunn has backed efforts to rewrite the Constitution to make it more amendable to his Christian nationalist views, which reportedly includes the belief that only conservative Christians should be eligible to hold office. Like Wilks, he has zeroed in on public schools as the great enemy that must be destroyed. Their main weapon has been funding primary opponents against any Republican who opposes them, which has created a state of fear within the party. Few dare cross them — including Abbott. 

---

Want more Amanda Marcotte on politics?  Sign up for her free newsletter, Standing Room Only, now also on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

Through his Midland Bible Church, Dunn founded Midland Classical Academy, which offers a glimpse of his preferred curriculum: anti-science Biblical literalism that will leave kids unprepared for living and working as adults in the real world. The school teaches “the authority of God over every area of life” and structure education along a historical timeline “from the garden to Mesopotamia, from Greece and Rome to the Reformation and beyond.” The intense parental involvement required by the academy sounds incompatible with allowing mothers to have jobs outside of the home. 

Abbott’s war on education isn’t just financial or limited to K-12. Republicans “have established strict state controls on what can be taught, researched, and even discussed” in universities, reports The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer. The University of Texas at Austin has been strong-armed into eliminating majors in “Africana studies, Mexican American and Latino studies, women’s and gender studies, and race and migration studies.” Political science professors have been forbidden from discussing the history of racism or the struggle for queer rights. The censorship has grown so severe that one philosophy professor was told to remove Plato’s “the Republic” because the ancient Greek philosopher mentions homosexuality. 

Abbott himself doesn’t read as a Christian fundamentalist like Dunn or Wilks. While the governor hits his minimum Republican allotment of God talk, he has also managed to evade a reputation as a rabid evangelical, despite his support for abortion bans and for forcing the Ten Commandments into classrooms. Part of it is his affect, which feels more old-school Republican than Bible-waving preacher. As a Catholic, Abbott has also managed to keep a discrete distance from the evangelicals who are the backbone of the Christian nationalist movement.

But whatever his personal beliefs, Abbott has emerged as one of the GOP’s most loyal soldiers in a movement to turn America into a far-right Christian nation. His benefactors have singled out public education as the biggest obstacle to an illiberal theocratic agenda — and with good reason. Education is power. It’s not just that kids who learn to read and think critically often leave conservative religions, though that is a big fear driving the war on public schools. It’s also that education empowers the majority of Americans who don’t subscribe to fundamentalist Christianity. 

If Wilks, Dunn and other far-right billionaires can break public schools, leaving the only options as religious education or none at all, they will turn America into a hellscape. Modern people need education to hold down decent-paying jobs, and civic participation depends on the ability to read, write and reason. A population without the benefits offered by public education would largely be left intellectually, financially and spiritually impoverished — and easier to control.

The post Who really controls Greg Abbott? appeared first on Salon.com.

PARIS — Edouard Philippe was once seen as the only man capable of defeating Marine Le Pen in next year’s French presidential election. But his lackluster campaign as the country’s voice of reason is putting his allies on edge — and some of them are starting to wonder if he has what it takes.

The former center-right prime minister promised a “massive” campaign platform that would fix France, put its finances back on track and restore the country’s standing in the world. And while Philippe has upped his campaign tempo in recent weeks, his proposals tend to fall flat.

POLITICO spoke to six members of Philippe’s political family, some of them campaign team members, who shared doubts about his strategy and chances of success. Some were granted anonymity to speak candidly about internal matters.

“It’s unbelievable how nothing is making an impact,” a campaign official told POLITICO ahead of Philippe’s decision to announce his plans for a flagship pensions reform. “I can’t stop thinking about it.”

Philippe is still the best-placed mainstream candidate to challenge far-right Le Pen, who commands a substantial lead in the polls. But his poll ratings have stalled over the past year, and he is now locked in a tight race with far-left candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon to clinch a second place which would qualify him for the runoff. MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, who trails the duo in most surveys, could see a boost for his campaign after scoring a decisive victory in the recent center-left primary.

Philippe is facing a pileup of problems: He has yet to unite the center behind him, remains burdened by a decade of centrist rule and is struggling to gain traction among voters with his pitch as the plain-speaking pragmatist fighting populism.

“Philippe is the most honest guy I know,” said an ally, “but he needs to unite and find a project that rallies people around him.”

Meanwhile, Le Pen and Mélenchon are dominating headlines with political one-upmanship and at times inflammatory proposals. The two populists locked horns last week over school protests, with Le Pen accusing Mélenchon of fueling the violence, and the far left positioning themselves as the protectors of France’s youth against police violence.

“The risk is great” that Le Pen and Mélenchon will squeeze him out of the race, Philippe’s ally added.

Stale marriage

Philippe, who left his position as prime minister under President Emmanuel Macron in 2020, has been planning his bid to succeed him for years. But things haven’t quite gone to plan on the campaign trail, where he has faced upsets and distractions.

When Philippe recently announced his unpopular proposal to push back the retirement age to 65, it was supposed to be a make-or-break moment in his campaign. Instead, it went almost unnoticed.

First, he was forced to delay his flagship announcement because Macron decided to address the nation about Russian threats and spiraling fuel costs. When he finally got round to it, it was overshadowed by antisemitism allegations against National Rally leader Jordan Bardella.

Ultimately, his 20-minute speech detailing his pensions plans on YouTube garnered only 70,000 views.

A day later, Mélenchon livestreamed a two-hour Q&A session with students from HEC, one of France’s top business schools. It got 550,000 views.

But according to Philippe’s campaign spokesperson Arnaud Péricard, the battle will be won in the long run.

“We’re not firing an arrow and then running away … Voters shouldn’t be underestimated; they can understand why our pensions system needs fixing,” he said. “But we aren’t mere accountants … We want a return of a powerful France that can lead on energy, industry; that’s why we need to balance our books.”

But a mix of economic realism and European ambition sounds all too familiar after a decade of Macron’s presidency — and even insiders know there’s little appetite for it. “There’s no desire for the centrist bloc. It’s a bit like marriage after 10 years,” said the same ally quoted above.

But for Philippe, a pro-European who was one of Macron’s coalition partners, there’s not much else he can offer.

“It’s difficult for the moderates: They know what state the country is in. They understand interest rates, debt and deficits,” said OpinionWay pollster Bruno Jeanbart. “They have to campaign as if things will get better, but it’s going to be difficult. We’ll have to work longer, accept more social spending, less benefits. There is no good news.”

Cornered

The silver lining for Philippe is that while he’s not doing too well, his immediate rivals aren’t doing any better. Conservative leader Bruno Retailleau is stuck on single-digit polling figures, while centrist Gabriel Attal, leader of Macron’s Renaissance party, has relentlessly campaigned throughout the summer but is still lagging behind and looks increasingly isolated.

Party insiders are confident Philippe will prevail, but admit the drawn-out centrist battle is dragging their champion down.

“We are at a bit of a standstill, and letting ourselves get boxed into a duel with Attal,” complained a senior official from Philippe’s Horizons party.

When Philippe and Attal announced their education proposals simultaneously last month, “people didn’t notice our proposals, they just saw the squabbling with Gabriel Attal,” the official added.

A member of Philippe’s campaign team said there was “little bandwidth” to make an impact because there were “too many” centrist candidates. “Maybe we’ll have to wait before addressing some campaign topics,” the official said.

In the coming weeks, Philippe’s team hopes to drain Attal’s support among lawmakers and local representatives, according to two allies, and force him to throw in the towel.

But that’s unlikely to provide Philippe with a much-needed boost, said a centrist senator, as enthusiasm is flatlining at the local level too. “There’s no real movement anywhere,” the senator said. “And the French aren’t really listening.”

Pauline de Saint Remy and Elisa Bertholomey contributed reporting.

Most of America’s major cities have made little to no progress reducing racial segregation in their public schools over recent decades. Many have slid backward, and are more polarized today than they were at the turn of the century.

These challenges were highlighted in Nikole Hannah-Jones’s wrenching New York Times Magazine piece in September about her experience sending her daughter to poor, intensely segregated public schools in New York City as part of a campaign to fix them — only for her child to fall behind in her education and demand a change to a more selective school with few Black and Hispanic students. The essay ends with both the writer and subject frustrated: Hannah-Jones with the seemingly insurmountable barriers to improving and integrating schools, and her daughter, with the burden of confronting these structural barriers on her own. 

But Washington, DC, the city I’ve called home on and off for most of my adult life, is one of the few standout exceptions to these trends. 

During the 2000s and 2010s, its public schools underwent a dramatic set of reforms that helped improve teaching and student achievement. At the same time, the number of white students leapt up, and the share of schools that had been almost uniformly Black or Hispanic plummeted by about 20 percentage points, the largest drop among the country’s 50 biggest cities.

Recently, I called Kaya Henderson, DC’s former top schools official, to ask about that era of progress, and whether she thought the policies she implemented had helped encourage integration. If not, what had? Her answer surprised me a bit: It simply wasn’t a question she had ever really pondered. 

“For me, integration was never the point,” Henderson said. “Giving our citizens of the district, no matter where they come from or what they look like, a high-quality school system, that was the point.” 

It’s always perilous to read too much into a single example of success in education. Each state and school district is different, and seemingly small differences in how reforms are implemented can make or break them. 

Each state and school district is different, and seemingly small differences in how reforms are implemented can make or break them.

But I think DC’s story is an instructive and hopeful counterpoint to the pessimism that seemed to pervade Hannah-Jones’s discourse-devouring essay. Having witnessed the dysfunction of these schools firsthand and concluding she was wrong to sacrifice her daughter’s education in a noble attempt to address it, Hannah-Jones doesn’t offer any explicit solutions. But she does seem to suggest that we won’t be able to fix the deep-seated problems in our education system unless we find a way to end de facto segregation, which she has long argued is a critical prerequisite to improving school quality for historically disadvantaged minority students. In her media tour, she has been more explicit, calling for New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani to produce “a plan to address and dismantle school segregation in the city.” 

“Nothing can help the working class change its material condition more than actually having access to an equal and quality education,” she told radio host Brian Lehrer.

I agree with much of that sentiment. But I can’t help but feel like Hannah-Jones is reversing the order of operations. As DC’s example suggests, the most realistic way to desegregate our schools today might actually be to focus on improving their results first. We don’t need to wait. And while Hannah-Jones famously sought to do that by rallying better-off parents to enroll and advocate for their children on a school-by-school basis, DC shows that, with the right plan, school administrators and teachers can deliver gains as well. 

Integrating schools is hard

One of the many reasons integrating public schools has proven so historically difficult is that most modern-day segregation is driven by differences between districts, rather than within them. Well-to-do and white families decamp to wealthy suburbs when it’s time for kindergarten or middle school, while Black and Hispanic families remain within city limits, or in working-class suburbs.  

Overcoming municipal boundaries tends to be an insurmountable challenge, both politically and legally. Forced bussing was never popular, and in 1974, the Supreme Court ruled that court-issued integration orders that required swapping students between districts were effectively unconstitutional, taking away one of the few tools activists thought they had to break through borders. 

