You don’t need Disney-level resources and drawing skills to create animation. People have made classics with sand and a source of light. With magazine clippings, or their own bodies animated via stop motion. There’s no barrier to entry, as we explore: ─➤animationobsessive.substack.com/p/sand-and-a-s…

George Orwell on writing:

Writing forces your brain to coordinate memory, reasoning, and meaning-making simultaneously. Every time you write, you rewire toward clearer thinking. Every time you let an LLM do it, you rewire toward consumption.

Someone just built an invisible teleprompter for your MacBook notch 🤯 It's called Notchprompt and it helps users maintain eye contact during Zoom calls, demos, or interviews. 100% Open Source.

I'm closely following new research showing a troubling gap in AI education tools. A 2026 MIT study gave students identical feedback—some told it was from their TA, others told it was AI. Both groups said the feedback was equally good, but students who thought a real person wrote

If your child becomes a reader, about 80% of the education job is already done. That's my honest assessment after working in education for over thirty years. Everything else is secondary. Most parents think science education is important. Yes it is. But if you can't read the

Please get back to doing puzzles, sudoku, board games, crosswords, word search. Read long novels and watch long form videos. Seeing my students and even my age-mates uncomfortable being cognitively unentertained is... something. We’re losing patience with thinking deeply.

I genuinely think the worst thing the internet did to reading was convince people that finishing books is a competitive sport. You don't need to read 52 books a year. You just need to read. Books you like. At your own pace. And think about them for longer than a TikTok video.

Please stop making everything digital. I want ticket stubs, handwritten letters, and a shoebox full of memories to open at 80.

Get your dopamine from production, not consumption.

Biggest take away from the Oscars for me is that finding people you love and making art with them is a worthy, integral and noble human pursuit, no matter the odds or outcomes.

My students who are poor writers are also poor thinkers. Many are smart, but their ideas are sporadic, unfocused, and weak. This is why students MUST learn how to write clear and focused arguments. Writing trains the mind to think clearly and rationally.

Did you vote for this? Sad day.

Sometimes…

You don’t teach critical thinking as a program. You teach it by: comparing texts asking better questions writing debating It’s not separate from reading. It is reading.

I get that this is an unpopular view but: We need more journalists & fewer pundits. We need more original reporting & fewer hot takes riffing off the news. We don't have this because reporting takes work and is difficult & pontificating on YouTube is lazy & easy.

Your literature teacher who wore hoop earrings and made you read Beowulf and Gatsby and marched in protests and taught you to question authority and said too much TV would turn your brain into soup had it exactly right.

whimsy is actually a form of resistance against a world that wants us to be miserable

A lot of people are under the mistaken impression that progress means advances in tech. Real progress is kids who are literate, free meals for public school students, a culture in which human art & poetry are celebrated. We're regressing rapidly & the only way forward is to read.