There's been a lot of talk about how this is a byproduct of the partriarchy and yeah, obviously, it is. But there is also an extreme crisis of depersonalization going on among younger people right now. This idea that relationships and people's inner lives are separate from experiences, or stories, or the Content of it all. These guys weren't thinking about how Jane Doe was going to feel when she woke up, or whether or not she wanted to have sex with them. I don't even think they were thinking about how *they* wanted to have sex with *her*. They were thinking about how great of a story this was. What it said about their college experiences and the bonds between brothers. They were thinking about how they'd be able to tell each other last night was a movie.

This article about admin bloat by @ProfBarryLam is very important. It points out that one of the major drivers of the bureaucratic build out in academia is an over-reliance on bullshit EdTech software that makes everything worse while requiring a legion of flunkies to manage it.

Wiseblood collaborated with Well-Read Mom to publish a special edition of this (previously) out-of-print book: Sorrow Built a Bridge: The Life of Mother Alphonsa, Daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne by Katherine Burton. Bringing us beyond mere biography and into the deeper meaning of Rose Hawthorne’s life, Burton shows how a privileged daughter of America’s literati came to lead a life of heroic virtue and become Mother Mary Alphonsa. Read more in our newsletter below . . .

This piece on YouTube in schools may turn out to be the most influence on K-12 perspectives this year. The stats in the piece come up all the time in conversation. 'Amy Warren’s "mom siren” went off when her seventh-grader in Wichita, Kan., seemed to know too much about Fortnite, a battling-and-shooting videogame he is barred from playing... When Warren signed into his school Google account, she was aghast: Her son Ben had accessed more than 13,000 YouTube videos during school hours from December 2024 through February 2025, according to viewing data she provided the Journal. His feed was rife with inappropriate content. Videos glorifying gun culture, asking about silencers on Nerf guns, “head shots” where children realistically portray being killed, a video with sexually explicit jokes about neighbors sleeping together. YouTube during snack time, dismissal and indoor recess. YouTube to teach drawing to first-graders. YouTube to read a book to class. YouTube under the covers at night, watching hamster videos on school-issued Chromebooks. A survey touted by YouTube executives shows that 94% of teachers have used YouTube in their roles. Granular data provided by parents highlight the scale: A second-grader in New York watched more than 700 videos in two months during school hours, including one featuring pole dancing. A tenth-grader in Oregon scrolled through more than 200 between 9 and 11:40 a.m. on March 6... YouTube is a top-viewed website on school devices, sometimes accounting for half of student traffic, according to administrators and web-filtering companies... When his middle-schooler began falling behind late last year, Massachusetts data scientist Jason Merkin sought her usage from her school district. They declined. He resorted to screenshotting her daily Chrome history and analyzing it with AI. He discovered his daughter spent some 40% of her computer time on noneducational sites at school, including accessing more than 1,000 YouTube videos in about 50 days. Watertown Public Schools said Merkin’s and others’ feedback—as well as a realization that YouTube’s filters “increasingly proved ineffective”—led to a districtwide block by January... Stan Winborne, superintendent of Granville County Public Schools in North Carolina, blanched to find YouTube was a top-accessed site in an audit he commissioned. His district calculated that “distracted” screen time was costing students up to 31 instructional days per year.'