When stuff gets out of hand, we don’t open disciplinary borders. We craft new disciplines: digital humanities, human geography, and yes, computer science (note that “science” glued to the end, to differentiate it from mere “engineering”). In time, these great new territories get their own boundaries, their own defenders. The interdisciplinarian is essentially an exile. Someone who respects no borders enjoys no citizenship.

All you have to do is look at a tree—any tree will do—to see how badly our disciplines serve us. Evolutionary theory, botany, geography, physics, hydrology, countless poems, paintings, essays, and stories—all trying to make sense of the tree. We need them all, the whole fragile, interdependent ecosystem. No one has got it right yet.

But as Elly Fishman reports in this uplifting piece, Mahbuba has made incredible progress in Chicago, thanks to her school’s deaf education program. With the help of a few people—notably her teacher and a refugee youth program manager—in just a few months Mahbuba has learned to sign simple sentences.

Hoffman spent the first few days sitting with Mahbuba on the floor of her classroom and playing games — mostly Jenga. She showed her toy houses where Mahbuba could play with plastic dolls and animals.

“I was really just trying to help her feel safe,” Hoffman recalls. “I could feel her fear.”

Over time, the teacher started to introduce numbers and colors. They slowly worked their way through the alphabet, both written and in sign. She used cards to begin to teach Mahbuba everyday objects, food and words to describe her day at school.

But before any of that, Hoffman introduced Mahbuba to a concept both simpler and far more profound: her own name.

But most everyone agreed that the library drama started with a single July 2021 Facebook post, in which a county commissioner expressed disapproval of the gay pride month display the library had put up. Soon a dozen or so people signed up to speak at the Board of Commissioners meeting, in a radical departure where the five elected commissioners usually skipped the public comment sessions because of lack of interest. This time comments lasted for more than an hour. “Parents should be informed of the queer agenda the library is implementing,” said one attendee. Another railed against the idea of a pride display in the library. “If we’re not encouraging heterosexuality among teenagers for a month in the public library,” he said, “we definitely should not be doing that with sexual identities that are known to cause things like suicide and HIV.” A stern-looking woman thundered against the young adult room. “I know about their dark basement for the teens, and enough is enough,” she said. Later that month, a local pastor posted on Facebook that he had discovered that the magician who was scheduled to perform at the library was transgender. The magician canceled her show after reportedly receiving threats.

In 1999, the government convened a group of experts in medicine and education to try and fix the problem. Jen-Yee Wu, who worked at the Ministry of Education and had done his doctoral thesis on eyesight protection, was asked to write a set of guidelines for schools to address nearsightedness. Later that year, he published a thin green book full of advice for teachers. It paid careful attention to desk height (to keep texts the right distance from the eyes) and room lighting, and advocated eye relaxation exercises, including a guided massage of points around the eyes and face. The book also advised giving children more space in their notebooks to pen the intricate characters that make up written Mandarin. And it formalized the 30/10 rule: a 10-minute break to stare into the distance after every half hour of reading or looking at a screen.

None of it worked. Nearsightedness rates continued to climb because, as it turned out, Taiwan, and the world, had been thinking about how to address myopia completely wrong.

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Anne P. Beatty | Longreads | June 2023 | 4,667 words (17 minutes)

The street divides us, one group of protesters on one sidewalk, one on the other. Two sets of signs: Masks are child abuse, Masks keep our children safe. No CRT in our schools, Teach our children the truth! You work for us, We support our teachers. A man with a clipboard guards the plate-glass double doors of the building. He knows our numbers and tells us when we’re allowed inside to speak. 

I’m looking at all these signs as I think about what I’ll say, ideas I’ve typed up and folded inside my back pocket. Down the street, I can see the corner of Eugene and Florence where, as an elementary school student, I waited for my bus.

Here in Greensboro, North Carolina, where I grew up, people have been gathering monthly for protests outside school board meetings. Here, as elsewhere, people disagree about banning books, teaching critical race theory, and arming teachers. This is a city where first a high school, then the district, upheld a teacher’s decision to assign Jesmyn Ward’s novel Salvage the Bones after parents challenged it, but this is also a city where, a few months later, a former Marine intentionally drove his car into a woman escorting patients inside our county’s sole abortion clinic. This is a Southern city, where some things bloom, and others are buried. 

