Nikole Hannah-Jones and her daughter’s education

The New Neo Posted on by

There’s a great deal of commentary around the blogosphere on this article by Nikole Hannah-Jones in The New York Times Magazine. You remember NHJ, don’t you? She was the mind behind the 1619 Project, the duplicitous Times rewriting of the American founding to be all about slavery.

This time NHJ is in a confessional mood. I haven’t read all of the article because it’s behind a paywall, but there are copious excerpts at Ace’s: see this. Here are some samples, which should give you the general idea. The title is “In Fighting For Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own?”:

A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice. …

“Did you know my school was bad like this when you decided to put me here?” [my daughter] asked.

My hands tightened on the steering wheel as I worked to keep my face neutral, buying a few moments to gather my thoughts. …

I had braced myself for this moment, spent nearly a decade expecting it, preparing for it. When Najya was entering pre-K, my husband, Faraji, and I decided to send her to the type of school that wealthier families with choices uniformly avoid — one that is low-income and mostly Black. Our decision had been informed by values shaped by my years of reporting on the enduring and too often seemingly hopeless battle for school integration.

Leftist race activists are often accused of compromising by sending their own children to elite private schools in order to protect them from a terrible public school system, opening the activists to accusations of hypocrisy. NHJ made a very different decision, which was to sacrifice her own child’s education in order to avoid such charges. When her daughter realized what had happened, she was angry – rightfully so, I think.

It’s amazing to me that NHJ wrote the piece at all, although apparently she sees herself as a well-meaning idealist rather than someone with insufficient regard for her daughter. I wonder if her daughter okayed the article, because it also seems like a possible invasion of privacy (as I said, I didn’t have access to the whole thing, so perhaps that issue is addressed in the article).

I think most leftists with the money probably opt for protecting their children and giving them a good education, unlike NHJ. But her approach has adherents, too – people for whom the principle overrides the person of the child. One such father was Leo Tolstoy, and the fight over the issue of education was a prominent and recurrent feature of his tumultuous relationship with his wife Sonya. Tolstoy had come to disbelieve in the value of education, but his wife Sonya wanted their children to have every advantage in that realm and she made sure they did.

[NOTE: I haven’t found much information online about the details of the Tolstoy battle over the children’s education, but I recall quite a bit about it after having read two books years ago that were devoted to the stormy Tolstoy marriage, and here’s a post I wrote on the subject.]

Writers write

The New Neo Posted on by

I am so grateful for your many heartfelt and touching condolences.

Thinking about the question of when to resume writing the blog, I think it’s a good idea for me to just plunge in – maybe not at quite the usual rate right away, though. I find that thinking about other things than myself and my own personal woes is a good distraction for me for a while each day.

Also, if you think about what makes a person want to write – and I certainly have thought about it – for most there’s an impulse to tell the tale. Although I’m not the most self-disclosing writer around – as you can tell from the green apple – I still feel compelled to tell what I’ve been going through or at least the part of it. So I plan to be adding some personal reflections on, for instance, how hospitals are run these days. I’ve had far more experience with that topic lately than I’d ever have liked.

Open thread 9/22/2026

The New Neo Posted on by

Spring and Fall
– to a young child

By Gerard Manley Hopkins

Márgarét, áre you gríeving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you wíll weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow’s spríngs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It ís the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Grieving

The New Neo Posted on by

He was a presence in my life for nearly sixty years – first as young boyfriend, then as husband, then as ex-husband. But always, always, a central figure. And how he is gone.

He had some health problems, to be sure. But not fatal ones, or ones that were supposed to be fatal. But he got aspiration pneumonia after a relatively routine surgery and just couldn’t shake it. Yesterday he died.

The chain of events lasted about a month from start to finish. It felt like something unstoppable, although I continue to think something could have been done to stop it. Perhaps that’s unrealistic of me, but that’s how I feel. It was only a few days ago that I realized this train to death would not stop, and by then there wasn’t time to talk and plan.

He was the person who knew what we had gone through, the only person except me. He was the most intense relationship of my life. We had a child together – now a grown man with a family of his own, giving us grandchildren. My ex-husband was a wonderful father and grandfather, able to entertain any child for hours. He entertained me, too. One of his favorite ploys was, in the middle of an argument between us, to make a joke that stopped me in my tracks and cracked me up.

