The Dictatorship

Boredom is better for children than AI will ever be

Published

4 weeks ago

June 6, 2026

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.

All this tech has been a huge experiment on kids, and experiments can go wrong.

American Federation of Teachers President Randi Weingarten

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.

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?

Technology is eliminating idle mental space and making people feel more bored when constant stimulation is not available.

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.

The Dictatorship

Trump filing shows he took in about $1.2 billion from crypto businesses last year

Published

6 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Trump filing shows he took in about $1.2 billion from crypto businesses last year

NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump took in nearly $1.2 billion from his crypto businesses last year, a federal filing released Tuesday shows, locking in profits while his investors were socked with losses.

Mere startups when he took the oath of office, the new ventures have now eclipsed in revenue much of his vast property portfolio that took him decades to accumulate. Fueling their rise were billionaire investors and Trump’s own move to quash a federal crackdown on the industry.

Trump got more than $500 million from his World Liberty Financial business selling new crypto products, including “governance tokens,” according to the required annual disclosure report with the Office of Government Ethics. It also showed another crypto business, CIC Digital LLC, took in more than $600 million from sales of souvenir-type “meme” coins stamped with his face.

Both the tokens and the coins have plunged in value since the sales.

Trump also took in millions last year from selling Trump-branded Bibles, sneakers and other small items in another unprecedented move for the presidency. The sale of Trump-branded watches alone brought in $4.7 million.

The 927-page disclosure form paints a stark, if incomplete picture of the massive growth of the president’s wealth since taking office last January through a web of business interests — many of which have benefited from the policy moves of Trump’s own government. Trump has insisted that his sons direct his finances but the arrangement rejects the conflict of interest protections that his recent predecessors in office had instituted.

Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $6 billion, up from $2.3 billion in 2024.

The Trump business is growing abroad

The rise of crypto relative to Trump’s property is especially noteworthy because he first rode to office boasting of his property wins. It’s also remarkable because that mainstay business also boomed last year. Trump took in tens of millions in fees from a flurry of new hotel, resort and condo deals overseas that amounts to the biggest property expansion ever in the century since the family business was founded.

Many of those countries were negotiating with the U.S. over tariffs, military aid and other important matters while the family business was striking the deals.

A property in the United Arab Emirates generated $10.4 million for the Trump business last year. One in Saudi Arabia being built by a real estate developer close to the ruling family sent the president’s company $9 million. And one in Bucharest, Romania, and another in Qatar sent him $5 million each.

One of his prominent domestic properties, Mar-a-Lago in Florida, notched big growth last year, too.

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Trump took in $77 million from the property, a 50% jump from the year earlier when he was just another citizen, as heads of state and business people flocked to it in his new term.

The disclosure report doesn’t give profit figures, just revenue, so it’s impossible to know how much he is earning.

Trump is now the billion-dollar crypto man

Trump said Wednesday that most of his gains last year came from the stock market and he’s just riding along with everyone else.

“We’re all profiting,” he said. “I’m profiting because I have a lot of money and a lot of cash.”

But crypto was clearly the big revenue generator last year in part due his own moves since taking office — pushing policies friendly to the industry and reversing a Biden administration regulatory crackdown.

The regulators are still worried. Before Trump’s World Liberty began selling “governance tokens,” they issued warnings about this new kind of crypto asset, saying that unlike stocks, the tokens offer no ownership stake in the issuing company, just voting power on certain corporate policies, and are difficult to value.

Buyers pounced anyway, including a Chinese billionaire who spent $75 million on the tokens and $200 million on the souvenir coins. In February last year, a federal lawsuit charging him with duping investors was paused before being settled for a $10 million fine.

The billionaire, Justin Sun, has repeatedly denied his spending on Trump businesses had anything to do with his federal case, while World Liberty has dismissed the notion of a conflict of interest.

Meanwhile, investors have seen the value of their Trump-tied holdings drop significantly.

The price of World Liberty tokens has fallen 80% since they started trading in September. And the Trump souvenir coins that spiked to more than $74 in the days after launching in January 2025 now sell for $1.68.

The White House says Trump only acts in the public interest

The White House has repeatedly said Trump put his business in a trust managed by his sons and is not involved in its decisions and that there are no ethics issues to discuss.

“Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged — or will ever engage — in conflicts of interest,” spokeswoman Anna Kelly said. “All actions by President Trump and his administration are taken in the best interest of the American people.”

The Trump umbrella company, the Trump Organization, has said its deals overseas were with private companies, not with governments.

