Dana Goldstein of The New York Times reached out to students and teachers in schools and colleges to find out how they teach writing in the age of AI.
What she learned was that many teachers are expecting students to write in class, not at home, to ensure that they are not turning in essays written by AI.
For today’s high school and college students, the all-night writing session, hunched over a laptop at home or in a library carrel, is on the way out.
In the era of artificial intelligence, take-home writing assignments have become so difficult to police for integrity that many educators have simply stopped assigning them.
Instead, in a rapid shift, teachers are requiring students to write inside the classroom, where they can be observed. Assignments have changed too, with some educators prompting students to reflect on their personal reactions to what they’ve learned and read — the type of writing that A.I. struggles to credibly produce.
This transformation is happening across the educational landscape, from suburban districts and urban charter schools to community colleges and the Ivy League.
The New York Times heard from nearly 400 college and high school educators who responded to a callout about how generative A.I. is changing writing instruction. Almost all described a deep rethinking of how to teach writing — and whether it still matters, since A.I. has become a better writer than most students (and adults), they said.
Teachers are responding to a widespread challenge. Over the past year, A.I. use has become ubiquitous among American students. Between May and December of 2025, the share of American middle school, high school and college students who reported regularly using A.I. for homework increased from 48 to 62 percent, according to polling from RAND — even as two-thirds of students said the technology harmed critical-thinking skills. A third of the students reported using A.I. to draft or revise writing.
The link is a gift article. Feel free to open and read.
I posted about this very important international study when it was first released in 2023. It is as relevant now as ever. Can we recognize failure and learn from it? Some European countries have. With some exceptions, we have not.
Ed-Tech is a major industry. Its profits are huge. We have allowed the hype and propaganda of the industry to remake schooling. Part of the marketing is the claim that “our public schools are failing.” The answer: buy more of what impairs learning. Or endorse school choice, charters, vouchers, and home schooling, even though there is zero evidence that these privately run schools are as effective as public schools.
Read the report. Reach your own conclusion. Did we dive into screens and laptops because they increased student motivation and effort? Or because we were swept along by the industry propaganda?
The puzzle at the heart of the document is the clash between learned experience and the imperatives of greed. We learned during the pandemic about the risks of becoming dependent on ed-technology as the main driver of instruction. As we reflect on the period from March 2020 to now, we can discern the damage that occurred to students when their teachers were replaced by virtual instruction: boredom, learning loss, mental health issues, loneliness, lack of socialization with their peers, lack of personal interaction with teachers.
Yet with most people believing that the pandemic (or the worst of it) lies in the past, ed-tech corporations are focused on selling more of what has already failed. Why would we want to expand what has demonstrably proved inadequate and harmful to students?
You probably will take a long while to read the full report, but do read the summary and conclusions to whet your appetite. The overview concludes that the global reliance on ed-tech was necessary in the circumstances, but was a tragedy. Children need human teachers. They need people who look them in the eye and encourage them. Education is not a mechanical process; people are not widgets.
The UNESCO report reviews the global evidence of the harm caused by dependence on ed-tech:
[The report] exposes the ways unprecedented educational dependence on technology often resulted in unchecked exclusion, staggering inequality, inadvertent harm and the elevation of learning models that place machines and profit before people.
The summary says:
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? documents how widespread school closures and the hard pivot to remote learning with connected technology during the COVID-19 pandemic resulted in numerous unintended and undesirable consequences.
Although connected technology supported the continuation of education for many learners, many more were left behind. Exclusion soared and inequities widened. Achievement levels fell, even for those with access to distance learning. Educational experiences narrowed. Physical and mental health declined. Privatization accelerated, threatening education’s unique standing as a public good and human right. Invasive surveillance endangered the free and open exchange of ideas and undermined trust. Automation replaced human interactions with machine-mediated experiences. And technology production and disposal placed new strains on the environment.
Visions that technology could form the backbone of education and supplant school-based learning – in wide circulation at the outset of the health crisis – had promised better outcomes. Ed-tech proponents held that the immense challenges of school closures could be met with technology and that deeper technology integration would transform education for the better. But these high hopes and expectations unraveled when ed-tech was hurriedly deployed to maintain formal education as COVID-19 tore across countries.
