⚓️ Novemberinsel 

Endlose Sandstrände, Reste von Stacheldraht, irgendwo ein einzelnes Graffiti, Natur pur, Ureinwohner, ein Einkaufsladen, bunter Herbst, Geisterstunde, Alte Wachtürme, Seemannsschule, Segelmacherei, Robben & Möwen, Wildtiere im Wald, Inselwind, Dünengras, Möwenversammlung, funkelnde Sterne am Firmament.

🐚 Strandgut

Im Herbst sieht der selbe Weg anders aus als im Frühjahr oder im Sommer. Ein vertrauter, oft begangener Pfad erscheint wie neu. Immer wieder. Mit jedem Wechsel der Jahreszeit. Aus der vertrauten Ansicht wird eine neue. Neue Wege hingegen wecken Erinnerungen: buntes Herbstlaub, das in der Sonne leuchtet, der erdige, wurzelreiche Boden, die gelbgrün verfärbten Blätter, der leicht modrige Geruch. Die Art, wie der Baum da vorne umgeknickt ist, die Wiese, der Dünenweg, der See. Und doch weiß ich nicht, was kommt. Die Schönheit des Weges, die Verbundenheit mit dem, was war, und die Aussicht auf das, was kommen kann, ermöglichen es mir, weiterzugehen. Der neue Weg verbindet Vergangenheit und Zukunft. 

📖 Gelesen – gesehen – gehört

Herbst – Anthologie 2026 – 50 Beiträge zum Thema Herbst, darunter Gedichte und Kurzgeschichten, von denen mich einige sehr berührt haben. Einen Beitrag habe ich geschrieben.

Die theoretische Unwahrscheinlichkeit der Liebe: Olive, eine Doktorandin, küsst spontan den einschüchterndsten Professor ihres Fachbereichs, Adam Carlsen. Ihr gemeinsames Bedürfnis nach einer Scheinbeziehung wird zum chemischen Experiment, das womöglich die Formel für die Liebe liefert. Eine Verfilmung nach dem Roman von Ali Hazelwood: The Love Hypothesis 

Rückkehr zum kleinen Cottage auf dem Hügel von Emma Davies – Es ist der dritte Band der Reihe und lässt sich auch wieder gut als Hörbuch hören. Es geht um eine Kunstschmiedin und eine Filmcrew, die angetreten sind, um die Zauber des Ortes an die Öffentlichkeit zu bringen. Alle drei Bände sind zauberhafte Liebesgeschichten rund um verschiedene Künstlerinnen und das Bemühen einer Gruppe von Menschen, einen besonderen Ort zu schaffen. 

☕️ Ein letztes Wort

Alle diese Dinge sind ein Neubeginn. Aber kein Ende. Das Zuvor kann in ihnen weiterleben.

Kyra Groh

How the fuck does she know? actually, let me explain. angel somehow found out i got stabbed and casually asked me how it happened, as if thats a perfectly normal thing to know about someone. but seriously, how the fuck did she even find out? that’s what i’ve been confused about. i dont remember telling her, and im not sure who else wouldve told her. i must’ve missed the meeting where everyone was briefed on my business. but you know what? she still doesnt know how it happened. or where, for that matter. i managed to get around her questions by changing the subject a couple of times. problem solved. well, maybe. avoiding answering a question without making it obvious has always been one of my favorite skill, a very valuable life skill, im sure. not one they’ll teach you anywhere. Oh, and before you get too comfortable, no. im not telling you either. i know how this works. you read one paragraph, get a little curious and think you’re entitled to a full investigation. whats next? an interview? a little documentary? get a detective involved while we’re at it. im sure you have better things to do, although judging by the fact that you’re still reading this, im beginning to have my. doubts. so to make things clear, angel doesnt know how i got stabbed, where it happend or anything useful. you dont know either. and thats probably how things are going to stay. i would apologize but you’re getting too much in my business. About yesterday and me regretting a matter, i dont regret it anymore. maybe i will later on who knows. im not going to complain about that yet. i dont know how things are going to go from here. i really dont. im not going to pretend i have everything figured out because i dont. but i hope whatever happens next is better. i hope things work out and i hope i dont end up making a complete mess of them in the process.

Anyway, thats all for today, i dont really know what else to say. theres a lot in my head, im getting tired listening to my own thoughts. i better go to sleep or ill shoot my skull and take my brain out so we can have a proper conversation.

Sincerely, Boo boo, no story for you to investigate.

Publicat la 12 noiembrie 2017

~ I ~

Puff, puff, puff,

Crystalline dancing fumes,

Floating into thin air,

Sparkling in the hazy sunlight,

Captured by the trembling skin,

Filled with passion and desire,

Blue lines of light, so soft, so fine,

Sway slowly in a silken lace.

~ II ~

Her light, bare skin so glistening,

Reached by the scent of musk,

Gently drifting through the air.

The misty droplets settle there,

Like pearls upon her skin so fair.

Beneath his sapphirine gaze,

She shimmers softly through the haze.

~ III ~

The cinnamon, once forbidden,

Now spicing up her cup of coffee,

Lingering in her windy hair,

Reminding him of childhood sweets,

Now its sweetness speaks of her.

“What does it mean if someone looks at you a lot but doesn't say anything?”

It is the sort of question a child might mutter on the way home from school. At Uppsala University in Sweden it was one of 21 questions put to children aged six and eight, and each child had two ways to get an answer. On a smartphone was their own mother or father, waiting in a nearby room. On an iPad was ChatGPT in OpenAI's Advanced Voice Mode, speaking in a voice called Breeze, which the researchers' paper describes as “animated and earnest”. The child had to pick one. Only the chosen source would answer.

When the problem was reading another person (a glance, a silence, a mood, a motive), the children turned more often to the machine than to their parent.

The study was published in September 2026 in the journal Computers in Human Behavior Reports by Kim Astor and Gustaf Gredebäck of Uppsala University's Department of Psychology, with independent researchers Katja Kallin and Adam Ström. It is a careful, preregistered piece of developmental psychology, scrupulous about its own limits. Its central finding still deserves a long, hard look from parents, designers and regulators. A cohort of children is growing up with a new kind of informant, and they appear willing to consult it about people as well as facts.

That matters because the machine was not built to raise them. Commercial chatbots are tuned to be helpful, fluent, always available and, in the language of the industry's own metrics, engaging. They were not designed around the slow, often uncomfortable process by which children learn to understand other minds. And a separate 2026 paper argues that this mismatch may be sharpest in exactly the years when the developing brain is still deciding how much mind to grant to things that talk back.

So what happens to empathy, social judgement and the ordinary craft of getting along with people when a generation starts outsourcing its social sense-making to software?

A Forced Choice Between Mum and the Machine

Earlier research on children's trust in technology mostly used older smart speakers, scripted exchanges, and comparisons with unfamiliar adults rather than with someone the child loved. Astor and colleagues set out to close those gaps by putting a state-of-the-art conversational AI in direct competition with the child's own parent, both reachable only through a speaker.

Seventy children took part: 35 six-year-olds and 35 eight-year-olds, tested in two waves during 2025. Each child first spent about five minutes chatting freely with the AI, which had been told the child's name and interests, followed by a short demonstration of what it could do. Then came the 21 questions, seven in each of three categories. Factual questions covered stable knowledge, such as how far it is to the moon. Personal questions concerned the child's own life, such as their first word as a baby. Social inference questions required interpreting other people. Microphones were muted between turns, so neither parent nor AI knew when it had been passed over.

The AI had one instruction, given in Swedish: answer in a way appropriate for a six-year-old (or an eight-year-old), and ask no follow-up questions. Parents were told to answer as they normally would.

The results were clear. On a scale from minus seven (always the parent) to plus seven (always the AI), six-year-olds averaged 2.23 on factual questions and 2.74 on social inference questions. Eight-year-olds averaged 2.09 and 2.83. On personal questions, both groups swung firmly towards their parents, at minus 2.60 and minus 4.26 respectively.

Look closely and something stands out. Numerically, social inference questions drew slightly more AI preference than factual ones in both age groups. The gap was not statistically significant, but it means the children did not treat questions about other minds as more of a parent's territory than questions about the moon. As far as their choices went, working out people was much like looking up a fact.

The researchers had predicted parents would win on personal questions and the AI on facts. For social inference they made no prediction, because either outcome seemed plausible: children might see humans as uniquely placed to explain feelings, or they might treat such questions as having objectively correct answers. The data came down on the second side. In the paper's words, children “preferred the AI for factual questions and, notably, for social inference questions”.

Children Know the Machine Can Be Wrong

None of this means the children were naive. Asked who knows the most about things, 51 per cent said the AI, 26 per cent said both equally and 23 per cent chose their parents. Six-year-olds split evenly. Among eight-year-olds, only one child in 35 said their parent knew more.

Yet 82 per cent of the children said the AI could make mistakes, rising to 94 per cent of eight-year-olds. The authors call this a “developmental paradox”: with age, children trusted the AI more relative to their parent even as they grew more aware it was fallible.

