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Essays, Foreign Affairs, Politics, religion

ZENDEGI-E NORMAL

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After the theocracy’s fall, the search for a normal life becomes Iran’s quietest revolution.

By Michael Cummins, Editor | October 16, 2025

This speculative essay, based on Karim Sadjadpour’s Foreign Affairs essay “The Autumn of the Ayatollahs,”  transforms geopolitical forecast into human story. In the imagined autumn of the theocracy, when the last sermons fade into static, the search for zendegi normal—a normal life—becomes Iran’s most radical act.

“They said the revolution would bring light. I learned to live in the dark.”

The city now keeps time by outages. Twelve days of war, then the silence that follows artillery—a silence so dense it hums. Through that hum the old voice returns, drifting across Tehran’s cracked frequencies, a papery baritone shaped by oxygen tanks and memory. Victory, he rasps. Someone in the alley laughs—quietly, the way people laugh at superstition.

On a balcony, a scarf lifts and settles on a rusted railing. Its owner, Farah, twenty-three, hides her phone under a clay pot to muffle the state’s listening apps. Across the street, a mural once blazed Death to America. Now the paint flakes into harmless confetti. Beneath it, someone has stenciled two smaller words: zendegi normal.

She whispers them aloud, tasting the risk. Life, ordinary and dangerous, returning in fragments.

Her father, gone for a decade to Evin Prison, was a radio engineer. He used to say truth lived in the static between signals. Farah believed him. Now she edits protest footage in the dark—faces half-lit by streetlamps, each one a seed of defiance. “The regime is weakening day by day,” the exiled activist on BBC Persian had said. Farah memorized the phrase the way others memorize prayers.

Her mother, Pari, hears the whispering and sighs. “Hope is contraband,” she says, stirring lentils by candlelight. “They seize it at checkpoints.”

Pari had survived every iteration of promise. “They say ‘Death to America,’” she liked to remind her students in 1983, “but never ‘Long Live Iran.’” The slogans were always about enemies, never about home. She still irons her scarf when the power flickers back, as if straight lines could summon stability. When darkness returns, she tells stories the censors forgot to erase: a poet who hid verses in recipes, a philosopher who said tyranny and piety wear the same cloak.

Now, when Farah speaks of change—“The Ayatollah is dying; everything will shift”—Pari only smiles, thinly. “Everything changes,” she says, “so that everything can remain the same.”

Farah’s generation remembers only the waiting. They are fluent in VPNs, sarcasm, and workaround hope. Every blackout feels like rehearsal for something larger.

Across town, in a military café that smells of burnt sugar and strategy, General Nouri stirs his fourth espresso and writes three words on a napkin: The debt is settled. Dust lies thick on the portraits of the Supreme Leader. Nouri, once a devout Revolutionary Guard, has outlived his faith and most of his rivals.

He decides that tanks run on diesel, not divinity. “Revelation,” he mutters, “is bad logistics.” His aides propose slogans—National Dignity, Renewal, Stability—but he wants something purer: control without conviction. “For a nation that sees plots everywhere,” he tells them, “the only trust is force.”

When he finally appears on television, the uniform is gone, replaced by a tailored gray suit. He speaks not of God but of bread, fuel, electricity. The applause sounds cautious, like people applauding themselves for surviving long enough to listen.

Nouri does not wait for the clerics to sanction him; he simply bypasses them. His first decree dissolves the Assembly of Experts, calling the aging jurists “ineffective ballast.” It is theater—a slap at the theocracy’s façade. The next decree, an anticorruption campaign, is really a seizure of rival IRGC cartels’ assets, centralizing wealth under his inner circle. This is the new cynicism: a strongman substituting grievance-driven nationalism for revolutionary dogma. He creates the National Oversight Bureau—a polite successor to the intelligence services—charged not with uncovering American plots but with logging every official’s loyalty. The old Pahlavi pathology returns: the ruler who trusts no one, not even his own shadow. A new app appears on every phone—ostensibly for energy alerts—recording users’ locations and contacts. Order, he demonstrates, is simply organized suspicion.

Meanwhile Reza, the technocrat, learns that pragmatism can be treason. He studied in Paris and returned to design an energy grid that never materialized. Now the ministries call him useful and hand him the Normalization Plan.

“Stabilize the economy,” his superior says, “but make it look indigenous.” Reza smiles the way one smiles when irony is all that remains. At night he writes memos about tariffs but sketches a different dream in the margins: a library without checkpoints, a square with shade trees, a place where arguments happen in daylight.

At home the refrigerator groans like an old argument. His daughter asks if the new leader will let them watch Turkish dramas again. “Maybe,” he says. “If the Internet behaves.”

But the Normalization Plan is fiction. He is trying to build a modern economy in a swamp of sanctioned entities. When he opens ports to international shipping, the IRGC blocks them—its generals treat the docks as personal treasuries. They prefer smuggling profits to taxable trade. Reza’s spreadsheets show that lifting sanctions would inject billions into the formal economy; Nouri’s internal reports show that the generals would lose millions in black-market rents. Iran, he realizes, is not China; it is a rentier state addicted to scarcity. Every reformist since 1979 has been suffocated by those who prosper from isolation. His new energy-grid design—efficient, global—stalls when a single colonel controlling illicit oil exports refuses to sign the permit. Pragmatism, in this system, is a liability.

When the generator fails, darkness cuts mid-sentence. The air tastes metallic. “They promised to protect us,” Pari says, fumbling for candles. “Now we protect ourselves from their promises.”

“Fattahi says we can rebuild,” Farah answers. “A secular Iran, a democratic one.”
“Child, they buried those words with your father.”
“Then I’ll dig them out.”

Pari softens. “You think rebellion is new. I once wrote freedom on a classroom chalkboard. They called it graffiti.”