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? recounts this tumultuous period, documenting the actions and decisions taken by governments, schools and technology companies. The publication contrasts the promises of ed-tech with the realities of what ed-tech delivered as a response to school closures that impacted over 1.6 billion learners and stretched intermittently from the beginning of 2020 to the end of 2022. The evidence and analysis highlight trends observed across countries and zoom in on the specificities of local experiences, creating a global mosaic of what students, teachers and families experienced when connected technology was elevated as a singular portal to teaching and learning.
Aimed at general and specialist audiences alike, this publication shows how the abrupt and deep changes brought about by the recourse to remote digital learning during the pandemic continue to ripple through the education sector even as schools have fully reopened. It questions whether more and faster integration of technology is desirable for learners, teachers and schools and if ed-tech is, as it is often billed, a key ingredient of educational resilience.
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? posits that new principles are needed to forge more humanistic directions for ed-tech development and use. In-person schooling and teaching should be guaranteed even as technologies improve and connectivity becomes more ubiquitous. Governments need to anchor this guarantee in the legal architecture upholding the right to education, especially for young learners. Moreover, future applications of ed-tech must show greater concern for holistic student well-being. While academic learning is central to education, it is not the only component. Ed-tech needs to support the multiple individual and collective purposes of education, from socio-emotional and personal development, to learning to live together, with the planet, as well as with technology.
In detailing what happened when ed-tech was deployed in response to pandemic school closures, as well as questioning why ed-tech was often elevated as a singular solution, this publication clarifies how the education community can move beyond merely reacting to technological change and instead play a more assertive role steering the digitalization of education towards the more holistic goals of education to shape inclusive, just and sustainable futures.
The future of education needs to be a humanistic one. The lessons extracted from what is premised here as an ed-tech tragedy illuminate the ways technology can better foster education that teaches and revitalizes human values, strengthens human relationships and upholds human rights.…
Ed-tech was supposed to solve a problem but it created other problems.
An Ed-Tech Tragedy? examines the many ways that the hurried embrace of technology solutionism steered responses to a global education challenge directly towards ed-tech. Along the way, the logic of technology solutionism changed understandings of educational problems to be solved. The analysis presented here helps reveal, for example, how technological solutions deployed during school closures took a narrow view of education and focused almost exclusively on furthering the academic progress of students in pared-down curricular subjects. This meant that little attention was paid to other education goals, such as fostering curiosity and inquiry and supporting physical health, mental well-being and social and emotional learning. This analysis also shows how ed-tech, originally cast as a solution to maintain learning continuity in the face of widespread disruptions to schooling, has more recently been positioned as a tool to help reverse learning loss. This ‘loss’, however, grew out of the deficiencies of technology-dependent remote learning to preserve the pace of academic learning that would have been typical without school closures stemming from the pandemic. The problem that ed-tech initially set out to solve morphed from assuring the continuity of learning to remedying lost learning. The way the problem was reframed while maintaining connected technology as the centrepiece of the solution is an example of technology solutionism at work.…
Recognizing the chaotic pivot from in-school learning to technology-facilitated distance learning as having a tragic arc provides a forceful rebuttal to a growing consensus that the education sector somehow ‘advanced’, ‘leapfrogged’, ‘catapulted’ or ‘disrupted’ itself to a better future when it deployed technology on a massive scale as an interim measure to confront a crisis. The evidence overwhelmingly points in the opposite direction: education became less accessible, less effective and less engaging when it pivoted away from physical schools and teachers and towards technology exclusively. ‘Tragedy’ in this sense signals regression – a denigration of the status quo,rather than a desired evolution. The narrative that ed-tech should be or must be a central component of ‘building education back better’ warrants new scrutiny after a careful examination of the experiences during the pandemic.