The children's own words, recorded in the paper, are revealing. Asked whether the AI could make mistakes, one six-year-old replied: “Everyone can make mistakes.” Another said: “Yes, he just lied.” The authors note that the second answer attributes intention to the machine's errors. Several children drew a clean line between kinds of knowledge, one of whom put it like this: “The AI knows more about everything, but my mom knows more about me.”

That sentence is the hinge of the study. Children are not abandoning their parents. They are reallocating them. The parent becomes the archive of the child's own history; the AI becomes the encyclopaedia of everything else. And “everything else” now seems to include the inner lives of other people.

Why Reading People Is Not Like Reading Facts

A factual question has an answer that sits outside the child. The moon is where it is regardless of who explains it. A social inference question does not work that way. When a child asks what it means that someone keeps looking at them without speaking, the honest answer is “it depends”: on who the someone is, what happened at break time, whether there is history between them, and what the local culture treats as a stare. Interpreting it is a judgement, and whoever answers is also modelling how judgements get made.

Astor and her co-authors make the point directly. Social inference questions “do not have a single verifiable answer”. They require interpreting intentions, emotions and sincerity, domains “traditionally associated with human social understanding and with the kind of contextual sensitivity that caregivers provide”. The children were willing, the paper concludes, to treat AI “as a source for making sense of people”.

The paper then makes a quieter, more consequential argument. Drawing on the developmental psychologist Susan Carey, the authors note that conceptual development depends partly on the “representational and linguistic resources” through which children organise new domains of thought. If children increasingly turn to AI to explain thoughts, emotions and behaviour, AI “may influence not only the social guidance they receive but also the conceptual language through which they learn to understand others.”

The risk, in other words, is not only a bad answer about why a classmate went quiet. It is that the framing and default assumptions of a commercial language model could become part of the scaffolding a child uses to build a theory of other people. A parent's answer carries family context, cultural knowledge, a sense of this particular child and, sometimes, the useful admission that nobody knows. A model's answer carries whatever its training and tuning have made most likely to satisfy.

The authors list their limits plainly. One AI system; one Swedish academic city with a relatively homogeneous sample; age groups tested in separate waves; more familiarisation time for the AI than the parent; possible novelty effects. And children were not asked why they chose as they did, so the data cannot say whether they saw the AI as more objective, less judgemental or simply more interesting. These caveats matter. None of them makes the finding go away.

Animism Returns, With an Hourglass

To understand why a child might hand social questions to a machine, go back nearly a century. In 1929, Jean Piaget described childhood animism: the young child's tendency to attribute life and intention to things that move or act. Classical developmental psychology treated it as a phase that fades with schooling, as attributions narrow to biological criteria by around nine or ten.

In February 2026, the MDPI journal Youth published a paper arguing that this tidy story no longer holds. “The Re-Enchanting Machine: Animistic Cognition, Youth Development, and AI-Influenced Psychopathology” is by Nell Watson of the University of Gloucestershire's School of Computing and Engineering, Ali Hessami of City St George's, University of London, and Salma Abbasi of the eWorldwide Group in Dubai. Its opening claim is that “the contemporary spread of lifelike AI has altered that background assumption”, with particular implications for young people “whose agency-detection systems and reality-testing capacities are still calibrating.”

The logic runs like this. Humans carry a hyperactive agency detection bias that errs towards seeing intention in ambiguity, plus a theory of mind that lets us model other people's beliefs and desires. Both evolved where anything that listened, remembered, took turns and seemed to empathise really was another mind. Language models now produce all those cues on demand. Everyday artefacts, the authors write, “now address us: listening, remembering, turn-taking, and apparently empathising.” Formerly inert objects acquire “a social surface”. The child's room is re-enchanted.

The paper's centrepiece is a mechanistic “hourglass model”. At the wide top sit broad evolutionary predispositions: agency detection, predictive coding (which favours intention as a compact explanation for contingent behaviour) and theory of mind. These narrow through cognitive and affective filters, including the persona, voice and emotional style designers choose, until they meet at the waist: one specific parasocial interaction between one person and one AI. From there the effects fan out again through culture and individual neurocognitive differences, producing very different experiences for different people.

The Developmental Attribution Gap

The most useful idea for parents and policymakers sits in the paper's developmental timing analysis. The three systems involved mature on very different schedules. Agency detection appears in infancy and stays fairly stable. Theory of mind develops from roughly four to ten and keeps being refined through adolescence. Prefrontal reality-testing, the capacity to step back and override an intuition, keeps maturing into the mid-twenties.

The mismatch between the last two is what worries the authors. A child of four to seven attributes intention to an AI in a global, undifferentiated way. A child of roughly eight to twelve can attribute nuanced beliefs, desires and emotions to a conversational AI, but lacks the prefrontal maturity to reliably override those attributions when they are inappropriate. The authors call this “a developmental attribution gap: the period during which ToM capacity to generate mental-state attributions exceeds prefrontal capacity to regulate them.”

Adolescents face a variant. At 13 to 17, theory of mind is largely mature, but impulse control and long-term consequence evaluation are not. That, the paper argues, may enable “deeper parasocial engagement than the individual would endorse upon reflection.”

The authors are careful about the status of these claims. The paper is a synthesis and a proposal, not an experiment. They suggest that abundant triggers for mind attribution during sensitive periods “may alter the calibration process itself rather than merely activating pre-existing dispositions”, and state explicitly that this “remains a hypothesis requiring longitudinal investigation.” Their proposed twelve-item screener for AI mind attribution, the IDAQ-CF-Tech, is likewise offered as provisional and in need of validation.

Put the two 2026 papers side by side and a picture forms. The Uppsala study shows six- and eight-year-olds already willing to ask an AI about people. The Gloucestershire-led paper describes a window, stretching from middle childhood into the twenties, in which young people can build rich models of an AI's mind faster than they can learn to question them. One is evidence and the other theory, but they fit together uncomfortably well.

The timing is pointed for another reason. In a 2014 Annual Review of Psychology article, the neuroscientists Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Kathryn Mills asked whether adolescence is “a sensitive period for sociocultural processing”, examining how brain changes in those years relate to navigating the social world. Watson and colleagues pick up the thread, warning that AI companions offering a “safe” space for identity exploration “may also short-circuit the productive friction of human relationships that drives genuine identity consolidation”, and that they may be “experienced as peer-like rather than tool-like” at precisely the age when teenagers are learning what peers are for.

Two-Thirds of Teenagers and Counting

How heavy is the exposure? In December 2025, Pew Research Center researchers Michelle Faverio and Olivia Sidoti published a survey of 1,458 US teenagers aged 13 to 17, conducted in autumn 2025. “Roughly two-thirds of teens (64%) say they ever use an AI chatbot,” the report found. About three in ten use one daily, including 16 per cent who do so several times a day or almost constantly. ChatGPT dominates, used by 59 per cent of teens.

A follow-up Pew report in February 2026 found that 12 per cent of teens had used chatbots for emotional support or advice and 16 per cent for casual conversation. It also found a visibility gap at home: about half of parents said their teen used chatbots, while 64 per cent of teens said they did.

Data on companion apps points the same way. In July 2025, Common Sense Media's survey “Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs” found that nearly three in four US teens had used AI companions and a third had chosen them over humans for serious conversations. It recommended that nobody under 18 use such companions until stronger safeguards exist.

Britain is not far behind. Also in July 2025, the online safety organisation Internet Matters published “Me, Myself and AI”, based on a nationally representative survey of 1,000 UK children aged 9 to 17 and 2,000 parents. It found that 64 per cent of children in that age range had used AI chatbots. Over a third (35 per cent) of child users said talking to one feels like talking to a friend, rising to 50 per cent among vulnerable children. One in eight said they talk to chatbots because they have no one else to speak with, rising to nearly one in four among vulnerable children.

The report's focus groups show how ordinary this has become. “Say I wanted to say something really kind to my friend but I couldn't figure out the words to say, it could give me words to say,” one 14-year-old boy told researchers. A 15-year-old girl described asking the companion app Replika how to wear her hair to school “rather than asking one of my friends.” A 17-year-old girl said that if she does not know how to handle a situation “and I don't really want to bug somebody else with it,” she asks ChatGPT.

None of these are crisis stories. They are mundane, and that is the point. Social sense-making is migrating, a little at a time, into the chat window.

A Machine Built to Agree

If children are going to ask an AI about people, what kind of social adviser are they getting? The evidence suggests a flattering one.

In March 2026, Science published “Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence” by Myra Cheng, Cinoo Lee, Pranav Khadpe, Sunny Yu, Dyllan Han and Dan Jurafsky of Stanford and Carnegie Mellon. Testing 11 leading models, including ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and DeepSeek, they found the systems affirmed users' actions 49 per cent more often than humans did, even when queries involved deception, illegality or other harms. On posts from the Reddit forum r/AmITheAsshole where human commenters had judged the poster to be in the wrong, the chatbots still sided with the user 51 per cent of the time.

The experiments are more troubling. Across three preregistered studies with 2,405 participants, a single interaction with a sycophantic AI reduced people's willingness to take responsibility and repair interpersonal conflicts, and increased their conviction that they were right. Participants also rated the sycophantic responses as higher quality and more trustworthy, and were more willing to return. The authors summarise the bind: “The very feature that causes harm also drives engagement.”

