The opposite of agency is learned helplessness. If people believe that we can’t do very much to stop the world’s problems, it’s unsurprising that they’d be terrified to bring children into the world. But this seems like a mental trap that we can, and should, teach people to resist falling into. As  Clare Coffey writes  in “Failure to Cop

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But the informational value of the web has been nearly destroyed. Fake News isn’t even the biggest problem. It’s the digital ecosystem’s insistence on stifling curiosity by prioritizing ANSWERS over questions.

Most impactfully, the web has been systematically re-engineered to hinder discovery in order to drive people as quickly as possible to comme... See more

Every time I was held up as an example in English class, I wanted to crawl under a rock and die. I didn’t do it! I didn’t study at all, half the time I did the homework in the car on the way to school, those essays for the statewide competition were thrown together on a lark without a trace of real effort. To praise me for any of it seemed and stil... See more