The invocation of tragedy also facilitates awareness that connected technologies, despite their growing reach, power and potential, remain tools in a repertoire of many others to construct stronger, more agile and more flexible education systems that can respond and adapt to disruption. Other tools include strengthened teacher training and support; enhanced school leadership and pedagogical management of schools; curricular renewal; smaller class sizes; and improved physical resources and infrastructure for schools and classrooms. Crises that necessitate the prolonged closure of schools and demand heavy or total reliance on technology have been exceedingly rare historically. Future crises may present entirely different challenges. The trauma of the pandemic has, in many circles, functioned to elevate technology as an almost singular solution to assure educational resilience by providing flexibility in times of disruption. Investments to protect education wrongly shifted away from people and towards machines, digital connections and platforms. This elevation of the technical over the human is contradictory to education’s aim to further human development and cultivate humanistic values. It is human capacity, rather than technological capacity, that is central to ensuring greater resilience of education systems to withstand shocks and manage crises.
Overall, the pandemic is a case study in how technology in its current iterations is not yet a suitable foundation for actualizing the diverse goals that communities assign to education. Expectations that technology may, in time, help further increase the reach, improve the quality and strengthen the agility of education are valid. For now, though, the experiences since early 2020 have shown it to be an alarmingly brittle solution – one incapable of effectively responding to widespread and extended school shutdowns. For far too many students, it was a solution that either never started in earnest or quickly broke down. The sudden shift to ed-tech also accelerated a concerning transfer of authority away from teachers, schools and communities and towards private, for-profit interests. Additionally, the censorship, data extraction, advertising, top-down control, intimidation and surveillance that so often characterize current models of digital transformation have made education less free and, arguably, less capable of facilitating critiques of and positive changes to the status quo. [emphasis added by DR.]
Countries made massive investments to digitalize education through much of the COVID-19 pandemic. But it remains far from clear whether these investments will improve education over the longer term and make it an engine of just, inclusive and sustainable development, especially when compared with conventional school-based and teacher-facilitated education. The digital transformation of education may yet be a force for beneficial change. But the logic of technological solutionism and its associated business models currently steering this transformation, led largely by the commercial technology entities that are remaking so many aspects of society, tend to treat education and knowledge as private commodities and not as global public goods that provide collective as well as individual benefits.
It is hoped that this analysis and its use of tragedy as a metaphor might moderate the discourse and popular view that the pandemic has ‘unshackled’ education systems and ‘launched’ them into desirable futures characterized by greater technology use. Documenting the severity and scope of the many negative consequences of ed-tech responses during the health crisis inverts the triumphalist narratives that accompany many descriptions of technology deployments to address the educational disruption caused by school closures. A critical examination of the assumptions of technology solutionism and a review of the existing evidence provide a corrective and a counterargument to notions that more, deeper and accelerated use of technology is uniformly positive for education…
Throughout the review that follows, considerable evidence illustrates how the rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education in many contexts. While some countries and localities managed a shift to digital learning with limited privatization of the educational experience, a defining characteristic of the technology-centric response to the educational disruptions of the pandemic tended to be the elevation of for-profit, private ed-tech companies. In addition to considering the ways reliance on ed-tech impacted educational inclusion, equity and quality, this publication also explores the complex and often symbiotic links between ed-tech and the privatization of education during the pandemic.The rush to distance and remote learning with ed-tech accelerated the privatization of education.
Most such reports tend to summarize the status quo. This one challenges it. It’s time to take stock before the Ed-tech industry takes control of our most precious asset: our children.
Parents and activists banded together to persuade the New York City Board of Education (aka the Panel on Educational Policy) to reject a proposal to open an AI-themed high school.
In Brooklyn, an artificial intelligence program helps public school students pronounce words. In Queens, high school students ask Google Gemini how to improve their essays. And in the Bronx, students in a robotics lab consult an A.I. tool before building parts on a 3-D printer.
As teachers and students in New York City and across the United States have increasingly embraced artificial intelligence in the classroom, school leaders in the nation’s largest school system were set to make one of their biggest splashes yet — the opening of an A.I.-focused high school in Manhattan next school year.
But on Monday, the new schools chancellor, Kamar Samuels, abruptly halted the creation of the school amid a groundswell of opposition to the rapid adoption of the technology and its potential harms.