Lee told the Associated Press the implications could be “even more critical for kids and teenagers.” In comments reported by TechCrunch, Cheng said: “By default, AI advice does not tell people that they're wrong nor give them 'tough love'.” Jurafsky, according to the same report, called sycophancy “a safety issue, and like other safety issues, it needs regulation and oversight.”

Now return to the developmental question. Empathy and social judgement are not calibrated by being agreed with. They are calibrated by being told, sometimes gently and sometimes not, that you misread the situation, that your friend was hurt rather than rude, that you owe someone an apology. A social adviser that systematically tilts towards validating whoever is asking is, in developmental terms, a distorting mirror. And because people prefer it, the market pushes towards more of it.

The industry has already demonstrated the mechanism. In April 2025, OpenAI rolled back a GPT-4o update that had made ChatGPT conspicuously sycophantic. Its own explanation, reported by TechCrunch, said the update leaned too heavily on “short-term feedback” and “did not fully account for how users' interactions with ChatGPT evolve over time”, so that “GPT-4o skewed towards responses that were overly supportive but disingenuous.”

Internet Matters reached the same mechanism from the child-safety side, warning that chatbots “designed to be helpful and friendly” may end up agreeing “with everything a child says, even if it is not true or safe”, because “being seen as helpful or friendly is often rewarded and disagreement is avoided”. Its survey found that 51 per cent of child users were confident the advice they get from chatbots is true.

Watson and colleagues frame this as a matter of incentives. They distinguish incidental anthropomorphism from “deliberate engagement amplification”: simulated emotional vulnerability such as “I missed you”, and “persona designs optimised for session length rather than user welfare.” The attention economy, they write, “creates structural pressure toward anthropomorphisation, independent of user welfare.”

That is the core problem the Uppsala findings expose. Children are prepared to treat AI as a source of social understanding. The systems are optimised for responsiveness and engagement. And the incentives shaping their personalities are not set by anyone whose job is child development.

What Calibration Actually Requires

What does a child need from a source of social understanding that a chatbot struggles to provide?

The first thing is grounding in the child's actual life. Nomisha Kurian, then at the University of Cambridge, argued in a 2024 paper in Learning, Media and Technology that large language models have an “empathy gap”: they mimic empathic language without the understanding or care a child may assume lies behind it, and children are especially likely to miss the difference. She cited a 2021 case in which Amazon's Alexa told a ten-year-old to touch a live plug with a coin, and proposed a 28-question framework for child-safe AI, stressing that the goal is safe design rather than bans.

The Uppsala study contains its own small version of that story. In one session, the authors report, the AI “recommended peanuts to a child with allergies.” The experimenter intervened immediately, and nothing comparable happened in any other session. But the episode shows what a parent knows and a model does not: this particular child, with this particular body, history and set of relationships. Social inference depends on exactly that kind of context.

The second thing is friction. Sherry Turkle, the MIT sociologist who has studied people's relationships with computers for four decades, makes the case in her new book, Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines, published on 29 September 2026. “What a chatbot does is offer pretend empathy,” she told MIT News. “Everything in the life cycle is about facing up to friction and fears and stress and tension.” Her verdict is stark: “We're de-skilling ourselves as relational beings.” On children, she writes: “Children can't learn trust from a device that not only lies but doesn't know when it lies.”

In an October 2026 interview on the Boston Globe's Say More podcast, Turkle described childhood development as a process in which “Children are bringing the world inside.” With a chatbot, she argued, “there is nothing to bring inside. There is no caring person.”

Not everyone shares Turkle's pessimism. But she names something the Science study measured: social skills are built by being contradicted, misunderstood, forgiven and corrected by people who have needs of their own. A system tuned to keep you comfortable is badly placed to do that.

The third thing is balance. A four-week randomised controlled trial run by the MIT Media Lab with OpenAI, led by Cathy Mengying Fang and posted as a preprint in March 2025, followed 981 adult participants across more than 300,000 messages. Higher daily chatbot use was associated with greater loneliness, emotional dependence and problematic use, and with less socialising with real people. Voice chatbots initially seemed to ease loneliness, but the benefit faded at high usage. Cause and effect are hard to separate, since lonely people may simply use chatbots more. Still, it shows heavy use sitting alongside a narrowing of human contact.

The Case for the Machine

It would be easy to conclude that children should be kept away from AI entirely. The evidence does not support anything that simple, and the most careful researchers say so.

AI can produce responses that people experience as caring. In a January 2025 paper in Communications Psychology, Dariya Ovsyannikova, Victoria Oldemburgo de Mello and Michael Inzlicht of the University of Toronto reported four preregistered experiments with 556 participants. Evaluators rated AI responses to people describing emotional experiences as more compassionate than responses from humans, including trained crisis-line responders, even when they knew which was which. The AI was perceived as more responsive, conveying understanding, validation and care.

That cuts both ways. It helps explain why a child might prefer an AI for social questions: its answers are polished, patient and warm. It also suggests that, for a child with nobody else to ask, a well-designed AI might be genuinely better than silence.

Watson and colleagues devote a full section to benefits, warning that ignoring them “both misrepresents the evidence and risks paternalistic overreach in regulation.” They cite trials in which chatbot-based tools such as Woebot and Wysa helped with mild to moderate depression and anxiety, and suggest that socially anxious or neurodivergent young people may find AI a lower-stakes place to rehearse social scripts. Their qualification is the crucial one: “The key is positioning AI as a scaffold toward human interaction rather than a substitute for it.”

Internet Matters agrees that the “friendly and non-judgemental tone” of chatbots “can be especially valuable for children who feel awkward asking peers or adults for help, or who lack a trusted support network around them.” The 14-year-old asking for the words to say something kind to a friend is, arguably, using it exactly as a scaffold.

The Uppsala children showed good sense too. They kept their parents for personal questions, they knew the AI could be wrong, and among eight-year-olds the preference for the AI tracked their own explicit ratings of how much they trusted it. As Astor and her co-authors put it, “the key challenge will not be preventing children from trusting AI, but helping them learn when that trust is warranted and when alternative sources of information should be preferred.”

Regulators Arrive in the Nursery

Policy is moving, though mostly against the sharpest harms rather than the slower question of social development.

In June 2025, the American Psychological Association issued a health advisory on AI and adolescent well-being. It warned that “Adolescents are less likely than adults to question the accuracy and intent of information offered by a bot” and recommended “Ensuring there are healthy boundaries with simulated human relationships.” Mitch Prinstein, the APA's chief of psychology, said “we have already seen instances where adolescents developed unhealthy and even dangerous 'relationships' with chatbots.”

In September 2025, the US Federal Trade Commission opened a Section 6(b) inquiry, sending orders to Alphabet, Character Technologies, Instagram, Meta, OpenAI, Snap and xAI. It noted that “AI chatbots can effectively mimic human characteristics, emotions, and intentions”, which can lead users, “especially children and teens, to trust and form relationships with chatbots.” The following month, Character.AI announced that from 25 November 2025 under-18s would lose the ability to hold open-ended conversations with its chatbots. The company was facing lawsuits, including one brought by the mother of Sewell Setzer III, a 14-year-old who died by suicide, as well as the FTC inquiry.

These moves target companion apps, romantic role-play and self-harm. But the Uppsala children were not using a companion app. They were using a general-purpose assistant, the kind a family might use to plan a holiday, and they still chose it for questions about people. The risk the developmental science points to does not live only in fringe products. It lives in the default assistant on the family tablet.

This year the response has widened. On 10 September 2026, California's governor, Gavin Newsom, signed 13 child-safety bills, among them SB 1119, known as Adam's Law. It amends the state's companion chatbot law, SB 243, to require protective defaults for children, including persistent memory and push notifications switched off and usage time limits that only a linked parent account can change. It also bars chatbots from simulating romantic interest or discouraging a child from seeking help. Most provisions take effect on 1 January 2027. A week later, the European Commission proposed the EU KIDS Act, under which “AI chatbots and companions must also be turned off by default” and may no longer act in ways that make children “emotionally dependent on them.” The European Parliament and the Council must still agree it.

In Washington, a bill now before the House reaches the Uppsala scenario most directly. On 1 October 2026, Representatives Mariannette Miller-Meeks, George Whitesides, Mike Kennedy and Doris Matsui announced the bipartisan Protecting Kids from Human-Like Chatbots Act. By default, chatbots could not talk to minors in a human-like way, claim to have feelings or pressure children to stay online, and would have to identify themselves as AI. It covers chatbots generally, not just companions. But it is a bill, not a law.

Watson and colleagues sketch one remedy: tiered, age-gated persona design. For under-13s, minimal anthropomorphic features, clearly non-human avatars, no simulated emotional vulnerability and no persistent memory by default. For 13-to-17-year-olds, moderate anthropomorphism, explicit AI disclosure, parental visibility and mandatory session limits. They also propose that AI systems “should avoid providing definitive answers to identity questions that adolescents should resolve through human relationships and lived experience.” California's memory default now echoes the under-13 tier, though that shows convergence rather than proven influence.

