Free Republic

In American high schools, the age of the book may be fading. Many teenagers are assigned few full books to read from beginning to end — often just one or two per year, according to researchers and thousands of responses to an informal reader survey by The New York Times. Twelfth-grade reading scores are at historic lows, and college professors, even at elite schools, are increasingly reporting difficulties in getting students to engage with lengthy or complex texts. Perhaps that is to be expected in the era of TikTok and A.I. Some education experts believe that in the near future,...

CAPERNAUM — Residents of several nearby villages were abuzz with excitement this week, as the traveling carpenter-turned-teacher Jesus of Nazareth healed a demon-possessed man by taking away his smartphone. According to witnesses, the man's desperate friends and family brought him to Jesus after His disciples were unable to help him. Multiple reports indicated that the man's rages, convulsions, and foaming at the mouth were instantly healed as soon as Jesus removed the man's smartphone from his hand. "You could tell he was immediately a different person," one witness said. "He had been screeching and wailing, screaming about arguing with...

The AWS crash was a warning shot: our hyperconnected world runs on fragile code, overworked defenders, and blind trust—and one real cyberattack could bring it all down. We are just concluding Cybersecurity Awareness Month, though this year’s reminder felt more like a warning flare than a celebration. The message is clear, however. Our digital infrastructure is hanging by a thread, and we just got a glimpse of how thin that thread really is.Just weeks ago, the world’s largest cloud provider, Amazon Web Services, suffered a massive outage that paralyzed everything from retail transactions to smart-home devices. The failure was traced...

A recent firmware update on my LG television revealed that the TV is taking audio samples of all content that is played through it. Other TVs are now taking audio and video samples and sending them off for analysis. Your Smart TV's HDMI Port Is Spying On You! | 23:43 Lon.TV | 389K subscribers | 62,195 views | October 27, 2025 VIDEO INDEX: 00:00 - Intro 00:55 - Supporter Thank Yous 01:26 - ACR / Automatic Content Recognition 02:10 - LG Televisions 04:03 - Samsung TVs 04:57 - Amazon Fire TV Sets 06:33 - Roku TVs 09:04 - Google TVs...

Microsoft has officially ended support for Windows 10, all but forcing users to either upgrade or pay more money to keep getting essential security updates for the OS they already own. No matter that its replacement, Windows 11, can’t be run on nearly half a billion machines, meaning it’ll create mountains of e-waste as those old, perfectly usable PCs get thrown out for new ones. If possible, things are getting even worse. This week, Microsoft is launching a suite of artificial intelligence features that basically turns existing Windows 11 systems into full-blown “AI PCs” which are controlled by Copilot, the...

If the dollar dominates stablecoins, America could dominate global finance for centuries“I will make sure the US is the crypto capital of the world,” Donald Trump vowed earlier this year. In July, he signed the Guiding and Establishing National Innovation for US Stablecoins (Genius) Act. The Act creates federal guardrails for dollar-pegged stablecoins and regulates who can issue and redeem them. Concerns from law enforcement are also addressed, by making sure anti-money laundering and consumer regulation applies. But what are stablecoins? They are digital tokens built to stay at a stable price, usually one dollar. They sit on the blockchain...

The past decade may rank as one of the worst in the history of American education. It marks a stark reversal from what was once a hopeful story. At the start of the century, American students registered steady improvement in math and reading. Around 2013, this progress began to stall out, and then to backslide dramatically. What exactly went wrong? The decline began well before the pandemic, so COVID-era disruptions alone cannot explain it. Smartphones and social media probably account for some of the drop. But there’s another explanation, albeit one that progressives in particular seem reluctant to countenance: a...

In my previous article I suggested that the UK’s proposed “mandatory” digital ID, called the BritCard, was a bait and switch psyop. I posited that the arguments presented by Keir Starmer’s purported Labour government, to supposedly justify the BritCard rollout, coupled with the timing of the announcement, the apparent inability to understand public opinion, and the lack of necessity for the BritCard, indicated that there was something amiss with the so-called government’s BritCard proposition. It seems to me that the purpose of the BritCard gambit is to frame the Overton Window for the public debate about digital ID in the...