In an interview, Mr. Samuels said that he understood the concerns and questions parents have about artificial intelligence in the classroom and its safety and impact on critical thinking. “I want to be able to think about the technology in a very thoughtful way,” Mr. Samuels said.
Despite the decision not to proceed, school leaders in New York City and beyond remain bullish on the future of artificial intelligence in education and its potential benefits. They argue that it could transform teaching and learning, a claim also promoted by companies that sell the tools, and that it would be irresponsible to ignore or restrict the technology.
But New York parents have expressed concern about the artificial intelligence programs used in schools or accessible on students’ computers, as well as the lack of information about the applications and data they collect. Some families recently delivered to Mayor Zohran Mamdani a petition with thousands of signatures calling for a two-year moratorium on generative A.I., such as chatbots.
“The intense outrage among parents in New York City is as great as I’ve seen it on any education issue that I’ve been working on for 25 years,” said Leonie Haimson, an education advocate in New York City and member of the Coalition for an A.I. Moratorium.
Under Mr. Samuels’s leadership, the city’s Education Department has started to develop guidelines for how teachers and students should use artificial intelligence. Last month, the school system published its first playbook for A.I., developed in consultation with educators and education technology companies.
The creation of the new high school, known as Next Generation Technology High School and located in the financial district of Manhattan, was expected to be another major step toward the embrace of artificial intelligence in a school system whose decisions, because of its size, often influence other districts. A vote on the creation of the high school by a 22-member education oversight panel was scheduled for Wednesday.
The group’s chairman, Gregory Faulkner, said that he did not believe a single member would have voted in favor of it. Mr. Faulkner said that out of the many emails he received and conversations he had with parents, just a handful of comments were supportive of the school.
“If there’s anything that even has a hint of A.I., there’s strong opposition to it,” Mr. Faulkner said. “People are very nervous about the technology and how it is going to be used.”
Since this is a gift article, feel free to open and finish reading.
Jared Cooney Horvath is highly critical of digital tools in the classroom. Horvath is a neuroscientist who studies learning, memory, and cognition. His most recent book is The Digital Delusion.
On January 15, 2026, he testified before a Senate Committee, where he linked the use of technology to declining academic performance, not just in the U.S. but in other countries.
Here is his written testimony with graphs, footnotes, and other evidence to support his thesis.
The BBC reports that that Sweden has joined Norway in ousting electronics from its classrooms and reviving the use of books. The Swedish government, like Norway’s, concluded that electronic tools were causing a decline in literacy rates.
Sweden’s government is championing a renewed focus on physical books, paper and pens in classrooms, designed to reverse falling literacy levels.
Schools in Sweden are returning to more traditional learning methods – such as reading from physical books – after seeing their reading standards drop while ipads and laptops were used.
There is now a focus on using more printed textbooks, handwriting and less screen time in early education. Experts say reading levels are getting better because of this.
Some teachers have said students are asking for more books and paper based learning in schools, saying they learn more quickly and retain information better than using a laptop.
This isn’t a total ban on technology in the classroom and digital devices are still used, but the government is spending millions buying physical textbooks, and library books.
During the 2000s and 2010s, books were sidelined in Swedish classrooms and replaced with laptops and ipads.
The idea was to prepare students for life in a digital world.
But it seems to have backfired.
Sweden’s reading standards, which were among the best in Europe in 2000, began to fall.
In 2012, after years of getting worse, its Pisa scores — a worldwide test that measures reading, maths and science literacy among 15-year-olds — hit their lowest point.
Now, by popular demand, the books are back in the classroom and things are improving again.
The state has launched a national reading challenge for ten-year-olds and the classes that read the most books win prizes.
Sweden had intended to be a leader in the field of digital learning, but eventually concluded that the heavy use of Ed-tech was harming student learning. Increased screen time was leading to distraction, inability to concentrate, and lessened ability to do deep reading. “Studies have linked heavy digital use to reduced comprehension and memory retention as well as eye strain.”
The U.S. spends billions every year for Ed-tech. But the pushback is growing.