Farah notices, for the first time, the quiet defiance stitched into daily life. Pari still irons her scarf, a habit of survival, but Farah ties hers loosely, a small deliberate chaos. At the bakery, she sees other acts of color—an emerald coat, a pop song leaking from a car, a man selling forbidden books in daylight. A decade ago, girls lined up in schoolyards for hijab inspections; now a cluster of teenagers stands laughing, hair visible, shoulders touching in shared, unspoken defiance. The contradiction the feminist lawyer once described—“the situation of women shows all the contradictions of the revolution”—is playing out in the streets, private shame becoming public confidence.

Outside, the muezzin’s call overlaps with a chant that could be mourning or celebration. In Tehran, it is often both.

Power, Nouri decides, requires choreography. He replaces Friday prayers with “National Addresses.” The first begins with a confession: Faith divided us. Order will unite us. For a month, it works. Trucks deliver bread under camera lights; gratitude becomes policy. But soon the whispering returns: the old Ayatollah lives in hiding, dictating verses. Nouri knows the rumor is false—he planted it himself. Suspicion, he believes, is the purest form of control. Yet even he feels its poison. Each morning he finds the same note in the intelligence reports: The debt is settled. Is it loyalty—or indictment?

Spring creeps back through cracks in concrete. Vines climb the radio towers. In a basement, Farah’s father’s transmitter still hums, knobs smoothed by fear. “Tonight,” she whispers into the mic, “we speak of normal life.”

She reads messages from listeners: a woman in Mashhad thanking the blackout for showing her the stars; a taxi driver in Shiraz who has stopped chanting anything at all; a child asking if tomorrow the water will run. As the signal fades, Farah repeats the question like a prayer. Somewhere, a neighbor mistakes her voice for revelation and kneels toward the sound. The scarf on her balcony stirs in the dark.

The old voice never returns. Rumor fills the vacuum. Pari hangs laundry on the balcony; the scarf flutters beside her, now simply weather. Below, children chalk zendegi normal across the pavement and draw birds around the words—wings in white dust. A soldier passes, glances, and does nothing. She remembers writing freedom on that school chalkboard, the silence that followed, the summons to the principal’s office. Now no one erases the word. She turns up the radio just enough to catch Farah’s voice, low and steady: “Tonight, we speak of normal life.” In the distance, generators pulse like mechanical hearts.

Nouri, now called Marshal, prefers silence to titles. He spends mornings signing exemptions, evenings counting enemies. Each new name feels like ballast. He visits the shrine city he once scorned, hoping faith might offer cover. “You have replaced revelation with maintenance,” a cleric tells him.
“Yes,” Nouri replies, “and the lights stay on.”

That night the grid collapses across five provinces. From his balcony he watches darkness reclaim the skyline. Then, through the static, a woman’s voice—the same one—rises from a pirated frequency, speaking softly of ordinary life. He sets down his glass, almost reaches for the dial, then stops. The scarf lifts somewhere he cannot see.

Weeks later, Reza finds a memory stick in his mail slot—no note, only the symbol of a scarf folded into a bird. Inside: the civic network he once designed, perfected by unseen hands. In its code comments one line repeats—The debt is settled. He knows activation could mean death. He does it anyway.

Within hours, phones across Iran connect to a network that belongs to no one. People share recipes, poetry, bread prices—nothing overtly political, only life reasserting itself. Reza watches the loading bar crawl forward, each pixel a quiet defiance. He thinks of his grandfather, who told him every wire carries a prayer. In the next room, his daughter sleeps, her tablet tucked beneath her pillow. The servers hum. He imagines the sound traveling outward—through routers, walls, cities—until it reaches someone who had stopped believing in connection. For the first time in years, the signal clears.

Farah leans toward the microphone. “Tonight,” she says, “we speak of water, bread, and breath.” Messages flood in: a baker in Yazd who plays her signal during morning prep; a soldier’s mother who whispers her words to her son before he leaves for duty; a cleric’s niece who says the broadcast reminds her of lullabies. Farah closes her eyes. The scarf rises once more. She signs off with the whisper that has become ritual: Every revolution ends in a whisper—the sound of someone turning off the radio. Then she waits, not for applause, but for the hum.

By late October, Tehran smells of dust and pomegranates. Street vendors return, cautious but smiling. The murals are being repainted—not erased but joined—Death to America fading beside smaller, humbler words: Work. Light. Air. No one claims victory; they have learned better. The revolution, it turns out, did not collapse—it exhaled. The Ayatollah became rumor, the general a footnote, and the word that endured was the simplest one: zendegi. Life. Fragile, ordinary, persistent—like a radio signal crossing mountains.

The scarf lifts once more. The signal clears. And somewhere, faint but unmistakable, the hum returns.

“From every ruin, a song will rise.” — Forugh Farrokhzad

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Magazines, Research, Science, Technology

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE – NOVEMBER 2025

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Scientific American

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Life’s Big Bangs’ – Did complex life emerge more than once?

Mysterious Rocks Could Rewrite Evolution of Complex Life

Controversial evidence hints that complex life might have emerged hundreds of millions of years earlier than previously thought—and possibly more than once

The Slippery Slope of Ethical Collapse—And How Courage Can Reverse It

Your brain gets used to wrongdoing. It can also get used to doing good

Which Anti-Inflammatory Supplements Actually Work?

Experts say the strongest scientific studies identify three compounds that fight disease and inflammation

The Sordid Mystery of a Somalian Meteorite Smuggled into China

How a space rock vanished from Africa and showed up for sale across an ocean

Artificial Intelligence, Computer Science, Essays, History, Technology

THE CODE AND THE CANDLE

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A Computer Scientist’s Crisis of Certainty

When Ada signed up for The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, she thought it would be an easy elective. Instead, Gibbon’s ghost began haunting her code—reminding her that doubt, not data, is what keeps civilization from collapse.