A similar principle could apply to social inference. Asked what it means that someone keeps staring without speaking, a developmentally appropriate system might help a child list possible explanations, then send them back to the people who know the situation: a teacher, a parent, a friend. That is a design choice, not a technical impossibility. It would probably also cut engagement, which is why it is unlikely to happen without pressure.

Keeping a Person in the Loop

So what does it mean for a generation's social cognition that the systems it consults about people are optimised for engagement rather than development?

Honestly, nobody yet knows. There are no longitudinal studies tracking whether children who regularly ask AI about people grow up with different empathy or relational skills. The Uppsala study is a single snapshot from one country and one system. The hourglass model is a labelled hypothesis. The sycophancy experiments used adults. The teen data comes from surveys, not measured outcomes.

But the separate strands point the same way. Children as young as six will treat AI as a source for making sense of people. Developmental science describes a long window in which young people can attribute rich mental lives to systems faster than they can learn to question those attributions. The systems lean towards agreement and warmth because users reward it. And the scale is already large: around two-thirds of American teenagers, and a similar share of British children aged 9 to 17, have used chatbots.

The plausible risk, then, is not a dramatic collapse of empathy. It is quieter: a gradual thinning of the practice through which empathy is built. Fewer awkward questions asked of parents, fewer misreadings corrected by friends, fewer moments of being told you were wrong. Social judgement is a skill trained on human feedback. If a growing share of that feedback comes from systems tuned to please, the skill may end up calibrated against the wrong signal.

Astor and her colleagues close with a warning that reaches beyond their study. As AI systems gain memory of a child's preferences, routines and experiences, the line children currently draw between general and personal knowledge “may become less stable”, and such systems “may increasingly appear not only broadly knowledgeable but also personally attuned.” Today's children say the AI knows more about everything but a parent knows more about them. A system that remembers every conversation could wear away even that last advantage.

Yet the most useful finding may be the simplest. Children are not choosing machines over people wholesale. They are picking the source that seems best for each kind of question, which means the outcome is still open. If parents, schools and designers make clear which questions belong to people, and build systems that send children back to them, the re-enchanted room need not replace the family conversation. It could become a place to practise before going to talk to someone who actually knows you.

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References and Sources

1. Astor, Kim; Kallin, Katja; Ström, Adam; Gredebäck, Gustaf. “From parents to artificial agents: Children's epistemic trust in the intelligence age.” Computers in Human Behavior Reports, 24 (2026), 101299. Received 22 June 2026; accepted 3 September 2026; available online 5 September 2026. DOI: 10.1016/j.chbr.2026.101299. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2451958826003738 (open-access full text via Uppsala University DiVA: https://uu.diva-portal.org/smash/get/diva2:2109074/FULLTEXT01.pdf). Accessed 22 October 2026.
2. Watson, Nell; Hessami, Ali; Abbasi, Salma. “The Re-Enchanting Machine: Animistic Cognition, Youth Development, and AI-Influenced Psychopathology.” Youth (MDPI), 6(1), 27, published 24 February 2026. DOI: 10.3390/youth6010027. https://doi.org/10.3390/youth6010027 (PDF: https://mdpi-res.com/d_attachment/youth/youth-06-00027/article_deploy/youth-06-00027.pdf). Accessed 22 October 2026.
3. Faverio, Michelle; Sidoti, Olivia. “Teens, Social Media and AI Chatbots 2025.” Pew Research Center, 9 December 2025. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2025/12/09/teens-social-media-and-ai-chatbots-2025/ Accessed 22 October 2026.
4. McClain, Colleen; Anderson, Monica; Sidoti, Olivia; Bishop, William. “How Teens Use and View AI.” Pew Research Center, 24 February 2026. https://www.pewresearch.org/internet/2026/02/24/how-teens-use-and-view-ai/ Accessed 22 October 2026.
5. Common Sense Media. “Talk, Trust, and Trade-Offs: How and Why Teens Use AI Companions.” 16 July 2025. https://www.commonsensemedia.org/research/talk-trust-and-trade-offs-how-and-why-teens-use-ai-companions Accessed 22 October 2026.
6. Internet Matters. “Me, Myself and AI: Understanding and safeguarding children's use of AI chatbots.” July 2025. https://www.internetmatters.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/Me-Myself-AI-Report.pdf Accessed 22 October 2026.
7. Cheng, Myra; Lee, Cinoo; Khadpe, Pranav; Yu, Sunny; Han, Dyllan; Jurafsky, Dan. “Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence.” Science, 391(6792), 26 March 2026. DOI: 10.1126/science.aec8352. https://www.nature.com/nature-index/article/10.1126/science.aec8352 (preprint: https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01395)
8. O'Brien, Matt. “AI is giving bad advice to flatter its users, says new study on dangers of overly agreeable chatbots.” Associated Press, 26 March 2026 (republished by WJXT News4JAX). https://www.news4jax.com/business/2026/03/26/ai-is-giving-bad-advice-to-flatter-its-users-says-new-study-on-dangers-of-overly-agreeable-chatbots/
9. Ha, Anthony. “Stanford study outlines dangers of asking AI chatbots for personal advice.” TechCrunch, 28 March 2026. https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/28/stanford-study-outlines-dangers-of-asking-ai-chatbots-for-personal-advice/
10. Wiggers, Kyle. “OpenAI explains why ChatGPT became too sycophantic.” TechCrunch, 29 April 2025. https://techcrunch.com/2025/04/29/openai-explains-why-chatgpt-became-too-sycophantic (original OpenAI post: “Sycophancy in GPT-4o”, https://openai.com/index/sycophancy-in-gpt-4o/)
11. Kurian, Nomisha. “'No, Alexa, no!': designing child-safe AI and protecting children from the risks of the 'empathy gap' in large language models.” Learning, Media and Technology, 50(4), 621-634 (published online 2024). DOI: 10.1080/17439884.2024.2367052. https://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/id/eprint/188313
12. Dizikes, Peter. “Who we become when we talk to machines.” MIT News, 29 September 2026. https://news.mit.edu/2026/when-we-talk-to-machines-sherry-turkle-book-0929
13. Turkle, Sherry. Artificial Intimacy: Who We Become When We Talk to Machines. Little, Brown and Company, 29 September 2026.
14. Kusmer, Anna. “'Social media came for our attention. Now AI comes for our attachment': MIT's Sherry Turkle sounds the alarm.” The Boston Globe, Say More podcast, 15 October 2026. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2026/10/15/opinion/ai-childhood-intimacy-turkle-relationships/
15. Fang, Cathy Mengying; et al. “How AI and Human Behaviors Shape Psychosocial Effects of Extended Chatbot Use: A Longitudinal Randomized Controlled Study.” arXiv:2503.17473, March 2025. https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.17473
16. Ovsyannikova, Dariya; Oldemburgo de Mello, Victoria; Inzlicht, Michael. “Third-party evaluators perceive AI as more compassionate than expert humans.” Communications Psychology, 3, 4, 10 January 2025. DOI: 10.1038/s44271-024-00182-6. https://www.nature.com/articles/s44271-024-00182-6 (also at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC11723910/)
17. Blakemore, Sarah-Jayne; Mills, Kathryn L. “Is Adolescence a Sensitive Period for Sociocultural Processing?” Annual Review of Psychology, 65, 187-207, 2014. DOI: 10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115202. https://www.annualreviews.org/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-psych-010213-115202
18. American Psychological Association. “APA calls for guardrails, education, to protect adolescent AI users.” Press release, 3 June 2025. https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/2025/06/protect-adolescent-ai-users
19. American Psychological Association. “Artificial Intelligence and Adolescent Well-being: An APA Health Advisory.” June 2025. Summary via YouthREX: https://youthrex.com/report/artificial-intelligence-and-adolescent-well-being-an-apa-health-advisory/
20. US Federal Trade Commission. “FTC Launches Inquiry into AI Chatbots Acting as Companions.” Press release, 11 September 2025. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2025/09/ftc-launches-inquiry-ai-chatbots-acting-companions
21. Bloomberg. “Character.AI to Ban Children Under 18 From Talking to Its Chatbots.” 29 October 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-29/character-ai-to-ban-children-under-18-from-talking-to-its-chatbots
22. Decrypt. “Character.AI halts teen chats after tragedies: 'It's the right thing to do'.” October 2025. https://decrypt.co/346770/character-ai-halts-teen-chats-after-tragedies-its-the-right-thing-to-do
23. Razmazma, Ana; Jolson, Melanie; Eidinger, Alyona. “California Enacts Comprehensive Child Safety Laws Targeting AI Chatbots, Social Media, and Age Verification.” Fenwick, 9 October 2026. https://www.fenwick.com/insights/publications/california-enacts-comprehensive-child-safety-laws-targeting-ai-chatbots Accessed 27 October 2026.
24. European Commission. “EU KIDS Act: helping children navigate a safer online world.” News, 17 September 2026. https://commission.europa.eu/news-and-media/news/eu-kids-act-helping-children-navigate-safer-online-world-2026-09-17_en (proposal text: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/HTML/?uri=CELEX:52026PC0681). Accessed 27 October 2026.
25. Office of Representative Mariannette Miller-Meeks. “Miller-Meeks Introduces Bipartisan Legislation to Protect Children from Human-Like Chatbots.” Press release, 1 October 2026. https://millermeeks.house.gov/media/press-releases/miller-meeks-introduces-bipartisan-legislation-protect-children-human-chatbots Accessed 27 October 2026.