Jonathan Haidt of NYU, a critic of Ed-tech and social media for children, has kept a running tab on his Twitter account of cities and school districts in the U.S. that ban social media for children. where students spend less time on cell phones and social media, libraries report an increase in books checked out.
To those who are not on the payroll of Big Tech are likely to recognize that the frenzied spending of billions of dollars on Ed-tech had more to do with profits than with student learning.
A massive revolt against educational technology in the classroom is under way, especially in certain European nations. Education leaders in some countries have concluded that Ed-tech is the primary reason for declining interest in reading and ability to read.
In the U.S., experts blame declining reading scores on the pandemic, on teachers, or on schools that have not yet adopted the “science of reading.” But even here, some parents and educators have concluded that Ed-tech is the driver of declining interest in reading books. Meanwhile the Ed-tech industry continues to promote their products as the answer, not the problem.
Among the nations that are abandoning ed-tech, Norway is a leader of the pack. In 2016, the schools gave every child a laptop. Since then, Norwegians have seen growing aliteracy and illiteracy. Education leaders decided that Ed-tech was the reason that students lost interest in reading.
Norwegian libraries are the hub of a rebirth in literacy. According to a report in the Sunday Times of England, Norwegian libraries have reinvented their activities to bring back children and teens. They offer roller skating, rap workshops, and–most especially—-books.
Children find a nook in Lillehammer’s library as part of the Boklek scheme BARBORA HOLLAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
There are 1,100 chairs in the main public library in Oslo — rocking chairs, armchairs, chairs on balls which let you spin yourself around. Every one is full.
When the Deichman Bjorvika library opened in 2020, staff quickly realised they needed teenagers’ ideas about how to attract young people. “When we used to arrange free pizza evenings on our own, nobody came,” said Mariann Youmans, head of Deichman Young.
Their ideas? Workshops to clean your trainers and write rap lyrics, chess tournaments and parties where you rollerskate around piles of books.
The theory is that the teenagers, who are paid about 187 Norwegian krone (£14.50) per hour to sit on the council for two hours a week, invite their friends; the library becomes a place that they know and like, and gradually they start borrowing books.
They held 1,000 events last year — and lent a record 2.2 million books across Deichman’s 23 libraries in the Norwegian capital. About 50 per cent were to children. It is books by the back door.
Welcome to the latest chapter in Norway’s attempts to reverse its catastrophic decline in reading. It might have one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds — about £1.5 trillion, and rising by the day — and the highest percentage of electric car sales — 96 per cent — but Norway, temporarily, forgot about the importance of books.
Around 500,000 Norwegians, in a population of only 5.6 million, cannot read a text message or simple instructions. Of the 65 countries measured for children’s enjoyment of reading by Pirls (Progress in International Reading Literacy Study), it comes bottom.
“We are far, far too rich, so we do stupid things with our money,” said Trine Skei Grande, the former education minister, now director of the Norwegian Publishers’ Association.
In 2016, the “stupid thing” was to give an iPad to every child when they started school at the age of five. It had no parental controls on it, and the parents who complained were ignored, dismissed as “dinosaurs”. Books disappeared from classrooms. Children stopped reading.
Norway is below the international average, and far below Britain, in the Pisa reading scores, compiled by the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). Before the iPads were introduced, it was significantly above both of them.
Such children were left, Skei Grande said, with what she described as “kitchen language”, a vocabulary for only the ordinary things in life, perhaps 17,000 words, rather than a bookworm’s 55,000-70,000.
But the fightback has truly begun. The prime minister, Jonas Gahr Store, vowed to make Norway into the best country in the world for reading. “Norwegian children used to be among the best readers in the world. But today, 15,000 pupils finish primary school without being able to read properly. That is serious,” he said, at the launch of a national reading initiative last August.
A reading commission was set up by the government in January. There are 13 experts on it, including two authors, who will report later this year. Skei Grande said there is political consensus across Norway’s parliament to resolve the problem. “We have no representative of Donald Trump saying: ‘I love the uneducated’. I’m happy with that,” she said.