Still, it is difficult to know what is truly private in countries ruled by authoritarians, royal families and one-party governments.

For a new Trump resort in Vietnam, the report shows Trump took in $5 million last year after the ruling Communist Party sent its deputy prime minister to sign off on the deal and, according to The New York Times, pushed farmers off the land to make way for the construction.

Whether the deals played any role in changing U.S. policies in ways these countries sought is nearly impossible to know, but the countries did get what they wanted.

Vietnam got tariff relief. Qatar got access to advanced U.S. technology previously off limits, and Saudi Arabia got U.S. fighter jets it had coveted for years.

___

AP White House reporter Josh Boak contributed from Washington.

The Dictatorship

‘REGIME CHANGE’ sold 300,000 copies…

Published

6 hours ago

July 2, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

It turns out readers still want to learn more about President Donald Trump after all.

“Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” the l atest book on the Trump presidencywritten by political journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, has sold more than 300,000 copies in its opening week, according to publisher Simon & Schuster.

They’re the kind of sales that numerous works about Trump reached during his first term, but had been rare during his second term. Publishers had speculated that the public had tired of Trump books, believing there was little left to know.

The total figures include preorders, print book sales, ebooks, and e-audiobooks and orders that have yet to be fulfilled because of demand, the publishing house said. Simon & Schuster said the book is into its third hard copy printing, with 200,000 copies on order, after it sold out quickly in bookstores and on Amazon. It’s the best first-week clip of any hardcover nonfiction book in 2026.

The book covers the first 14 months of Trump’s second presidency and takes readers inside the West Wing, White House residence and Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, aboard Air Force One and on foreign trips with the president.

Trump, who has a long history with Haberman from her days covering him as a New York City business and society figure, has trashed the book as “mostly made up.” Haberman and Swan are now New York Times reporters.

Their manuscript depicts meticulous details of Trump’s military decisions, how he’s wielded the power of the Justice Department against his political opponents, his conversations with other power players, and the time and attention he’s devoted to remaking the aesthetics and structure of the White House.

The book spells out a thesis that Trump himself believes: Had he not lost the 2020 election, he would not be as powerful in his second term as he is now — emboldening him to trample norms, dismantle established institutions and push the limits of presidential power.

Haberman and Swan have been featured regularly across news talk shows promoting the book and sharing details of their reporting, including a sit-down with Trump in which he boasted about being compared to some of history’s great villains.

Sean Manning, vice president and publisher at Simon & Schuster, said the book “has entered the national conversation” and will hold up as “a work of historic importance.”

The Dictatorship

Vance contradicts Trump about bipartisan cooperation on housing bill

Published

13 hours ago

July 1, 2026

Blue Light Newsroom

Vance contradicts Trump about bipartisan cooperation on housing bill

As a rule, JD Vance seems to go out of his way to say whatever Donald Trump wants him to say, but from time to time, contradictions emerge between the president and the vice president.

Take the recently passed housing bill, for example, which arrived at the White House earlier this week.

As part of an interview Tuesday night with Fox News’ Laura Ingraham, the Ohio Republican said, “Frankly, Laura, I would love it if Democrats were willing — you know, not that they will agree with Republicans all the time — but if they were willing to work with us on lowering housing prices, on lowering gas prices, on actually making the lives of American citizens better. You know, we could have some real bipartisan compromise. That’s not what they’re talking about.”

I realize the vice president must be very busy, but it really isn’t that difficult to keep up with the basics of current events. In this case, when Vance said Democrats are unwilling to work with Republicans on priorities such as “lowering housing prices,” he turned reality on its head. It was literally last week when Democrats offered unanimous support for a bipartisan bill to address housing prices — legislation that members such as Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts helped to write.

Democrats recognized that doing so would offer the GOP some election-season bragging rights, but Democrats did it anyway because they have prioritized governing and “actually making the lives of American citizens better” over partisan considerations.

But Vance didn’t just contradict reality; he also contradicted his boss.

Just one day before the vice president brazenly misled a national television audience, Trump was asked about the pending housing bill. “It’s very bipartisan; that means the Democrats like it,” the president saidwhile acknowledging that he hasn’t yet decided whether to sign it.

In other words, when Vance said policymakers “could have some real bipartisan compromise,” he seemed indifferent to the fact that we’ve already had some real bipartisan compromise — a detail that even Trump was willing to acknowledge a day earlier.

Whether the vice president will suffer for publicly contradicting the president remains to be seen.

Steve Benen is a producer for “The Rachel Maddow Show,” the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He’s also the bestselling author of “Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans’ War on the Recent Past.”