Today, ideas like redrawing school boundaries to make them more diverse poll well when Americans are asked about them in the abstract, but it’s at best unclear how many suburbanites would tolerate such a thing if it was proposed in their town. 

Those sorts of options were never available to DC, anyway. It’s a politically isolated city bordered by neighbor-state suburbs like Arlington, Virginia, and Montgomery County, Maryland, where the region’s well-off professionals have long moved for the school systems. The only way to meaningfully integrate its own schools racially and economically was to lure more white or high-earning families into the district and keep them there. 

How DC saw a major drop in segregated schools

And that is in fact what happened. 

Starting in the early 2000s, DC’s population started to balloon with Gen X and millennial professionals of all races, which had the net effect of raising the overall share of white residents. Many flocked to the city after the financial crisis and Great Recession, since Washington was one of the few places where jobs remained plentiful. And they eventually set down roots. Public school enrollment — including both charters and traditional schools — grew alongside the city’s population, and the share of those students who were white jumped from 3.9 percent in 2000 to 13.7 percent in 2023. 

The influx led to a large drop in the number of what the Civil Rights Project at UCLA has defined as “intensely segregated” schools — where fewer than one in 10 students are white. In 2000, 90 percent of DC’s traditional public and charter schools fell into that category, the most of any district covering the country’s 50 largest cities, according to data from the Segregation Tracking Project at Stanford’s Educational Opportunity Project. By 2023, it had fallen to 69 percent, leaving it in the middle of the pack. 

Over that same period, only five of the 50 largest saw any decline at all. 

I don’t want to oversell DC’s progress. It went from among the worst in the country on this measure to looking more like a typical urban school district — similar to New York City today, where 71 percent of schools remain “intensely segregated.” I doubt many are satisfied with that status quo. There are also obvious downsides to the kind of gentrification that made these gains possible — the city lost thousands of Black families during the 21st century to rising housing prices (though the decline was even larger in the ’80s and ’90s, as its economy was in collapse). 

DC’s white students still tend to cluster in public schools serving affluent neighborhoods, such as Capitol Hill or the famously leafy areas west of Rock Creek Park, and there are vanishingly few white families in the city’s poorest wards, east of the Anacostia River. Using the Segregation Tracking Project’s “normalized exposure” index, I found that there were only three other large cities where white students were spread less evenly across their school district. But because white enrollment grew so much, it still spilled out of those enclaves, and helped diversify schools that had previously been overwhelmingly low-income, Black, and Hispanic. As a result, the city became a rare example of progress on one of America’s most stubborn social ills. 

The city’s school performance improved

During the same period in which its schools became less segregated, DC was also embarking on a high-profile education reform effort.

That drive began with the arrival of charter schools in the late 1990s, which put new competitive pressure on the district’s traditional public schools; today the charter sector teaches almost half of the city’s students. But the pace of reforms hastened after 2007 when then-Mayor Adrian Fenty took control of the city’s schools. His major changes included a controversial pay-for-performance system for teachers known as IMPACT, as well as stronger curriculum standards tied to the Common Core. Later leaders adopted more rigorous standardized tests that allowed parents to easily compare results between schools, a single citywide school lottery, and the city’s much celebrated universal pre-K program.

These changes did not work miracles — but they did lead to a major rise in students’ reading and math scores. DC became the fastest-improving large urban school district in the country on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), considered the gold standard for measuring learning gains, with both Black and white students seeing significant progress. Again, this was largely a game of catchup: Washington went from among the very worst performing urban school districts on the NAEP to matching the large city average. But it led to a broad sense that schools were on the upswing. 

It’s difficult, and maybe impossible, to say how much any one of the reform policies actually affected parents’ decisions to stay in the city, or helped reduce segregation in schools. Some have had an obvious impact: DC’s universal pre-K program, which began in 2008, anchors professional families here when their children are young, then acts as a funnel into the public school system. Others are probably less consequential on their own: Studies have found that centralized lotteries like the one DC adopted have only small impacts on integration. 

Regardless, the total package seems to have worked. It’s theoretically possible that the army of Sweetgreen-chomping, DC-Brau-chugging millennials who showed up to DC in the Obama era would have decided to raise their kids here no matter what the state of the city’s schools had been. The more reasonable reading, however, is that DC created a virtuous cycle, by taking steps to improve its K-12 system just as its economy was attracting a new influx of relatively well-off transplants. One telling fact: While the number of white children in DC roughly doubled in this time, the number in public and charter schools more than quadrupled, meaning parents were choosing to send them at higher rates. 

Still, it’s a model, one that shows how a city can change the makeup of its school system when it realistically can’t just make kids commute in from the suburbs. 

It seems telling that one of the only other cities to see similar declines in segregation, Atlanta, put a similar emphasis on education reform early in the century. Although those efforts were eventually sidetracked by a cheating scandal in which schools and teachers were caught faking standardized test scores, it did notch real improvements, as shown on the NAEP. 

Some will ask how much of a model DC can really be, given the uniqueness of its circumstances — not every city will have a chance to capitalize on a boom in young professionals. Still, it’s a model, one that shows how a city can change the makeup of its school system when it realistically can’t just make kids commute in from the suburbs. 

What Henderson, who served as DC schools chancellor between 2010 and 2016, emphasized to me was that insofar as DC has succeeded more than other cities at integrating in its schools, it was at best a side effect of education reform policies, rather than an explicit goal. At one point in our chat, I started reading a few of the stats I had dug up about the decline in “intense” segregation before she stopped me.

“I don’t even know if people collected that kind of data,” she said. “We prided ourselves on ‘what gets measured, gets done.’ If integration was a goal, that would have showed up on some of my [performance indicators]. And we just literally never had that conversation.” I suspect she was exaggerating slightly — Henderson and her deputy celebrated DC’s increase in white enrollment back in 2011. But it’s hard to think of a deeper contrast with Hannah-Jones’s view — where unless cities take politically implausible steps to desegregate, we’re doomed to failing children.

MADRID — Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez has finally done something the far right approves of — calling a snap election on Nov. 29 that the anti-immigrant Vox party is hailing as “Spain’s last chance to be Spain again.”

Polling third in the race, Vox is Spain’s leading nationalist, euroskeptic force and it sees next month’s contest as its prime opportunity to remold the country after eight years of Sánchez’s socialist premiership by getting its people into top ministerial jobs.

Party leader Santiago Abascal greeted Monday’s election announcement as “excellent news.” His delight is hardly surprising given that polls suggest Vox is on track to make the biggest gains of any major party.

While the center-right People’s Party is expected to come first — with about 33% of the vote, according to POLITICO’s Poll of Polls — it will almost certainly have to team up with Vox, which commands support of about 18%, to build a stable coalition.

Abascal will then be able to demand the inclusion of key elements of Vox’s agenda as its price for that partnership. Its goals include deportations of undocumented migrants, a benefits preference for Spaniards over foreign nationals, slashing EU health and safety rules in the farming sector and rolling back support for gender equality and the LGBTQ+ community.

Vox secured 33 of the 350 seats in Congress in 2023, but is now set to double that. Under the PP’s coalition leadership, it should be able to form part of a comfortable majority.

“This time round, Vox is much stronger,” José Antonio Fúster, spokesperson for the party and a member of the Madrid regional parliament, said. “We are going into a very important election, not so much for us, as for Spaniards … This is the last hope for Spain to be Spain again.”

Fúster would not be drawn on which ministries his party has set its sights on, warning against “selling the bearskin before it has been hunted.”

Pointing to talks with the PP in recent months in four regions where the two parties now govern in coalition, he said the shaping of policy was being prioritized ahead of institutional power. “That is the last thing we negotiate because it is the least important,” he said.

Pet portfolios

In August, Vox MEP Jorge Buxadé told POLITICO that forming part of the government was not the only option open to his party, but that in a hypothetical coalition with the PP, his party would seek a number of ministries “in proportion to our vote share.”

That would amount to a significant percentage. If current polls translate into results in November, Vox would be in a position to claim about a third of ministerial posts.

Analysts expect Vox to press for portfolios that focus on its pet policies, such as agriculture, domestic policy, immigration and industry. The culture and education portfolios could also be of interest to the party, given their relevance in the hard right’s campaign against so-called wokeism.

The regions where the PP and Vox currently govern together — Andalusia, Aragón, Castile and León, and Extremadura — offer clues: The government departments that Vox controls are mainly linked to agriculture, welfare benefits and the family.

The party is heading into the election campaign espousing three main ideas: the concept of “national priority” — ensuring that Spaniards have access to public services and benefits ahead of foreign nationals — a clampdown on immigration and broad deregulation.

Although Vox’s rise to prominence was driven by its fierce stance against Catalan nationalism nearly a decade ago, that debate has faded from the political arena. Now, its focus is, like its European far-right counterparts, more firmly on immigration-related matters.

“Before, Vox talked about immigration, but it wasn’t the nuclear issue it has become,” said Guillermo Fernández Vázquez, a political scientist at Carlos III University and author of a book about the European far right. “Now, when Vox talks about social security payments, it talks about immigration; when it talks about the economy, it talks about immigration. Immigration is the issue that dictates everything.”

Vox also subscribes to the “remigration” policy being touted by many far-right parties, under which undocumented migrants and those who commit crimes would be deported. The PP has appeared to respond to Vox’s hard line by toughening its own stance, calling for the expulsion of foreign criminals and opposing a government migrant legalization program.

In each of the regions where the two parties are in coalition, Vox has ensured that its senior partner agreed to formally include the national priority principle in their governing agreement.

“But when it comes to national priority, the PP has added the caveat that it has to be implemented in line with the law,” said Miguel González, a journalist at the El País daily newspaper and author of a book about Vox. Legislation prevents discrimination against foreign nationals when it comes to accessing public benefits and services, meaning the policy is currently little more than symbolic in those regions. 

“In reality, in order to implement this properly, you’d have to change the immigration law,” González added.

Vox is eyeing an overhaul of that legislation to make it a workable policy.

“It’s very possible to change laws that are bad for Spaniards, so we have to roll them back and introduce new laws, making sure that Spaniards are not last in line,” Fúster said.

Deregulation nation

Deregulation also offers a platform from which to attack EU health-and-safety norms that are reviled by the farming sector, one of Vox’s main voter bases.

Fúster accepted that this could lead to clashes with the European Commission, but insisted that pressure from what he described as a rising tide of European parties sharing Vox’s values would “make sure that Brussels returns to the path of common sense.”

PP leader Alberto Núñez Feijóo has criticized phytosanitary restrictions on farmers but has shown little appetite for conflict with European institutions.

In social policy, González said Vox might use the broader notion of deregulation to dismantle funding for gender equality and LGBTQ+ departments and projects, as it has done on a local level. Fúster was reluctant to be drawn on this: “We believe in the equality of Spaniards,” he said. “We don’t believe that anyone should have privileges above others.”

Fernández Vázquez of Carlos III University said that the origins of Vox suggest a bumpy ride for the PP. Vox would be the first far-right party to enter government in half a century since the death of Francisco Franco in 1975 — and there would likely be clashes.

