There’s a moment in Jacob Collier’s TED talk, The Wiggly Wonder of Music, where he takes something we usually explain to death- melody, rhythm, harmony- and insists instead that music was never meant to run in straight lines. He calls it “the wiggle,” and what struck me isn’t the theory; it’s what he does with it: he hands that curviness to a room full of strangers who’ve never studied a chord in their lives, and they find their way into it together, by ear, by trust, by play. The parts of music that resist easy understanding are exactly what pull people into the same note at the same time.
I’ve been sitting with that alongside a much darker story about the same instinct gone the other way. Harlan Ellison’s “I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream” (which just got a new paperback release that includes several commentaries from Harlan himself!) is about a machine humans built past the point of understanding and, rather than follow Ted Lasso’s advice to be curious and not judgemental, embraced dominion and fear, ending up with something that has vast capacity and no way left to connect, only punish.
And then there’s what actually happened to a teacher named Kathryn Merrick, who was pushed out of her job for daring to put that story in front of her students, then spent six years rebuilding a career because a community met something hard to fully grasp with suppression instead of conversation. Same fork in the road, playing out for real. We are extraordinary at making things that outrun our first understanding of them. What we do with that gap, whether we lean toward it or slam the door on it, is most of the story. This week’s ten things are, in one way or another, about people who leaned in.
10 Things — September 24, 2026
Ethan Mollick argues most of the anxiety about AI right now is about future models, even though today’s models are already wildly underused. He had one build a full 3D adaptation of a 1977 text-adventure game and reconstruct Umberto Eco’s entire personal library from YouTube walkthroughs. The real opportunity, he says in his latest, is closing the gap between what AI can already do and what most of us actually ask it for, using four distinctly human advantages: deep knowledge, wide knowledge, taste, and agency.
Michael Horn and the Clayton Christensen Institute are six papers deep into a state policy playbook on why K–12, higher ed, and workforce systems keep grinding against each other instead of meshing — using Christensen’s business-model theory and Chesterton’s Fence to explain why well-meaning reforms keep failing, and what states can actually do differently.
Trevor Aleo goes after both the “kids don’t read anymore” panic and its nostalgic opposite in a new essay, arguing that basic literacy, print culture, and literary tradition are three different things we keep collapsing into one crisis narrative. First in a planned series on what literacy actually looks like now.
MIT’s new report on AI in higher ed got Christine Nowik thinking about grades themselves — specifically, how they work like a detached “academic currency” that AI-assisted cheating is just the latest way to spend. She writes about what happened to her strongest writers once that currency stopped being the point.
Angela Stockman lost a coaching partner to cancer, and it’s part of what’s behind the six postures she now names for herself mid-conversation as an instructional coach — diagnostic, teaching, pacing, framing, connecting, mirroring — built around what the person in front of her actually needs in the moment, not a fixed developmental ladder.
Molly Beasley on the year a divorce had her sleeping on her mom’s living room floor, and what taught her that heart — showing up for kids even while your own life is falling apart — is the actual job, whatever the standards say.
The new PISA reading scores have everyone theorizing, but Kip Glazer thinks the real story isn’t the decline itself — it’s the widening gap between the highest- and lowest-achieving students, and the fixes (less crammed content, more community, more relationship-building) are cheaper and simpler than anyone wants to admit.
We assume creativity needs freedom; John Spencer makes the opposite case in a short piece and podcast — that limits are often what push people past their most obvious first idea.
A short cross-posted statement, written with colleagues at her Peer & AI Review + Reflection project, explaining why a platform built around human peer review still leans on AI — Anna Mills lays out the reasoning in just a few lines.
Not an education piece, but a genuinely moving one: Stephen Wolfram writes at length about his wife, a mathematician, and their 36 years together in a remembrance worth reading slowly, with coffee.
That’s all, folks. Keep making cool stuff; if you get discouraged, just remember that even the best of us need to remember how awesome we are sometimes.