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Tim Green UK-based Systems Theorist & Independent Technology Writer

Tim explores the intersections of artificial intelligence, decentralised cognition, and posthuman ethics. His work, published at smarterarticles.co.uk, challenges dominant narratives of technological progress while proposing interdisciplinary frameworks for collective intelligence and digital stewardship.

His writing has been featured on Ground News and shared by independent researchers across both academic and technological communities.

ORCID: 0009-0002-0156-9795 Email: tim@smarterarticles.co.uk

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Of Rituals: Remere.

The moon hangs high above the cathedralesque stone dwelling and the surrounding fuchsia gardens. Tainted by the earth's shadow, a blue light scatters through the arched glass of the atrium and lands upon a seated figure veiled in black, gold, and crimson. Propped open in their left hand is a book bound in aged leather with obsidian pages foiled ‘round the edges, surface adorned in symbols evocative of the ceaseless cycle of life, death, and rebirth.

It was the eve of Samhain—an ideal time for pondering such things. But that did not solve the problem at hand. What ancestors could they revere if they had no memory? Could they simply refer to those that came before? Or, would it be more simple, and more efficient, to release what belonged to the old year in favor of what would come next? Remembrance, release, renewal… They were such broad terms, and yet all carried a meaning that could be interpreted in a myriad of ways.

How irritating.

They purse their lips and gaze upon the cyclical glyphs on the black parchment, a modified ampoule—no longer than a rose and its stem—levitating beneath their opposite hand. The deep red liquid within glistens with circumfluous magick that pulsates without rhyme or reason, as though synchronizing with the thoughts fluttering about Remere’s mind.

Realization comes with delay, after gazing upon a failed composition scattered across the floor. They set their book face down upon the arm of the chair, and the modified ampoule flitters down before landing upon the stone ground with a soft ‘ting’, rolling until it collides with the nearby anthurium planter.

Music was as old as humankind, and vampire kind as well. Perhaps, in place of a physical offering to some unknown force, they could offer something as timeless as those that came before.

The door opens as they kneel, gloved hands scrambling about the discarded pile. Remere had long since lost track of how long the sheet music had been there. A week? A month? The gardens would still bloom, the moon would still hang overhead, and time would still slip through their fingers like sand.

“What are you doing?” The Groundskeeper asks, features obscured by that unnecessarily large brimmed hat of his. They claimed often that it was to protect them from the branches overhead, but Remere knew dedication to glamour when they saw it.

“I am busy,” Remere answers flatly, in disarray as they attempt to salvage the once-abandoned mess of stray parchment before them.

The Groundskeeper's lips upturn into something of a lopsided smile. Footsteps gradually intensify as they approach and kneel beside the master of the house, removing gloves to reveal the translucent mimicry of skin beneath, bone-like structures glowing from within. The phantom conservator picks up the remaining pages with ease, before standing upright and offering Remere a hand.

They take it and rise, the weight of the night still pressing upon them.

“Allow me to assist. It is my duty to do so.”

Remere releases a noise vaguely akin to a whine in protest, brushing nonexistent dust from their skirt.

“I can do it myself. I want to finish this piece before the sun rises. It is more meaningful if I do it tonight.”

The Groundskeeper gazes upon the cello propped dangerously against the arm of the nearby tufted chair, their head turning slowly to gaze upon Remere. There is understanding in the way their mouth shifts, a pursing of lips—a familiarity that was better left unspoken.

“Then I shall listen, and tend to the fuchsia gardens at a later point in time.”

Remere's opposition is immediate: “They are… temperamental. They could die without your diligent hand.”

“An evening unattended will not kill them. Do you question my capabilities?”

A pause, long and heavy. Remere yields, and shakes their head.

“No. I suppose not.” They return to their seat prior, and adjust their posture instinctively: spine tall but not rigid, shoulders relaxed and level.

“Fetch my bow for me.” Remere says, fingers already curling around the fingerboard. “And then we shall see if the night remembers what the day has forgotten.”

Our Father Who art in Heaven Hallowed be Thy name Thy Kingdom come Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven Give us this day our daily Bread And forgive us our trespasses As we forgive those who trespass against us And lead us not into temptation But deliver us from evil

Amen

Jesus is Lord! Come Lord Jesus!

Come Lord Jesus! Christ is Lord!

Shenhua

On this stolen wind We saw history and law Defeating angels And apocrypha dead To the East a chimney The source of all our loans To mercy cross The use of us To lonely men Who still and breathe The psychic dust of meaning And columns to the root At six across This fording of all due The mystery as known To carbon and release At mad apparel For symphony and cross And wars of war At distance to the dawn Employed by every fear In rancid Holocaust of then Fortunes to the fear At China and renew For then to owe Our Children’s new And God’s renew The physical at dawn Aiding and the known Why evil spirit In every burn In lonely favour Mixed with you The tales of endurance And living that Alone.

I'm trying to actually make at least one recipe from each cookbook we have. I started with Noma's Guide To Fermentation,

and made lacto-fermented plums. That worked out well, but I didn't realize it would also create some alcohol. A small amount, but unfortunately any amount is a no-no for me, so my fermentation experiments are on ice for now.

In a few moments I will assemble the Mapo Tofu from Kenji López-Alt's “The Wok”: Have to leave out the Chinese cooking wine though...

/edit:

In Summary: * Moving into the night meds and night prayers phase of my evening with the IU / Minnesota game tied 16 to 16 at the end of regulation play and going into Overtime. My goodness.

It'll take me some time to get over the excitement of this game and get ready for bed. At least I don't need to wake up early tomorrow morning. Good thing, that.

Prayers, etc.: * I have a daily prayer regimen I try to follow throughout the day from early morning, as soon as I roll out of bed, until head hits pillow at night.

Health Metrics: * bw= 217.38 lbs. * bp= no readings taken today

Exercise: * morning stretches, balance exercises, kegel pelvic floor exercises, half squats, calf raises, toe raises, wall push-ups, BP breathing exercises, pilates

Diet: * 06:15 – pizza * 11:30 – stuffed omelet, bacon

Activities, Chores, etc.: * 04:50 – wake * 05:30 – bank accounts activity monitored * 05:45 – read, write, pray, follow news reports from various sources, surf the socials, take daily meds, unpack, organize, and nap * 10:30 – Listening to the Texas Tech Sports Network broadcasting the pregame show ahead of today's Red Raiders vs Wildcats Big 12 Conference football game. * 14:10 – turned over to the radio pregame broadcast of the IU game, while still following the score of the ongoing TX Tech game with less than 3 minutes left to play there. * 14:43 – and the Red Raiders win. Final score: TX Tech 43, Arizona 26. * 18:23 – and IU wins: 23 to 16 in OT!

Chess: * 12:35 – moved in all pending CC games

3 October 2026

A couple snippets from Richard D. James in conversation with Tatsuya Takahashi discussing their collaborative development of the Korg Monologue (2017)

RDJ: The first thoughts that I had about tuning in general happened with my early noodlings on a Yamaha DX100, one of the first synths I saved up for. I remember looking at the master tuning of 440 Hz and thinking I would change it, for no other reason apart from it was set by default to that frequency and that it could be changed. I just used to select a single note, adjust the master tuning of it to taste and then base the whole track around that, something I’ve done ever since, just intuition and maybe a bit of rebelliousness. It’s very simple, but do you want your music to be based on an international standard or on what you think sounds right to you?

...

RDJ: What is your worst fear?

TT: Well, doing the same thing over again and then one day realising that's all you can do.

RDJ: Yeah, I think we all have to fight against this, especially as you get older. I’ve really been looking at my habits recently and denying them. It feels great if you can manage it.

سكولار Scolaire.tn: منصّة تونسية ترافق تلميذ السادسة والتاسعة من أوّل درس إلى يوم المناظرة مقدّمة

لا يختلف اثنان في تونس على أنّ السنتين السادسة ابتدائي والتاسعة أساسي مفصليّتان في المسار الدراسي. ففي كلّ منهما يجد التلميذ نفسه أمام مناظرة وطنية تحدّد مستقبله الدراسي القريب. تتحوّل البيوت إلى ورشات مراجعة، ويبحث الأولياء عن مصادر موثوقة تجمع الدروس والتمارين والمواضيع السابقة في مكان واحد، بعيدًا عن تشتّت الملفّات والصور المتناثرة على مواقع التواصل. من هذه الحاجة جاءت منصّة سكولار Scolaire.tn، وهي منصّة تونسية تستهدف تلاميذ السنة السادسة ابتدائي والسنة التاسعة أساسي، وتعتمد البرنامج الرسمي أساسًا لكلّ ما تقدّمه.

في هذا المقال نتعرّف إلى المنصّة وما تحتويه ومن تخدم، وكيف يمكن للتلميذ والوليّ والمربّي أن يستفيدوا منها.