The far-right party formed in 2013 as a breakaway from the conservatives in frustration at what its founders saw as the pusillanimity of the PP in the face of Catalan separatism. 

“I think the relationship between Vox and PP [in government] will be a bad one,” the researcher said. “Abascal and his colleagues are going to enjoy showing up Feijóo whenever they can, portraying him as lukewarm and weak.”

Fúster accepted “it could be a difficult relationship,” adding that the PP “don’t see things the way we do and we don’t share their vision.”

“We’re not willing to make concessions, we’re willing to have a frank, open and reasonable negotiation.”

But for now, the priority is simply to remove the Socialists. In his traditionally combative style, Abascal insisted the election was a chance to hold on to “the peace, prosperity and freedom that a mafioso government wants to snatch from us forever.”

Max Griera contributed to this article.

We have no business running a private school.

We’re reporters, not teachers. That doesn’t matter. Inexperience has hardly been a barrier for those who want to start their own schools, as we have reported this year. And it didn’t stop us, either. 

Over the last few months, to test the process, reporters from ProPublica partnered with local journalists in three states to establish private schools. None required much effort.

In Arkansas, all it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state website, $45 and an American flag to form a bona fide private school with the Arkansas Times.

We established a school with Mountain State Spotlight in West Virginia after filing our new school’s name and location with authorities on a piece of notebook paper, then exchanging a few emails.

And with The Assembly in North Carolina, we filed an online notice of intent to open a private school at Ponysaurus Brewing Co. in Durham, while perched on its metal bar stools, eyeing glasses of a crisp kolsch.

We used our names and news organization email addresses, following each state’s rules for starting private or microschools, a type of private school intended for just a few students. Experience running a school wasn’t needed. No one from any of the states asked us about our backgrounds or qualifications, though West Virginia did ask for proof of a high school diploma. No one questioned what we plan to teach or how we would measure whether students are learning.

And yet we could enroll students in two states right now, if we wanted to. Arkansas even suggested ways our school could accept public money through the state’s voucher-style program.

For the record, we are not enrolling students and have no intention of operating our new schools. We did, however, register a website for our new school ventures, ProPublicaAcademy.com, and even designed some fun pencils to show our school spirit.

This year, a team of ProPublica reporters has been documenting how the American education landscape is shifting dramatically as states use public money to help fund private schools. With few regulations, hundreds of new private and microschools have proliferated.

Our reporting has shown the relative ease with which people — some with questionable backgrounds — founded their own schools in unusual places. They’ve popped up in barns and on farms, in strip malls between an antique shop and an ax-throwing business and in churches, where lighting and sound for worship services is part of the curriculum.

---

Start your day with essential news from Salon.
Sign up for our free morning newsletter, Crash Course.

---

All of this led to a clear reporting question: If the hurdles to open a private school are so low, could we do it? And what would we learn along the way?

Inside a flag shop in Little Rock, we surveyed our options. There were handheld American flags on skinny sticks, midsize ones to display on a wall and majestic formal flags adorned with silky gold fringe.

State law in Arkansas doesn’t require much to open a private school, nothing about teacher skills or what kids learn. But it does require that all schools display an American flag, and we wanted to follow the rules. So, at the Arkansas Flag and Banner store, we decided on a smallish one that could fit in a circular base atop a newsroom cubicle. We also bought an Arkansas flag — even though only public schools are required to have those. Total cost: $49.45. 

Picking the flags for our new school was the hardest part of an astoundingly easy process.

Early in our reporting in Arkansas, we tried to figure out what steps we’d need to take to make a private school. We couldn’t find all the answers online, so we called the state.

“We don’t have rules for opening a private school,” Kaelin Clay, an Arkansas Department of Education spokesperson, told us earlier this year.

In fact, we didn’t even have to file anything with the Education Department. All it took was a few clicks on the Arkansas secretary of state’s website, where we registered the ProPublica-Arkansas Times Curiosity Academy LLC as a business, listed ourselves as agents and officers, and paid a fee. 

“We picked a name. We paid 45 bucks,” a ProPublica reporter noted after we submitted the application. With that, we had created a private school.

The secretary of state’s office approved our new business the same day. We even got a certificate. 

The Arkansas Department of Education does not regulate private schools once they’re open, and no one from the state inspected the Arkansas Times newsroom, the location we chose for our school. As far as we know, nobody checked our backgrounds, either.

Arkansas adopted a private school funding plan in 2023, and back then there were fewer than 100 private schools on record. With the state in the fourth year of its Education Freedom Accounts program, which provides vouchers that can be spent on private schools, there are now more than 220. 

In addition, 143 microschools, which are a different category in Arkansas, were approved this year to accept tax dollars. That’s up from about 100 last school year.

Establishing the Curiosity Academy was so simple — and, frankly, a bit anticlimactic — that reporters then applied to become eligible to receive public funds. (Again, we applied with our names, work email addresses and a note that this was a journalistic exercise. We had no intention of actually ever taking any public money.) 

We wanted to see how far our curiosity could take us. 

Accessing public funds as a microschool in Arkansas is easier than it is for other types of private schools, even though there is no limit to the number of students one can enroll. Unlike private schools, we didn’t need to seek accreditation or show proof of financial solvency to accept state funding. 

It took about 10 minutes to fill out the required information in early September. Other than our contact information, we had to upload just two documents — one detailing our proposed tuition and fees, and the other with our refund policy. 

We said that — “should we open a school” — our tuition and fees per student would not exceed $7,208 per school year, the exact amount of Education Freedom Account money that each student in Arkansas is eligible for this year. We said tuition “would be collected only if education is delivered, and it would be the policy of the school to refund all tuition payments for educational services that are not provided.”

When more than two weeks passed and we hadn’t heard back, we reached out to the state Education Department. An employee called back that afternoon and explained that the department had decided not to accept any more because the school year was underway.

But he didn’t reject us outright. He looked up our application and invited us to keep pursuing the public money. He said we still could apply to receive public money this school year, but as a vendor providing educational services such as tutoring. He also said we could apply as a microschool next year and even suggested a tweak to the language in our tuition policy should we decide to do that.

After we hung up, he emailed us the vendor application (which we will not pursue) and let us know the microschool application for next school year will open in the spring.

We asked the state Education Department whether it would be OK with us operating a publicly funded microschool. Clay, the spokesperson, said the agency’s role is to decide if schools meet state requirements. Microschool families, she said, “have the freedom to choose the educators and learning environments that best meet their children’s needs.”

Hunched over a desk in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom in Charleston, West Virginia, pen in hand, we scrawled out official notice of our new school in a spiral-bound notebook. We wrote that we would serve middle school students and listed our first day as TBD.

Leaving the crunchy, ragged edges on the paper, we stuffed our notice of intent into an envelope. We’d seen other new operators file similarly casual ones as they sought to register private schools in West Virginia. 

Then we drove over to the state Education Department to deliver the request. Our group — two reporters, a photographer and a video journalist — went through security and, camera rolling, wound our way through the maze of the midcentury building. We got lost once, and our entourage received several perplexed glances from workers, but otherwise it was smooth sailing. The person we needed to deliver the letter to was out, but a friendly employee agreed to place it on his desk.

Dozens of new private and microschools have set up shop in the state in recent years, fueled by the roughly $5,400 the Hope Scholarship offers each student to pay tuition. New private schools all go through Dustin Lambert, a manager in the Office of Student Enrichment and Support at the West Virginia Department of Education.

We heard back from Lambert the next day. Our notice was received. (Hooray!) He said now we needed a letter from the fire marshal that our school building was safe for children. (Oh no.)

This was a problem. Our school would be housed in the Mountain State Spotlight newsroom, which had not been inspected as a school site. We didn’t want to usurp public resources to undergo a new inspection. It felt like the end of our Mountain State school experiment.

But it wasn’t.

After we followed up to ask whether all schools, including virtual schools, need safety clearance to register with the state, Lambert told us that though all brick-and-mortar private schools do, we “may want to consider the microschool route.” 

In that case, we later learned, the department wouldn’t be involved because state law doesn’t include any mechanism for oversight.  

West Virginia defines microschools as schools that charge tuition and are started by one or more teachers. In practice, there’s no real difference between a microschool and private school — neither has a limit on enrollment. (Yes, a micro can be macro.) He forwarded us the rules for starting a microschool, which involve providing proof of a high school diploma, at least. We notified the local school district of our new microschool venture and sent a college transcript.

The Kanawha County school district, in turn, notified the state of the existence of a new microschool.

And with that — bypassing the building health and safety requirements — we established the ProPublica-Mountain State Spotlight Curiosity Academy. Officials at the Department of Education said they were aware that journalists were establishing a school. But they had to just watch us do so — they have no authority over the state’s microschools.

In an official statement, the department’s spokesperson said it “does not approve or deny the operation of microschools for any reason, including the qualifications of the owner/operator.”

By law, should we open our microschool — and we won’t — we could enroll an unlimited number of students.

On Friday evenings, hundreds of people gather at Ponysaurus Brewing Co., a trendy spot in Durham, North Carolina, to savor its craft beers and cocktails, hardly the place you’d expect a school to open. But why not? 

On a recent Tuesday morning, the brewery was quiet and closed to customers. Behind the bar, yeast busily converted sugars into alcohol inside giant stainless steel fermentation tanks. Two journalists settled onto barstools beneath signs for pilsners and cherry sours. Icy cold glasses of Tell the Truth, a light and lemony ale, sat before them on a high-top table beside a stenographer’s notebook and a laptop. 

The brewery created the craft ale in partnership with The Assembly, which also is ProPublica’s journalistic partner in this private school endeavor, so it all felt very symbiotic. Ponysaurus’s owners had agreed to let us use their building and its fire and sanitation inspections, which are required to open a private school in the Tar Heel State.

Reporters from The Assembly and ProPublica scanned a state of North Carolina website that details how to file a notice of intent to open a private school. 

First, it explained the state’s statutory requirements for opening a private school, things like reporting the school’s name and address. We also would have to administer a standardized test in certain grades, if we were going to open an actual school, and maintain annual records about student attendance and immunizations. 

Then, we watched a four-minute, 39-second video explaining how to file the required notice of intent. 

From there it seemed simple. We created a login, then filled in the address of our school (Ponysaurus’s building), noted its owner and chief administrator (our reporters), and named it the ProPublica-Assembly Academy. We’d hoped to include the word Curiosity in the name, but the field in the form didn’t allow enough characters. In North Carolina, our curiosity would have to be implied.

We filled in a few more fields, including the grades we would serve (high schoolers), whether we would open a religious school (no) and the dates of our academic year. 

Then we needed to upload fire and sanitation inspection reports. This step is what brought us here, to Ponysaurus, filling out the online notice to the tune of a hissing compressor that kept clean air moving through the brewing system.  

“You will need to secure inspections for the building where the school will be housed. You will need a fire inspection from the local fire marshal and a health and sanitation inspection from the local health department,” the video said. 