By Michael Cummins | October 2025

It was early autumn at Yale, the air sharp enough to make the leaves sound brittle underfoot. Ada walked fast across Old Campus, laptop slung over her shoulder, earbuds in, mind already halfway inside a problem set. She believed in the clean geometry of logic. The only thing dirtying her otherwise immaculate schedule was an “accidental humanities” elective: The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. She’d signed up for it on a whim, liking the sterile irony of the title—an empire, an algorithm; both grand systems eventually collapsing under their own logic.

The first session felt like an intrusion from another world. The professor, an older woman with the calm menace of a classicist, opened her worn copy and read aloud:

History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies, and misfortunes of mankind.

A few students smiled. Ada laughed softly, then realized no one else had. She was used to clean datasets, not registers of folly. But something in the sentence lingered—its disobedience to progress, its refusal of polish. It was a sentence that didn’t believe in optimization.

That night she searched Gibbon online. The first scanned page glowed faintly on her screen, its type uneven, its tone strangely alive. The prose was unlike anything she’d seen in computer science: ironic, self-aware, drenched in the slow rhythm of thought. It seemed to know it was being read centuries later—and to expect disappointment. She felt the cool, detached intellect of the Enlightenment reaching across the chasm of time, not to congratulate the future, but to warn it.

By the third week, she’d begun to dread the seminar’s slow dismantling of her faith in certainty. The professor drew connections between Gibbon and the great philosophers of his age: Voltaire, Montesquieu, and, most fatefully, Descartes—the man Gibbon distrusted most.

“Descartes,” the professor said, chalk squeaking against the board, “wanted knowledge to be as perfect and distinct as mathematics. Gibbon saw this as the ultimate victory of reason—the moment when Natural Philosophy and Mathematics sat on the throne, viewing their sisters—the humanities—prostrated before them.”

The room laughed softly at the image. Ada didn’t. She saw it too clearly: science crowned, literature kneeling, history in chains.

Later, in her AI course, the teaching assistant repeated Descartes without meaning to. “Garbage in, garbage out,” he said. “The model is only as clean as the data.” It was the same creed in modern syntax: mistrust what cannot be measured. The entire dream of algorithmic automation began precisely there—the attempt to purify the messy, probabilistic human record into a series of clear and distinct facts.

Ada had never questioned that dream. Until now. The more she worked on systems designed for prediction—for telling the world what must happen—the more she worried about their capacity to remember what did happen, especially if it was inconvenient or irrational.

When the syllabus turned to Gibbon’s Essay on the Study of Literature—his obscure 1761 defense of the humanities—she expected reverence for Latin, not rebellion against logic. What she found startled her:

At present, Natural Philosophy and Mathematics are seated on the throne, from which they view their sisters prostrated before them.

He was warning against what her generation now called technological inevitability. The mathematician’s triumph, Gibbon suggested, would become civilization’s temptation: the worship of clarity at the expense of meaning. He viewed this rationalist arrogance as a new form of tyranny. Rome fell to political overreach; a new civilization, he feared, would fall to epistemic overreach.

He argued that the historian’s task was not to prove, but to weigh.

He never presents his conjectures as truth, his inductions as facts, his probabilities as demonstrations.

The words felt almost scandalous. In her lab, probability was a problem to minimize; here, it was the moral foundation of knowledge. Gibbon prized uncertainty not as weakness but as wisdom.

If the inscription of a single fact be once obliterated, it can never be restored by the united efforts of genius and industry.

He meant burned parchment, but Ada read lost data. The fragility of the archive—his or hers—suddenly seemed the same. The loss he described was not merely factual but moral: the severing of the link between evidence and human memory.

One gray afternoon she visited the Beinecke Library, that translucent cube where Yale keeps its rare books like fossils of thought. A librarian, gloved and wordless, placed a slim folio before her—an early printing of Gibbon’s Essay. Its paper smelled faintly of dust and candle smoke. She brushed her fingertips along the edge, feeling the grain rise like breath. The marginalia curled like vines, a conversation across centuries. In the corner, a long-dead reader had written in brown ink:

Certainty is a fragile empire.

Ada stared at the line. This was not data. This was memory—tactile, partial, uncompressible. Every crease and smudge was an argument against replication.

Back in the lab, she had been training a model on Enlightenment texts—reducing history to vectors, elegance to embeddings. Gibbon would have recognized the arrogance.

Books may perish by accident, but they perish more surely by neglect.

His warning now felt literal: the neglect was no longer of reading, but of understanding the medium itself.

Mid-semester, her crisis arrived quietly. During a team meeting in the AI lab, she suggested they test a model that could tolerate contradiction.

“Could we let the model hold contradictory weights for a while?” she asked. “Not as an error, but as two competing hypotheses about the world?”

Her lab partner blinked. “You mean… introduce noise?”

Ada hesitated. “No. I mean let it remember that it once believed something else. Like historical revisionism, but internal.”

The silence that followed was not hostile—just uncomprehending. Finally someone said, “That’s… not how learning works.” Ada smiled thinly and turned back to her screen. She realized then: the machine was not built to doubt. And if they were building it in their own image, maybe neither were they.

That night, unable to sleep, she slipped into the library stacks with her battered copy of The Decline and Fall. She read slowly, tracing each sentence like a relic. Gibbon described the burning of the Alexandrian Library with a kind of restrained grief.

The triumph of ignorance, he called it.

He also reserved deep scorn for the zealots who preferred dogma to documents—a scorn that felt disturbingly relevant to the algorithmic dogma that preferred prediction to history. She saw the digital age creating a new kind of fanaticism: the certainty of the perfectly optimized model. She wondered if the loss of a physical library was less tragic than the loss of the intellectual capacity to disagree with the reigning system.

