I was trying to describe someone — a teacher, a manager, the kind of authority figure who issues a lot of direction without doing much of it themselves — and I kept landing on a word that surprised me. Not incompetent. Not lazy. Afraid. Fear isn’t what I usually reach for when I’m trying to explain coercive leadership. But sit with it long enough and it makes a very specific kind of sense. The people who lead by force and mandate and the threat of consequence are, very often, the people who most fear leading by example. Not for personal reasons. For structural ones. When you lead by example, your behavior is the argument. Not your title. Not your seniority, your credential, your years in…

A student stayed after class and asked me, a little apologetically, whether the practice actually regulates the nervous system or whether that’s just a thing teachers say. Fair question. The honest answer is that the people who built this had no idea what a nervous system was, and it worked anyway. That should bother you more than it does. We’re standing on two thousand years of instruction written by people who couldn’t have told you why a single piece of it helped. No mechanism. No study. No control group. And yet here we are, still doing it, because it kept producing something worth coming back for. I’ve stopped finding that embarrassing. I’ve started finding it clarifying. Here is what the ancients actually had: outcome data….

I was half-listening to an AI regulation podcast when the pattern landed. Not a new podcast — there are a thousand of them now, all saying roughly the same things with different levels of alarm. This one had someone who had actually read the filings, the testimony, the CEO letters to Congress. I was not taking notes. I was making lunch. That is where I heard it: the AI company leaders are very specific about harms. They can name the displaced workers — coders, first, but then radiologists, paralegals, customer service reps. They cite the studies on teenage mental health and algorithmic exposure. They talk about AI-generated pornography with enough specificity to suggest they have thought hard about it internally. The precision is striking when…

A student in the front row can’t hinge forward. She’s seated, legs extended, trying to reach toward her feet. Her pelvis won’t move. Her spine is rounding from the base. Her face is doing the thing faces do when the body refuses and the person inside has decided this is a personal failure. I tell her: put something under your butt. She looks at me like I offered her a reduced sentence. The prop mythology runs deep. Blocks are for beginners. Props are for people who can’t do it yet. Put the block away when you’re ready. Some of this comes from lineage — traditions where the shapes were sacred, where modification was equivalent to deviation. Some of it is aesthetic. A room of people…