Mike Minded

A travel article addressing how tourists can adapt their Cancun vacation plans when sargassum seaweed makes beaches unusable. The piece suggests alternative activities that aren’t beach-dependent, reframing disappointment as opportunity for different experiences. Teaching: • When students encounter obstacles in practice (injury, fatigue, life chaos), offer ‘seaweed-proof’ alternatives rather than canceling—restorative sequences, pranayama-focused sessions, or…

Philip Ball examines the concept of biological agency—the idea that living organisms devise their own goals and act on them—as a way to distinguish life from non-living matter. The debate centers on whether organisms are simply genetic automata or genuine decision-making agents that integrate contextual information to set proximal goals and cause change in the…

UK judges are hearing an appeal over Trinidad and Tobago’s colonial-era law criminalizing same-sex intimacy. A 2018 ruling struck down the law as unconstitutional, but was overturned in 2023; the case now tests whether ‘savings clauses’ preserving British colonial laws after independence remain valid. Activists across the Caribbean are watching closely, as similar laws persist…

Adam Mastroianni argues that many forms of deviance (crime, teen drinking, smoking, pregnancy) have declined since the 1990s due to rising prosperity, not intentional policy. He explores why we fail to celebrate these wins and introduces three internet-accelerated trends: cultural carcinization (convergence on a small set of viable strategies), de-frictioning (removal of obstacles that once…

The essay recounts Sartre’s famous 1945 lecture ‘Existentialism Is a Humanism,’ delivered to an overflow crowd in post-war Paris. Sartre attempted to defend existentialism and construct a morality beyond nihilism, paradoxically offering guidance while insisting people guide themselves. He later regretted the lecture’s viral success, fearing it reduced his complex philosophy to pullquotes and distorted…

The National Museum of Women in the Arts opened a new café in partnership with DC roaster Slipstream, featuring a Colombian coffee line cultivated exclusively by female farmers. The opening coincided with a Free Community Day offering extended hours, drop-in art activities, gallery talks, and tours celebrating women artists. Teaching: • Use the female-farmer coffee…

Alpha School, a $75,000/year private network backed by wealthy tech figures and promoted by the Trump administration, uses AI tutors to compress education into two-hour sessions. Former employees report the AI curriculum is poorly structured, students need far more than two hours daily, and the school collects extensive personal data while operating without state oversight…

Meta’s data center in Cheyenne, Wyoming contaminated municipal wastewater with Cupriavidus gilardii, a rare multidrug-resistant bacterium with a 31% mortality rate, during a fill-and-flush cooling system startup. The incident prompted city officials to ban fill-and-flush discharge for all data centers, highlighting how infrastructure decisions create cascading consequences for entire communities. Teaching: • Use this as…

OfficeCLI is an open-source command-line tool that enables AI agents to create, read, and edit Microsoft Office files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) without requiring Office installation. It includes a built-in HTML rendering engine for high-fidelity document preview and operates through simple one-line commands, replacing complex Python libraries with streamlined CLI syntax. Teaching: • Use the render-look-fix…

A Kindle user discovers Amazon has remotely disabled downloading new books to their older device, forcing them to either buy new hardware or use other platforms. The author concludes they will now pirate books they’ve purchased rather than reward Amazon’s planned obsolescence, noting the company has eliminated any incentive to continue buying from them. Teaching:…