She thought of a specific project she’d worked on last summer: a predictive policing algorithm trained on years of arrest data. The model was perfectly efficient at identifying high-risk neighborhoods—but it was also perfectly incapable of questioning whether the underlying data was itself a product of bias. It codified past human prejudice into future technological certainty. That, she realized, was the triumph of ignorance Gibbon had feared: reason serving bias, flawlessly.

By November, she had begun to map Descartes’ dream directly onto her own field. He had wanted to rebuild knowledge from axioms, purged of doubt. AI engineers called it initializing from zero. Each model began in ignorance and improved through repetition—a mind without memory, a scholar without history.

The present age of innovation may appear to be the natural effect of the increasing progress of knowledge; but every step that is made in the improvement of reason, is likewise a step towards the decay of imagination.

She thought of her neural nets—how each iteration improved accuracy but diminished surprise. The cleaner the model, the smaller the world.

Winter pressed down. Snow fell between the Gothic spires, muffling the city. For her final paper, Ada wrote what she could no longer ignore. She called it The Fall of Interpretation.

Civilizations do not fall when their infrastructures fail. They fall when their interpretive frameworks are outsourced to systems that cannot feel.

She traced a line from Descartes to data science, from Gibbon’s defense of folly to her own field’s intolerance for it. She quoted his plea to “conserve everything preciously,” arguing that the humanities were not decorative but diagnostic—a culture’s immune system against epistemic collapse.

The machine cannot err, and therefore cannot learn.

When she turned in the essay, she added a note to herself at the top: Feels like submitting a love letter to a dead historian. A week later the professor returned it with only one comment in the margin: Gibbon for the age of AI. Keep going.

By spring, she read Gibbon the way she once read code—line by line, debugging her own assumptions. He was less historian than ethicist.

Truth and liberty support each other: by banishing error, we open the way to reason.

Yet he knew that reason without humility becomes tyranny. The archive of mistakes was the record of what it meant to be alive. The semester ended, but the disquiet didn’t. The tyranny of reason, she realized, was not imposed—it was invited. Its seduction lay in its elegance, in its promise to end the ache of uncertainty. Every engineer carried a little Descartes inside them. She had too.

After finals, she wandered north toward Science Hill. Behind the engineering labs, the server farm pulsed with a constant electrical murmur. Through the glass wall she saw the racks of processors glowing blue in the dark. The air smelled faintly of ozone and something metallic—the clean, sterile scent of perfect efficiency.

She imagined Gibbon there, candle in hand, examining the racks as if they were ruins of a future Rome.

Let us conserve everything preciously, for from the meanest facts a Montesquieu may unravel relations unknown to the vulgar.

The systems were designed to optimize forgetting—their training loops overwriting their own memory. They remembered everything and understood nothing. It was the perfect Cartesian child.

Standing there, Ada didn’t want to abandon her field; she wanted to translate it. She resolved to bring the humanities’ ethics of doubt into the language of code—to build models that could err gracefully, that could remember the uncertainty from which understanding begins. Her fight would be for the metadata of doubt: the preservation of context, irony, and intention that an algorithm so easily discards.

When she imagined the work ahead—the loneliness of it, the resistance—she thought again of Gibbon in Lausanne, surrounded by his manuscripts, writing through the night as the French Revolution smoldered below.

History is little more than the record of human vanity corrected by the hand of time.

She smiled at the quiet justice of it.

Graduation came and went. The world, as always, accelerated. But something in her had slowed. Some nights, in the lab where she now worked, when the fans subsided and the screens dimmed to black, she thought she heard a faint rhythm beneath the silence—a breathing, a candle’s flicker.

She imagined a future archaeologist decoding the remnants of a neural net, trying to understand what it had once believed. Would they see our training data as scripture? Our optimization logs as ideology? Would they wonder why we taught our machines to forget? Would they find the metadata of doubt she had fought to embed?

The duty of remembrance, she realized, was never done. For Gibbon, the only reliable constant was human folly; for the machine, it was pattern. Civilizations endure not by their monuments but by their memory of error. Gibbon’s ghost still walks ahead of us, whispering that clarity is not truth, and that the only true ruin is a civilization that has perfectly organized its own forgetting.

The fall of Rome was never just political. It was the moment the human mind mistook its own clarity for wisdom. That, in every age, is where the decline begins.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Aging, Essays, Healthcare, Robotics

TENDER GEOMETRY

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How a Texas robot named Apollo became a meditation on dignity, dependence, and the future of care.

This essay is inspired by an episode of the WSJ Bold Names podcast (September 26, 2025), in which Christopher Mims and Tim Higgins speak with Jeff Cardenas, CEO of Apptronik. While the podcast traces Apollo’s business and technical promise, this meditation follows the deeper question at the heart of humanoid robotics: what does it mean to delegate dignity itself?

By Michael Cummins, Editor, September 26, 2025

The robot stands motionless in a bright Austin lab, catching the fluorescence the way bone catches light in an X-ray—white, clinical, unblinking. Human-height, five foot eight, a little more than a hundred and fifty pounds, all clean lines and exposed joints. What matters is not the size. What matters is the task.

An engineer wheels over a geriatric training mannequin—slack limbs, paper skin, the posture of someone who has spent too many days watching the ceiling. With a gesture the engineer has practiced until it feels like superstition, he cues the robot forward.

Apollo bends.

The motors don’t roar; they murmur, like a refrigerator. A camera blinks; a wrist pivots. Aluminum fingers spread, hesitate, then—lightly, so lightly—close around the mannequin’s forearm. The lift is almost slow enough to be reverent. Apollo steadies the spine, tips the chin, makes a shelf of its palm for the tremor the mannequin doesn’t have but real people do. This is not warehouse choreography—no pallets, no conveyor belts. This is rehearsal for something harder: the geometry of tenderness.