He was the person who could look at me now and remember me when I was a young woman. And I could look at him and remember him when he was a young man.

Now there are many sad tasks to perform – in particular the dismantling of all the carefully-assembled memorabilia and bric-a-brac and voluminous paperwork that are amassed in a long life by someone who very much liked to save things.

It is a tremendous loss for me.

The case against AI doom

The New Neo Posted on by

I’d rather the world not be destroyed by AI, so I’m heartened by this. An excerpt:

Here are the main counterarguments:

* Intelligence does not imply agency: A system can be extraordinarily capable at prediction, theorem proving, engineering, programming, etc. without having persistent goals, self-preservation drives, or an independent desire to act.

That has long puzzled me about the assertions of AI-doomers, as well.

More:

* Agency does not imply a single, stable utility function: Much alignment theory reasons about agents as expected-utility maximizers with coherent preferences. Actual AIs systems need not resemble that abstraction, and currently do not. …

* Capability and motivation are being conflated: Being able to formulate a plan for escaping a sandbox doesn’t entail wanting to escape it. …

* Recursive self-improvement doesn’t entail an intelligence explosion …

Intelligence may have sharply diminishing returns: There may be no meaningful scalar quantity corresponding to arbitrarily large “general intelligence.” Even if there is, going from IQ-equivalent 150 to 1,500 need not produce the sort of qualitative advantage that separates humans from chimpanzees. …

* Superintelligence isn’t omnipotence: Intelligence cannot repeal physics or eliminate uncertainty. A brilliant AI still needs processors, electricity, network access, money, factories, robots and people willing or tricked into doing things. …

* Humans retain numerous intervention points: The doom narrative sometimes jumps from “AI behaves dangerously” to “humanity is helpless.”

There’s a lot more at the link. Much although not all of it seems to have to do with the idea of agency and the tendency of people to anthropomorphize AI. Many of the comments there are worthwhile, too.

However, the following seems ironic, tacked on at the end of the lengthy tweet:

ChatGPT 6 Astra assisted with the research for this post.

News roundup

The New Neo Posted on by

(1) We wouldn’t want a wonderful person such as this to be deported from Canada, now would we?

A Haitian woman who disfigured a stranger in a Montreal-area biting attack has been given a reduced sentence by a Quebec judge on the grounds that a harsher prison term would endanger her “precarious immigration status.”

Just two days after Christmas in 2022, Macdala Monfiston spent eight minutes viciously attacking a woman outside a bar in Laval, Que., leaving the victim with bite marks all over her arms and face. …

Although good Samaritans attempted to intervene, they were held back by Monfiston’s boyfriend.

After Monfiston pleaded guilty to aggravated assault in early 2025, a Court of Quebec judge sentenced her to four years in prison – the sentence already a fraction of the maximum 14-year sentence set for the crime under the Criminal Code.

But in a decision released this week, the Quebec Court of Appeal ruled that four years was too harsh, in part because it could possibly get her deported.

Canada has gone left, and I’d say it’s also gone pretty far into suicidal empathy. This may be especially true in Quebec. Note also that the Quebec Court of Appeal ruling was signed by three female judges – not that males are immune to suicidal empathy, but I think females are somewhat more vulnerable.

(2) Not supporting Israel-hating rap singer Macklemore enough gets Ed Sheeran in trouble with the “Free Palestine” crowd. Mackelmore has been saying that “Free Palestine” are “two words … near and dear to my heart.”

I think a good rejoinder would be, “Yes, free Palestine … from Hamas and Jew-hatred.”

(3) The holdout juror in the Clancy trial says that no, he did not have reasonable doubt, contrary to what some other jurors on the panel have alleged about him. He’s also a Trump-supporter, which he says made him a target of the others. I can well believe it.

(4) The British village of Piddington (great name) doesn’t seem to suffer from suicidal empathy:

A tiny English village has voted overwhelmingly to leave the United Kingdom in a symbolic referendum triggered by government plans to house more than 1,200 male asylum seekers at a former military site nearby.

