Today is #WorldPolioDay 📍

🚨 MIT just published the most comprehensive report, proving universities have no remaining reason to exist. A committee of professors and students spent five months studying what AI is doing to learning on campus. The findings are a warning, not a footnote. Study groups are disappearing. Office hours are emptying out. Problem sets and take-home exams no longer prove anything, because AI can produce a credible answer to almost any undergraduate assignment. The report has a name for what's happening to students: "cognitive surrender." Reaching for AI the instant something gets hard, before even trying to think it through. The numbers back it up: 46% of MIT undergrads use LLMs daily 90% say they're worried about their own overreliance More students now believe AI makes them replaceable than believe it makes them capable MIT's answer wasn't more surveillance. No AI detectors, no lockdown browsers. The committee called that path unreliable and said it just breeds distrust. Instead: oral exams, semester-long portfolios, in-person project work, a required social component in every subject. They're even floating rethinking grades entirely, since without a GPA to game, most of the incentive to cheat disappears. The most famous tech school on the planet just admitted the machines broke its teaching model. Its answer was more humans, not more software. (Paper link in comments)

This man had been hospitalized for three months due to a joint condition when he received a lovely surprise: a visit from his dogs, organized by the hospital staff.

A new exhibition is celebrating the 200-year history of The Coombe Hospital, which was founded in Dublin in 1826 rte.ie/news/dublin/2026/1022…

I came across him because of Tina, the goldie. Having had goldies in my life I was horrified that this 🐕 was left in such an horrendous state. Were it not for Niall, she wouldn't have known love & kindness. He transformed her. The 🏨 in her name & his relentless work- he's an👼

“I wasted time, and now doth time waste me,” Dame Judi Dench shares some of the quotes from Shakespeare that mean the most to her – and tells us why she’s ‘besotted with sonnets’.

Illustration by Timo Elliott

November for my 2027 calendar - last details Calendar now available on my site 🏚