Because I want my three kids to know sooner than I did what happens and has happened in our town, I usually make them come to the protests organized by a local anti-racism alliance to which I belong. Sometimes I bribe them: Dum-Dums in their coat pockets, Razzmatazz smoothies from the Juice Shop. Sometimes they surprise me and join in all the chants, especially my eighth grader, the oldest, who yells, Power to the people! and What do we want? The truth. When do we want it? Now! But they aren’t here with me tonight.

Across the street, the other group of protesters have a trifold pasted with the faces of smiling children killed at Sandy Hook, because they believe that if there were more police officers in the school that day, or teachers with guns, those children would still be alive. They are a local chapter of a national movement called Take Back Our Schools, a name that suggests a possessive nostalgia for a mythical past, a territory to defend against invaders. Once I looked up the website for their local school board candidate and found her blog post titled, “Seriously, Who Are These People and How Did They Get in Our Schools?” I’m a high school English teacher, so it was hard not to take this personally.

To speak to the school board, you must email your name and address to the clerk before the meeting, and she will reply to confirm your place in the speaking order. I am number 28. 

One year, after reading George Orwell’s essay “Politics and the English Language,” in which he skewers the intentional obfuscation of political rhetoric, my class discussed the title of a bill proposed by our state legislature that spring. The bill, called the Youth Health Protection Act, targeted trans kids and would require that teachers disclose anything students say about their gender identity to the student’s parents. One of my students snorted, “They should call it the ‘Teachers Are Narcs’ Law.” The bill didn’t pass, but this year a similar bill is before the legislature, and it also includes provisions about what teachers can teach with regard to LGBTQ issues. Its goal is curriculum suppression, a member of the anti-racism alliance pointed out.

Figuring out what to teach and how is getting harder in North Carolina for many reasons. In 2021, our Republican lieutenant governor created a reporting portal called F.A.C.T.S. (Fairness and Accountability in the Classroom for Teachers and Students — a name Orwell would love.) The website offers a space for parents to report, among other things, “examples of students being subjected to indoctrination according to a political agenda or ideology” and “examples of students being exposed to inappropriate content or subject matter in the classroom.” 

When two white mothers mounted a campaign against Ward’s 2011 National Book Award-winning novel, Salvage the Bones, they claimed that it was “trash” and “pornography.” Esch, the narrator, is a pregnant teenager, and there are scenes of coercive sex in the book, which mostly focuses on the love and resilience of Esch’s working-class Black family on the Mississippi Gulf Coast as she and her brothers prepare for Hurricane Katrina. The white mothers questioned whether this family was worthy of reading about, coded language that seemed designed to trigger racial implications without saying the word “race.” My students are good at sniffing out implicit messages. It’s my job to help them get even better.

The Take Back Our Schools folks seized upon this book-banning hearing. Their school board candidate urged supporters to attend and pack the audience. On her blog she wrote wryly, “Apparently, the young 15-year-old finds her strength and her voice through the unfolding tragedies and her sexual trysts.” I want my students to be able to read that sentence and see the lip curl around the word “apparently.” 

At the hearing in the (mostly white) school’s media center, the AP English teacher defended her choice to teach this work of literary merit, claiming, “Silencing this book would be silencing the voice of a young, teenage girl who learned to stick up for herself.” She cautioned, “We cannot pick and choose the parts of our histories and cultures within our comfort zones. Imagine how empty these shelves would be.” I wasn’t there to hear her — I was teaching my own students that morning — but I read her quote and pictured her gesturing to the library walls. It was easy to picture, because five years ago, I taught at that school. I had been the senior AP teacher.

Her students showed up to support her. Some held signs like Banning Books = Hiding the Truth. One Black female student explained to reporters, “Silencing the voice of young African American women won’t silence the experiences they go through.” I admire these students for their political awareness and sense of their own voices as necessary to the conversation. They remind me of my own students a few miles away. 