Just that morning, a City of Durham Fire Department inspector had visited the brewery and provided Ponysaurus with a fresh business occupancy inspection. We uploaded the new report, along with the brewery’s current food establishment inspection (on which it received a 99, an excellent score, we felt, for a school).

The screen flashed a confirmation. “Thank you. We have received your request to open a private school.” If approved, the page said, we should receive a school identification number in three to five business days. 

We hoped to join the at least 169 other new private schools that have opened in North Carolina since the 2021-22 school year, which marked the start of a series of expansions to the state’s publicly funded vouchers for private school tuition.

If we wanted our school to tap the voucher money, we’d have to go through some additional steps such as getting criminal background checks. We weren’t doing that.

The following day, we hit a snag. It came in a brief and garbled email. It said only: “Good morning and thank you for submitting a Notice of Intent to operate a private school. To complete the process we need to fire and sanitation inspections to” and then ended abruptly like that, no explanation or period. We emailed back, asking for clarity and noting we had already uploaded the inspection reports.

An official from the state Division of Non-Public Education then called. The school’s name needs to be on the inspection reports, she said, something we had not seen in any of our research. We also had not found any state statutes or rules that would preclude us — or anyone else — from opening a private school wherever we saw fit, be that a church or a brewery, as long as it passed “reasonable fire, health and safety inspections.” 

In a follow-up call, she clarified that her division checks only to be sure the building has passed inspections specifically for a school. A spokesperson for the agency later added that state statute does not allow them to deny a private school application, but they won’t process an incomplete application — notably one without the proper inspections.

We hadn’t expected we would need a school-specific inspection at this point. The video explainer referred to inspections only generally, and the state’s written guidance indicated only that this would need to happen before occupancy. 

Given we had no intention of actually opening a school, we had decided ahead of time that we wouldn’t consume any additional public resources — such as fire or health inspectors’ time — in our journalistic pursuit. 

Perhaps Ponysaurus could pass the school-specific inspections. But the ethical red line would be our stop sign. Our curiosity would have to end in North Carolina.

The post We’re reporters, not teachers. We were able to start private schools anyway appeared first on Salon.com.

In October 2024, students at Cornell University received a campus crime alert about a reported sexual assault. At the time, it was just a campus story. Nearly two years later, on September 16, the victim, known only as “Jane Doe,” filed a civil lawsuit that brought national attention to her story. People across the country are asking what happened and why criminal charges never followed. 

Doe alleges that seven men drugged and sexually assaulted her at the Chi Phi fraternity house two years ago. Her lawsuit also accuses the university, fraternity and sorority organizations, and a local bar of failing to protect her. 

The lawyers for several of the men have denied the allegations and any wrongdoing. Cornell says its disciplinary actions led to suspensions and expulsions for some of the young men, and that the Chi Phi fraternity remains barred from campus. 

Doe went to campus police in November 2024, and the district attorney’s office reviewed her account and declined to bring charges. Tompkins County District Attorney Matthew Van Houten has said that what she described to Cornell police didn’t meet the state’s requirements for criminal charges. 

Van Houten reopened the investigation late last month while continuing to defend his original decision to not pursue charges, but it’s now out of his hands: On Thursday, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul named the state attorney general, Letitia James, as special prosecutor to investigate the allegations, saying she had “lost faith” in Van Houten. 

To break down why Van Houten didn’t pursue the case at the time and what should have happened instead, Today, Explained co-host Noel King spoke with Lauren Hersh, a former Brooklyn prosecutor who led the office’s sex trafficking unit and CEO of World Without Exploitation, about how authorities handled Jane Doe’s allegations, the limits of New York’s consent laws, and what needs to change. 

Hersh also explains where she believes the case should go next and what a special prosecutor can do to investigate (the interview took place prior to James’s appointment). 

Below is an excerpt of Hersh’s conversation with Noel edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

I want to start with what we know in 2024. A young woman who we know as “Jane Doe” goes to the Cornell campus police and says she had gone to a frat house while under the influence of alcohol. 

At the frat house, she was given more alcohol and ketamine. Several men had sex with her while she was intoxicated. This is what she tells Cornell campus police. What, in your view, is supposed to happen next? 

There are a number of things that could happen. What I would say about these cases is there is no perfect scenario of what is supposed to happen, because what is critically important is we listen to the desire of the survivor. 

We want to take this at her pace. We want to be guided by her wishes. We want her to decide if she is ready to go forward, if she wants to speak to campus police, the Title IX office, if she wants to speak to the local law enforcement. There are a lot of variables here, but for me, what is critically important is that we’re listening to the survivor and what she ultimately wants to happen. 

In the present day, the district attorney who was involved has said that his office reviewed Jane Doe’s statement at the time and found at the time that what she described didn’t meet the legal definition of a crime. 

I think people want to understand, Lauren, how is that possible? 

To be really candid with you, Noel, this is an area that seems super unclear to me because the role of the district attorney in that moment is to investigate. 

When you first get a case file, you first get a victim statement, and especially with facts as horrific as these facts are, or our understanding of this six-page document that the DA read — I would never say that this is a clear-cut case where there’ll be a conviction at the end. We never know that. 

What I can say with 100 percent certainty is if you get a document like that, as a prosecutor, that is a significant investigative lead. And so, as a prosecutor, what I believe to be good practice is starting to pull the layers back, trying to understand what transpired here. Interviewing the victim. That feels critical. That never happened. We now know that there are all these text messages that were shared between these boys, and the prosecutor’s now saying, “I didn’t know about the text messages.” 

It’s my understanding that there were a lot of boys on that particular text thread. And so a good investigator would have gone to that fraternity house and tried to interview some of those boys, tried to understand what were the contemporaneous statements made at that time. Were there any text messages? Was there any social media activity? And I believe that had they done that in a timely fashion, they likely would have come up with these text messages at that time and not two years later.

What you’re saying is interesting because the DA has come out publicly and defended himself by saying, essentially, the details of this lawsuit, which was filed in September of this year, are different from the details in the young woman’s 2024 statement to the police. 

He has used that in his defense, right? “Here’s what I knew at the time versus what this young woman is saying today.” I think I hear you saying that maybe that’s not an excuse?

You’re asking about the inconsistent statements, and I find it troubling that the DA is leading with this notion that the victim has inconsistent statements because that feels to me like here we are making excuses and blaming the victim. 

To my knowledge, the DA has not yet interviewed this victim. Perhaps he’s talking about the civil complaint, which I would think is written in a way where she has worked with her lawyer to put this together. And the initial statement, the initial six-page document that the DA read, my understanding is that it is basically a summary of a conversation. 

Inconsistencies come in all shapes and sizes, so it’s hard to know exactly what we’re talking about here, but it is very common for there to be some inconsistencies. That is not a dealbreaker, despite the fact that this prosecutor wants the public to believe that it is. 

What do you make of the prosecutor speaking publicly in the way that he is at this moment?

I find it rather confusing. I’m not really understanding why he is doing a media tour rather than sitting in his office doing the work, interviewing this particular victim, interviewing witnesses, seeing what evidence actually exists.

It seems to me that the DA has gotten to a conclusion before he’s done the work in actually investigating the case, and it is deeply troubling. And I think the governor should consider appointing a special prosecutor because I am not certain, based on this media tour, that this DA is able to give this particular survivor a full and fair investigation of the facts. 

Drugs and alcohol are central to this case, right? The young woman admits she had been drinking and she was using ketamine. Under New York law, how does that affect whether or not someone is believed to be capable of consenting to sex? 

New York law is actually really problematic here. It’s a place where I believe we are desperate for a legislative fix. I think that there have been a lot of advocates who’ve been championing a correction to this voluntary intoxication loophole for a lot of years, and we’ve not been able to get it. 

New York law makes it very, very hard to prosecute a person when the victim is voluntarily intoxicated, but not unconscious, and this new law would allow the prosecutors the ability to bring cases when the victim is so severely intoxicated but not physically helpless and where a reasonable person should have known the victim’s condition. 

In this particular case, based on what we’re hearing, she was in a condition where a reasonable person should have known her condition. And so in this particular instance, the DA is right. This is a very, very hard case to prove in this moment, but I’m a big believer. We don’t not prosecute cases because they’re hard cases. But at the same time, we know that a change to the law is critically important. 

You clearly want more investigation here. What questions do you want asked? Who do you want to be [interviewed]? 

Before I say who and how and what that investigation looks like, I think it’s really important to say that when two years have passed and the DA did not investigate these cases immediately, we have a big problem on our hands.

The fact that the DA did not investigate this from the moment he found out about this, it’s really problematic because as we know, evidence disappears, memories fade. When you’re dealing on a college campus with a specific culture, there may be a narrative that takes hold. And so it’s important to talk about the time lapse and how that harms the case. 

That said, I still believe that the investigation is critically important. I don’t believe that this DA is the right person to do the investigation. I think a special prosecutor should be appointed. And then I think that the prosecutor and law enforcement should be interviewing everybody who was in that fraternity on that night. Anybody who saw this victim before, saw this victim after. Were there any statements in the immediate aftermath of her leaving that fraternity? Was there an outcry witness? We know that some text messages have come to light. Are there other text messages? I suspect that there are. 

I’d want to interview as many of those boys as possible to understand what was going on because some of those text messages that have come to light — one says, “Free pussy” — don’t sound like a mindset that is engaging in consensual sex. 

I think it is critically important that we understand all of the correspondence of that night. I think we want to see what is out there that helps us get closer to understanding what transpired that night. 

I’ve seen two lines of thinking about this. One is that this is a horrific incident that never should have happened, but it is in some ways singular. But I’ve seen another line of thinking that says, “No, this is a systemic failure. This kind of thing goes on on college campuses, and the steps that follow the outcomes are often the same.”

I wonder if you think this is a systemic failure, and if you think it is, what would need to be done to fix this problem? 

That’s a big question. I do think it’s a systemic failure. I also think it’s a cultural failure. And the reason that I would say this is because I don’t think this is isolated to this specific college campus. I think that sexual assault is happening across the country on college campuses everywhere.

In terms of additional systemic failures, I’ve been working with the Epstein survivors for the last year and a half, so I’ve seen so many systemic failures, so many prosecutorial failures, so much failure with law enforcement. I think that this is yet another example of prosecutorial failure. 

I think the law enforcement failed this young person — the fact that there’s no investigation that happened immediately in the aftermath of this incident, no investigation. We just continue to fail survivors all over the place, and we have to start doing better.

“In what world,” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul asked on Friday, “would the police learn from a victim that she’d been literally gang raped while she was intoxicated by five men in a fraternity house and not elevate those allegations to the district attorney?” 

Hochul was speaking about the case of a former Cornell student who said she was raped by several members of the university’s Chi Phi fraternity in 2024. At the time, the district attorney filed no criminal charges.

The case has rocked the nation and forced a renewed reckoning over how sexual assault is dealt with in higher education. While the district attorney has defended his handling of the case, many politicians and legal experts are now examining whether certain details of the alleged victim’s account were neglected, and prosecutors have reopened the case.