If the mannequin stays upright, the room exhales. If Apollo’s grasp has that elusive quality—control without clench—there’s a hush you wouldn’t expect in a lab. The hush is not triumph. It is reckoning: the movement from factory floor to bedside, from productivity to intimacy, from the public square to the room where the curtains are drawn and a person is trying, stubbornly, not to be embarrassed.

Apptronik calls this horizon “assistive care.” The phrase is both clinical and audacious. It’s the third act in a rollout that starts in logistics, passes through healthcare, and ends—if it ever ends—at the bedroom door. You do not get to a sentence like that by accident. You get there because someone keeps repeating the same word until it stops sounding sentimental and starts sounding like strategy: dignity.

Jeff Cardenas is the one who says it most. He moves quickly when he talks, as if there are only so many breaths before the demo window closes, but the word slows him. Dignity. He says it with the persistence of an engineer and the stubbornness of a grandson. Both of his grandfathers were war heroes, the kind of men who could tie a rope with their eyes closed and a hand in a sling. For years they didn’t need anyone. Then, in their final seasons, they needed everyone. The bathroom became a negotiation. A shirt, an adversary. “To watch proud men forced into total dependency,” he says, “was to watch their dignity collapse.”

A robot, he thinks, can give some of that back. No sigh at 3 a.m. No opinion about the smell of a body that has been ill for too long. No making a nurse late for the next room. The machine has no ego. It does not collect small resentments. It will never tell a friend over coffee what it had to do for you. If dignity is partly autonomy, the argument goes, then autonomy might be partly engineered.

There is, of course, a domestic irony humming in the background. The week Cardenas was scheduled to sit for an interview about a future of household humanoids, a human arrived in his own household ahead of schedule: a baby girl. Two creations, two needs. One cries, one hums. One exhausts you into sleeplessness; the other promises to be tireless so you can rest. Perhaps that tension—between what we make and who we make—is the essay we keep writing in every age. It is, at minimum, the ethical prompt for the engineering to follow.

In the lab, empathy is equipment. Apollo’s body is a lattice of proprietary actuators—the muscles—and a tangle of sensors—the nerves. Cameras for eyes, force feedback in the hands, gyros whispering balance, accelerometers keeping score of every tilt. The old robots were position robots: go here, stop there, open, close, repeat until someone hit the red button. Apollo lives in a different grammar. It isn’t memorizing a path through space; it’s listening, constantly, to the body it carries and the moment it enters. It can’t afford to be brittle. Brittleness drops the cup. And the patient.

But muscle and nerve require a brain, and for that Apptronik has made a pragmatic peace with the present: Google DeepMind is the partner for the mind. A decade ago, “humanoid” was a dirty word in Mountain View—too soon, too much. Now the bet is that a robot shaped like us can learn from us, not only in principle but in practice. Generative AI, so adept at turning words into words and images into images, now tries to learn movement by watching. Show it a person steadying a frail arm. Show it again. Give it the perspective of a sensor array; let it taste gravity through a gyroscope. The hope is that the skill transfers. The hope is that the world’s largest training set—human life—can be translated into action without scripts.

This is where the prose threatens to float away on its own optimism, and where Apptronik pulls it back with a price. Less than a luxury car, they say. Under $50,000, once the supply chain exists. They like first principles—aluminum is cheap, and there are only a few hundred dollars of it in the frame. Batteries have ridden down the cost curve on the back of cars; motors rode it down on the back of drones. The math is meant to short-circuit disbelief: compassion at scale is not only possible; it may be affordable.

Not today. Today, Apollo earns its keep in the places compassion is an accounting line: warehouses and factories. The partners—GXO, Mercedes—sound like waypoints on the long gray bridge to the bedside. If the robot can move boxes without breaking a wrist, maybe it can later move a human without breaking trust. The lab keeps its metaphors comforting: a pianist running scales before attempting the nocturne. Still, the nocturne is the point.

What changes when the machine crosses a threshold and the space smells like hand soap and evening soup? Warehouse floors are taped and square; homes are not. Homes are improvisations of furniture and mood and politics. The job shifts from lifting to witnessing. A perfect employee becomes a perfect observer. Cameras are not “eyes” in a home; they are records. To invite a machine into a room is to invite a log of the room. The promise of dignity—the mercy of not asking another person to do what shames you—meets the chill of being watched perfectly.

“Trust is the long-term battle,” Cardenas says, not as a slogan but like someone naming the boss level in a game with only one life. Companies have slogans about privacy. People have rules: who gets a key, who knows where the blanket is. Does a robot get a key? Does it remember where you hide the letter from the old friend? The engineers will answer, rightly, that these are solvable problems—air-gapped systems, on-device processing, audit logs. The heart will answer, not wrongly, that solvable is not the same as solved.

Then there is the bigger shadow. Cardenas calls humanoid robotics “the space race of our time,” and the analogy is less breathless than it sounds. Space wasn’t about stars; it was about order. The Moon was a stage for policy. In this script the rocket is a humanoid—replicable labor, general-purpose motion—and the nation that deploys a million of them first rewrites the math of productivity. China has poured capital into robotics; some of its companies share data and designs in a way U.S. rivals—each a separate species in a crowded ecosystem—do not. One country is trying to build a forest; the other, a bouquet. The metaphor is unfair and therefore, in the compressed logic of arguments, persuasive.

He reduces it to a line that is either obvious or terrifying. What is an economy? Productivity per person. Change the number of productive units and you change the economy. If a robot is, in practice, a unit, it will be counted. That doesn’t make it a citizen. It makes it a denominator. And once it’s in the denominator, it is in the policy.

This is the point where the skeptic clears his throat. We have heard this promise before—in the eighties, the nineties, the 2000s. We have seen Optimus and its cousins, and the men who owned them. We know the edited video, the cropped wire, the demo that never leaves the demo. We know how stubborn carpets can be and how doors, innocent as they seem, have a way of humiliating machines.

