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What happens when we hand kids the most powerful intellectual shortcut ever invented? New York City is putting the brakes on generative AI for hundreds of thousands of younger students, and it raises a much bigger question: Are we teaching kids how to use AI, or teaching them they don’t need to think anymore?

Then there’s the strange case of the disappearing American. We used to go to banks, pharmacies, grocery stores, restaurants and dozens of other places where we actually encountered other human beings. Now almost everything comes to us. It’s incredibly convenient. So why are we surprised that people increasingly feel disconnected from one another?

And then science enters the room and completely loses its fucking mind.

Cockroach milk. One thousand pairs of underwear buried around the world. Scientists deliberately stepping on venomous snakes. The physics of blowing your nose. Splash-free urinals. Mosquitoes being recruited for microscopic 3D printing. Every one of these is real scientific research, and somehow the explanations may be even better than the headlines.

Somewhere between kids outsourcing their homework, Americans outsourcing the need to leave the house, and scientists discovering that apparently we haven’t fully exploited the nutritional potential of cockroaches, you begin to realize how spectacularly strange ordinary life has become.

This is definitely A World Gone Mad.

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