Residents of Piddington, a rural village in Oxfordshire, voted 285 to 26 to “secede from the UK and pursue self-determination,” with a turnout of nearly 92%. The vote has no legal force.

Piddington has a population of around 350 people. The asylum accommodation plan would house up to 1,256 asylum seekers, more than three times the population of the village, at a former British military base in Bicester, half a mile from Piddington.

The site would operate as a non-detained asylum accommodation, meaning the asylum seekers would be able to come and go. …

“I’m worried about the safety of the children and the women of the village,” said Jennifer Owen, who voted to leave the U.K. “The towns won’t be the same, they’ll be overrun, village will be overrun. It just won’t be the same again.”

Isn’t that the point?

Until now, most of the asylum centers have been located near poorer towns. Piddington, however, is relatively affluent. And that’s the plan, too:

“We cannot have a situation where it’s only the poorest communities in the country that receive all of the dispersal of refugees and asylum seekers,” [Prime Minister] Burnham told GB News.

Well then, I suggest he take about thirty into 10 Downing Street and an equal number into his family home, where he sometimes still lives.

(5) Iran branches out:

One disturbing aspect of the surge in antisemitic violence since October 7 has received relatively little attention: Western governments say that Iran and Iranian-backed organizations have been behind a series of plots and attacks against Jewish and Israeli targets across Europe, North America and Australia.

The phenomenon became impossible to dismiss as a collection of unrelated incidents in June. Twenty-four governments, including the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, Germany and Sweden, jointly condemned “lethal plotting and other malign actions” by Iran’s IRGC Intelligence Organization, Quds Force and Ministry of Intelligence. They specifically identified “Jewish and Israeli communities and interests” among Iran’s targets and noted the Iranian security services’ longstanding relationship with international and local criminal groups.

This is not completely new, however. For example, there’s the 1994 bombing of a Jewish center in Buenos Aires that killed 85 people and was sponsored by Iran and carried out by Hezbollah. There was also the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in that city. More at the link.

Slightly overzealous comment filter

The New Neo Posted on by

The new comments policy I instituted a while back has been working very well so far (knock wood) to block trolls.

On the other hand, it’s a trifle overeager and sometimes blocks certain comments from regular comments for no reason whatsoever, as far as I can tell. So if you find that a comment of yours fails to appear, please wait a few hours. I check these things at least once a day, and I’ll liberate it from the moderation or spam pile before too much time passes.

Also, comments from first-time commenters go into moderation just that first time, until I approve them. After that, comments from that same commenter should appear automatically.

Throwing money at schools doesn’t work …

The New Neo Posted on by

… if you don’t apply it in a thoughtful way. New York, case in point:

… New York public education is falling behind because the state has ignored chances to discover what educational practices really work, use that evidence to improve student outcomes, and make its leadership accountable for results.

While the state gathers troves of data, many of its most important programs are poorly measured or poorly evaluated.

For example, New York knows very little about its two fastest-growing programs: special education and school-based mental-health services. In New York, 21 percent of public school students are classified as having a disability, compared with the national average of 15 percent. The state has also opened more than 1,000 school-based mental-health clinics and hired counselors at a rate few other states can match. But it does not track if students are getting the services they need, if the programs are effective, or even if parents agreed to them.

Brilliant, just brilliant.

Similar problems dog New York’s tracking of individual students, teacher training programs, and the elimination of the infamous compulsory Regents exams of my youth. New York knows that charter schools are a good idea, but for political reasons they are very limited. And on and on and on.

It’s a choice to be mediocre, and to use money to fund Democrat constituencies in education rather than caring about education itself.

Say goodbye to the penny

The New Neo Posted on by

The act eliminating them is a pun:

The House of Representatives voted to send the smallest piece of US currency the way of the dodo on Monday, passing the bipartisan Common Cents Act in a unanimous vote.

In addition to blocking the Treasury from minting any more pennies save for collector coins, the bill would also set up a framework for cash transactions to be rounded to the nearest 5 cents, in order to eliminate the need for pennies altogether.

When was the last time you used a penny? Now they cost too much to manufacture. So begone!

When I was a kid, penny candy was actually a thing. We went to a little news store that had many bins of it and made our choices carefully. But that’s when a candy bar usually cost a nickel.