The lab knows this better than anyone. On the third lift of the morning, Apollo’s wrist overshoots with a faint metallic snap, the servo stuttering as it corrects. The mannequin’s elbow jerks, too quick, and an engineer’s breath catches in the silence. A tiny tweak. Again. “Yes,” someone says, almost to avoid saying “please.” Again.

What keeps the room honest is not the demo. It’s the memory you carry into it. Everyone has one: a grandmother who insisted she didn’t need help until she slid to the kitchen floor and refused to call it a fall; a father who couldn’t stand the indignity of a hand on his waistband; the friend who became a quiet inventory of what he could no longer do alone. The argument for a robot at the bedside lives in those rooms—in the hour when help is heavy and kindness is too human to be invisible.

But dignity is a duet word. It means independence. It also means being treated like a person. A perfect lift that leaves you feeling handled may be less dignified than an imperfect lift performed by a nurse who knows your dog’s name and laughs at your old jokes. Some people will choose privacy over presence every time. Others want the tremor in the human hand because it’s a sign that someone is afraid to hurt them. There is a universe of ethics in that tremor.

The money is not bashful about picking a side. Investors like markets that look like graphs and revolutions that can be amortized—unlike a nurse’s memory of the patient who loved a certain song, which lingers, resists, refuses to be tallied. If a robot can deliver the “last great service”—to borrow a phrase from a theologian who wasn’t thinking of robots—it will attract capital because the service can be repeated without running out of love, patience, or hours. The price point matters not only because it makes the machine seem plausible in a catalog but because it promises a shift in who gets help. A family that cannot afford round-the-clock care might afford a tireless assistant for the night shift. The machine will not call in sick. It will not gossip. It will not quit. It will, of course, fail, and those failures will be as intimate as its successes.

There are imaginable safeguards. A local brain that forgets what it doesn’t need to know. A green light you can see when the camera is on. Clear policies about where data goes and who can ask for it and how long it lives. An emergency override you can use without being a systems administrator at three in the morning. None of these will quiet the unease entirely. Unease is the tax we pay for bringing a new witness into the house.

And yet—watch closely—the room keeps coaching the robot toward a kind of grace. Engineers insist this isn’t poetry; it’s control theory. They talk about torque and closed loops and compliance control, about the way a hand can be strong by being soft. But if you mute the jargon, you hear something else: a search for a tempo that reads as care. The difference between a shove and a support is partly physics and partly music. A breath between actions signals attention. A tiny pause at the top of the lift says: I am with you. Apollo cannot mean that. But it can perform it. When it does, the engineers get quiet in the way people do in chapels and concert halls, the secular places where we admit that precision can pass for grace and that grace is, occasionally, a kind of precision.

There is an old superstition in technology: every new machine arrives with a mirror for the person who fears it most. The mirror in this lab shows two figures. In the first: a patient who would rather accept the cold touch of aluminum than the pity of a stranger. In the second: a nurse who knows that skill is not love but that love, in her line of work, often sounds like skill. The mirror does not choose. It simply refuses to lie.

The machine will steady a trembling arm, and we will learn a new word for the mix of gratitude and suspicion that touches the back of the neck when help arrives without a heartbeat. It is the geometry of tenderness, rendered in aluminum. A question with hands.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Magazines, Research, Science, Technology

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE – OCTOBER 2025

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SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘Voyage to Nowhere’

How a Billionaire’s Plan to Reach Another Star Fell Apart

An abandoned plan to visit another star highlights the perils of billionaire-funded science

When the Rain Pours, the Mountains Move

As warming temperatures bring more extreme rain to the mountains, debris flows are on the rise

New Fossils Could Help Solve Long-standing Mystery of Bird Migration

Tiny fossils hint at when birds began making their mind-blowing journey to the Arctic to breed

Essays, Magazines, Opinion, Science, Technology

THE NEW ATLANTIS — AUTUMN 2025 ISSUE

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THE NEW ATLANTIS MAGAZINE: The latest issue features….

What Comes After Gender Affirmation?

Making transition the first-line treatment for children was a mistake, many health agencies now say. A growing group of psychologists wants to restore the therapeutic relationship.

Two Hundred Years to Flatten the Curve

How generations of meddlesome public health campaigns changed everyday life — and made life twice as long as it used to be

Why We Are Better Off Than a Century Ago

Our ancestors built grand public systems to conquer hunger, thirst, darkness, and squalor. That progress can be lost if we forget it.

Artificial Intelligence, Magazines, Research, Reviews, Technology

MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW – SEPT/OCT 2025 PREVIEW

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MIT TECHNOLOGY REVIEW: The Security issue issue – Security can mean national defense, but it can also mean control over data, safety from intrusion, and so much more. This issue explores the way technology, mystery, and the universe itself affect how secure we feel in the modern age.

How these two brothers became go-to experts on America’s “mystery drone” invasion

Two Long Island UFO hunters have been called upon by some domestic law enforcement to investigate unexplained phenomena.

Why Trump’s “golden dome” missile defense idea is another ripped straight from the movies

President Trump has proposed building an antimissile “golden dome” around the United States. But do cinematic spectacles actually enhance national security?

Inside the hunt for the most dangerous asteroid ever

As space rock 2024 YR4 became more likely to hit Earth than anything of its size had ever been before, scientists all over the world mobilized to protect the planet.

Taiwan’s “silicon shield” could be weakening

Semiconductor powerhouse TSMC is under increasing pressure to expand abroad and play a security role for the island. Those two roles could be in tension.

Culture, Magazines, Opinion, Previews, Science, Society, Technology

Culture: New Humanist Magazine – Autumn 2025

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The cover of New Humanist's Autumn 2025 issue is an illustration of an astronaut surrounded by stars

NEW HUMANIST MAGAZINE: This issue is all about how the battle over space – playing out unseen above us – concerns us all.

Space and society

In the latest edition of our “Voices” section, we ask five experts – from scientists to philosophers – how to protect space for the benefit of all of humanity.

