In April, the New York Times Learning Network tried something. They told teens to pick any three recent Times stories, read them, tell us what you learned. Only 123 teenagers bit. But they came from at least 41 schools across five continents, entering one by one rather than as classes, which is what made the editors suspect most of them did it because they wanted to. Lamees, 16, put it best: "I hate to study, but I love to learn." They read about avalanche rescue dogs, the world's reliance on oil through the Strait of Hormuz, and the global AI arms race. A 14-year-old in India came away asking whether platforms that reward outrage and virality are quietly raising a generation that prizes performance over connection.

I read that the same week as two pieces that complicate it.

In The Atlantic, Walt Hunter argues that AI has already changed how we write and is now changing how we read. Once you can't be sure whether a person or a machine wrote a sentence, the old trust between reader and author goes brittle, and reading turns watchful instead of absorbing. The pleasure is the casualty.

A new Georgetown study, written up by NBC News, suggests what's lost when you skip the work. The brain learns to do a hard thing automatically, but only after a punishing number of repetitions: in the experiment, people sorted images more than 30,000 times before the task moved to a region of the brain that runs it without conscious effort. A psychologist quoted in the piece, who wasn't part of the study, added the caution that matters here: lean on AI to skip the reps, and the skill may never wire itself in. The 123 teenagers weren't running an experiment, but they were doing the slow, unglamorous work the shortcut is built to skip, and doing it by choice. Which is the part worth holding onto.

— Thomas

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