What is taught has always been policed. Though it’s also true the level of scrutiny depends on your state, your school, and your courses — in other words, it depends on which side of the street you stand on. In my experience, people rarely question what’s being taught in the low-performing school, or in the standard classes at the high-performing school. And sometimes teachers police themselves. When I was hired at that previous school, in that white, mostly affluent community, other teachers described the uproar a few years prior when parents had challenged Mark Mathabane’s Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa, allegedly over a passage describing sexual assault. Teachers remembered news vans stationed outside the school, meetings with district officials and administrators, harassment from parents. “Don’t teach it,” they warned, even though the book’s standing in the curriculum had been upheld. Hundreds of copies lined the shelves of the bookroom, hidden, mute. Nothing is more silent than an unread book.

As with my children, I want my students to know what happened here, in our city, our country, our world. I have taught Invisible Man and Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian and Fences, all of which have been challenged or banned somewhere. Still, some things I have never taught, even though I have lamented their conspicuous absence in my own education, like the Greensboro Massacre of 1979. I’m an English teacher, not a history teacher, I rationalized. It was easy to stay silent, to think that’s not my job.

The massacre began on November 3 as another protest, with people chanting and singing in the streets two miles from where I grew up. Video footage shows posters aloft, children chanting. The political rally had been planned by a multiracial coalition, many of whom were organizing textile workers here, and most of whom were Communist Workers Party members. It was billed as a “Death to the Klan” march — and the Ku Klux Klan and American Nazis showed up. In photographs you can see the Klan members unloading shotguns and rifles from the trunk of a finned Ford Fairlane. The word that comes to mind is brazen: efficient but unhurried. In minutes the Klan members and Nazis had killed four people and wounded 11 others. A fifth victim died the next day. 

The Klan members arrived in a slow-cruising caravan as the march was about to start. The caravan included an informant who had told the police department of the plans, yet no police were present when the shooting began. Although a few protesters had guns and fired back, no Klan members were killed. Police arrived shortly after, arresting 12 Klansmen and Nazis in a van, but not apprehending any of the other vehicles. Instead, they arrested protesters. 

In the two criminal trials, all Klan members were acquitted by all-white juries. In the one civil trial, the defendants — the Klan members along with the Greensboro Police Department — were found guilty of a wrongful death charge, but only in the case of the one victim who was not a member of the Communist Workers Party. In 2004, before I’d moved back home, the city began holding Truth and Reconciliation hearings modeled on those of South Africa. Survivors, victims’ widows, community members, and police officers spoke about their understanding of what had happened that day to try to move forward with an increased awareness of why the tragedy had unfolded. Desmond Tutu, the Archbishop of Cape Town, came. These hearings were the first of their kind to be held in this country. People had a sense that we were facing our history in a new way. 

It might be easier to recall that sense of reckoning — optimism, even — during the hearings if the public schools had followed the commission’s eventual recommendation, in 2006, to develop curriculum to teach local students about the massacre. Now, 17 years later, teaching and raising my kids here, I know that students still only learn about the massacre in pockets, from individuals who feel compelled to teach it. Most students still graduate from this district of 70,000 kids knowing nothing about what happened here that day — just as I did.

In eighth-grade social studies — state and local history — I was handed a blank map and told to identify all hundred counties in the state. We practiced so much before the test that I can still see the photocopied map of elongated North Carolina, the outlines growing fuzzier with each duplicate away from the original. I’m sure I aced the test, though I’d be hard-pressed now to name more than 20 counties. I never learned about the massacre, or the bloody white supremacist coup in Wilmington in 1898. 

Such omissions from the history curriculum inspire our protest signs. Our group came up with slogans like Teach our children the truth and Racism divides and True history unites. Scrutinizing these placards in our front yard, though, my husband Adam points out that this language is so ambiguous, so dependent upon one’s assumptions about what “truth” or “teach” means, that either side could claim them. Orwell would agree.

Adam’s observation is corroborated the following month when a friend tells me he wasn’t sure, driving up to the protest, whether to stand with us or against us based on our signs. It was only when he saw we were masked and multiracial that he knew he wanted to be on our side of the street.

Outside the December school board meeting, a rangy white man from the other side crosses the street, past our row of protesters, to the door of the school building. In jeans and boots, with the look of a past-his-prime country singer, he demands that the man with the clipboard let him inside. The man calmly says, “Your name isn’t on the list.” 

“All I know,” yells Angry Man, “is that Tom told me to come down tonight and speak, and I’m here!”

“Sir, you have to sign up to speak, and your name isn’t on the list.”

