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**Beyond Test Scores: How to Measure Real Progress in Education**

By Tony Hicks
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Education loves numbers. We adore them. We frame them, rank them, plaster them across district websites, and whisper them like sacred spells at board meetings: test scores, graduation rates, attendance percentages, college acceptance metrics. Numbers feel clean. They feel objective. They feel like progress. And that’s exactly why they’re dangerous. Because when you only measure what fits into a spreadsheet, you eventually forget that the point of education is a human being. The modern education system has perfected the art of looking busy while quietly mistaking motion for growth. Schools churn out assessments like factories stamping serial numbers onto metal parts. Administrators compile dashboards that glow with color-coded urgency. Parents refresh portals for grade updates as though their child’s worth fluctuates in real time like a stock ticker. Somewhere in the middle of all this measurement, the kid—the actual living, thinking, evolving person—becomes a footnote. If we’re going t...
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The State of the Union (According to Everyone, Everywhere, All at Once)

By Tony Hicks
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Every year, a nation gathers around screens, snacks, and carefully rehearsed expectations to hear The Speech. Not just a speech — The Speech . The one where everything is simultaneously going incredibly well, urgently in need of fixing, and somehow both caused and solved by whoever is currently holding the microphone. If you have ever watched one of these grand annual recaps, you know the rhythm. It’s a strange ritual, like political karaoke performed in a suit. The leader steps up. The applause happens in waves. Half the room claps like they just won the lottery; the other half applauds with the emotional enthusiasm of someone waiting at the DMV. And yet, we all watch. Or at least pretend we watched so we can debate it the next morning. This year’s imaginary State of the Union followed tradition with impressive discipline. Economic numbers were polished until they reflected studio lighting. International issues were arranged into digestible sound bites. Optimism was delivered in c...
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It’s Not Just About the Number on the Scale: The Hidden Value of So-Called “Yo-Yo Dieting”

By Tony Hicks
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For years, “yo-yo dieting” has been treated like the moral failure of modern health culture. The phrase itself drips with judgment. It conjures an image of someone helplessly bouncing up and down in weight, a victim of bad discipline, bad habits, or bad character. Media headlines frame it as a cautionary tale. Fitness influencers use it as the ultimate warning. Doctors sometimes mention it with a sigh. But what if the story we’ve been told is incomplete? What if the problem isn’t the people moving up and down in weight — but the way we’ve chosen to interpret that movement? Because beneath the shame, the memes, and the warnings lies a more complicated truth: fluctuation is normal. Human metabolism is adaptive. And the journey people call “yo-yo dieting” may actually represent something far more meaningful than failure. It may represent persistence. The Myth of the Straight Line Our culture loves linear stories. You set a goal. You work hard. You achieve it. End of narrative. W...
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How Beastro Is Cooking Up a Stew of Your Favorite Cozy and Card Games

By Tony Hicks
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There are two kinds of games in the modern era. The first kind wants you to save the world from a cosmic threat while juggling seventeen currencies, eight skill trees, and a morally complex dialogue system that somehow still makes you feel guilty about picking the sarcastic option. The second kind just wants you to make soup and feel okay about your life for twenty minutes. Beastro lives firmly in the second category — but it also sneaks into the first one through the back door wearing an apron and pretending it doesn’t know what “meta progression” means. On the surface, it’s cozy. It’s cute. It’s warm. It serves soft music and gentle colors like comfort food for your overclocked brain. But beneath all that steam rising off the digital stovetop is something else entirely: a careful, almost suspiciously competent fusion of cozy genre conventions and card-game systems, simmered together until they feel like one thing. And that’s where things get interesting. Because if you’ve played eno...
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One Big Beautiful Bill Act Drives U.S. Construction Boom and Manufacturing Growth

By Tony Hicks
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America builds again — and everyone suddenly remembers they love hard hats. There are moments in American politics when everyone pretends they suddenly agree on something. Infrastructure is one of those rare moments. Politicians who can’t agree on what day it is somehow unite around the idea that roads, factories, and cranes look fantastic on camera. Enter the so-called “One Big Beautiful Bill Act” — less a single legislative masterpiece and more a symbolic umbrella representing the era of mega-spending, massive incentives, and industrial revival now reshaping the American economy. Call it policy. Call it strategy. Call it economic adrenaline injected straight into the veins of construction firms and manufacturing executives. Whatever the label, the result looks unmistakable: concrete pouring at record rates, semiconductor plants rising from farmland, industrial parks filling up faster than anyone predicted, and a whole lot of people rediscovering what steel smells like at six in t...
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⚡ “Every Computer Job Will Change” — The New AI Warning Nobody Can Ignore

By Tony Hicks
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The latest alarm bell didn’t come from a random futurist or a hype-driven startup founder — it came from inside the engine room. A senior engineer at Anthropic , the company behind Claude, says AI agents are about to reshape nearly every computer-based job in America — and he’s blunt about what comes next: It’s going to be disruptive. It’s going to be painful. This isn’t sci-fi speculation. It’s a preview of a workplace already being rewritten in real time. 🧠 The Shift: From Chatbots to Digital Workers The key idea here isn’t just “better AI.” It’s agentic AI — systems that don’t just answer questions but actually use computers like humans do . According to Anthropic engineer Boris Cherny (creator of Claude Code), these tools are quickly learning to: run commands analyze files move between apps message collaborators build websites or software In other words: they perform the actions behind office work, not just the words. And once software can navigate the same workflow you do… the...
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Resilient Children, Struggling Parents: Mapping American Parenting

By Tony Hicks
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There was a time when parenting advice fit on a refrigerator magnet: love them, feed them, don’t let them lick electrical outlets. Now it’s a full-time research project with competing schools of thought, algorithmic judgment, and the constant suspicion that you are already screwing everything up. American parenting today is less a philosophy and more a battlefield—one where children somehow emerge adaptable, witty, digitally fluent, and emotionally articulate while their parents look like sleep-deprived graduate students trapped in an endless group project. The paradox is everywhere. Kids show surprising resilience—navigating complex social worlds, absorbing new technologies faster than adults can pronounce the app names, developing empathy and awareness at earlier ages. Meanwhile, parents report record levels of exhaustion, anxiety, and guilt. The result is a cultural landscape where childhood appears more intentional than ever, and adulthood feels increasingly unprepared. This isn’...
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