Amy Wang is a staff reporter at the Washington Post who’s been covering the story over the past week. She spoke with Today, Explained co-host Noel King about what allegedly happened on the night in question, what happened afterward, and what we still don’t know. 

Since the two spoke, New York state Attorney General Letitia James has also been assigned to oversee the case and said it is now “an active criminal investigation.” As new information comes to light, further legal action could be taken. 

Below is an excerpt of the conversation between King and Wang, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

In October of 2024, a young woman went to a fraternity house near Cornell University’s campus. Who is this young woman, and why did she go to the frat house that night?

The young woman is only identified in documents as Jane Doe, so we don’t know her name. She was, at the time, 20 years old. She was a sophomore at Cornell. And around 11 pm on the night of October 19, 2024, this Jane Doe goes to a bar on campus, and then, after that, goes to the Chi Phi fraternity house to hang out with a friend. 

She said that she was already pretty intoxicated at that point, and she’d had maybe 10 drinks in about three hours. Her friend at the fraternity house hands her a beer. After that is where she alleges that another member of the fraternity pressured her into taking drugs, specifically ketamine and marijuana, and drinking more alcohol. She alleges that two members of the fraternity assaulted her, and that one of them later sent a Snapchat message out to active Chi Phi members. The message is pretty graphic, but essentially invites them to join in, and several did.

In about three weeks, this young woman was going to go to the Cornell campus police and report what happened that night. But in the interim, what was going on? What was happening?

We now know, based on reporting by the New York Times and CBS News, this young woman was a member of a campus sorority, so she went to a member of her sorority and was trying to make sense of what happened. She was still processing it in real time. She wasn’t using, according to their reporting, the word “rape” or “assault.” And she was also seeing rumors circulating around campus about what had taken place at the fraternity house and was growing concerned about how they portrayed her. 

She, in the interim, also received a text message from one of the seven men at the fraternity essentially apologizing for how things went down the other night. She is not yet accusing them of assault, but is chatting, even seeks to reassure him in that first message. 

On October 22, she then makes an appointment at the campus health clinic because she had what she thought was a UTI and wanted to be tested because she told the doctor that she had gone through a traumatic experience. 

According to the New York Times reporting, you could see her thinking about what happened kind of evolve over those few weeks. She at some point says that this is starting to ruin her life, and she’s sleeping and crying and she’s feeling ashamed. She’s just really grappling with what had taken place, trying to make sense of it. By November 3 is when, according to these investigative documents that were obtained by the Times, she kind of comes to this conclusion that what happened at the party at Chi Phi was assault. 

She texts one of the seven fraternity members and says, “This was not consensual. I was given more ketamine than I can remember,” and that she was uncomfortable. A few days later, November 7th, 2024, according to these documents, she goes to the ER and asks for a rape kit. And the following day is when she goes to Cornell University Police.

When she goes to the police, how does she characterize what happened to the police? What does she tell them?

What she tells the police is that she believes she was assaulted, and she tells the police that it had started out as something that was consensual. And then at the end she says, “I can say with 100 percent confidence I was raped.” She tells police she was extremely uncomfortable and that she kept taking ketamine in part because she thought she might black out and pass out. She had thought of at least two of the men as her friends. After the events of that night, she is then confronted with rumors that were spreading across campus, sort of depicting her as loose and blaming her essentially.

What happens after Jane Doe talks to the police? What do they do?

When she talks to Cornell University Police, they summarize what she said in a six-page statement that she then signs. And that is the statement that is submitted to the Tompkins County district attorney. 

And the district attorney would be the person who would bring charges or decide not to bring charges. What does he decide? 

Yes, so the district attorney decides not to bring charges in 2024 based on, he has said, the sworn statement that she signs to police. 

The DA says no charges for the seven men. Were they disciplined in any way?

We don’t know exactly how each of the men were disciplined. Cornell has said that they faced a range of disciplinary measures, including expulsions and suspensions. One of the details that had gone particularly viral about this is that the disciplinary measures included for some of the students to write essays. Cornell has not denied that, but it has specifically denied that the students only had to write essays as a disciplinary measure. The university has cited privacy laws and said it really can’t release any more specifics about how individual students were punished or not punished. 

What did Jane Doe do after first talking to the police and then learning the DA wasn’t going to press charges?

After she goes to police, we know she remains on campus and she has to continue seeing some of these men. And she also participates in the school’s Title IX investigation, which takes place over several months and concludes at some point in 2025.

I want to ask you about the DA. He is out in public defending his decision to not press charges in 2024. How is he defending himself?

The DA is a big part of the story. This is the Tompkins County District Attorney. His name is Matthew Van Houten. And he has said that in 2024, based on the written statement from Jane Doe, they did not have what they needed to press criminal charges. 

It’s important to note that we, as in the public, we’ve not actually seen a copy of Jane Doe’s sworn statement. The DA issued a press release in which he summarizes that statement. And in that summary, he describes her characterization of this as voluntary and conscious and consensual. That is at odds with some of the investigative documents that we’ve seen reported since then, including that transcript of Jane Doe’s interview with Cornell Police in which she very confidently says that she believes she was raped and even says that she was physically hit during that night.

The DA said that he did not see, before the lawsuit, the screenshot of the Snapchat message where the frat members are talking pretty crudely about the situation, and he also says he didn’t see the transcript of the interview between Jane Doe and police.

We now know the names of the seven men who were there that night. Have they said anything?

The seven men themselves have not publicly said anything, and the lawyers for three of those seven men have publicly denied the allegations. One of them says that his client went into the room, but immediately left and didn’t participate in the assault.

This is a story that is developing very quickly, and it seems like new information is coming out just about every day. What do we know about what happens next?

So there’s at least two things going on here. There is the reopened criminal investigation. 

Separately, there’s the civil lawsuit that Jane Doe filed last month, and that is not dependent in any way on how the criminal investigation goes, but that will also proceed against the university, the seven fraternity members, and the fraternity itself.

This story was originally reported by Brooke Migdon of The 19th. Meet Brooke and read more of their reporting on gender, politics and policy.

Speaking to a crowd of supporters in central Florida in August, U.S. Rep. Byron Donalds denounced his soon-to-be general election opponent for governor, Democrat David Jolly, as a “Trojan horse” for progressive politics in the reliably red state.

“David Jolly is somebody who thinks it’s still OK for boys to be in girls’ sports,” said Donalds, purposefully misgendering transgender girls. “Just pure insanity.” A day later, he secured the Republican nomination.

In a Facebook post earlier that week, the Republican Party of Florida had claimed “boys WILL be allowed to compete in girls’ sports” if Jolly, a former Republican congressman who has objected to sweeping state bans on trans student-athletes, is elected in November. The group shared a video of an AI-generated brawny, masculine figure in a women’s bathing suit smirking on a winner’s podium, strutting through a women’s locker room and ripping open a shower curtain.

“Will I have to race someone like that one day?” a young girl asks in the video. “David Jolly says we have to let them play,” her mother replies.

But Jolly, who secured the Democratic nomination for governor last month, would not have the authority to do so: Florida law has prohibited trans student-athletes from joining sports teams that match their gender identity for more than five years. Jolly has said he has “no plans” to change the current law.

This story appeared in Today, Explained, a daily newsletter that helps you understand the most compelling news and stories of the day. Subscribe here.

Today’s newsletter is a heavy one — so please feel free to skip it if you need to. But as the uproar over an alarming rape allegation at Cornell University from 2024 keeps building, I wanted to take a minute to look at the facts of the case and the wider scourge of campus sexual assault. (We’ll get into that second topic in just a minute.)

You’ve probably read about the case on social media, but if not, let me bring you up to speed. A former Cornell undergraduate student, identified as Jane Doe in a civil lawsuit filed earlier this month, alleges that seven men pressured her into drinking and snorting large amounts of ketamine, an anesthetic that can cause dissociation, before raping her at a campus fraternity house.

At the time, she reported the incident to campus police — but her lawsuit alleges the men were never adequately investigated. Instead, the case was handled through Cornell’s administrative disciplinary system, which meted out noncriminal punishments, such as suspensions and expulsions, and permanently shuttered the fraternity house.

The case and its handling have horrified observers online and in Ithaca, New York, where Cornell is located. In response to that uproar, the Tompkins County district attorney announced on Monday that he was reopening his office’s investigation. A nine-page statement further explained why the DA’s office didn’t file criminal charges two years ago: At the time, the statement says, the woman did not allege that she was incapacitated or that the encounter was nonconsensual. 

For many online, however, that explanation only prompted more questions, such as: Was Jane Doe ever interviewed by a specialist trained to speak to survivors? And what prompted her to go to police in the first place, if she believed the encounter was consensual? The reopened investigation will take time, but should provide some answers.

Go a little deeper

Sexual assault remains appallingly common on college campuses. When I taught an undergraduate writing class in 2024, I assigned my students a personal essay and encouraged them to choose a topic they found weighty or meaningful. In a class of 11 women, two wrote about being assaulted at school. 

That proportion surprised and horrified me, though it shouldn’t have. Surveys have consistently estimated that roughly one in five undergraduate women experiences some form of sexual assault or nonconsensual contact during college. 

Awareness around the issue has grown over the past decade or so, particularly in light of the Me Too movement and after a string of high-profile cases in the mid-2010s. But progress has been more complicated.

First, it’s difficult to know if the situation is improving or worsening, because the data around campus sexual assault is really limited. Federal law has historically required that universities disclose only the incidents reported through official channels — a small minority of all cases. 

In 2022, Congress enacted a requirement directing colleges and universities to begin conducting more comprehensive surveys on campus sexual assault every two years. That would have helped measure the true scope of the problem — arguably, a prerequisite for designing and tracking potential interventions. But the Biden administration never set up that survey, and President Donald Trump has, if anything, rolled back college sexual assault protections and slow-walked Title IX investigations related to sexual harassment and violence.

Just Monday, in fact, Trump’s Department of Education formally rescinded Biden-era rules designed to better hold schools accountable for sexual assault. The department will now revert to rules put in place during Trump’s first term, which defined sexual harassment more narrowly and gave schools more latitude over how they handle allegations. 

It’s an amazing irony, really, that those rollbacks were formalized on the same day that prosecutors reopened the Cornell case. If anything, the outrage over that investigation shows that people want institutions to take sexual assault more seriously. 

One link for later

➨ Make art a little more personal. The average museumgoer looks at any one piece of art for only 27 seconds — maybe because it’s daunting to spend any more time on the task of Serious Art Appreciation. Instead of laboring to interpret a piece the “right” way, try relating it to your personal experience and other cultural objects you know well. This is also a correct and valid way to look at art! As one artist told Vox, “I don’t need the viewer of my paintings to know exactly what I meant…it’s more about an openness to a conversation.” 

Before you go…

• Did you know…that the sun’s magnetic north and south poles reverse roughly every 11 years? It generally doesn’t have much of an impact on Earth, though it can make the auroras more visible. 
• Today’s trivia: The civil rights activist Ruby Bridges became famous at age 6 for doing what? (You can find this and other brain puzzles in Vox’s daily crossword. Look for the answer in tomorrow’s edition.)
• Yesterday’s trivia: We asked you for the name of the unrequited love interest in Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame. That would be Esmeralda, whose fate was way darker in the 1831 novel than in the Disney movie version. 

