Mark Anderson

I press myself into a density of the withheld. I am dropping silently into the depths, leaving only a trail of screaming bubbles that burst somewhere distant unseen.

I press myself into a density of the withheld. I am dropping silently into the depths, leaving only a trail of screaming bubbles that burst somewhere distant unseen.

#CreativeWriting #PersonalNarrative #Poetry

No matter how great I’ve shown myself to be in someone else’s eyes, I will become immediately self-effacing, I will ensure that your momentary passion is deflected, I will go dark when you want me to be alight, I will ensure that whatever flame you were electing me to ascend will be snuffed.

. . .ensuring that I could walk away without holding on to any hope.

Even when it turned out you were in love with me, infatuated with me, listening outside of my dorm room waiting for me to become a human being with a history that you could hold. It was too late.

So I could be something no one could hold onto, to be a little less controlled, a little less self-conscious, a little less self-defeating. So I could just be with you as a complete stranger there in that moment, flowing with nothing else between us, . . .

Let it be lost, I must have told myself at some point, from whence I decided memory was not a thing I needed to be beholden to. I decided I didn’t need to hold on to anything. I was the monk, I was the void, I was a sieve to everything in the moment, letting it run through me.

I will do everything I can to avoid getting confronted by the blankness of my yet unsaid. What I wanted to say already happened, and I’m moving on. Letting go of the dull ache of expectation. Becoming one with the void. Rather than expanding my pettiness onto it, filling it with my spent affections.

We Need to Talk About Scaffolding A new replication challenges the evidence behind one of education’s core ideas.

"Education #research suffers from a certain kind of evidential laxity: a tendency to accept claims on the basis of face validity, theoretical elegance, or ideological appeal rather than rigorous empirical testing."

via @carlhendrick.substack.com

#education

open.substack.com/pub/carlhend...

As an immigrant scientist in the U.S., travel bans and visa uncertainty are taking a toll “I began to question whether I truly belonged,” this postdoc writes

"For the first time, I began to question whether I truly belonged in the U.S. I even became self-conscious about my accent and appearance."

www.science.org/content/arti...

We Americans, Conservative and Liberal, demand that those with the duty to defend our Constitution do it now.

Fossil teeth from an 11-year-old reveal clues to why human childhood lasts so long Humans stand apart from many other primates by taking more time to mature, relying on a supportive network during a long period of childhood.

"Scientists propose that lengthening childhood in early humans might have come 1st, driving cultural transmission and social learning.

Over time, this dynamic may have supported brain expansion, rather than the brain growing first and pushing for extended development"
www.earth.com/news/human-c...

I’m a US citizen and a veteran. ICE arrested me for no reason. Jailed for three days without an explanation or ability to notify anyone, George Retes argues the only path to healing starts with the government taking accountability for its actions.

“I spent three nights and three days in federal custody. During that time, I was never told what I was charged with, was not allowed to shower despite being covered in tear gas and pepper spray, had no phone call to my family, and no access to an attorney.” - George Retes, U.S. citizen and veteran.

Welcome to Zero Migration America Closed borders will make the country smaller, poorer and less innovative

“The jobs that low-skilled migrants do…let people in other parts of the economy take on more skilled work. Florence Jaumotte of the IMF and colleagues find that in rich countries a 1 pct pt rise in migrants’ share of the adult population ultimately raises GDP per person by 2%.”

For my practitioner friends, people who managed Title I funds (among others) were laid off today.

Babies Start Processing Foreign Languages before They Are Born Babies process foreign languages they heard in utero much like their mother tongue, researchers find

"Babies start processing #language before they are born, a new study suggests."

www.scientificamerican.com/article/babi...

Using helicopters and chemical agents, immigration agents become increasingly aggressive in Chicago Activists, residents and elected leaders say increasingly combative tactics used by federal immigration agents are sparking violence and fueling neighborhood tensions in the nation’s third-largest cit...

CHICAGO (AP) — Storming an apartment complex by helicopter as families slept. Deploying chemical agents near a public school. Handcuffing a Chicago City Council member at a hospital.

apnews.com/article/chic...

Welcome to the Era of "Kavanaugh Raids" ICE crosses another big, important line.

America enters a new, dark chapter: "Kavanaugh Raids" on entire buildings and neighborhoods, a chapter surely to be remembered as infamously as we now view the "Palmer Raids" of the first Red Scare. www.doomsdayscenario.co/p/welcome-to...

Massive immigration raid on Chicago apartment building leaves residents reeling: 'I feel defeated' The Department of Homeland Security said federal agents with Border Patrol, the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives arrested 37 people in the raid.

"Watson said she saw agents dragging residents, including kids, out of the building without any clothes on and into U-Haul vans. Kids were separated from their mothers, she said."

chicago.suntimes.com/immigration/...

I Filmed the ICE Officer Who Shoved a Woman. It Felt Like the New Normal. I arrived in the U.S. eight weeks ago to report on how the administration’s immigration crackdown was playing out from the front lines. What I saw Thursday was the culmination of ICE’s aggressive behavior.

NEW: I arrived in the U.S. eight weeks ago to report on how the administration’s immigration crackdown was playing out from the front lines.

What I saw Thursday was the culmination of ICE’s aggressive behavior.

By @tilleckert.com

The findings underscore the importance of looking beyond simple averages to understand the complex effects of #bilingual experience.

Instead of relying on conventional averages, the study modeled performance as a continuous function of time, revealing that higher levels of English immersion were associated with slower initial performance, but a higher usage of English relative to Mandarin was linked to faster overall learning.

There have been a wide variety of contradictory findings on whether #bilingualism enhances #cognition or not, and a recent study suggests the way researchers measure performance may be the key to solving this mystery.

www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

To Understand AI, Watch How It Evolves | Quanta Magazine Naomi Saphra thinks that most research into language models focuses too much on the finished product. She’s mining the history of their training for insights into why these systems work the way they d...

"There are benefits of working on a slower timescale. You don’t get caught up in hype waves. You can take weekends off and still publish something original."

www.quantamagazine.org/to-understan...

A man sitting and looking towards the viewer of the engraving. The man leans his arm on a parapet and is surrounded by female personifications of Painting, Drawing and Sculpture as well as a winged angel with fanfare trumpets (Glory), Father Time with his scythe and the skeletal figure of Death clutching an arrow; a putti holds aloft a wreath and carries a palm. The image is part of a larger engraving, made around 1600, and nowadays at the BM 58490001 (Source: https://www.britishmuseum.org/collection/image/58490001 ).

This is how your email finds me.

Beyond the Brick Wall: Using Environmental Neuroscience to Boost Learning and Well-being The capacity for intense focus in our students is a finite resource—a cognitive fuel tank that can, and does, run low. We see the results daily in the classroom: irritability, impatience, and a fra…

Big thanks to @manymindspod.bsky.social and Dr. Marc Berman's research for inspiring my latest post.

#Nature isn't just an amenity, it's essential for student #cognition.

#education #neuroscience

schoolecosystem.wordpress.com/2025/09/21/b...

Dear American citizens, whatever you wish more German citizens would have done in 1933, do that now.

"these results demonstrate that latent tree-structured sentence representations emerge in both humans and LLMs"

languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=71128

Americans are most likely to encounter people from different economic classes in gas stations, restaurants and hotels. This mixing is least likely to happen in elementary and secondary schools, while exercising, and in supermarkets. www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Educator Perceptions of HQIM Alignment, Adoption, and Implementation in Grades K-5: Report - Tennessee Reading Research Center

Check out our latest report: Educator Perceptions of HQIM Alignment, Adoption, and Implementation in Grades K-5, which captures the experiences and perceptions of district leaders, school leaders, and teachers who have implemented HQIM in Grades K-5 in TN.

trrc.utk.edu/resources/hq...

New York City’s Rats Have a Secret Nightlife—And a Language Humans Can’t Hear A new preprint field study reveals that New York City’s rats aren’t just survivors—they’re talkative city dwellers with their own hidden nightlife. Mapping their movements and conversations could offe...

"One of the rats that the team recorded even soliloquized alone inside a garbage bag—perhaps offering a Yelp review for passing comrades."

www.scientificamerican.com/article/scie...