“When people hear the term ‘space technology’, they tend to picture rocket launches, or maybe missions to the Moon … Other types of space activity with strong social impact tend to get less attention”

The satellite war

We speak to security expert Mark Hilborne about space warfare – and how it could be the deciding factor in the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

“The public doesn’t understand how much we rely on space as a domain of warfare”

Sexism in space

When Nasa prepared a message to aliens with the Pioneer probes in the 1970s, sexism skewed how they represented humankind. Within the next decade, we may have another chance to send a message deep into space – and this time, we must do better, writes Jess Thomson.

“Only five objects we have crafted here on Earth are now drifting towards infinity, and four of them tell a lie about half of humankind”

American alien

The new Superman movie offers the vision of a kinder, more tolerant United States – saved by an immigrant, in this case a literal alien. But should we really pin our hopes on a superhero?

“Trump has even shared photoshopped images of himself as Superman. The idea that superheroes can save us all, if we just let them break all the rules, is one that the Maga followers find congenial”

Magazines, Research, Science, Technology

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE – SEPTEMBER 2025

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Scientific American Volume 333, Issue 2 | Scientific American

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN MAGAZINE: The latest issue features ‘The End of Food Allergies?’ – Life-changing therapies for peanut reactions are already here.

How Your Brain’s Nightly Cleanse Keeps It Healthy

Washing waste from the brain is an essential function of sleep—and it could help ward off dementia BY Lydia Denworth

Can Peanut Allergies Be Cured?

Maryn McKenna

What Happens When an Entire Generation of Scientists Changes Its Mind

Charles C. Mann

How Scientists Finally Learned That Nerves Regrow

Diana Kwon

Plastics Started as a Sustainability Solution. What Went Wrong?

Jen Schwartz

The Universe Is Static. No, Expanding! Wait, Slowing? Oh, Accelerating

Richard Panek

How RNA Unseated DNA as the Most Important Molecule in Your Body

Philip Ball

Artificial Intelligence, Education, Essays, Social Media, Technology

AI, Smartphones, and the Student Attention Crisis in U.S. Public Schools

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By Michael Cummins, Editor, August 19, 2025

In a recent New York Times focus group, twelve public-school teachers described how phones, social media, and artificial intelligence have reshaped the classroom. Tom, a California biology teacher, captured the shift with unsettling clarity: “It’s part of their whole operating schema.” For many students, the smartphone is no longer a tool but an extension of self, fused with identity and cognition.

Rachel, a teacher in New Jersey, put it even more bluntly:

“They’re just waiting to just get back on their phone. It’s like class time is almost just a pause in between what they really want to be doing.”

What these teachers describe is not mere distraction but a transformation of human attention. The classroom, once imagined as a sanctuary for presence and intellectual encounter, has become a liminal space between dopamine hits. Students no longer “use” their phones; they inhabit them.

The Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan warned as early as the 1960s that every new medium extends the human body and reshapes perception. “The medium is the message,” he argued — meaning that the form of technology alters our thought more profoundly than its content. If the printed book once trained us to think linearly and analytically, the smartphone has restructured cognition into fragments: alert-driven, socially mediated, and algorithmically tuned.

The philosopher Sherry Turkle has documented this cultural drift in works such as Alone Together and Reclaiming Conversation. Phones, she argues, create a paradoxical intimacy: constant connection yet diminished presence. What the teachers describe in the Times focus group echoes Turkle’s findings — students are physically in class but psychically elsewhere.

This fracture has profound educational stakes. The reading brain that Maryanne Wolf has studied in Reader, Come Home — slow, deep, and integrative — is being supplanted by skimming, scanning, and swiping. And as psychologist Daniel Kahneman showed, our cognition is divided between “fast” intuitive processing (System 1) and “slow” deliberate reasoning (System 2). Phones tilt us heavily toward System 1, privileging speed and reaction over reflection and patience.

The teachers in the focus group thus reveal something larger than classroom management woes: they describe a civilizational shift in the ecology of human attention. To understand what’s at stake, we must see the smartphone not simply as a device but as a prosthetic self — an appendage of memory, identity, and agency. And we must ask, with urgency, whether education can still cultivate wisdom in a world of perpetual distraction.

The Collapse of Presence

The first crisis that phones introduce into the classroom is the erosion of presence. Presence is not just physical attendance but the attunement of mind and spirit to a shared moment. Teachers have always battled distraction — doodles, whispers, glances out the window — but never before has distraction been engineered with billion-dollar precision.

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are not neutral diversions; they are laboratories of persuasion designed to hijack attention. Tristan Harris, a former Google ethicist, has described them as slot machines in our pockets, each swipe promising another dopamine jackpot. For a student seated in a fluorescent-lit classroom, the comparison is unfair: Shakespeare or stoichiometry cannot compete with an infinite feed of personalized spectacle.

McLuhan’s insight about “extensions of man” takes on new urgency here. If the book extended the eye and trained the linear mind, the phone extends the nervous system itself, embedding the individual into a perpetual flow of stimuli. Students who describe feeling “naked without their phone” are not indulging in metaphor — they are articulating the visceral truth of prosthesis.

The pandemic deepened this fracture. During remote learning, students learned to toggle between school tabs and entertainment tabs, multitasking as survival. Now, back in physical classrooms, many have not relearned how to sit with boredom, struggle, or silence. Teachers describe students panicking when asked to read even a page without their phones nearby.

Maryanne Wolf’s neuroscience offers a stark warning: when the brain is rewired for scanning and skimming, the capacity for deep reading — for inhabiting complex narratives, empathizing with characters, or grappling with ambiguity — atrophies. What is lost is not just literary skill but the very neurological substrate of reflection.

Presence is no longer the default of the classroom but a countercultural achievement.

