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Psychologist and writer. Author of the memoir Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class, and of a newsletter on human nature, psychology, social class and what he calls luxury beliefs.

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  By early childhood, girls already perceive boys as academically inferior to themselves, while teachers rate girls as academically superior even when test scores show the opposite.

  Their words

  By four years of age, girls tend to think that boys are academically inferior to them. Teachers often see their female students as academically superior, even when aptitude tests show the opposite pattern for their classes.

  Dark Forest, Young Men, Blood Boyrobkhenderson.com

Writer and podcaster; co-author of Abundance with Ezra Klein, a staff writer at The Atlantic from 2008 to 2025, and host of the Plain English podcast.

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  AI is removing human involvement from entry-level hiring by pitting AI-written job applications against AI-written screening filters.

  LLMs

  Their words

  Artificial intelligence has unleashed a torrent of cheating on campus and created chaos in the job application process, as both students and employers use large language models: the former, to write hundreds of AI-assisted applications; the latter, to screen those AI-written applications with AI-written filters, thus removing from the process of finding a first job those procedural frictions sometimes known as "people."

  derekthompson.org

Writer and teacher on productivity and personal knowledge management. Author of Building a Second Brain and founder of Forte Labs, which runs the course of the same name.

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  Educational methods should be validated by measurable research, not by how satisfying they feel to students and teachers.

  Their words

  The deeper lesson is that education has to be research-based and proven to work measurably, not just based on positive emotions or customer satisfaction.

  fortelabs.com

Founder of Trilogy Software and principal of Alpha School, the private school network built around two hours a day of AI-delivered mastery learning.

From one piece How to Accelerate Learning & Improve Education | Joe Liemandt 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  A school should be judged on how fast its students are learning, not on how much they already know when measured.

  Their words

  And you should measure a school based on the rate of learning and the slope of the line, the growth rate, not its achievement.

  youtube.com

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  Homeschooling outcomes are bimodal: families who care about academics beat conventional school outright, and families who reject standards leave their children knowing very little.

  Their words

  The level of academics that those students know is very low because the parents have basically abandoned that and said, "I care all about the life skills." For parents who really care about academics, those kids crush it.

  youtube.com

Programmer and teacher; writes on software, learning and the web, and makes the Coding Blocks video course.

• Lovedrcmnd.app

  The Annotated Turing: A Guided Tour Through Alan Turing's Historic Paper on Computability and the Turing Machine

  Their words

  I guess you can’t go wrong with Charles Petzold. This book is excellent and highly recommended to anyone interested in computing. Must read for computer science students and software developers.

  rakhim.org

Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford, co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.

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  Denying students AI because you fear they will cheat is its own harm, as bad as letting the tool take their motivation away.

  Their words

  The other kind of danger is in the name of agency and and uh and motivation the tools are denied to our students because we're worried you cheat or worry you only got your answer from Chad GBT. That is very bad as well

  youtube.com

Makes NeetCode, the structured practice list and video walkthroughs people use to prepare for coding interviews; a former Google engineer.

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  Students who learn everything through an LLM are not learning, they are cheating, and the skill loss is already showing up in experienced programmers too.

  LLMs

  Their words

  I think a lot of people, especially students, are unfortunately learning everything through LLMs. So a lot of that isn't really learning, they're just kind of cheating and they're just doing everything like that. And then they lose a lot of their skills

  Tech interviews with NeetCodeyoutube.com

Organizational psychologist and professor at the Wharton School. Author of Give and Take, Originals, Think Again and Hidden Potential, host of the Re:Thinking podcast, and writer of the GRANTED newsletter.

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  AI-assisted writing creates an illusion of greater creativity while actually reducing the originality of the ideas expressed.

  Their words

  although students' personal statements seem more creative because they use more varied words, they actually feature less original ideas. AI writing produces an illusion of creativity.

  The Must-Read Articles of the Monthadamgrant.substack.com

Non-fiction writer, podcaster and occasional TV host. Author of thirteen books including The Ghost Map, Where Good Ideas Come From and Extra Life, host of the PBS series How We Got To Now, and author of the Adjacent Possible newsletter on innovation.

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  A well-designed AI-integrated approach to schoolwork can produce better learning outcomes than pre-AI research and writing methods.

  Their words

  I truly believe that following this kind of approach to AI in the classroom would, in the aggregate, produce better learning outcomes than the research and writing workflows available to students pre-AI.

  Cognitive Uploadingadjacentpossible.substack.com

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

From one piece Why I'm Skeptical About Efforts to Revolutionize Schooling 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Gamified learning is medicine wrapped in candy, and in practice children eat the candy and throw the medicine away.

  Their words

  Gamified learning is a bit like wrapping medicine in candy. Yes, it may help some students swallow some instruction they otherwise find bitter, but in practice it’s easy to pull off the candy, consume it, and throw the medicine away.

  scotthyoung.com

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  General problem-solving ability is neither learned nor taught; what transfers has to be taught explicitly rather than discovered through projects.

  Their words

  General problem solving abilities are neither learned nor taught. While some problem-solving methods have broader applicability than others (such as the scientific process of hypothesis testing), students learn these methods better when they’re explicitly taught rather than simply giving students projects and hoping they’ll reinvent them on their own.

  scotthyoung.com

Researcher on distributed systems and local-first software at the University of Cambridge; wrote Designing Data-Intensive Applications.

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  The essay a student hands in is not the point of education; the thought process that produced it is the entire desired outcome.

  Their words

  We don't ask the students to write essays because we love reading their amazing essays. We ask them to write essays because they we want them to go through a thought process, which helps them learn something.

  youtube.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

From one piece When People Say They Want to Send Their Kid to a Good School, They Usually Mean Schools Without "Bad Kids" 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  The best teachers, unlimited resources and every evidence-based intervention still fail on a student who does not want to learn.

  Their words

  You can staff a school with the best teachers on earth, give them unlimited resources, and wrap the place in every evidence-based intervention imaginable, and it still won’t work if students are resistant, disengaged, or actively hostile to the enterprise.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

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  Putting the children most likely to succeed into one school is segregation, not educational excellence.

  Their words

  Simply creating artificial separation between different students is not a strategy for “educational excellence.” It’s just segregation.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Opening school to everybody necessarily made average measured performance look worse, because the students who used to be excluded are now in the data.

  Their words

  But if you know anything about my obsession with selection bias, you can predict the outcome: when you expand access from a population that excludes more students to one that excludes fewer, you’re very likely to see declining performance.

  freddiedeboer.substack.com

American social psychologist at NYU Stern School of Business; author of The Happiness Hypothesis, The Righteous Mind and The Anxious Generation.

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  Students have lost the capacity for sustained attention over the past decade, and they report the difficulty themselves.

  Their words

  So many of us in the education world have seen this precise change in our students over the past decade: They have more difficulty reading books, sitting through a 75-minute class, or doing their homework.

  The Devil's Plan to Ruin the Next Generationafterbabel.com

Writer and academic, author of The Cult of Smart and How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement; writes a daily newsletter on politics, education and culture.

From one piece There Are No Miracles in Education 2 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Educational miracles are manufactured by selection: the students who would have scored badly are quietly moved off the books.

  Their words

  That’s how educational miracles are manufactured: through artificially creating selection bias, which is the most powerful force in education.

  There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com

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  Academic talent is normally distributed, so some students failing is inevitable rather than anybody's fault.

  Their words

  Academic talent is normally distributed throughout the population, and so some degree of failure is literally inevitable.

  There Are No Miracles in Educationfreddiedeboer.substack.com

Founder of Terraform Industries and formerly a physicist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory; writes about energy, space and manufacturing.

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  NASA has deferred its next great telescope so far that the people who would build it will have retired first.

  Their words

  Current PhD students will be nearing retirement by the time these missions fly.

  It Is Time To Build The Monster Scopecaseyhandmer.wordpress.com

Statistician at Carnegie Mellon; writes on complex systems, machine learning and inference, and has kept a books-read notebook since 2000 that is now thousands of entries long.

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  What Your Professor Thinks You Already Know About US Politics

  Their words

  I forget (again!) how I chanced across it, but it fills a very real need for a lot of the students in my inequality class, and I intend to make it recommended/optional reading in the future. (I'll have to see if the library can buy a digital copy.)

  bactra.org

Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto and Brooks and Suzanne Ragen Professor Emeritus at Yale. Author of Against Empathy, The Sweet Spot and Psych, and writer of the Small Potatoes newsletter.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  The Writing Workshop

  Their words

  I highly recommend this for graduate students and postdocs, but it’s useful for the rest of us as well.

  smallpotatoes.paulbloom.net

Theoretical physicist and philosopher, Homewood Professor of Natural Philosophy at Johns Hopkins and fractal faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. Writes the Preposterous Universe blog and hosts the Mindscape podcast.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  The Copenhagen interpretation taught to physics students is a God-awful mess; many-worlds is beautiful because it needs fewer ingredients and one equation.

  Their words

  If you think about how we teach quantum mechanics to our students, the Copenhagen interpretation, it’s a God-awful mess. No one’s going to accuse that of being very beautiful. I’m a fan of the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and that is very beautiful in the sense that fewer ingredients, just one equation, and it could cover everything in the world.

  youtube.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

From one piece I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a cop 3 beliefs, in the piece's order there

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  Instruction is collaborative and evaluation is adversarial, which is why putting them in the same hands degrades both.

  Their words

  Instruction is collaborative: students want to learn, and I want them to learn, too. Evaluation is adversarial: students want the points, and I have to make sure they don’t get too many.

  I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com

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  Grading flattens whatever is taught into what can be tested, and teaches students to ignore everything else.

  Their words

  Evaluation forces me to flatten everything I teach into something that can be tested, and it encourages students to ignore everything that isn’t on the test.

  I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com

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  Needing grades to make students pay attention is evidence that the class is boring, not that students do not care about learning.

  Their words

  If my class is so boring that I have to devise an additional carrot-and-stick system to get students to pay attention, the problem is my class is boring.

  I wanted to be a teacher but they made me a copexperimental-history.com

Experimental psychologist and author of the blog Experimental History, on psychology, science reform and creativity.

• Our readingkorrents.com

  Learning a technical skill turns less on memorising its parts than on accepting that you will feel stupid and carrying on anyway.

  Their words

  The students who ultimately succeed in learning R are not the ones who force themselves to memorize functions or do a bunch of coding drills.

  experimental-history.com

Writer on learning and skill acquisition; author of Ultralearning and Get Better at Anything, known for the MIT Challenge and the Year Without English.

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  Pure discovery learning, in which students are never shown how, fails badly.

  Their words

  Pure discovery learning, where students are never shown instructions or examples, fails miserably.

  scotthyoung.com

Computer science professor at Georgetown University and author of Deep Work, Digital Minimalism and Slow Productivity; writes about focus, technology and work at calnewport.com and hosts the Deep Questions podcast.

• Likedrcmnd.app

  Number: The Language of Science

  Their words

  Though the book perhaps gets a little too math-ey by the end (and this is coming from someone who is literally teaching discrete mathematics to university students at the moment), Dantzig provides a compelling overview of what we mean when we talk about "numbers," and why this is a question that we must repeatedly keep re-visiting.

  calnewport.com

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

• Recommendsrcmnd.app

  Desmos

  Their words

  It's an online graphing calculator that makes it very simple to whip up surprisingly complicated graphs. I found it abundantly useful for live presentations over a stream, and what's nice is that you can share the links of what you build so that students can play with them.

  3blue1brown.com

Mathematician and maker of the 3Blue1Brown YouTube channel, which explains mathematics through animation. Creator of the open-source Manim animation library and founder of the Summer of Math Exposition.

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  Primes of the Form x^2 + n y^2

  Their words

  This might seem like a bizarrely specific question to write a whole book about, but that's actually the charm. It covers deep and general ideas, such as class field theory and elliptic functions, which are usually only taught to graduate students, but Cox approaches it all from an extremely concrete question which Fermat thought about.

  3blue1brown.com

Co-founder, chairman and chief investment officer of Ritholtz Wealth Management. Hosts the Masters in Business podcast for Bloomberg and wrote How NOT to Invest.

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  The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning

  Their words

  Scott Galloway, The Algebra of Happiness: Notes on the Pursuit of Success, Love, and Meaning: Galloway should be familiar to readers as both the brand strategy professor at NYU Stern School of Business, a regular guest on Masters in Business, and as the author of The Four. He usually writes about technology and business, but concern with his students’ life issues led to this 10 minute YouTube video that garnered nearly 2 million views. That became this lovely short book which is likely to be a graduation and holiday gift for years to come.

  ritholtz.com