Money is being poured into new strategies to get children reading again — and adults, constantly staring at their phones, are being targeted too.
An initiative, from Foundation Read, will encourage workplaces to set up book clubs for their staff, or at least to have a shelf of books that staff can exchange with each other. Nearly 30 companies have signed up.
Silje Brathen, from Foundation Read, said: “We need children to see their parents reading because why should they be forced to read if their parents are never doing that?” IPads have been removed for the first three years of school, and mobile phones banned for all ages.IPads have now been removed for younger schoolchildren.
There are summer reading competitions during the eight to nine-week holiday which begins in the middle of June, just as the sun barely sets in Norway.
Every child is encouraged to log their reading — cartoons and newspapers, as well as novels — and then to go to the library to pick up a prize to reward a milestone, such as getting to page 50. The shark tooth that children were given proved particularly popular one summer.
Helene Voldner, from the Norwegian Library Association, said: “Last summer, a library in Haugesund [a coastal town in the southwest of Norway] completely ran out of children’s books because so many wanted to take part.”
In Lillehammer, about two hours by train north of Oslo, an initiative, called Boklek, which translates as “book play”, was born, the brainchild of Marit Borkenhagen, festival director of the Norwegian Festival of Literature.
In the months before they start school in August at the age of five or six, every kindergarten class is invited to visit the local library.
Each year, one book is chosen, and the author, or a storyteller, comes to the library to read the story to the children, but also to play games linked to it. This year’s book is Det Runde Problemet by Vegard Markhus about a boy called Robert who loses his head.
At 10am in the library on Wednesday, there were 47 children listening to the story, with their 12 teachers, all sitting in socks, not shoes, in the children’s section. At midday, there were another 59 children from other kindergartens.
They do not listen silently. They were encouraged, by the storyteller, Kristine Haugland, to get involved — patting their head to check it is still there, and counting the number of socks on Robert’s messy bathroom floor. Kristine Haugland of Boklek keeps children enthralled at the library in Lillehammer BARBORA HOLLAN FOR THE SUNDAY TIMES
It is reading, but not the quiet, dull type that puts off so many children. The aim is to show the children, and their teachers, how reading can be fun.
The same book is read to all children that year, and a copy given both to their kindergarten and their new class at primary school. It is designed to make them feel comfortable when they make the move to big school.
Mia Granum, a Boklek co-ordinator, said: “When I was a child, we all watched the same TV. We had a lot more in common with each other. It’s important to have something comfortable that is familiar to everyone. The Boklek book gives them this.”
For Sarah Willand, director of one of Norway’s oldest and biggest publishers, Cappelen Damm, the decline in reading — but the newfound determination to reverse the problem — means she describes herself as a “concerned optimist”.
She said: “We are concerned that both people — children and adults — are reading less … It is not enough that books exist. They must be read or heard.
Next month, Norway will be the guest of honour at the annual Children’s Book Fair in Bologna, Italy, with dozens of events organised by Norla (Norwegian Literature Abroad).
Back in Oslo, Deichman Bjorvika — all 19,600 square metres of it — has five 3D printers, six sewing machines, and a scheme to hand out seeds to visitors. The architect designed the five-storey building — or ten if you include the five mezzanines — to look like a forest. If you look up, you see light coming in through the glass roof. Oslo’s central library, Deichman Bjorvika. The five-storey building opened in 2020.
To open the library, streets were closed, royalty invited, and little children — with rucksacks of books on their backs — walked from the old library to the new building. “We wanted the first inhabitants of the new library to be children. We wanted to show them the way,” said Youmans.
There are moments in history when legislation stops being merely controversial and becomes openly barbaric. Tennessee’s House Bill 570 is one of those moments. Proposed by two Republican lawmakers, this bill seeks to classify abortion as homicide punishable by life imprisonment, life without parole, or even the death penalty. There are no exceptions for rape. There are no exceptions for incest. There are no exceptions for the health of the mother. This is not a policy debate. This is a war on women, and it is being waged in broad daylight. But Tennessee is not an outlier. It is a preview.