And here Kahneman’s framework becomes crucial. Education traditionally cultivates System 2 — the slow, effortful reasoning needed for mathematics, philosophy, or moral deliberation. But phones condition System 1: reactive, fast, emotionally charged. The result is a generation fluent in intuition but impoverished in deliberation.

The Wild West of AI

If phones fragment attention, artificial intelligence complicates authorship and authenticity. For teachers, the challenge is no longer merely whether a student has done the homework but whether the “student” is even the author at all.

ChatGPT and its successors have entered the classroom like a silent revolution. Students can generate essays, lab reports, even poetry in seconds. For some, this is liberation: a way to bypass drudgery and focus on synthesis. For others, it is a temptation to outsource thinking altogether.

Sherry Turkle’s concept of “simulation” is instructive here. In Simulation and Its Discontents, she describes how scientists and engineers, once trained on physical materials, now learn through computer models — and in the process, risk confusing the model for reality. In classrooms, AI creates a similar slippage: simulated thought that masquerades as student thought.

Teachers in the Times focus group voiced this anxiety. One noted: “You don’t know if they wrote it, or if it’s ChatGPT.” Assessment becomes not only a question of accuracy but of authenticity. What does it mean to grade an essay if the essay may be an algorithmic pastiche?

The comparison with earlier technologies is tempting. Calculators once threatened arithmetic; Wikipedia once threatened memorization. But AI is categorically different. A calculator does not claim to “think”; Wikipedia does not pretend to be you. Generative AI blurs authorship itself, eroding the very link between student, process, and product.

And yet, as McLuhan would remind us, every technology contains both peril and possibility. AI could be framed not as a substitute but as a collaborator — a partner in inquiry that scaffolds learning rather than replaces it. Teachers who integrate AI transparently, asking students to annotate or critique its outputs, may yet reclaim it as a tool for System 2 reasoning.

The danger is not that students will think less but that they will mistake machine fluency for their own voice.

But the Wild West remains. Until schools articulate norms, AI risks widening the gap between performance and understanding, appearance and reality.

The Inequality of Attention

Phones and AI do not distribute their burdens equally. The third crisis teachers describe is an inequality of attention that maps onto existing social divides.

Affluent families increasingly send their children to private or charter schools that restrict or ban phones altogether. At such schools, presence becomes a protected resource, and students experience something closer to the traditional “deep time” of education. Meanwhile, underfunded public schools are often powerless to enforce bans, leaving students marooned in a sea of distraction.

This disparity mirrors what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital — the non-financial assets that confer advantage, from language to habits of attention. In the digital era, the ability to disconnect becomes the ultimate form of privilege. To be shielded from distraction is to be granted access to focus, patience, and the deep literacy that Wolf describes.

Teachers in lower-income districts report students who cannot imagine life without phones, who measure self-worth in likes and streaks. For them, literacy itself feels like an alien demand — why labor through a novel when affirmation is instant online?

Maryanne Wolf warns that we are drifting toward a bifurcated literacy society: one in which elites preserve the capacity for deep reading while the majority are confined to surface skimming. The consequences for democracy are chilling. A polity trained only in System 1 thinking will be perpetually vulnerable to manipulation, propaganda, and authoritarian appeals.

The inequality of attention may prove more consequential than the inequality of income.

If democracy depends on citizens capable of deliberation, empathy, and historical memory, then the erosion of deep literacy is not a classroom problem but a civic emergency. Education cannot be reduced to test scores or job readiness; it is the training ground of the democratic imagination. And when that imagination is fractured by perpetual distraction, the republic itself trembles.

Reclaiming Focus in the Classroom

What, then, is to be done? The teachers’ testimonies, amplified by McLuhan, Turkle, Wolf, and Kahneman, might lead us toward despair. Phones colonize attention; AI destabilizes authorship; inequality corrodes the very ground of democracy. But despair is itself a form of surrender, and teachers cannot afford surrender.

Hope begins with clarity. We must name the problem not as “kids these days” but as a structural transformation of attention. To expect students to resist billion-dollar platforms alone is naive; schools must become countercultural sanctuaries where presence is cultivated as deliberately as literacy.

Practical steps follow. Schools can implement phone-free policies, not as punishment but as liberation — an invitation to reclaim time. Teachers can design “slow pedagogy” moments: extended reading, unbroken dialogue, silent reflection. AI can be reframed as a tool for meta-cognition, with students asked not merely to use it but to critique it, to compare its fluency with their own evolving voice.

Above all, we must remember that education is not simply about information transfer but about formation of the self. McLuhan’s dictum reminds us that the medium reshapes the student as much as the message. If we allow the medium of the phone to dominate uncritically, we should not be surprised when students emerge fragmented, reactive, and estranged from presence.

And yet, history offers reassurance. Plato once feared that writing itself would erode memory; medieval teachers once feared the printing press would dilute authority. Each medium reshaped thought, but each also produced new forms of creativity, knowledge, and freedom. The task is not to romanticize the past but to steward the present wisely.

Hannah Arendt, reflecting on education, insisted that every generation is responsible for introducing the young to the world as it is — flawed, fragile, yet redeemable. To abdicate that responsibility is to abandon both children and the world itself. Teachers today, facing the prosthetic selves of their students, are engaged in precisely this work: holding open the possibility of presence, of deep thought, of human encounter, against the centrifugal pull of the screen.

Education is the wager that presence can be cultivated even in an age of absence.

In the end, phones may be prosthetic selves — but they need not be destiny. The prosthesis can be acknowledged, critiqued, even integrated into a richer conception of the human. What matters is that students come to see themselves not as appendages of the machine but as agents capable of reflection, relationship, and wisdom.

The future of education — and perhaps democracy itself — depends on this wager. That in classrooms across America, teachers and students together might still choose presence over distraction, depth over skimming, authenticity over simulation. It is a fragile hope, but a necessary one.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI