Jun. 6, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

ByFla. Its. Shevrin Jones

The Florida Legislatureconvened for a special session this week and passed Gov. Ron DeSantis proposal to put a gradual elimination of homestead property taxes on November’s ballot. As a legislator who represents a vibrant, diverse community in South Florida, I could not in good conscience support this measure.  I voted “no”  because the math does not add up and Floridians deserve honesty, not political theater.

The resolution would raise the homestead exemption from $50,000 to $150,000 in 2027 and to $250,000 in 2028, with a stated path toward full elimination of homestead property taxes. Florida is already one of nine states in the United States without an income tax.

Republicans across the country, including many here in Florida, have talked for so long about lowering taxes or eliminating taxes that they seem to have forgotten that taxes pay for things that people need and that getting rid of taxes in such a haphazard way will cause pain for individuals and local governments across the state.

Jun. 6, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Late last month, American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten called for what would amount to a significant reversal of the education establishment’s embrace of technology when she suggested restrictions on artificial intelligence and electronic screens in schools. Though her call to action stopped short of a total ban, Weingarten said restrictions are needed “to harness the benefits of technology while mitigating harms.”

Schools have spent billions of dollars rushing devices into children’s hands. Such spending was especially high during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the results have been profound. As of last school year, 88% of public schools reported providing every child with a laptop, tablet or similar device. Just last year, the AFT partnered with Microsoft, OpenAI, Anthropic and others to launch a $23 million National Academy for AI Instruction aimed at helping educators use AI responsibly and effectively in schools.

But in a May 27 speech at the National Press Club, Weingarten said, “All this tech has been a huge experiment on kids, and experiments can go wrong.”

Much of the debate over AI in schools has focused on the loss of students’ analytical skills, cognitive offloading and shrinking attention spans. Those are legitimate concerns. But we should pay more attention to another essential cognitive function being systematically engineered out of existence: boredom.

Often misunderstood as a passive state, boredom is a transitional state that frequently precedes curiosity, imagination and original thought. Boredom is deeply tied to children developing the ability to think for themselves.

Doomscrolling social media and watching endless short video clips already make a state of boredom harder to reach. But there are still gaps where a child (or adult) can drift into boredom, and from there, imagination.

AI systems, however, anticipate the idle moment. They analyze our behavior and preferences to personalize content, predict our questions before we finish asking them and generate answers before we can wrestle with a problem. Every pause is filled before the mind has a chance to wander somewhere unexpected. Thus, they reduce the cognitive friction that often gives rise to insight. Psychologists call that friction a “productive struggle.”

To the student assigned an essay, the blank page creates a kind of discomfort. Where to start? Which ideas are worth pursuing? What questions need answering? If a person stares at the page long enough, boredom will eventually give way to emerging ideas. But when such writing is outsourced to AI, that discomfort disappears, along with the friction that sparks creativity.

For years, educators have treated boredom as an enemy of learning and something to be eliminated. The last thing a teacher wants is a disengaged or disinterested student, right? But there’s a difference between apathy and a boredom that triggers curiosity in the unoccupied mind. Boredom can provoke students to ask unusual questions, meander through half-formed ideas and try to solve problems or complete tasks in unconventional ways. But constant digital stimulation makes that less likely.

Boredom is not a bug in human cognition. It’s a complex neurological feature that can fuel introspection, invention and the activation of the brain’s default mode network. That’s the state associated with mind-wandering, reflection and original thought — and the occasional inspiration to dye our hair neon.

Bored children learn to tolerate frustration, entertain themselves and persist through uncertainty. Those are skills that adults who grew up before smartphones and generative AI didn’t have to work to acquire.

From Newton’s theories to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” and Alexey Pajitnov’s Tetris, these creators were driven by the same impulse: to fill the silence of the mind with something new. But that requires having access to that idle moment, something AI and other technologies are actively patching out.

You’ve likely heard the counterargument: that AI, by automating mundane tasks, frees us for higher-level thinking and creativity. However, a a 2022 study found that five-minute, low-effort, low-distraction pauses boosted productivity by 7.12%. And in a 2012 studyresearchers found that participants who completed a dull task later performed better on creative problem-solving tasks. That suggests “boring” tasks are not a waste of time but may enhance creative thinking.

Another recent study by Katy Tam and Michael Inzlicht published in Communications Psychology found that people are paradoxically more bored in the digital age than before it.  Technology, they found, is eliminating idle mental space and making people feel more bored when constant stimulation is not available. Various studies have shown that attempts to escape boredom contribute to problematic uses of digital technologies and declining mental health.

Weingarten is right that we’ve been running an experiment on children. But while we may track reading levels and test scores, we don’t know what happens to children who don’t develop the ability to sit in discomfort long enough for their minds to wander.

What are the long-term consequences when an entire generation is deprived of the opportunity?

The antidote isn’t just reduced screen time, though that’s part of the equation. We need to embrace boredom, engineering it back into our lives, our lesson plans and the design of the technology students use.

Answers could include device-free spaces, unstructured school time, outdoor playchallenging students to solve problems that cannot be completed with digital tools, incorporating 15–20 minutes of daily meditative silence, increasing physical activity or deliberately introducing friction, latency and moments that prompt human reflection and ideation into the AI technologies we use.

We need to reclaim agency over the systems designed to eradicate boredom out of our lives. Weingarten must know that students will complain that they’re bored if their screens are taken away. And when they do, their teachers can tell them that’s the point and hand them a blank page. Because what comes next is what we’re trying to preserve.

Katherine Brodsky is a journalist (WIRED, Newsweek, Skeptic) and author who often covers the intersection of technology, psychology and culture. She publishes the “Random Minds” newsletter on Substack.

Jun. 6, 2026, 6:00 AM EDT

Graham Platner needs to drop out of the Maine Senate race — and Democrats should be the ones to coax him toward the door.

When Platner first threw his hat in the ring last year, there was a reasonable argument for his candidacy — here was a political outsider with a fresh perspective who represented a new generation of political talent for Democrats.

But everything we have learned about Platner over the past several months suggests that he is a moral and political trainwreck, with enough skeletons in his closet to fill a graveyard.

Indeed, since Platner announced his candidacy last year, there has been an unceasing drumbeat of scandals about him. He filled a Reddit message board with sexist, racist and off-color comments. He has exaggerated his working-class background and appears to have spent most of his life living off handouts from his parents. But above all, there was the revelation last fall that he had gotten a Nazi Totenkopf tattoo on his chest two decades ago — and by his account only realized it was a Nazi tattoo in the fall of 2025, as he began his campaign for the U.S. Senate.

In recent days, the stories about Platner have taken on a darker, more troubling hue. Last week, The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times revealed that soon after his marriage in 2023, Platner was caught by his wife sexting as many as a dozen women. His profile page on Kikan anonymous social media site often used for dating, was still active.

Then on Thursday, The New York Times published an account of three former girlfriends of Platner who described him as volatile, unfaithful and physically threatening. One woman, Lyndsey Fifield, a conservative activist, reported that during an argument, Platner “twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out.” Another former romantic partner, Jenny Racicot, who is a Democrat, said of Platner, “This person does not respect women.” The Times spoke with several other women Platner dated who spoke well of him, including that “they felt safe with him” and remain friends with him to this day. Platner on Thursday told MS NOW’s Chris Hayes that “some allegations” in the Times’ article “are simply not true,” specifically, “anything alleging physicality, anything alleging that I knew what my tattoo was.” Platner did acknowledge that he spent a good amount of time “struggling, not being a good boyfriend, certainly self-medicating with alcohol.”

Fifield also told the Times that Platner had joked to her about his Nazi tattoo — contradicting his denials — and even produced a screenshot from a group chat in August 2025 of her talking to friends about the Nazi emblem. Platner has said he didn’t know about the tattoo’s Nazi origins until months later.

Platner has been caught in so many lies that it’s difficult to take anything he says seriously. And every time Platner is caught, he makes the same excuse: that he was in a dark period after he returned from serving in Iraq. While one can sympathize with Platner’s post-war experiences, this justification for his past behavior should not and cannot excuse a pattern of consistently bad behavior that dates back years and was occurring as recently as a few years ago.

Yet none of these revelations have pushed congressional Democrats to call on Platner to stand down. In fact, some are rallying around him.

According to Rhode Island liberal Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse, the latest reports about Platner’s behavior toward women “seems like a lot of nothing.”

Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., called Platner’s behavior “wrong and toxic,” but that’s not stopping him from appearing at a rally with Platner in Maine this weekend. When asked earlier in the week about Platner, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who has publicly endorsed him, offered a classic whataboutist defense: “Is he a saint? I guess not. I don’t know too many saints here”

Even New York Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand, who led the charge against former Minnesota Sen. Al Franken when he was accused of sexual impropriety, has refused to condemn Platner, telling reporters, instead, “We are still going to win Maine.”

Put aside the hypocrisy of national Democrats, who have long preached the idea of believing women when they claim sexual harassment or violence; none of this makes sense from a political standpoint. Recent polling suggests Platner has a narrow lead over Republican Sen. Susan Collins.

In a political environment that heavily favors Democrats and in a state that has voted for the Democratic presidential candidate in each of the past three presidential elections, Democrats should be well-positioned to flip the Maine seat from red to blue. And this is the polling situation today, before Maine voters have fully digested the latest Platner scandals. Where will Platner’s numbers be in November after five months of GOP ads hammering him? That’s not even taking into account the very real possibility that more scandals will emerge. Quite simply, even if one thinks that Platner is a unique political talent — and there isn’t much evidence that he is — why take the risk?

Sticking with Platner is not only a dangerous political move, but it also opens up Democrats to charges of hypocrisy, especially when they attack Republicans for sticking with morally and ethically flawed candidates like Ken Paxton in Texas. And after all, if there is one party that should care about how a man treats women, both in public and in private, it’s Democrats. It’s not as if Republicans have much of a leg to stand on with President Donald Trump as their standard-bearer.

In an ideal world, Platner would recognize that he is a flawed candidate who is putting the Democrats’ chances of flipping the Senate in significant danger. But he appears more focused on his political aspirations than doing what’s best for the Democratic Party. His staff would tell him the same thing, but they seem more focused on covering up for his sins than doing what’s best for the party.

That’s why it’s incumbent on national Democrats to demand Platner drop out of the race, either before or after Maine Democrats go to the polls next week. They can look to Democratic Gov. Janet Mills, who, even though she dropped out of the race, is still on the ballot. Or they can look to recruit the runner-up in the competitive Democratic primary for governor. At least that person will have been vetted by the media. But considering how politically vulnerable Collins is, the mood of the electorate and Maine’s Democratic tilt, seemingly anyone would be a better option than Platner and his heavy baggage.

Heading into November with Platner as their nominee risks Democrats losing both the Maine Senate race and their souls.

Michael Cohen is the publisher of the newsletter Truth and Consequences and hosts the weekly podcast “That ‘70s Movie Podcast.”