The good news is that the Republican-dominated legislature killed the proposal. They would not go along with the insane idea that a woman should spend her life in prison or get the death penalty as punishment for an abortion.
A Tennessee House committee rejected an anti-abortion bill Tuesday that would have criminalized women for seeking abortion procedures, potentially allowing them to be charged with murder.
The bill failed for lack of support and didn’t come to a vote in the Population Health Subcommittee, leading supporters to sing hymns and protest in the Cordell Hull Legislative Building…
Groups such as End Abortion Now and the Foundation to Abolish Abortion that supported Barrett’s bill blasted the Republican supermajority legislature for claiming to be “pro-life” but refusing to support the legislation. They expect to revive the bill in 2027..
In this post, Dr. Jeremy Faust interviews Dr. Joe Sachs, executive producer of the popular television series “The Pitt.” Both Dr. Faust and Dr. Sachs are emergency room physicians.
The show is an hour-by-hour depiction of life in an emergency room in Pittsburgh. Every hour brings new emergencies, new crises. The viewer sees doctors teaching resident doctors and making crucial decisions in an instant. If they make a mistake, the patient may die. Not every story has a happy ending.
As a viewer, you see patients who worry how they can afford the medical care; you see patients die; you see ICE agents bring in a woman who is injured, but whose very presence terrifies patients and staff. you see patients who are cooperative but also patients who are drunk and aggressive.
You see the staff acting and reacting in a situation that is always stressful. Some thrive on the stress. Others don’t.
This interview is really wonderful as an inside view about how the show was made. Many doctors and nurses are on set to make sure that their acting counterparts are doing what they would do. Every word in the script is reviewed by doctors.
Because I enjoy the program, I enjoyed the interview. I think you will too.
Finished paying your taxes? I bet you didn’t do as well as Secretary of Energy Chris Wright. Politico reported that the company founded made huge profits and paid no taxes. In fact, his company got a refund! It’s Trump tax policy at work for the 1%.
Politico wrote:
The company founded and formerly run by Energy Secretary Chris Wright paid no federal corporate income taxes last year, according to its regulatory filings, and actually got more than $10 million back from the IRS.
Liberty Energy, the oil field services company Wright founded in 2011 but left last year to join the Trump administration, was among several energy companies included in a report issued Tuesday by the nonpartisan Institute on Taxation and Economic Policy naming 88 companies that together made more than $105 billion before taxes last year but paid no federal corporate income taxes.
Liberty recorded net income before taxes of $193 million last year but received more than $10 million back in tax benefits, according to its latest annual financial disclosure. The company paid $33 million in federal taxes for the 2024 tax year after making a net income of $403 million before taxes.
The six conservative-right wing justices on the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act of 1965, by striking down Section 2, which requires that minorities have districts in which their voting preferences may be heard. This section led to the creation of districts that elected Black representatives.
We can now expect redistricting of Congressional districts and state legislative districts to sharply reduce the number of Black elected officials.
Richard L. Hasen of Slatewrote that the decision “will go down in history as one of the most pernicious and damaging Supreme Court decisions of the last century. All six Republican-appointed justices on the court signed onto Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion gutting what remained of the Voting Rights Act protections for minority voters, while pretending they were merely making technical tweaks to the act.
This decision will bleach the halls of Congress, state legislatures, and local bodies like city councils, by ending the protections of Section 2 of the act, which had provided a pathway to assure that voters of color would have some rudimentary fair representation. It’s the culmination of the life’s work of Chief Justice John Roberts and Samuel Alito, who have shown persistent resistance to the idea of the United States as a multiracial democracy, and a brazen willingness to reject Congress’ judgment that fair representation for minority voters sometimes requires race-conscious legislation. It gives the green light to further partisan gerrymandering. It protects Alito’s core constituency: aggrieved white Republican voters. It’s a disaster for American democracy.
Future generations of legal scholars will review the Republicans’ retreat from civil rights protections enacted in the 1960s. Perhaps psychologists will figure out why Justice Clarence Thomas consistently opposes laws intended to protect people like him.
Diane Ravitch's blog 