Author: Errica Jensen

T. Alexander Puutio, a professor of economics at Harvard, observed an odd phenomenon with his students’ essays in the fall of 2022. Suddenly, writers he knew to be strong B+ students were turning in work that was polished in ways that didn’t resemble anything they had previously produced, and it was strewn with Oxford commas and em dashes. The writing was skillful. The voice had vanished. He quickly identified it as the specific blankness of text that has been processed rather than written, which has since been dubbed “AI slop” with a high degree of accuracy. Puutio took a different…

People tend to stay in the studio at Swansea College of Art, UWTSD. Students spread fabric samples and pattern drafts across all available surfaces at long worktables and Apple Mac suites in this open-plan, well-lit space. It’s the type of area that conveys institutional intent; it’s not just a place where work is done, but a space that conveys the importance of the work being done. Many of the students who are now enrolled in Surface Pattern and Textiles were not enrolled when they first entered the studio. It was as rivals. Students, trainees, and apprentices have the opportunity to…

For the first time in years, a student stopped in front of a tree on the Montclair State University campus in New Jersey and looked at it for several minutes. She observed the bark’s ridges, the way each leaf maintained its shape, and the snow-like pattern of seeds floating from branches. She then wrote about it. Not for a science project. Not for a class on art. For a course called Creative Thinking, which was taught concurrently by a professor of classics, a mathematician, a physicist, and a philosopher, none of whom completely agreed on what creativity was but all…

In practically every American city, you can find laminated safety procedures, periodic tables, and labeled diagrams all over the walls of a high school biology class. The walls appear completely different when you enter the art room down the hall. There are student paintings, partially completed ceramics, and pinned-up sketches that are in different stages of development. Typically, the distance between the two rooms is around thirty feet. They might as well be located in separate structures. The physical division between the arts wing and the science corridor is intentional. It reveals a deeper aspect of the way American schools…

A researcher presents a picture of a newborn to an algorithm inside a children’s hospital in Washington, D.C., which is close to the U.S. Capitol. In a matter of seconds, the software measured the infant’s eye angle, nose bridge width, and the distance between specific facial landmarks. It also identified a potential chromosomal abnormality that no one in the room had yet to name out loud. The infant is two days old. The program, known as mGene, was created at Children’s National by Marius George Linguraru and his colleagues. As of right now, it has accuracy rates well over 90%…

A seven-year-old types four words into a screen and sees a fully rendered dragon appear in front of her somewhere in an elementary school classroom, the kind with construction paper tacked to the walls and a jar of dried-out markers on the windowsill. The picture is vivid, intricate, and truly amazing. It wasn’t drawn by her. She didn’t start with a rough sketch. She got the scales wrong three times before getting them right, but she didn’t smear paint on her hands. She punched. She got it. She went on. A growing number of child development researchers are spending a…

Shrewsbury is not the type of town that frequently makes headlines across the country. With its cobblestone streets, timber-framed buildings that lean slightly into one another, and the River Severn curving around the entire area as if it had nowhere better to be, it is medieval in the best sense of the word. You could be forgiven for believing that not much has changed in three centuries if you stroll through the alleyways and shuts off the high street on a Tuesday morning. Because of this, it’s simple to pass number 5 Belmont and overlook what’s going on inside. Located…

There is currently a specific type of quiet rebellion taking place in classrooms, one that is much more unsettling to the institution than the kind that results in students being sent to the principal’s office. The curriculum is not being protested by students. They are merely utilizing AI to create something that better suits them in order to get around it. It doesn’t appear dramatic. After a macroeconomics lecture, a Chicago college sophomore opens ChatGPT and asks it to explain the same idea from the perspective of her grandmother’s Guadalajara small business. An AI is asked to suggest books that…

When you stroll through a large engine maintenance facility, where wide-body jet engines are kept on stands under fluorescent lighting by coverall-wearing technicians who are familiar with every bolt by feel, you’re likely to notice the average age of the workers. Those with twenty or thirty years of accumulated knowledge own the hands. Now, the unsettling question facing the aerospace industry is who will take their place when they depart. The figures underlying that discomfort are not conjectural. According to the International Civil Aviation Organization, the aviation sector will require an extra 2.5 million workers worldwide by the early 2040s.…

When a child can’t stop moving, a certain kind of frustration permeates the classroom. A bouncing knee beneath a desk. A tapping pencil. A body twisting in a chair that seems to have been made for someone who has never experienced an uncontrollable thought. Teachers’ natural reaction has been the same for decades: stop fidgeting, sit still, and pay attention. According to recent Stanford research, even though the response made sense, it might have been completely incorrect. According to a study that was published in the Journal of Educational Psychology in late 2025, about 80% of middle school students came…