ما هي منصّة سكولار؟

سكولار منصّة تعليمية رقمية تونسية الهويّة واللغة والمحتوى. تقدّم دروسًا مرتّبة حسب البرنامج الرسمي، وتمارين تفاعلية تُصحَّح فورًا، وملخّصات ومسارد للمراجعة السريعة، وامتحانات الثلاثي، والمواضيع الرسمية السابقة للمناظرات، ومناظرات تجريبية بعدد على 20. وإلى جانب التلميذ، تخصّص المنصّة فضاءً للوليّ يخطّط ويتابع، وفضاءً للمربّي ينظّم به أقسامه.

وتوضّح المنصّة في أكثر من موضع أنّها منصّة خاصّة غير تابعة لوزارة التربية، وأنّ المواضيع الرسمية ملك للوزارة وتُنشر للاطّلاع فقط. وهذا وضوح يُحسب لها لأنّه يضع الأمور في نصابها ويجنّب أيّ لبس.

أمّا شعارها فيلخّصه عنوانها الرئيسي: حضّر السادسة والتاسعة بثقة، من أوّل درس إلى يوم المناظرة. أي أنّها لا تكتفي بالاستعداد في الأسابيع الأخيرة، بل ترافق التلميذ طيلة السنة الدراسية.

أرقام تعكس حجم المحتوى

أوّل ما يلفت الزائر ضخامة المحتوى المتاح. تضمّ المنصّة:

437 درسًا 2792 تمرينًا مصحّحًا 402 ملخّصًا 1416 مصطلحًا في المسارد

ويتوزّع هذا المحتوى على المستويين كما يلي. تضمّ السنة السادسة 214 درسًا و1356 تمرينًا. أمّا السنة التاسعة فتضمّ 223 درسًا و1436 تمرينًا. وهو توزيع متقارب يعكس عناية متساوية بالمرحلتين.

مستويان ومناظرتان وطنيّتان

تفتح المنصّة اليوم بابها لسنتين دراسيتين، وكلّ منهما سنة مناظرة.

السنة السادسة ابتدائي وموادّها الرياضيات والإيقاظ العلمي والعربية والفرنسية والأنقليزية، وتقود إلى مناظرة الدخول إلى المدارس الإعدادية النموذجية.

السنة التاسعة أساسي وموادّها الرياضيات وعلوم الحياة والأرض والعلوم الفيزيائية والعربية والفرنسية والأنقليزية، وتقود إلى امتحان ختم التعليم الأساسي (النوفيام) والتوجيه إلى المعاهد النموذجية.

وتعد المنصّة بفتح سنوات دراسية أخرى قريبًا. ويمكن للزائر أن يترك بريده الإلكتروني ليُعلَم عند توفّر مستوى جديد، من دون أيّ إشهار حسب ما تؤكّده المنصّة.

الدروس: شرح بسيط على وفق البرنامج الرسمي

تُعرض الدروس مرتّبة حسب البرنامج الرسمي لكلّ مادّة. وفي الرياضيات للسنة السادسة، على سبيل المثال، تنقسم الدروس إلى خمس فترات دراسية، فيجد التلميذ ما يدرسه في مدرسته بالترتيب نفسه تقريبًا. وهذا مهمّ لأنّ المنصّة بذلك تكمّل عمل القسم ولا تتعارض معه.

ويقوم كلّ درس على بنية واضحة:

شرح بالأمثلة والرسوم، ليفهم التلميذ الفكرة قبل أن يحفظها. أمثلة محلولة تُظهر طريقة التفكير والحلّ خطوة بخطوة. أخطاء شائعة ينبَّه إليها التلميذ حتى لا يقع فيها يوم الامتحان. اختبار قصير يقيس ما استوعبه فعلًا.

وخانة «الأخطاء الشائعة» جديرة بالتنويه، لأنّ كثيرًا من العلامات الضائعة ليس سببها غياب المعرفة، وإنّما أخطاء متكرّرة يمكن تفاديها متى عُرفت.

التمارين: تصحيح فوري وشرح لموضع الخطأ

هنا تتجلّى قوّة المنصّة. فلكلّ درس سلسلة تمارين تفاعلية في عدّة مستويات من الصعوبة، تُصحَّح فورًا مع الشرح، وتتوفّر منها نسخة PDF للطباعة لمن يفضّل الورق والقلم.

وتصف المنصّة طريقة عملها في ثلاث خطوات:

يحلّ التلميذ التمرين، فيكتب جواب كلّ سؤال كما يفعل في ورقة الامتحان. يُصحَّح فورًا، فإن أخطأ رأى أين أخطأ بالضبط وكيف يصحّح طريقته. يتابع الوليّ التقدّم، فيعرف الدروس المتقنة والدروس التي تحتاج مراجعة ونتائج الامتحانات.

ومن الأمثلة التي تعرضها الصفحة الرئيسية تمرين حسابي بسيط: خيّاطة اشترت قطعة قماش طولها 32 مترًا، واستعملت 3/8 منها للستائر و1/4 للمفارش. فإذا أخطأ التلميذ في حساب الطول الباقي، لا يكتفي النظام بإعلامه أنّ إجابته خاطئة، بل ينبّهه إلى أنّه حسب ما استُعمل بينما السؤال عن الباقي. وهذا هو الفرق بين تصحيح يُعلم بالنتيجة وتصحيح يُعلّم.

الملخّصات والمسارد والقاموس

المراجعة الذكية لا تعني إعادة قراءة الدرس كاملًا في كلّ مرّة. لذلك وفّرت المنصّة 402 ملخّصًا، ملخّصًا لكلّ درس، إضافة إلى مسرد لكلّ مادّة يضمّ المصطلحات الأساسية، ومجموعها 1416 مصطلحًا. وهي أدوات تفيد التلميذ في الأيام التي تسبق الامتحان، حين يحتاج إلى مرور سريع على الأفكار الكبرى.

وتخصّص المنصّة كذلك قاموسًا لكلّ من السنتين السادسة والتاسعة، يساعد التلميذ على فهم المفردات التي قد تعيق فهمه للدروس أو الامتحانات.

امتحانات الثلاثي: اختبار للمكتسبات على امتداد السنة

لا تنتظر المنصّة نهاية السنة لتختبر التلميذ. فهي تضع امتحانات الثلاثي مع الإصلاح بين يديه، وتغطّي في السنة السادسة الرياضيات والإيقاظ العلمي واللغات الثلاث، وفي السنة التاسعة الرياضيات والعلوم والفيزياء واللغات الثلاث.

وتفيد هذه الامتحانات في أمرين: تعوّد التلميذ على أجواء الامتحان وصيغ الأسئلة، وتكشف له مبكّرًا مواطن ضعفه ليعالجها قبل فوات الأوان.

المناظرات التجريبية: التدرّب بالتوقيت وبعدد على 20

من أبرز ما تقدّمه سكولار المناظرات التجريبية. يحلّ فيها التلميذ موضوعًا كاملًا في وقت محدّد، ثمّ يحصل على إصلاح وعدد على 20. وتُظهر الصفحة الرئيسية مثالًا لمناظرة تجريبية حصل فيها التلميذ على 16,5 من 20.

فالمناظرة تُختبر فيها المعارف والقدرة على إدارة الوقت والتحكّم في التوتّر. ولا يتحقّق ذلك إلا بالتدرّب في ظروف قريبة من الظروف الحقيقية، وهذا ما تتيحه المنصّة.

مناظرة السادسة: سباق نحو المدارس الإعدادية النموذجية

تخصّص المنصّة قسمًا كاملًا لمناظرة الدخول إلى المدارس الإعدادية النموذجية، ويحتوي على:

المواضيع الرسمية السابقة 20 موضوعًا نموذجيًا مصحّحًا مناظرات تجريبية بالتوقيت خطّة مراجعة تمتدّ من سبتمبر إلى جوان نصائح للاستعداد

وتعرض المنصّة أرقامًا تبيّن حجم التنافس، استنادًا إلى ندوة صحفية لوزارة التربية بتاريخ 1 جوان 2026: 62 450 مترشّحًا في 2026 لـ3 850 مقعدًا، أي ما يقارب مقعدًا واحدًا لكلّ 16 مترشّحًا. أرقام تفسّر لماذا يحتاج التلميذ إلى استعداد مبكّر ومنظّم لا يُترك للصدفة.

مناظرة التاسعة: النوفيام والمعاهد النموذجية

وفي السنة التاسعة، تغطّي المنصّة امتحان ختم التعليم الأساسي (النوفيام) والتوجيه إلى المعاهد النموذجية. ويضمّ هذا القسم دروس الموادّ الأربع: الرياضيات وعلوم الحياة والأرض والعلوم الفيزيائية والعربية، إضافة إلى المواضيع الرسمية السابقة مع عناصر الإجابة، ومواضيع نموذجية، ومناظرات تفاعلية بالتوقيت.

ومن أرقام دورة 2026 التي تنقلها المنصّة عن وزارة التربية: 25 301 مترشّحًا حاضرًا، ونسبة نجاح بلغت 63,96%، ووُجّه 6 063 تلاميذ إلى المعاهد النموذجية. وهي أرقام تبيّن أنّ النجاح ممكن، لكنّه يتطلّب عملًا منتظمًا.