Angry Man moves in, menacing, and two police officers in the lobby step through the doors to intervene. He screams at them; they are calm but insistent; he eventually goes back across the street, still screaming, to stand beside the sign advocating for a stronger police presence in schools. 

I can’t think of any other time I’ve been so close to such a volatile adult in public. It’s his anger, even more than the cold, that I’m glad has been omitted from my kids’ experience of the protests. Yet I know it is this protective urge that shields our children from the blunt facts of the world.

A woman across the street is shouting into her bullhorn, ostensibly to school board members, “You work for us!” A half-hour later, I see her huddled with another woman around Angry Man’s cell phone, on which he appears to be, if I’m eavesdropping correctly, displaying images of a man’s face he had punched in a bar in some chivalrous act on behalf of a girl. I’m not sure what this bragging — “see those bruises?” — has to do with the Board of Education or the history curriculum or our children or why we’re all standing out in the cold, watching our breath bloom outside our lungs. But I understand that even on these sidewalks we are pushing up against the serrated edge of violence.

At home after one of the protests, my eighth grader and I read some of the tenets for Take Back Our Schools online: 

Teaching students or training educators that they are oppressors or oppressed is wrong. 

You cannot judge a child by their parents [sic] sins and you cannot hold today’s society responsible for the ancestor’s [sic] past. 

Politics DO NOT have a place in our schools. We LOVE America and believe our children should too. 

To read this last proclamation is to be reminded of a line from the transcripts of the Truth and Reconciliation proceedings for the Greensboro Massacre. At one hearing, the KKK’s Grand Wizard in 1979, Virgil Griffin, who had been in the caravan, surprised people by agreeing to come talk about his memories. He claimed the Klan didn’t come to the march looking for violence, but when the protesters began beating on their cars, they got out and unloaded their guns. The Klan came, he said, “to fly the flags and let ’em know we was proud of America.” 

It seems impossible to disentangle this grim patriotism from the policing of schools and teachers, from the desire to dictate what people learn or believe about this country. I care about this problem as a teacher, as a mother, as a citizen. And yet I always have a moment when I don’t want to go to the protests. The kids are on the couch or playing outside with friends, dinner isn’t sorted, an annoying work email has just popped up on my phone that I don’t want to read, much less answer. What are we doing, anyway? Holding a sign, stamping our feet in the cold, waving at the cars that honk in support. It’s not enough, which makes it easy to think it means nothing. It’s harder to believe it might mean something. 

In her speech “The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action,” Audre Lorde warns of the danger of being “mute as bottles.” She tells us, “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” I think a lot about the silences I have been handed, and the silences I hand off, as a parent or teacher. Who or what were these silences meant to protect? 

Most months, I find myself hollering at the kids to find their shoes. I will get the lollipops and the smoothies and keep yanking the signs out of the yard on the second Tuesday of the month, even though every time I replant them, they get more crooked, even though every time I shove the coat-hanger metal back into those maddening holes, each jab threatens to puncture the words “true history.” It’s good to show up, I tell my kids. We get in the car and go.

How do we learn the true history of where we come from, if not in school or at home? I was on the other side of the world when I learned of the Greensboro Massacre. Adam and I, while living in Asia for several years, had flown to Vietnam from Thailand to travel with Adam’s dad, whom I had never met before. Over dinner one night, my future father-in-law said, “So, you’re from Greensboro. What do you know about the Greensboro Massacre?”

His question hung in the air, gelatinous, as I fumbled with my chopsticks. I was 24. I’d never heard of it. He explained what had happened and why he knew about it. One of the victims, Jim Waller, had been a friend who had invited Adam’s parents to the protest. They were living in West Virginia at the time, raising three little boys, and decided not to attend the rally. 

Because the story was told as part of his parents’ history, Adam had already known about the Greensboro Massacre, even though he grew up in Seattle, even though his parents never visited Greensboro before our wedding. The massacre took place a few miles from my house, yet the story was not told as part of my family’s history, or mentioned in my public schools, from kindergarten to university. It was not even publicly memorialized until a historical marker was erected on a street corner in 2015. Doubtless some kids from Greensboro grew up knowing about it, but not me.

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On that trip, too, I finally learned more about the Vietnam War, seeing as my AP U.S. History course didn’t go past WWII. Flying into the country, I knew so little. I knew my dad had been in the war. I knew he was drafted and didn’t want to go. I knew he was in the Judge Advocate General’s Corps because he had already graduated from law school. I knew he went to Bangkok on R&R and bought my grandmother two rings, a star sapphire and a fire opal, both of which I inherited. Even though the rings were from Thailand, they made me think of Vietnam, along with my father’s Army fatigues that I’d appropriated for a jacket in high school. My best friend did the same with her dad’s jacket. We walked the halls with our last names stitched over our hearts. In class, we had memorized something called the Gulf of Tonkin but I could no longer tell you what that was. Like most kids of the ’80s, from movies as much as school, I had a vague sense that the Vietnam War had been a tragic mishap, a blot of shame. 

My vague sense of the war became an acute understanding as we traveled up the country to Hội An and Da Nang. We climbed through the Củ Chi tunnels the Viet Cong had used to move throughout the country. We ate pho on the sidewalk, perched on plastic squat stools, and watched uniformed Vietnamese kids stream past us when school let out. Their backpacks were adorned with Cinderella and Belle and Ariel, a blur of communist Disneyfication. As we toured the country by day and read history by night, in bootleg copies of books we bought at street markets, I kept wondering why I had never known anything more about the war than the bits dribbled down to me by pop culture and family history. The experience of being elsewhere magnified my understanding of here — my home. It was disorienting, like looking at myself from across the street.

This dislocation, a sense of the world as entirely different than I’d previously thought, crystallized at the Vietnam Military History Museum in Hanoi, where I saw the war I’d always referred to as the Vietnam War listed on every plaque as the American War. Twenty years later I will remember this — that who you are and where you’re from dictates what you call something — when I see the campaign posters for the local conservative school board candidate that read Education, not indoctrination. I agree with the slogan, though I know, from reading the woman’s blog, that we don’t mean the same thing. 

Years after my trip, while teaching The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien’s collection of short stories about the Vietnam War, I would tell my 10th graders about the American War, which doesn’t exist in America, and the Vietnam War, which doesn’t exist in Vietnam. They would be as surprised as I’d been to learn this, and then, a moment later, as bewildered by their own surprise. It’s hard to create the dizzying sense of history’s interconnectedness for students sitting at a desk, staring out the smudged window in Greensboro, even for teachers who want to.

Only once I start going to the protests do I decide I must teach the Greensboro Massacre. I’m 44, and not a history teacher, but whether the district tells me to or not, I will work it into my course on rhetoric. I’m lucky to have a trusting principal and supportive parents, both of which give me a kind of freedom not all teachers here have. Still, it feels risky. When I ask my 52 10th graders how many have heard of the massacre, only three raise their hands. I give my students photographs, newspaper articles, and essays about the event, and ask them to write an argument answering the question adults should be wrestling with: Should the Greensboro Massacre be taught in local schools, and if so, how? 

In their essays, my students all argue that the massacre should be taught. Their opinions vary about when and how and to whom, but none of them advocate for silence. Many draw links between what happened here in 1979 and what happened in Charlottesville in 2017, when a white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of protesters, or what happened on January 6, 2021, when insurrectionists stormed the U.S. Capitol — similarly brazen, confident in their knowledge of who will be punished in this country and who won’t. My students see the patterns: that what happens here happens elsewhere, and what happens elsewhere also happens here.

Good teachers teach students how to find the pattern, and how to find the deviance: how to see that different things are actually the same thing, or, sometimes, that what look like the same things are in fact different. I want my students to know what I hope other people are also teaching my children: that the world is manifold, and that their place in this world is fraught and implicated and full of potential power.

Although the scope and impact of the Greensboro Massacre pales compared to that of the Vietnam War, the two are now forever linked in my mind, in part for reasons that Griffin, the KKK’s Grand Wizard, also saw: What happened here in 1979 was directly connected to the larger political tensions of the time. 

There’s this that he said, in one of his several tirades about communism during the hearings: “And I think every time a Senator or a Congressman walks by the Vietnam Wall, they oughta hang their damn heads in shame for allowing the Communist Party to be in this country. Our boys went over there fightin’ Communism, came back here and got off the planes, and them that they call the CWP was out there spittin’ on ’em, callin’ ’em babykillers, cursin’ ’em. If the city and Congress’d been worth a damn, they would told them soldiers turn your guns on them, we whooped Communists over there, we’ll whoop it in the United States and clean it up here.”

Or there’s the fact that on the funeral march route seven days after the massacre, an enormous sign posted to the back of a parked pickup truck read: Greensboro People Don’t Want You Communist Bastards In Our Town.

But mostly I suspect these events are linked for me because I learned about the Greensboro Massacre in Vietnam, where I also learned, finally, about the Vietnam — the American — War, and both revelations kindled the same feeling of betrayal over not knowing what I should’ve known about the place I call home. 

Number 26 is called. Then number 27. I’m nervous. I’ve never done anything like this before. I am informed I have three minutes to speak. I begin, “I come to you tonight with this message: Our students are stronger and more resilient than we might think. We must teach our children the whole truth about our country’s history of racial injustice. They are strong enough to handle this truth. In fact, they’re hungry for it. And when students realize they have not learned the full truth, they feel betrayed.”

I explain my own sense of betrayal when I learned about historical events only as an adult, and I ask the school board members to trust teachers to facilitate these conversations, to teach students how to think, not what to think. When I walk outside, Angry Man is gone. The woman with the bullhorn is gone. Most protesters on both sides are gone. Leaving, I drive past that corner where I used to wait for the school bus on distant mornings, neighborhood kids jeering, a stick skittering across the road into the gutter. 

Later that night, I will replay in my head Angry Man’s demands to be allowed inside, his boasts about the bruises he inflicted. The more I scroll through the law-and-order comments that Take Back Our Schools sympathizers post under viral Facebook videos of high school fights, and the more I recall the screech of the bullhorn — the woman’s long pink nails clacking against its plastic handle with a magnified roughness — the more I see how that man’s violence and aggression fits a pattern. He was angry way before he got here. This night is just another beat in this country’s long exhalation of anger and fear. 

At the end of her speech, Lorde says, “We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired. For we have been socialized to respect fear more than our own needs for language and definition, and while we wait in silence for that final luxury of fearlessness, the weight of that silence will choke us. … And there are so many silences to be broken.”

Eventually, I’ll go back to speak to the school board again. I’ll be less nervous. The Take Back Our Schools candidate will lose her race, and then the county’s local chapter will disband. This will feel like a victory. But months later, state legislators will propose a bill called Equality in Education to regulate what teachers can and cannot say about race and the American government. The threat of silence remains.

Meanwhile, every weekday morning, the buses will come, and students all over this city will herd onto them and unload into classrooms, where some days they will be handed a blank map and some days they will be mute as bottles. But other days they will learn how to become the wind whistling over the lips of bottles. A teacher demonstrates how a wet mouth over a glass O can make it sing, and then listens as her students carry the sound.

Anne P. Beatty writes and teaches in Greensboro, North Carolina. More of her work can be found at www.annepbeatty.com.

Editor: Cheri Lucas Rowlands
Copy-editor: Carolyn Wells

The incredible story of how the ship was lost and found can finally be told in full. It’s a tale of tragedy, determination, and a powerful friendship that brought this all to light: that of DWP cofounders Ken Stewart, a retired Black copy-machine repairman from Nashville, and Brenda Lanzendorf, a white flight attendant turned marine archaeologist at Biscayne National Park in the Florida Keys, the area where the Guerrero went down. With an increasingly divided country and a state that recently banned critical race theory, sharing its history is more urgent than ever, Stewart says. “Do we embrace the legacy of the Guerrero?” he says, “or do we run away from it?”

Some students probably are using AI at 100 percent: to complete their work absent any effort of their own. But many use ChatGPT and other tools to generate ideas, help them when they’re stuck, rephrase tricky paragraphs, or check their grammar.

Where one behavior turns into another isn’t always clear. Matthew Boedy, an English professor at the University of North Georgia, told me about one student so disengaged, he sometimes attended class in his pajamas. When that student submitted an uncharacteristically adept essay this spring, Boedy figured a chatbot was involved, and OpenAI’s verification tool confirmed as much. The student admitted that he hadn’t known how to begin, so he asked ChatGPT to write an introduction, and then to recommend sources. Absent a firm policy on AI cheating to lean on, Boedy talked through the material with the student in person and graded him based on that conversation.

A computer-science student at Washington University in St. Louis, where I teach, saw some irony in the sudden shift from giving fully open-book assignments earlier in the pandemic to this year’s attitude of “you can use anything except AI.” (I’m withholding the names of students so that they can be frank about their use of AI tools.) This student, who also works as a teaching assistant, knows firsthand that computers can help solve nearly every technical exercise that is assigned in CS courses, and some conceptual ones too. But taking advantage of the technology “feels less morally bankrupt,” he said, “than paying for Chegg or something.” A student who engages with a chatbot is doing some kind of work for themselves—and learning how to live in the future.

Kim and Felix each wore a button with Lexi’s image on it. [Ted] Cruz sat casually, with one of his trademark cowboy boots crossed over his knee. A staffer handed him a Diet Dr Pepper.

Felix pulled out his cellphone and showed Cruz a photo of Lexi in her casket. “That’s our daughter who was murdered at Robb Elementary.” Kim then said she and Felix hoped they could count on the senator’s support for an assault weapons ban. She was about to say more, but Cruz jumped in and told Kim and Felix about his own plan to stop school shootings: he wanted to put more law enforcement officers and more mental health services on school campuses. 

A staffer gently interrupted the senator to say he had another appointment. The meeting had lasted less than five minutes, and Kim was not happy. As Cruz stood up to leave, Kim also rose, looked him in the eye, and snapped “You have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m going to do everything I can to make sure you are not reelected.” Before Cruz had a chance to say anything else, Kim walked out of the office, followed by Felix. A spokesman for the senator later said the senator “saw firsthand” the Rubios’ “pain and grief.” But Cruz wasn’t changing his position on guns. In fact, the spokesman said, right after his meeting with the Rubios, Cruz went to the Senate floor “to fight for his school safety legislation.” 

Kim was so dismayed by the meeting with Cruz that she began wearing a T-shirt—yellow for Lexi—with the phrase “You f@#ked with the wrong mom” on the back. She had a tattoo artist ink one of Lexi’s drawings of her and Lexi on her upper left arm, and she rolled up her sleeves so that anyone could see it. “The inaction of our political leaders is the reason my daughter is no longer here,” she told me. “And I am never going to let them forget that.”

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A kindergarten class dispersed by war. A taut investigation into two men’s disappearance. A portrait of the legendary Harry Belafonte. Memories of a traditional cooking lesson. And everything that goes into the restaurant of the moment. These are our favorite reads of the week, chosen from all of our editors’ picks.

1. How the War in Ukraine Has Forever Changed the Children in One Kindergarten Class

Elissa Nadworny, Claire Harbage | NPR | April 12, 2023 | 4,700 words

This piece takes war down to the micro level, the story of a conflict told not through politics or death tolls but through the fate of one class of kindergarten children. It makes for a blisteringly relatable read. Elissa Nadworny and Claire Harbage have carried out meticulous reporting, meeting several children and their families from a classroom in Kharkiv with “bright yellow and green walls and long, gauzy curtains.” (Such attentive details are sprinkled throughout.) Some children remain in Ukraine, but more than half have fled around the world, separated by thousands of miles. Some are struggling with new languages. Some can’t sleep. Some are still scared. They all miss each other. Beautiful photographs and snippets from their group chats help to bring their new realities to life. A small war story but a powerful one: These few children represent so many. —CW

2. The Deputy and the Disappeared

Thomas Lake | CNN | April 21, 2023 | 9,276 words

What happened to Felipe Santos and Terrance Williams, two men who went missing three months apart in Immokalee, an agricultural town near Naples, Florida? As you discover in this gripping, well-researched investigation by Thomas Lake, the evidence points to Steven Calkins, the Collier County deputy suspected to be the last person to see both men. Lake and the CNN reporting team bring inconsistencies and telling details to light, and build minute-to-minute timelines of the days these men disappeared, using interview transcripts, dispatch logs, phone records, and other documents. Calkins declined interview requests, but comments from people around him, including former colleagues, reveal suspicion and a loss of trust in the former officer. Still, the cases remain unsolved, and you wonder: Where is the justice for these men, for their families, for this small town? —CLR

3. Voice and Hammer

Jeff Sharlet | VQR | October 2013 | 8,251 words

Like Harry Belafonte himself, there is much to love about Jeff Sharlet’s profile of the legendary singer, actor, and activist who died this week at the age of 96. The writing is vivid, the quotes astonishing, every anecdote riveting. Like the one where Belafonte recruits Sidney Poitier to go with him to hand-deliver $50,000 to civil rights organizers in Mississippi, amid a storm of violence and threats of it. (“They might think twice about killing two big n****rs,” Belafonte tells Poitier.) A truck presumably driven by Klansmen meets them at the Greenwood airstrip and follows them into town, ramming the back of the car that’s carrying them. When Belafonte arrives at a dance hall where supporters are waiting, he sings a version of his most famous tune, “Banana Boat (Day-o),” and defiantly dumps a bag full of dollars onto a table. What a story — to put it lightly, holy crap. But the moment that got me most in this gorgeous piece is when Sharlet sits in an archive, headphones on his ears, watching a tape of “Tonight with Belafonte,” an iconic 1959 TV revue. “I felt like I was watching a different past, one in which the revolution had been televised,” Sharlet writes. “Goddamn. As if that was what TV was for. A signal. This, I thought, this.” I have the same feeling about Belafonte’s existence. It showed what living could be for. This, I’m still thinking. This. —SD

4. Remembering the Egyptian Childhood I Never Had Through Its Culinary Traditions

Jasmin Attia | Literary Hub | March 27, 2023 | 2,014 words

Jasmin Attia’s beautiful Lit Hub essay puts you, the reader, in the kitchen as she and her mother make waraa eynab (stuffed grape leaves). This is a story that captures all your senses: You can smell the sumac, feel the smooth grape leaves, and hear the perfect traditional soup bubbling gently on the stove, a meal that binds her Egyptian heritage with her birth in America. One of the most difficult jobs a writer must do is convey lived experience so that those who lack it can begin to understand. “But my hands must still learn what the right amount of meat feels like between my fingers. There is no recipe in my family, nothing written down, no measurements. Measurements are for the inept. This is my mother’s mantra. We, the proud women of the family, we feel and smell and taste and touch and create. We know when it is good because we know when it is good,” she writes. This small but wonderful taste of Attia’s writing left me hungry for a second helping. —KS

5. Inside Superiority Burger: The Buzziest Restaurant in America

Brett Martin | GQ | April 26, 2023 | 3,834 words

Most writing about food focuses on the output. Some of it focuses on the people. A bit of it focuses on technique. But not enough of it teases out the synesthesia of a night in a restaurant: the adrenaline, the prep, the community, the taste. The vibe of eating, as much as I hate to use that word. Brett Martin’s piece shrugs off those limitations on its way to being the most visceral look inside a restaurant since The Bear. Nominally a profile of punk-drummer-turned-chef Brooks Headley and his vegetarian burger joint, it manages to capture the twin high-wire acts of executing and eating inside New York City’s restaurant of the moment. Martin veers from evocative tasting notes (“[s]omething about the feathery sheets of tofu skin, layered on a squishy hero roll with broccoli rabe and a spiced chickpea paste that evokes Vietnamese pate, flips the same feral switch in my chest as does eating, say, andouillette, the most offaly of French sausages”) to capturing Headley at full speed on a packed Thursday night (“[o]ften, he’ll bustle in one direction, only to pull up short as though he’s forgotten what he was doing, and then run off in another”) to some shrewd commentary on the punk ethos and food gentrification. It feels, in the very best way, like you’re a drone being piloted through Superiority Burger during a dinner rush. Whether it makes you hungry is beside the point; it’s a feast of its own. —PR

Audience Award

It’s time for the piece our readers loved most this week — and the oversized trophy goes to:

Kids have been trying to play video games on school computers for as long as computers have cropped up in schools, but decades ago, they jumped through those hoops in a dedicated computer lab, or secretly downloaded homemade games to their TI-83 calculators while pretending to crunch equations. But these days, computers are deeply intertwined into education, and many school age children have regular access to a computer, usually a Chromebook or iPad, as early as 1st grade, when kids are only six or seven years old.

What exists now is an escalating game of whack-a-mole between students, teachers, and IT departments, as kids hopeful to do anything but school work try to find a way to play games.