Books & Ideas · Week of August 24, 2026
As machines claim cognition and governance, human minds and institutions defend their ground
- The Elimination of Thinking: Cross-Disciplinary Evidence That AI Tools Degrade CognitionTen minutes. That is all it took.
- Rule by Machine: Lepore, Arendt, and AI Governance as a Threat to Democratic LegitimacyThere is a contradiction sitting inside the praise for Jill Lepore's new book, and it is worth naming before anyone gets swept up in the elegy.
- Post-Literate but Still Reading: America's Comprehension Collapse as a Qualitative CrisisTwo facts arrived in my inbox this month that cannot both be true — or rather, cannot both mean what they seem to mean.
- AI Can Engineer But Cannot Think: The Princeton Test of Recursive Self-ImprovementSix days. Three thousand dollars in API credits. A GPU budget, virtual computers, and open access to the web. Given all of that, the frontier model ran its experiments on tiny synthetic datasets that couldn't possibly an…
- Odysseus with PTSD: Nolan's Homer and What We Now Want From Epic HeroesWithin weeks of Nolan's Odyssey reaching screens, a strange thing happened that had nothing to do with the film's merits.
Threads we are following
- Can persistence-eroding friction ever be engineered back into an AI tool that students freely choose?
- Whether pending AI-governance legislation will mandate discrete, authored, contestable decision acts or settle for transparency gestures
- Whether any school or university will pilot comprehension as an explicit, testable curriculum rather than an assumed prerequisite
- Whether the Princeton team's rerun with Anthropic's most advanced model moves the judgment ceiling at all.
- Whether Nolan's Athena-as-victim device shifts how future adaptations handle perpetrator guilt versus trauma
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