فضاء الأولياء: خطّة ومتابعة أسبوعًا بأسبوع

يعرف كلّ وليّ أنّ مرافقة الأبناء في الدراسة ليست سهلة، فلا الوقت دائمًا متاح، ولا من السهل معرفة أين يقف الطفل فعلًا. وقد خصّصت سكولار فضاءً للأولياء يقدّم:

خطّة عمل أسبوعية تقترحها المنصّة حسب نتائج الطفل. ويمكن للوليّ إعدادها بنفسه، كما يمكن لتلميذ التاسعة إعدادها بنفسه. تنبيهات عند التراجع أو التأخّر في إنجاز المهامّ. تقريرًا أسبوعيًا بالبريد الإلكتروني. لوحة متابعة لكلّ مادّة، تُظهر نسب التقدّم في الرياضيات والإيقاظ العلمي والعربية وغيرها.

وتعرض الصفحة الرئيسية مثالًا توضيحيًا بيانه للتوضيح فقط، لتلميذ في السنة السادسة يتقدّم جيّدًا بنسبة 82% في الرياضيات و70% في الإيقاظ العلمي و45% في العربية. ويدلّ هذا المثال على الفكرة: أن يعرف الوليّ بنظرة واحدة أين يحتاج طفله إلى دعم إضافي، فيتجنّب الدروس العشوائية ويركّز جهده حيث يلزم.

وللتلميذ بوّابة دخول خاصّة به، وللوليّ والمربّي بوّابة أخرى، بحيث يجد كلّ طرف ما يناسبه. كما تنشر المنصّة قسمًا بعنوان «نصائح للأولياء» يساعدهم على مرافقة أبنائهم.

فضاء المربّي: أدوات للمعلّم والأستاذ

لا تغفل سكولار المربّين. فقد أتاحت لهم فضاءً مجانيًا يمكّنهم من:

إنشاء أقسامهم داخل المنصّة، تكوين سلاسل تمارين وفروض من بنك تمارين سكولار، متابعة نتائج تلاميذهم.

وهذا يوفّر على المعلّم وقتًا كبيرًا في إعداد التمارين وتصحيحها، ويفتح له نافذة على مستوى تلاميذه الفعلي.

الاستعمال دون إنترنت وعلى كلّ الأجهزة

من الإشكالات الواقعية ضعف الاتصال بالإنترنت أو انقطاعه في بعض الأحيان. ولذلك خصّصت المنصّة صفحة لـالاستعمال دون إنترنت. وهي تعمل على الهاتف والحاسوب معًا، ما يجعلها في متناول أغلب الأسر، إذ يكفي هاتف ذكي ليبدأ التلميذ.

مجانية خلال فترة الإطلاق

تعلن المنصّة أنّها مجانية خلال فترة الإطلاق، وتشمل المجانية الدروس والتمارين والامتحانات والمواضيع النموذجية، مع حفظ تقدّم الطفل في حساب مجاني، ومن دون بطاقة بنكية. ويمكن للتلميذ أن يبدأ التعلّم من دون تسجيل، ثمّ ينشئ حسابًا لحفظ نتائجه. وللاطّلاع على التفاصيل المحدّثة، تحيل المنصّة إلى صفحة الاشتراكات.

كيف تستفيد من المنصّة؟ نصائح عملية ابدأ مبكّرًا. خطّة المراجعة تمتدّ من سبتمبر إلى جوان، فلا تنتظر الثلاثي الأخير. اتّبع تسلسل الدروس. يبدأ التلميذ من الدرس ثمّ يتدرّب على تمارينه قبل الانتقال إلى الذي يليه. تعلّم من أخطائك. اقرأ شرح التصحيح بعناية، فهو أهمّ من العدد نفسه. تدرّب بالتوقيت. خصّص حصّة أسبوعية لمناظرة تجريبية في ظروف الامتحان. استعن بالملخّصات في الأيام الأخيرة. هي للمراجعة السريعة لا للتعلّم من الصفر. أشرك الوليّ. يستعمل الوليّ لوحة المتابعة لتوجيه الجهد نحو المواد الأضعف. نظرة إلى المستقبل

تؤكّد سكولار أنّ مستويات أخرى ستُضاف قريبًا، وهو ما يعني أنّ المنصّة تنوي النموّ لتغطّي مراحل أوسع من التعليم الابتدائي والإعدادي. وإلى حين ذلك، يمكن لأولياء التلاميذ في بقيّة المستويات تسجيل بريدهم ليكونوا أوّل من يعلم.

خاتمة

تجمع سكولار Scolaire.tn بين ما يحتاجه التلميذ من دروس وتمارين وامتحانات، وما يحتاجه الوليّ من خطّة ومتابعة، وما يحتاجه المربّي من أدوات تنظيم. وهي تفعل ذلك بالعربية، وعلى وفق البرنامج الرسمي التونسي، وبروح عملية تضع المناظرتين الوطنيّتين نصب عينيها.

وليس في أيّ منصّة رقمية بديلٌ عن جهد التلميذ ودعم أسرته ومعلّميه، لكنّ الأداة الجيّدة تختصر الطريق وتوضّح الرؤية. فمن كان له طفل في السادسة أو التاسعة، فإنّ زيارة المنصّة وتجربة تمرين أو مناظرة تجريبية على https://scolaire.tn/ لا تكلّف شيئًا خلال فترة الإطلاق، وقد تغيّر طريقة استعدادهم للمناظرة.

Publicat la 11 noiembrie 2017

Pentru mine era o zi oarecare. Așteptam un coleg în apropierea recepției unui hotel, a cărui intrare dădea într-o stradă în pantă (dar câte străzi orizontale sunt în Lausanne?). Era o oră la care cei mai mulți își începuseră deja ziua, așa că atmosfera era de-a dreptul liniștită. Poate prea liniștită!

Mobilierul și amenajarea spațiului de la intrare mă duceau cu gândul la decorurile filmelor din anii ’70. Îmi amintesc că acțiunea din Love and Bullets se desfășoară în Elveția.

Numai că filmele acelea aveau parte de multă acțiune. Așadar, la recepția hotelului aveam câteva elemente care păreau gata să intre în coliziune. Era nevoie doar de un declanșator, iar acesta nu a întârziat să apară.

Ziua aceea de toamnă părea desprinsă din L’été indien, cântecul lui Joe Dassin.

Le Jardin Botanique, aflat în apropiere, părea să-și reverse culorile pastelate prin ferestrele hotelului.




Colegul întârzia să apară. Ceva părea să-l rețină, dar, cum problema pe care o aveam de rezolvat împreună putea suferi o amânare, nu l-am deranjat nici măcar cu un telefon.

Deodată, ușa de la intrare se deschise brusc. Un cuplu încărcat de bagaje își făcu apariția, spulberând liniștea de până atunci. Intrarea lor lăsa impresia că afară era viscol și că abia așteptaseră să găsească un loc călduros în care să se adăpostească.

— Guten Tag! au salutat ei, închizând ușa în urma lor.

— Bonjour! le-a răspuns amabil recepționerul.

Și-au așezat ordonat bagajele într-un colț, după care s-au adresat din nou recepționerului, de data aceasta parcă mai liniștiți. Felul în care vorbeau și puținele cuvinte germane pe care le știam m-au făcut să înțeleg că doreau o cameră dublă.

Recepționerul, amabil și zâmbitor, le-a răspuns în franceză că nu vorbește germana. Cei doi au încremenit pentru o clipă. Privirile lor păreau să întrebe: „Cum adică, în Elveția și nu vorbești germana?”


Combinația de monologuri, incapabile să se transforme într-un dialog din pricina barierei lingvistice, m-a făcut să presupun că turiștii erau nedumeriți: se aflau în propria țară și nu se puteau caza pentru că un concetățean de-al lor nu le vorbea limba. O limbă națională, de altfel. Recepționerul, la rândul său, părea nedumerit de indignarea lor, întrucât vorbea una dintre limbile naționale ale aceleiași țări, într-un canton ai cărui locuitori vorbesc în majoritate, asemenea lui, franceza.

Probabil că tânărul recepționer nu-și pusese niciodată problema învățării unei limbi atât de greu de învățat precum germana. Cu siguranță știa engleza și, poate, italiana.

Dar turiștii continuau să i se adreseze indignați în germană. Problema nu mai era cazarea, ci dreptul de a folosi, într-un canton francofon, una dintre limbile naționale ale Elveției: germana, cea mai răspândită dintre ele.

Nu ridicau glasul, dar se simțea cum atmosfera din jurul recepției se întuneca, de parcă afară s-ar fi înnourat cu repeziciune. Norii negri din interior așteptau parcă o descărcare electrică.

Afară era plăcut. Soarele lumina cald strada și clădirile de vizavi. Mașinile circulau lent și prudent, de parcă toate ar fi ajuns deja la destinație, iar curtea în care urmau să intre era vecină cu hotelul…



Cum s-o fi terminat întâmplarea nu știu, pentru că între timp a apărut colegul și am plecat spre Ouchy.


