Breaking: Texas Tech transfer quarterback Brendan Sorsby plans to enter the NFL Supplemental Draft, sources tell @PeteThamel. Amid the legal wrangling over his NCAA eligibility after admitting he bet on sports, Sorsby intends to head to the NFL.

The fact that two-time Academy Award-winning actor Emma Thompson wrote this line for the 1995 adaption of ‘Pride & Prejudice’ movie but she didn’t want to be credited. #WomenWriters #JaneAusten

Texas Tech Pres. Lawrence Schovanec, on NCAA gambling rules (Brendan Sorsby) “I think we have to recognize the rules in place now we’re made long before there were millions of young people walking around with a legal gambling apparatus in their pocket” Sorsby bet on Indiana football, basketball and Cincinnati hoops…

A message to the Texas Tech community from our leadership.

The Ingalls family journey begins. Little House on the Prairie, based on the beloved books, premieres July 9.

Not sure how many more of these pieces about AI influences on education I'm going to post, because at this point, I think the conclusion is both clear and obscure. Clear: Our current high school curricula and college liberal arts degrees cannot continue to be administered as they've been for the last century. Obscure: What we'll replace them with. ** If at first teachers worried about students using chatbots to write essays, now new agentic tools such as Claude Code are allowing students to outsource even more of their work to the machines. Need to take an online math quiz? Write a biology-lab report? Create a PowerPoint presentation for history class? AI can do all of this and more. One high schooler recently told me that he struggles to think of a single assignment that AI wouldn’t be able to do for him. As a measure of just how good AI has become at schoolwork, consider a new bot called Einstein. Several weeks ago, the tool went viral with big claims: “Einstein checks for new assignments and knocks them out before the deadline,” a website advertising the bot explained. All that a student had to do was hand over their credentials for Canvas, the popular learning-management platform, and Einstein promised to do the rest... When I first came across Einstein, I was skeptical: Flashy AI demos have a way of overpromising and under-delivering. So I decided to test the tool out for myself. Because I’m not a college student, I enrolled in a free online introductory-statistics class. The course website explained that the class was self-paced and that it could help undergraduates, postgraduates, medical students, and even lecturers build up basic statistical knowledge. I set the bot loose, and in less than an hour, Einstein had worked through all eight modules and seven quizzes. There were some hiccups—the bot took one quiz 15 times—but it ultimately earned a perfect score in the class. As for me? I hardly so much as read the course website. ...Einstein does seem to be an indicator of where AI in the classroom is headed. The latest bots have massive context windows, meaning that students can feed in mountains of course content such as syllabi, lecture slides, and practice exams. Today’s agentic tools can complete all kinds of tasks, such as participating in online discussion forums and taking notes on recorded lectures without student intervention. According to one analysis, the percentage of students middle-school age or older who self-reported using AI for help with homework climbed by 14 points from May to December of last year... Instructors, as I have previously written, are also using plenty of AI. Canvas recently introduced a new AI teaching agent designed to save instructors time on “low educational value tasks” such as organizing online-course modules and adjusting assignment due dates. “Faculty are using AI tools both for instructional purposes, for building course materials, but they’re also starting to play around with generative AI to actually grade and assess the learning,” Marc Watkins, a researcher at the University of Mississippi who studies AI and education, told me. He gave a hypothetical: “I could set my agent up, open it up in my course, go out on campus to walk across campus to get a cup of coffee at Starbucks,” he said. By the time he returned, 15 minutes later, all of the essays would be graded, and “bespoke personal feedback” would be sent out to each student. AI can save teachers time—that same grading takes him 10 or 12 hours, Watkins estimated—but in the process, the technology threatens the relationship between students and teachers that is core to education. “That’s really scary,” he said. Most people I spoke with seemed unhappy with the current trajectory of bots in the classroom. Even as growing numbers of students are using the technology, a majority believe that the more they use AI for classwork, the more it will harm their critical-thinking skills...Some educators are worried about “a fully automated loop”—as the Modern Language Association put it last fall—in which AI-generated assignments are completed and graded by AI agents. Instructors have taken to analyzing students’ Google Docs history to make sure they are typing responses live instead of pasting in text from a bot. But of course, an AI work-around exists for that too: A new suite of human-typing simulators promises to generate text to make it look as if a student is writing in real time when, really, the work is being done by AI. theatlantic.com/technology/2…

"I support the alcoholic's ability to return to alcohol after treatment."

Schools saying they will refuse to schedule Texas Tech is one thing. But the real question is whether the Big 12 steps in to stop the Red Raiders from playing Brendan Sorsby after a Texas judge overruled the NCAA: nbcsports.com/college-footba…

On Sunday, my friend Gordon Wood was struck and killed in a car accident. Gordon taught history at Brown Univ. and was among the most accomplished historians America has produced. He won the 1993 Pulitzer Prize for The Radicalism of the American Revolution, and his earlier book The Creation of the American Republic, 1776–1787 took the 1970 Bancroft Prize. He also received the National Humanities Medal. He was, in my view, the finest historian of America's founding—which makes it all the sadder that he did not live to see the nation's 250th birthday. His reputation reached popular culture, too. Matt Damon's character in Good Will Hunting invokes him by name in the famous bar scene, accusing a Harvard student of simply "regurgitating Gordon Wood, talking about [...] the pre-Revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization." I feel fortunate to have collaborated with Gordon on several projects. In a 2019 anthology I compiled, he wrote an essay on the possibility of a shared American narrative. He centered his argument on equal rights as "the most radical and most powerful ideological force" the Revolution unleashed. "This powerful sense of equality is still alive and well in America," he wrote, "and despite all of its disturbing and unsettling consequences, it is what makes us one people." When I needed jacket blurbs for my new book Lincoln's Compass, coming out this November, I turned to Gordon. The fit was natural: the book argues that Abraham Lincoln took the Declaration's claim that "all men are created equal" as his guiding moral compass—and that he refocused the nation on that claim. Gordon, ever the gentleman, offered generous praise. He was, in many respects, the dean of American historians. He will be very hard to replace.

Anthony Head, best known for TV roles in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Ted Lasso and Little Britain, dies aged 72 bbc.in/4g2M45Z

LIGHT THE TOWER 🤘🏆