Digital journalism is as subject to fads as any other medium. Snarky fisking — responding to an article line-by-line — gave way to the quiz boom, which was consumed by the personal essay before the long decade of short-form video. But if you squint, you can see the outline of the type of stuff that always works. 

Gossipy reported pieces on scams and relationships, such as the latest news about Donald Trump’s aide Natalie Harp or The Cut’s regular output, are always a safe bet. Fightstarters over ambiguous issues — the annual argument over “Baby, It’s Cold Outside,” the internet-breaking Dress, countless poorly written math equations on Facebook — are evergreen. Barring that, it never hurts to channel Helen Lovejoy from “The Simpsons”: You won’t go broke thinking about how we should all think of the children. 

Over the weekend, one such piece tore through the well-meaning liberal corners of the internet — meaning Bluesky and Threads, mostly — and prodded at the gap between educational idealism and the hyper-competitive reality of schooling in America. 

In a column for the New York Times Magazine titled “In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”, Nikole Hannah-Jones agonizes over her decision to walk the walk with regard to her belief in robust, well-funded public schools for all children. The journalist made the decision to send her child to a Brooklyn public school whose student body was predominantly Black and impoverished, believing that her well-resourced family could help push for better education for all the city’s children from within. She wrestled with the struggles her daughter faced while trying to get ahead and deciding to test into one of New York’s ultra-selective specialized public high schools.

In her column, Hannah-Jones grapples with the ways underfunded schools leave even talented students feeling pre-emptively defeated — a sense that the city’s elite schools are beyond their grasp, even if their own test scores might indicate otherwise. Overworked and burnt-out staff teaching the children of overworked and burnt-out adults isn’t a recipe for educational success, and Hannah-Jones’ recollection of her repeated frustrations and conversations with educators paints a heartbreaking picture of a systemic issue that no one family could reverse. She makes herself sick with guilt over her choices, reaching out to activists and her daughter’s former educators to help her make sense of the problem and her response to it. 

But Hannah-Jones is ultimately unsuccessful. As the principal of her daughter’s struggling middle school puts it, “there’s no model out there for holding all of these truths, these complex truths, all at once.

“We are working within the system that we know is not working, while trying to recreate and reimagine a new system, while working with young people who have all this potential, who’ve not been given the opportunities for that potential to thrive and be unleashed,” the educator says.

In the end, Hannah-Jones’ daughter succeeded against the odds, landing in a great test-in school. But it’s hard to come away from her story believing that such a result would be attainable for others. 

Once the column hit the web, it quickly devolved into a fight over whether wanting the best for your child is a betrayal of egalitarian ideals. Hannah-Jones is a gifted writer, and her piece isn’t as flat as that argument implies. But the dilemma pokes at what has long been a sore spot for well-heeled liberals. Are the exceptions that every parent would make for their child morally permissible? Does sending your child to the best possible schools make believers in a better world for all big, fat hypocrites? 

I’ll let you in on another bit of digital journalism that always holds true: Questions explored in commentaries are either unanswerable or the answer is “no.” We should have well-funded schools for all American children, where success isn’t so tied to where you call home and the relative affluence of your neighbors. We don’t, though and kids only get one shot at raising their children.

Like Hannah-Jones and her husband, I was the product of well-funded public schools. Private school was never an option for my working-class parents, but living close to the vacation homes of wealthy people boosted the quality of public schooling. The coastal county where I was raised is even wealthier and more populous now, but Florida’s rightward turn to school choice, along with a post-COVID crackdown on classroom curriculums that might be deemed “woke,” has left those same public schools poorer and its teachers less free to do their jobs. The state is currently in the midst of a property tax revolt that may further gut local school funding. A rabble-rousing, union-advocating teacher friend of mine came out of the same public schools as me, and she now teaches at a private school, primarily to pay for the discounted tuition her daughter receives.

---

Want more sharp takes on politics? Sign up for our free newsletter, Standing Room Only, written by Amanda Marcotte, now also a weekly show on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

---

I’ll soon have skin in this debate myself. I’m expecting my first child at the end of this year, and if I didn’t live hundreds of miles away from Florida, I would be looking into the academies, charters and parochial schools that serve the county’s booming population of wealthy remote workers trying to pull the ladder up behind them. 

Living in New Orleans, I’m lucky in a way. My child will be born into a city that has no traditional public school system; New Orleans went all-charter in 2019. The scramble to get kids into the best schools is baked in, with parents entering their grade-schoolers into school choice lotteries with little regard to geography, making it unlikely that my child will go to a school that mirrors the demographics of our neighborhood. That decision was made for us years ago. While I believe that public education should be funded at the state level, with equal per-student distributions of tax dollars coming from the top, I won’t be required to back that belief in equality up with action any time soon.

Hannah-Jones’ experiment might be novel, but the fight that broke out around it is familiar. You can see it anytime an outwardly progressive politician or commentator benefits from their personal wealth. If you really believe that America is in the grips of a homelessness crisis, why haven’t you opened your own home to the down-on-their-luck? How can an elected official like Sen. Bernie Sanders push for affordable healthcare for all, while benefitting from the Cadillac health plans afforded to Congress? If you’re such a believer in public schools, why would you balk at sending your child to a failing and underfunded institution?

Such arguments are meant to pare down complicated, systemic issues into a series of individual choices. They may vary on the specifics, but the intent is the same. Critics of progressive policy pushers want activists to shut up about privilege because it makes them uncomfortable. Having to think about the advantages and disadvantages baked into the system strays too far from the preferred framework of school choice advocates and other conservatives — that all people are equally free to choose the life they lead, and that failure to wring a good education out of our flagging system is entirely the fault of the individual.

It’s not a frame that public school advocates, Medicare for All true-believers or affordable housing rabble-rousers need to accept. The gap between progressive beliefs and reality is right there in one of its oldest and most popular bits of sloganeering: Another world is possible. Admitting that it’s not here yet is the first step to fighting for it.

The post Wanting the best school for your kid doesn’t make you a hypocrite appeared first on Salon.com.

Students and faculty across the country were punished for their reactions to the conservative activist’s murder. A recent graduate of Texas Tech’s law school is still trying to clear her name.

Editor’s note, September 6, 8 am ET: We’re bringing you some of our best-loved Your Mileage May Vary columns while Sigal Samuel is on parental leave. The one below was originally published last year.

This unconventional advice column offers you a unique framework for thinking through moral dilemmas. It’s based on value pluralism: the idea that each of us has multiple values that are equally valid but that often conflict with each other. Submit your own question here.

I am a university teaching assistant, leading discussion sections for large humanities lecture classes. This also means I grade a lot of student writing — and, inevitably, see a lot of AI writing too. 

Of course, many of us are working on developing assignments and pedagogies to make that less tempting. But as a TA, I only have limited ability to implement these policies. And in the meantime, AI-generated writing is so ubiquitous that to take course policy on it seriously, or even to escalate every suspected instance to the professor who runs the course, would be to make dozens of accusations, some of them false positives, for basically every assignment.

I believe in the numinous, ineffable value of a humanities education, but I’m also not going to convince stressed 19-year-olds of that value by cracking down hard on something everyone does. How do I think about the ethics of enforcing the rules of an institution that they don’t take seriously, or letting things slide in the name of building a classroom that feels less like an obstacle to circumvent?

Dear Troubled Teacher,   

I know you said you believe in the “ineffable value of a humanities education,” but if we want to actually get clear on your dilemma, that ineffable value must be effed! 

So: What is the real value of a humanities education? 

Looking at the modern university, one might think the humanities aren’t so different from the STEM fields. Just as the engineering department or the math department justifies its existence by pointing to the products it creates — bridge designs, weather forecasts — humanities departments nowadays justify their existence by noting that their students create products, too: literary interpretations, cultural criticism, short films. 

But let’s be real: It’s the neoliberalization of the university that has forced the humanities into that weird contortion. That’s never what they were supposed to be. Their real aim, as the philosopher Megan Fritts writes, is “the formation of human persons.” 

In other words, while the purpose of other departments is ultimately to create a product, a humanities education is meant to be different, because the student herself is the product. She is what’s getting created and recreated by the learning process. 

This vision of education — as a pursuit that’s supposed to be personally transformative — is what Aristotle proposed back in ancient Greece. He believed the real goal was not to impart knowledge, but to cultivate the virtues: honesty, justice, courage, and all the other character traits that make for a flourishing life. 

But because flourishing is devalued in our hypercapitalist society, you find yourself caught between that original vision and today’s product-based, utilitarian vision. And students sense — rightly! — that generative AI proves the utilitarian vision for the humanities is a sham. 

As one student said to his professor at New York University, in an effort to justify using AI to do his work for him, “You’re asking me to go from point A to point B, why wouldn’t I use a car to get there?” It’s a completely logical argument — as long as you accept the utilitarian vision. 

The real solution, then, is to be honest about what the humanities are for: You’re in the business of helping students with the cultivation of their character. 

I know, I know: Lots of students will say, “I don’t have time to work on cultivating my character! I just need to be able to get a job!”

It’s totally fair for them to be focusing on their job prospects. But your job is to focus on something else — something that will help them flourish in the long run, even if they don’t fully see the value in it now. 

Your job is to be their Aristotle. 

For the ancient Greek philosopher, the mother of all virtues was phronesis, or practical wisdom. And I’d argue there’s nothing more useful you can do for your students than help them cultivate this virtue, which is made more, not less, relevant by the advent of AI.

Practical wisdom goes beyond just knowing general rules — “don’t lie,” for example — and applying them mechanically like some sort of moral robot. It’s about knowing how to make good judgments when faced with the complex, dynamic situations life throws at you. Sometimes that’ll actually mean violating a classic rule (in certain cases, you should lie!). If you’ve honed your practical wisdom, you’ll be able to discern the morally salient features of a particular situation and come up with a response that’s well-attuned to that context. 

This is exactly the sort of deliberation that students will need to be good at as they step into the wider world. The breakneck pace of technological innovation means they’re going to have to choose, again and again and again, how to make use of emerging technologies — and how not to. The best training they can get now is training in how to wisely make this type of choice. 

Unfortunately, that’s exactly what using generative AI in the classroom threatens to short-circuit, because it removes something incredibly valuable: friction. 

AI is removing cognitive friction from education. We need to add it back in.

Encountering friction is how we give our cognitive muscles a workout. Taking it out of the picture makes things easier in the short term, but in the long term, it can lead to intellectual deskilling, where our cognitive muscles gradually become weaker for lack of use. 

“Practical wisdom is built up by practice just like all the other virtues, so if you don’t have the opportunity to reason and don’t have practice in deliberating about certain things, you won’t be able to deliberate well later,” philosopher of technology Shannon Vallor told me last year. “We need a lot of cognitive exercise in order to develop practical wisdom and retain it. And there is reason to worry about cognitive automation depriving us of the opportunity to build and retain those cognitive muscles.” 

So, how do you help your students retain and build their phronesis? You add friction back in, by giving them as many opportunities as possible to practice deliberating and choosing. 

If I were designing the curriculum, I wouldn’t do that by adopting a strict “no AI” policy. Instead, I’d be honest with students about the real benefit of the humanities and about why mindless AI cheating would be cheating themselves out of that benefit. Then, I’d offer them two choices when it comes time to write an essay: They can either write it with help from AI, or without. Both are totally fine. 

But if they do get help from AI, they have to also write an in-class reflection piece, explaining why they chose to use a chatbot and how they think it changed their thinking and learning process. I’d make it shorter than the original assignment but longer than a paragraph, so it forces them to develop the very reasoning skills they were trying to avoid using.

As a TA, you could suggest this to professors, but they may not go for it. Unfortunately, you’ve got limited agency here (unless you’re willing to risk your job or walk away from it). All you can do in such a situation is exercise the agency you do have. So use every bit of it.

Since you lead discussion sections, you’re well-placed to prompt your students to work their cognitive muscles in conversation. You could even stage a debate about AI: Assign half of them to argue the case for using chatbots to write papers and half of them to argue the opposite.

If a professor insists on a strict “no AI” policy, and you encounter essays that seem clearly AI-written, you may have little choice but to report them. But if there’s room for doubt about a given essay, you might err on the side of leniency if the student has engaged very thoughtfully in the discussion. At least then you know they’ve achieved the most important aim.

None of this is easy. I feel for you and all other educators who are struggling in this confusing environment. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if some educators are suffering from moral injury, a psychological condition that arises when you feel you’ve been forced to violate your own values.

But maybe it can comfort you to remember that this is much bigger than you. Generative AI is an existential threat to a humanities education as currently constituted. Over the next few years, humanities departments will have to paradigm-shift or perish. If they want to survive, they’ll need to get brutally honest about their true mission. For now, from your pre-paradigm-shift perch, all you can do is make the choices that are left for you to make. 

Bonus: What I’m reading

• I went back to Shannon Vallor’s first book, Technology and the Virtues: A Philosophical Guide to a Future Worth Wanting. If there’s one book I could get everyone in the AI world to read, it would be this one. And I think it can be useful to everyone else, too, because we all need to cultivate what Vallor calls the “technomoral virtues” — the traits that will allow us to adapt well to emerging technologies. 

• A New Yorker piece about AI and cognitive atrophy led me to a 2024 psychology paper titled “The Unpleasantness of Thinking: A Meta-Analytic Review of the Association Between Mental Effort and Negative Affect.” The authors’ conclusion: “We suggest that mental effort is inherently aversive.” Come again? Yes, sometimes I just want to turn off my brain and watch Netflix, but sometimes thinking about a challenging topic is so pleasurable! To me, it feels like running or weightlifting: Too much is exhausting, but the right amount is exhilarating. And what feels like “the right amount” can go up or down depending on how much I practice.

• Astrobiologist Sara Imari Walker published an essay in Noema provocatively titled “AI Is Life.” She reminds us that evolution produced us and we produced AI. “It is therefore part of the same ancient lineage of information that emerged with the origin of life,” she writes. “Technology is not artificially replacing life — it is life.” To be clear, she’s not arguing that tech is alive; she’s saying it’s an outgrowth of human life, an extension of our own species.

This story was originally published in The Highlight, Vox’s member-exclusive magazine. To get early access to member-exclusive stories every month, join the Vox Membership program today.

Today's links

• Discernment: How can you fact-check AI when you're asking it to teach you something you don't understand?
• Hey look at this: Delights to delectate.
• Object permanence: How to help with computers; Batman equation; Fuck and the law; NC's racist voting law; Pregancy app is full of spyware; Stiglitz v Apple's "tax fraud"; Accelerometer fingerprinting; Sacklers v bankruptcy; Boss-politics antitrust.
• Upcoming appearances: Edinburgh, Sydney, Melbourne, Brighton, London, South Bend.
• Recent appearances: Where I've been.
• Latest books: You keep readin' em, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Upcoming books: Like I said, I'll keep writin' 'em.
• Colophon: All the rest.

---

Discernment (permalink)

As far as I can tell, this dialog between MacArthur prize-winning mathematician Terrence Tao and Chatgpt about "the Jacobian conjecture counterexample" is very impressive:

https://chatgpt.com/share/6a5fdc7a-d6f8-83e8-bbea-8deb42cfed56

Now, the clause "as far as I can tell" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I am reasonably math literate, up to first-year calculus and a lifetime spent around my father (a mathematician). However, I have never heard of "the Jacobian conjecture," and while I know what all the words in the first paragraph of the relevant Wikipedia entry mean, I can't parse any of the sentences they form:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacobian_conjecture

In other words, I lack the discernment to evaluate the output of the chatbot that Tao exchanged theories with. If you showed me an equally opaque transcript of a "conversation" between a chatbot and a crank with AI psychosis whose math made no sense whatsoever, I couldn't make an a priori judgment about which one was a solid piece of mathematical theorizing and which one was a math-flavored word-salad.

As many skilled programmers can attest, chatbots can produce very useful output – but as even the most ardent AI-assisted coder will admit, chatbot-written code is also full of baffling, obvious errors (and subtle, hard-to-spot ones):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/04/bad-vibe-coding/#maximally-codelike-bugs

These errors (which the industry wants us to refer to as "hallucination" – a whimsical, obscuring, anthropomorphizing euphemism) are the reason that reliable AI use requires the discernment that comes from skill and expertise. I use a local chatbot to spellcheck these posts. Chatbots spot all kinds of typos that regular spellcheckers miss:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/02/19/now-we-are-six/#stock-buyback

There's a reactionary group of strangers who seek me out to tell me that I'm a bad person for doing this. These are pointless conversations, mostly because I can barely make out a word over the scraping sounds of all the goalpost-moving these scolding strangers engage in.

They start by insisting that I'm burning down the planet by running a low-CPU load piece of software on my own computer. After I explain that running a chatbot on my machine uses no more carbon than, say, applying a blur effect to an image in my image editor, they tell me I'm unwisely giving my private data to the AI companies. Then I show them the network logs that demonstrate that my local chatbot doesn't send or receive any network data.

Then they turn to the supposed cognitive effects of using a chatbot to find typos in an essay. I explain that I'm not asking an AI to write things for me or explain them to me – I'm asking it to point out where I've forgotten to put a period at the end of a paragraph, or fatfingered a word like "ever" as "every." I even send them the "before" and "after" of an essay after I've corrected some chatbot-identified typos in it:

https://craphound.com/before.txt

https://craphound.com/after.txt

This is when things get increasingly pointless. My interlocutors come up with farcical reasons why it's immoral or dangerous to use this LLM-based spellchecker. They say I'm using too much compute and that I could use a simpler piece of software to do the same thing (which is both untrue and silly – I also run a journaling filesystem on my computer that is vastly overpowered for editing a textfile – who cares?). Or they insist that the mere act of making copies of published works in order to count their elements and the relationships between them is a sin, despite the fact that this standard would kill search engines, the Internet Archive, and the Oxford English Dictionary:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/17/how-to-think-about-scraping/

I mean, by all means let's hate the AI companies and work to end their disgusting campaign to pauperize creative workers, but let's not fall into the trap of siding with the media bosses who insist that the salvation of creative labor will arrive when Sam Altman pays David Zaslav for the right to cram the entire Warner catalog into Openai's chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/03/its-a-trap-2/#inheres-at-the-moment-of-fixation

Above all, my interlocutors continue to insist that my LLM-powered, local, open source chatbot spellchecker will make me a worse writer. It's a very strange insistence. My first word processor was a program listing published in a magazine I bought at a corner store and laboriously typed into my Apple ][+. In the 40+ years since, word processors have gotten lots of new features, many of which I thought were useful and many more that I found annoying. There were even some of these features that made the writers who used them worse at writing, in my (expert) judgment.

But from the very start, I knew that you couldn't just trust a spellchecker to correct your documents. I mean, I'm a science fiction writer. I started making up silly words decades before coining "enshittification." I've been telling spellcheckers to fuck off since I learned to type. If you aren't a good writer, spellcheckers are dangerous, and the more "advanced" the spellchecker is, the more dangerous it is.

A few of my collaborators insist that I use Office 365's AI-enabled version of Word to work on documents with them. It's maddening. I estimate the ratio of good suggestions to bad ones that M365 insists on shoving into my face at about 1:100. It's practically unusable – so much so that I often copy the block of text we're working on into a text editor, make my changes, then paste it back into the Word window.

If I were to accept even 10% of these suggestions, my work would be made significantly worse. Putting chatbots into Word pushed it from "annoying" into "enshittening." I certainly understand how relying on a chatbot to make edits to your work could make it worse.

That's where discernment comes in. I have written more than 30 books over the past 25 years. I have lots of experience defending my word choices, and not just against the mechanical judgments of a high-handed spellchecker, but also against overreaching copyeditors and paranoid publisher's lawyers. I know which words I want to write, and I know why I want to write them – and I know when a suggested fix is a good one and when it's wrong or stupid or just plain clunky. When it comes to writing, I have discernment.

That's not true when it comes to higher math. I would no more ask a chatbot to explain "the Jacobian conjecture counterexample" than I would tell my writing students to get a chatbot to suggest ways to fix their stories:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/07/delicious-pizza/#hold-the-gravel

I don't know nearly enough about math to ask a chatbot to explain it, or check my work, or even assemble a bibliography of human-authored works I should work my way through if I want to learn about it. If I wanted to understand "the Jacobian conjecture counterexample," I would set aside several days and work my way through that gnarly Wikipedia entry and its references and blue links to related concepts. If I really wanted to understand it, I'd enroll in a course at the Open University or Khan Academy.

All of this has been obvious to me since I first encountered LLM-powered bots. If you understand a subject really well – well enough to discern useful bot output from defective bot output – then bots can be useful. Sometimes very useful, mostly ordinarily useful. For example, I've been writing Pluralistic for about 6.5 years now. I've written 1,683 posts now (1,684 after I hit publish on this one), and the corpus is now getting large enough that I sometimes struggle to find a post I'm trying to reference, even with all my careful tagging and my extensive knowledge of WordPress's URL-line options for searching the database with tag and keyword combos.

I've been toying with the idea of exporting my whole corpus and shoveling it into a local chatbot, so that I can type, "Which post did I talk about the evils of showing people your chatbot output in?" and get a link to the correct essay:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#robowanking

(Don't follow this link! I will be referencing the essay it goes to shortly; I struggled to find it when I sat down to write today; I'd accidentally tagged it with "at" instead of "ai" and missed the typo when I published it.)

There are very few subjects I have more discernment over than "essays I have written." If I ask a chatbot to tell me which post I'm thinking of, I will instantly know which of its guesses are correct and which ones aren't. No one in the universe is better qualified than me to perform this task. No one ever will be.

Now, as it happens, I know exactly how badly a chatbot can screw up when it comes to my own work, because strangers insist on asking chatbots about me and then, for reasons I find baffling, they send me the output. Please don't show anyone your chatbot transcripts unless they ask to see them. It's embarrassing at best and annoying at worst:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/03/02/nonconsensual-slopping/#robowanking

(There's that reference I promised. You can follow the link now!)

Again, discernment is everything when it comes to getting useful work out of a chatbot. If you don't know anything about my work and you ask a chatbot to explain it to you, you will likely be badly misled. If you are familiar with my work and you ask a chatbot for the best examples where I explain a given subject, you may get a good answer, and if you get a bad one, you'll know it.

The centrality of discernment to productive AI usage is obvious, and that's why I find the insistence that AI can be used as a teaching assistant (or worse, a teacher) so baffling. By definition, a student isn't an expert on the subject they're studying. That's the whole point of studying – to acquire knowledge and thus discernment. Asking students to learn via chatbot explanations is both incoherent and dangerous.

Doubtless, there are ways that teachers might find chatbots useful, but for Christ's sake, don't use them to teach. There's plenty of ways teachers can use chatbots without asking students to learn from them.

Here's an example. My daughter graduated from a big, typical American high school a couple years ago, and I spent her high-school years getting progressively angrier about the bad compromises that her teachers were forced into.

Between "Common Core" and "Advanced Placement," the US system has been highly standardized. Teachers are under enormous pressure to teach specific aspects of specific subjects in a specific order, and students are told that their future life chances turn on their ability to pass high-stakes tests:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/01/16/flexibility-in-the-margins/#a-commons

This gives rise to many frustrations for teachers and students alike, but nothing got my dander up so much as my daughter's math teachers' testing practices. In all of my kid's higher math classes, teachers had a single, prized set of tests, and lived in fear of these escaping into the wild and turning into cheating aids. As a result, teachers collected students' math exams and quizzes and did not return them. Students sat exams, worked through the problems and got their grades – but were not allowed to take home their tests to see where they went wrong.

Look, I know I'm no mathematician, and I know I'm not a math teacher, but I know enough about pedagogy to know that this is crazy. This is like trying to get better at archery by loosing arrows at a target but not checking to see where they hit. It's bananas.

I also understand why the teachers felt they had to do it. Writing test questions that test for specific concepts in a specific order is a lot of work, and generating new tests for every class is the kind of task that would consume time better spent on lesson planning and meeting with students.

It's easy to imagine a teacher who creates prompts for each test question that cause a chatbot to emit a new test paper for each class, along with answer keys. These questions are easily validated by a skilled teacher, who definitionally has the discernment to know whether a test question fits the bill. I could even see vibe-coding a little app to spit these questions out – though again, I would want the teacher to work through the questions each time to make sure they were sound.

Both my parents are teachers. My brother is a teacher. I teach every now and again. Teachers do a lot of repetitive, unrewarding work. They also do a lot of difficult, creative, extremely important work. Good teachers have the discernment to sort good classroom materials from bad ones. They do that already, because just as you don't need an LLM to generate bad spellchecker suggestions, you also don't need an LLM to generate sub-par educational materials. There are plenty of "educational" publishers who'll do that all day long.

AI is a normal technology. That means there are times when it is useful and times when it is pointless or actively harmful. One rule of thumb for chatbots is that they can only provide useful information to experts who have the discernment to ignore the defective output that LLMs always emit. That means that the dream of chatbots as replacements for teachers is a nightmare.

Getting rid of teachers because we all have chatbots is like getting rid of doctors because we all have the plague.

---

Hey look at this (permalink)

• How Far Did Vannevar Bush Get on the Memex? https://brewster.kahle.org/2026/07/26/how-far-did-vannevar-bush-get-on-the-memex/

• Things with Feathers https://vimeo.com/1188522762/7efe874428

• Neuromancer — Official Teaser https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g79GPZSQHBk

• Shop worker owned businesses online https://www.workerowned.info/marketplace

• Americans — including many Republicans — are losing faith in capitalism, polling shows https://edition.cnn.com/2026/07/23/politics/republicans-capitalism-socialism-poll

---

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago How to help someone use a computer https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/agre/how-to-help.html/

#20yrsago Arrested for taking a pic of a cop arresting someone else https://web.archive.org/web/20060813102257/http://www.nbc10.com/news/9574663/detail.html

#15yrsago Batman logo in equation form https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/j2qjc/do_you_like_batman_do_you_like_math_my_math/

#15yrsago Vindictive WalMart erroneously accuses couple of shoplifting, has husband deported, wife fired, costs them house and car https://web.archive.org/web/20111002102637/https://www.courthousenews.com/2011/07/26/38455.htm

#15yrsago House Committee passes bill requiring your ISP to spy on every click and keystroke you make online and retain for 12 months https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2011/07/house-committee-approves-bill-mandating-internet

#15yrsago Fuck and the law https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=896790&

#15yrsago Bill Nye explains to Fox News why lunar volcanoes don’t disprove anthropogenic global warming https://web.archive.org/web/20110924185725/https://www.mediamatters.org/mmtv/201107280007

#10yrsago North Carolina’s voter suppression law struck down as “racist” https://edition.cnn.com/2016/07/29/politics/north-carolina-voter-id/index.html

#10yrsago Pregnancy-tracking app was riddled with vulnerabilities, exposing extremely sensitive personal information https://www.consumerreports.org/electronics-computers/mobile-security-software/glow-pregnancy-app-exposed-women-to-privacy-threats-a1100919965/

#10yrsago “Tellin The World” 1972 voting PSA aimed at 18-25 y/o working-class voters https://archive.org/details/TellinTheWorld

#10yrsago Trump campaign frisks, then blocks ticketed Washington Post reporter at Pence rally https://web.archive.org/web/20160729170353/https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/07/28/a-washington-post-reporter-was-banned-from-a-trump-pence-rally-yesterday-that-should-frighten-you/

#10yrsago Nobel-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz calls Apple’s tax strategy a “fraud” https://web.archive.org/web/20160731112543/http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-07-28/stiglitz-calls-apple-s-profit-reporting-in-ireland-a-fraud

#5yrsago Unauthorized cups https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#well-run-dry

#5yrsago Tracking you with accelerometer signatures https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#in-motion

#5yrsago Stories from Black women's customer service hell https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#arise-ye-prisoners

#5yrsago Bankruptcy and elite impunity https://pluralistic.net/2021/07/29/impunity-corrodes/#morally-bankrupt

#1yrago Boss-politics antitrust and the MAGA crackup https://pluralistic.net/2025/07/29/bondi-and-domination/#superjove

---

Upcoming appearances (permalink)

• Virtual: EFFecting Change: Who the Machine Serves, Aug 12
  https://www.eff.org/event/effecting-change-who-machine-serves

• Edinburgh International Book Festival with Jimmy Wales, Aug 17
  https://www.edbookfest.co.uk/events/the-front-list-cory-doctorow-and-jimmy-wales

• Sydney: The Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Aug 23-24
  https://festivalofdangerousideas.com/program/

• Melbourne: Enshittification at the Wheeler Centre, Aug 25
  https://www.wheelercentre.com/events-tickets/season-2026/cory-doctorow-enshittification

• Brighton: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Carole Cadwalladr (Brighton Dome), Sep 8
  https://brightondome.org/whats-on/LSC-cory-doctorow-the-reverse-centaurs-guide-to-life-after-ai/

• London: The Reverse Centaur's Guide to Life After AI with Riley Quinn (Foyle's Picadilly), Sep 9
  https://www.foyles.co.uk/events/enshittification-cory-doctorow-riley-quinn

• South Bend: An Evening With Cory Doctorow (Notre Dame), Oct 6
  https://franco.nd.edu/events/2026/10/06/an-evening-with-cory-doctorow/

---

Recent appearances (permalink)

• AI is not inevitable (Betakit)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbiTVkq1WHo

• A Conversation with Lina Khan (Law and Economy Student Network)
  https://www.youtube.com/live/7Ak5LZllqwE

• Will AI ever come alive, and what happens if it does? (BBC News)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lzk4o3fPZZE

• Waarom jij straks het hulpje van AI bent (VPRO)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOnvR2fs8CA

• Talk Tech Bock (Vera Linß)
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3PFjGvQoBgc

---

Latest books (permalink)

• "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/

• "Canny Valley": A limited edition collection of the collages I create for Pluralistic, self-published, September 2025 https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/04/illustrious/#chairman-bruce

• "Enshittification: Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, October 7 2025
  https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374619329/enshittification/

• "Picks and Shovels": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about the heroic era of the PC, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2025 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9781250865908/picksandshovels).

• "The Bezzle": a sequel to "Red Team Blues," about prison-tech and other grifts, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), February 2024 (thebezzle.org).

• "The Lost Cause:" a solarpunk novel of hope in the climate emergency, Tor Books (US), Head of Zeus (UK), November 2023 (http://lost-cause.org).

• "The Internet Con": A nonfiction book about interoperability and Big Tech (Verso) September 2023 (http://seizethemeansofcomputation.org). Signed copies at Book Soup (https://www.booksoup.com/book/9781804291245).

• "Red Team Blues": "A grabby, compulsive thriller that will leave you knowing more about how the world works than you did before." Tor Books http://redteamblues.com.

• "Chokepoint Capitalism: How to Beat Big Tech, Tame Big Content, and Get Artists Paid, with Rebecca Giblin", on how to unrig the markets for creative labor, Beacon Press/Scribe 2022 https://chokepointcapitalism.com

---

Upcoming books (permalink)

• "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

• "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

• "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2027

• "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027

---

Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Fourth draft completed. Submitted to editor.

• A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING

---

This work – excluding any serialized fiction – is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. That means you can use it any way you like, including commercially, provided that you attribute it to me, Cory Doctorow, and include a link to pluralistic.net.

https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Quotations and images are not included in this license; they are included either under a limitation or exception to copyright, or on the basis of a separate license. Please exercise caution.

---

How to get Pluralistic:

Blog (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

Pluralistic.net

Newsletter (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://pluralistic.net/plura-list

Mastodon (no ads, tracking, or data-collection):

https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic

Bluesky (no ads, possible tracking and data-collection):

https://bsky.app/profile/doctorow.pluralistic.net

Medium (no ads, paywalled):

https://doctorow.medium.com/

Tumblr (mass-scale, unrestricted, third-party surveillance and advertising):

https://mostlysignssomeportents.tumblr.com/tagged/pluralistic

"When life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla" -Joey "Accordion Guy" DeVilla

READ CAREFULLY: By reading this, you agree, on behalf of your employer, to release me from all obligations and waivers arising from any and all NON-NEGOTIATED agreements, licenses, terms-of-service, shrinkwrap, clickwrap, browsewrap, confidentiality, non-disclosure, non-compete and acceptable use policies ("BOGUS AGREEMENTS") that I have entered into with your employer, its partners, licensors, agents and assigns, in perpetuity, without prejudice to my ongoing rights and privileges. You further represent that you have the authority to release me from any BOGUS AGREEMENTS on behalf of your employer.

ISSN: 3066-764X