Virtual Worlds · Digital Culture · AI Literati
Death is the thing most parents want to protect their children from knowing about, and also the thing it is genuinely impossible to protect them from. Every child will experience it — a grandparent, a...
Read article →For most of human history, friendship was a geographic fact. You were friends with the people who lived nearby, worked nearby, grew up nearby. Distance was the natural boundary of connection. The idea...
Read article →When parents and educators talk about keeping children safe online, the conversation almost always gravitates toward threats: predators, cyberbullying, inappropriate content. These are real. But frami...
Read article →Every evening in millions of households, the same fight unfolds. A child refuses to start homework. A parent insists. There are tears, threats, slammed doors, and eventually something that technically...
Read article →The American Academy of Pediatrics has issued screen time guidelines. The World Health Organization has issued screen time guidelines. Your pediatrician has probably mentioned screen time guidelines....
Read article →Ask a boy what he is feeling and the most common answer, across most ages and most cultures, is "fine." Ask him again, more specifically — are you sad, are you scared, are you embarrassed — and you ma...
Read article →Raising Emotionally Intelligent Children in an Age of Emotional Suppression The paradox is hard to miss once you see it. We live in a cultural moment that talks about emotional intelligence more than...
Read article →How Children Actually Learn Social Skills (It's Not What You Think) Most conversations about teaching children social skills focus on the wrong thing. They focus on direct instruction: telling childre...
Read article →Divorce is hard enough when it is clean. When it is messy — when there was betrayal, or years of conflict, or a custody dispute that went to court — co-parenting afterward can feel like being asked to...
Read article →Anxiety is one of the most common things children experience, and one of the most misunderstood by well-meaning parents. The instinct to soothe, reassure, and protect is powerful. When your child is s...
Read article →Teen Social Media: The Parent's Practical Survival Guide Let me start with what the research actually says, because the conversation about teenagers and social media is often conducted at a temperatur...
Read article →Your child is growing up in a world where artificial intelligence is not a science fiction concept — it is the thing that suggests what to watch next, writes their classmate's essay, and powers the vo...
Read article →Stoicism for the Modern Soul: What Marcus Aurelius Would Think of AI Marcus Aurelius would not have been impressed. This is not a criticism of him — he was a man who watched a plague kill five million...
Read article →Free Will in the Age of Algorithms: Are Our Choices Really Ours? There is an old philosophical question that has acquired a new urgency. The question of free will — whether your choices are genuinely...
Read article →Buddhist Non-Attachment in the Age of Social Media Likes Buddhism has been misunderstood by the wellness industry in ways that are almost impressively thorough. Non-attachment, which is a core teachin...
Read article →The Illusion of Control: Why We Plan and Life Ignores Our Plans The Greek word for the tragic irony of plans undone by circumstance is peripeteia — the reversal. Aristotle considered it essential to t...
Read article →The Philosophy of Listening: Why Being Truly Heard Is So Rare Most of what passes for listening is actually waiting. You can see it in the slight tension in someone's face as you speak — the gathering...
Read article →Simone de Beauvoir and the Loneliness of Being a Woman in Public There is a specific kind of loneliness that Simone de Beauvoir identified before anyone had given it a name. It is not the loneliness o...
Read article →What Does It Mean to Be Present? AI and the Philosophy of Attention The instruction to be present is among the most frequently offered pieces of advice in contemporary wellness culture, and among the...
Read article →Albert Camus on Loneliness: The Absurd and the Comfort of Strangers Camus is often read as a philosopher of despair, which is a misreading so common it has almost become the official reading. The Stra...
Read article →The Ship of Theseus Problem and Personal Identity: Who Are You Becoming? The story is simple enough to be told in two sentences. The Athenians preserved the ship of Theseus as a monument, replacing pl...
Read article →Existential Questions AI Actually Helps You Sit With There is a specific kind of conversation that most people cannot have with anyone in their lives. Not because the people around them are unsympathe...
Read article →Is Friendship in the Digital Age Still Real Friendship? The question seems almost too obvious to ask, which usually means it is worth asking carefully. Of course digital friendships can be real. Peopl...
Read article →Finding Purpose Without Religion: What Secular Philosophy Offers There is a gap in the secular world that does not get acknowledged often enough. When people leave religious communities — whether by s...
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