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Let’s start with the obvious: Something called the Honor Code was never going to survive 2026 America. You’ve got to give Princeton some credit for holding out as long as it did: Well over a century is a pretty good run. Let’s do a quick Princeton Review. “In 1876, an editorial in Princeton’s newly founded campus newspaper, The Princetonian, argued against the use of proctors to monitor exams. Proctoring was ‘a means of bad moral education,’ the author wrote. Treat students as presumptively dishonest, and some would become so; treat them as honorable, and they would learn to behave honorably. And so the editorial board suggested a different approach: ‘Let every man write at the end of his paper a pledge that he has neither given nor received help, and let professors and tutors address themselves to some better business than watching for fraud.’” Cut to 2026. Students are back to being treated as being presumptively dishonest and proctors are back in the business of watching for fraud. The internet couldn’t break the policy. Mobile phones couldn’t break the policy. But then the policy met a new kind of opponent. The Atlantic (Gift Article): How AI Killed a 133-Year-Old Princeton Tradition. “The code lasted through two world wars, the upheaval of the 1960s, the disillusionment of Watergate, and even the rise of search engines and SparkNotes. It finally met its match in generative AI. Yesterday, after the rise of AI-facilitated cheating became too obvious to ignore, Princeton’s faculty voted to begin proctoring exams again. Technically, the Honor Code is still in place. Students will still sign a pledge that they didn’t cheat. But now professors will be watching to make sure they’re telling the truth. The Honor Code can’t run on the honor system anymore.” (Don’t worry. At some point, the Honor Code will be able to run on Nvidia chips...)
2
Leaving Kids on Read
The writing is on the wall. The question is whether today’s kids can read it. “Something troubling is happening in U.S. education. Almost everywhere in America, students are performing worse than their peers were 10 years ago, according to new, district-level test score data released Wednesday by the Educational Opportunity Project at Stanford. Compared with a decade earlier, reading scores were down last year in 83 percent of school districts where data was available. Math scores were down in 70 percent. The declines have affected both rich and poor districts, and crossed racial and geographic divides.” NYT Upshot (Gift Article): Why U.S. Test Scores Are in a Generation-Long Decline. “From 2017 to 2019, students lost as much ground in reading as they did during the pandemic, and reading scores continued to fall at a similar rate through 2024.”
+ NPR: Kids’ test scores began declining way before COVID. These schools are making gains. (Hopefully, all the schools making gains aren’t still using Princeton’s Honor Code during tests...)
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Life Inhale
“Over lunch at his golf club in Jupiter, Fla., on the first Saturday of May, President Trump got an earful from a group of tobacco executives and lobbyists unhappy with the way the Food and Drug Administration was regulating their industry. Eventually Mr. Trump had heard enough. He interrupted the conversation to call Dr. Marty Makary, the F.D.A. commissioner. No answer. Furious, the president then dialed Dr. Makary’s boss, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and another top health official, Dr. Mehmet Oz, the head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. He complained to them about the F.D.A.’s regulation of e-cigarettes.” And just like that, those tobacco execs and lobbyists are about to be able to sell flavored vapes. They gave the president an earful and the president is giving American kids a lungful. NYT (Gift Article): With a Friend in Trump, the Tobacco Industry Secures a Lucrative Win. You can say this about the Trump administration: you get what you pay for. Put that in your cotton candy, pink lemonade, mango mania pipe and smoke it.
+ The decision was part of the reason Marty Makary is no longer the FDA commissioner. And now, Rich Danker, a top Kennedy spokesman has resigned in protest.
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Harp on The Same String
How does Trump stay up all night posting insane and offensive material on social media? Well, he has some help. And that help, it turns out, includes a printer and an unfriendly ghost-writer. “Natalie Harp, Trump’s executive assistant, plays an integral role in Trump’s Truth Social activity. She brings the president stacks of printed-out draft social-media posts for his approval. The proposed posts often recycle content from other accounts that Harp or advisers think would appeal to Trump, according to people familiar with the matter. Harp then logs onto the president’s account—at times outside of normal work hours—and posts batches of Trump-approved messages.” WSJ (Gift Article): The Late-Night Truth Social Storms That Offer a Window Into the President’s Mind. “Earlier this year, at Trump’s direction, Harp posted a video that included racist imagery depicting Barack and Michelle Obama as apes, and an AI-generated image of Trump as a Christ-like figure, people familiar with the matter said.”
5
Extra, Extra
The Great Haul of China: “The Middle East conflict that Trump started, and seems unable to finish, will cast a long shadow over two days of talks amid fears that he might be tempted to weaken US support for Taiwan, the self-governing democracy claimed by China, in return for Xi’s assistance.” Trump lands in China for high-stakes summit with Xi Jinping. It’s pretty clear from the Air Force One manifest that this trip is more about business than any other topic. Who was on Trump’s plane to China? Elon Musk, Nvidia CEO and more.
+ RSVPlease: “Dear NATO Members: I get it. You despise President Trump for all the right reasons. He has walked away from Ukraine. He has threatened to seize Greenland and annex Canada. He has coddled Vladimir Putin. He is eroding America’s democratic institutions and norms. He insulted each of you so much that the German chancellor recently barked back that Trump’s America was being ‘humiliated’ by Iran. I get it. Now get over it.” Thomas Friedman in the NYT (Gift Article) with an invitation he knows will be declined. NATO, Please Help. Trump Has No Strategy for Iran. Meanwhile, “Secret new assessments say Iran has operational access to 30 of its 33 missile sites along the Strait of Hormuz, suggesting that its military remains far stronger than President Trump has asserted.” (Maybe because he’s an assertified liar?)
+ Shark Bait: “The Stratos artificial intelligence datacenter footprint will cover more than 40,000 acres (62 sq miles) over three sites in Box Elder County in north-western Utah. The facility will require about 9GW of power, which is more than the entire state of Utah currently consumes, and suck up a significant amount of water in an area that has been hit by severe drought in recent years.” Backlash as Utah approves datacenter twice the size of Manhattan. “The proposed project is backed by Kevin O’Leary, the venture capitalist who appears on the TV show Shark Tank ... ‘I don’t think there’s a bigger site in the world than this ... It shows the Chinese and the rest of the world we are not messing around, we are going to get this done, move it forward and provide the compute power to our AI companies that defend the country.’”
+ Murdaugh, She Wrote: “In a unanimous opinion, the State Supreme Court said that ‘shocking jury interference’ by a court clerk who oversaw jurors during the 2023 trial meant that Mr. Murdaugh’s convictions must be overturned. Mr. Murdaugh, 57, will remain in prison because he also had pleaded guilty to various charges related to stealing millions of dollars from his law firm and his former clients.” Murdaugh Murder Convictions Overturned by South Carolina’s Top Court. (Does this mean more docuseries are on the way?)
+ Senate Chambers: “A burst of gunfire rang out Wednesday night in the Philippine Senate, where authorities have tried to arrest a senator who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for a charge of crime against humanity.”
+ Trading Blows: “Welcome to lower Manhattan’s Church Street Boxing Gym, where steel usually sharpens steel. But on this Thursday night, the ring is occupied by traders buying and selling cryptocurrencies—bitcoin, ether, even Pengu, a penguin-themed memecoin. The prize: $10,000 in cash and an ornate Japanese katana. And Parillo, a partner at a venture-capital firm, is methodically, brutally, pounding his rivals into submission.” WSJ(Gift Article):