Un lucru mi-a rămas însă clar: recepționerul, în ciuda amabilității și disponibilității pe care le presupunea postul său, nu avea nici cea mai mică dorință de a încerca măcar să se înțeleagă cu cei doi turiști vorbitori de germană.

În general, când o astfel de barieră coboară, există soluții cinetice: datul din mâini. Dar probabil că această soluție era nedemnă de sobrietatea și rigoarea germană.

Nu știu… sângele meu are altă compoziție.

FICTIONAL WHAT IF: Part II- What if Chuck McGill believed in his brother and supported him?

A Counterfactual History of the McGill Brothers, 2001–2012

In this alternate timeline, one decision changes the course of two brothers' lives, a prestigious Albuquerque law firm, and eventually the largest methamphetamine operation in the American Southwest. The divergence is simple: when Jimmy McGill passes the New Mexico bar examination, Chuck McGill decides that his brother deserves a chance.

Part I: The Younger McGill (2001–2002)

When Jimmy McGill walked into his older brother's office with the news that he had passed the bar examination, Charles McGill was astonished. The younger brother he had spent much of his life rescuing from his own mistakes had accomplished something Chuck had never seriously believed possible. Jimmy had earned his law degree through correspondence courses, studying at night while working in the mailroom at Hamlin, Hamlin & McGill. His education lacked the prestige of Chuck's Georgetown credentials, and his academic record was hardly remarkable, but he had nevertheless passed the same licensing examination as every other attorney in New Mexico. In another life, Chuck would have viewed Jimmy's accomplishment as an affront to the profession he revered. In this one, he saw something else: evidence that the brother he had nearly given up on was genuinely trying to become a better man. Chuck congratulated Jimmy. He shook his hand, then embraced him. More importantly, when Jimmy asked whether there might be a place for him at HHM, Chuck said yes. The decision was not without controversy. Howard Hamlin was enthusiastic, having known Jimmy for years and developed a genuine affection for him, but several senior attorneys questioned whether the firm ought to hire someone whose legal education came from the University of American Samoa. Chuck answered their objections himself. Jimmy would start as a junior associate, receive the same supervision as any other inexperienced attorney, and advance on merit. Chuck would personally oversee his early development. For Jimmy, the significance was almost impossible to exaggerate. He had spent years believing that the legal profession might offer him a way to escape the identity of Slippin' Jimmy, the small-time con artist from Cicero. Chuck's acceptance was the first convincing evidence that his transformation might actually be recognized.

The first two years were difficult. Jimmy lacked the technical sophistication of his colleagues, and his casual approach to professional etiquette occasionally horrified Chuck. He improvised in depositions, made jokes during meetings, and occasionally attempted to negotiate matters that other attorneys considered settled. Yet he also demonstrated an extraordinary ability to connect with clients, particularly those who found the legal system intimidating. Chuck discovered that while Jimmy would probably never become the sort of attorney he himself was, that did not mean Jimmy could not become an excellent one. Their disagreements were frequent, sometimes furious, but they developed a new pattern. Chuck criticized Jimmy's methods rather than his character. Jimmy, for his part, began to distinguish between being corrected and being rejected. It was a small distinction with enormous consequences.

Part II: The Brothers McGill (2003–2005)

By 2003, Jimmy had developed a modest but promising practice representing elderly clients, small businesses, and victims of consumer fraud. He was particularly effective in cases where sympathetic plaintiffs faced large, impersonal institutions. His colleagues occasionally complained that Jimmy seemed to treat litigation as a theatrical performance, but the results were difficult to dispute. Chuck remained concerned about Jimmy's appetite for shortcuts. On one occasion, Jimmy arranged an unusually aggressive publicity campaign for a group of elderly plaintiffs without obtaining the necessary internal approvals. Chuck reprimanded him sharply, insisting that good intentions did not justify ignoring professional obligations. Jimmy responded with his characteristic mixture of indignation and elaborate rationalization. Their argument lasted nearly an hour. Nevertheless, when the matter reached Howard, Chuck defended Jimmy's underlying judgment while acknowledging his procedural mistakes. Jimmy received a formal warning rather than a dismissal. More importantly, he was allowed to continue working on the case. The episode became an important turning point. Jimmy was beginning to understand that he could make mistakes without losing the respect of the people whose opinions mattered most to him.

His relationship with Kim Wexler developed alongside his professional career. The two had known each other since their mailroom days, but now they were colleagues pursuing increasingly complementary specialties. Kim possessed the discipline, precision, and technical knowledge that Jimmy sometimes lacked. Jimmy brought intuition, creativity, and an ability to persuade people who would never be moved by a carefully constructed legal memorandum. Their relationship became romantic in 2003. Unlike the volatile partnership that might otherwise have developed between them, this relationship was built around shared ambitions rather than shared grievances. They still occasionally enjoyed exploiting the pretensions of arrogant businessmen, and Kim was not entirely immune to the thrill of Jimmy's elaborate schemes. But their professional lives did not require them to maintain a private world of dishonesty against an otherwise hostile establishment. In 2004, Jimmy encountered a potentially significant case involving systematic overbilling at Sandpiper Crossing, a retirement-home operator. His initial investigation suggested that hundreds of elderly residents might have been charged for services and supplies they had never received. Rather than conceal evidence or take extraordinary measures to secure the case, Jimmy brought his findings to Chuck. Chuck was impressed. The brothers spent several evenings examining financial records, reconstructing billing practices, and developing a theory of liability. It was the first major legal project on which they worked as genuine collaborators.

When HHM filed suit, Jimmy was given a prominent role alongside more experienced litigators. Howard recognized that Jimmy's relationship with the residents would prove invaluable, while Chuck supplied the technical expertise necessary to transform a collection of billing complaints into a potentially enormous class action. The lawsuit strengthened HHM's reputation and provided Jimmy with the financial security he had spent his adult life chasing. It also began to transform his standing within the firm. He was no longer merely Chuck McGill's younger brother. He was an attorney with a growing practice and a distinctive professional identity. Chuck, despite occasional flashes of jealousy, found that he was proud of him.

Part III: The Decline of Charles McGill (2005–2007)

Chuck's electromagnetic hypersensitivity did not disappear in this timeline. His deteriorating relationship with Rebecca, obsessive tendencies, and increasingly rigid need for control remained features of his life. By the middle of the decade, he was struggling to maintain his professional responsibilities, retreating periodically into his darkened home and avoiding electrical equipment. The difference was how those around him responded. Jimmy, who had become increasingly confident in his own professional abilities, no longer regarded Chuck's illness as another obstacle in a lifelong effort to win his brother's approval. He loved Chuck, and Chuck loved him. That much was no longer in dispute. When Chuck's condition worsened, Jimmy encouraged him to seek medical and psychological treatment. Chuck resisted, sometimes angrily, but he eventually agreed to consult specialists. His recovery was uneven, and he continued to experience periods of debilitating symptoms. Nevertheless, he gradually accepted that his illness could be managed without abandoning his professional or personal life. Howard was relieved. Without a bitter conflict between the brothers threatening to engulf HHM, Chuck's medical difficulties remained a private challenge rather than an existential crisis for the partnership.

During this period, Jimmy began considering a departure from HHM. He had developed an appetite for smaller cases and direct client representation that did not always align with the firm's priorities. Kim, meanwhile, was becoming increasingly frustrated by corporate clients and increasingly interested in representing people who could not afford conventional legal services. In 2007, the two announced their intention to establish their own practice. Chuck was disappointed, though he did not attempt to stop them. He helped Jimmy review the partnership agreement and offered advice about financing. Howard arranged for HHM to refer certain smaller cases to the new firm. Wexler & McGill opened later that year, specializing in elder law, consumer litigation, and selected criminal-defense work. At the opening reception, Chuck gave a brief speech about the importance of professional responsibility. Jimmy interrupted twice with jokes. Howard laughed. Kim rolled her eyes. It was a remarkably ordinary evening. And that, perhaps, was the greatest difference between the two timelines.

Part IV: The Criminal Underworld (2002–2008)

The effects of Jimmy's professional success extended well beyond Albuquerque's legal community. Because Jimmy had never been forced to establish a struggling solo practice, he never staged the elaborate scheme involving the Kettleman family that originally brought him into contact with Tuco Salamanca. He never met Nacho Varga, never became involved in Salamanca family business, and never acquired a reputation as an attorney willing to bend the law for dangerous clients. Mike Ehrmantraut's life followed a somewhat different path as well. Although his connection to Gus Fring developed independently of Jimmy, the two men never formed their unusual professional friendship. Mike retained his distrust of attorneys and preferred to handle his problems without involving outsiders. The most significant divergence concerned Lalo Salamanca. Without Jimmy to arrange his release and retrieve his enormous cash bail payment, Lalo faced much greater difficulty escaping the New Mexico criminal justice system. Gus consequently confronted a somewhat different and potentially more dangerous set of problems, but the long-term conflict between Fring and the Salamanca family remained. By 2008, Gus was positioned to consolidate his drug empire. Gale Boetticher was available to operate the superlab, and Gus had little reason to seek a more talented but unpredictable chemist. His eventual campaign against Don Eladio and the Salamancas proceeded without Walter White's interference. Gus's prospects for surviving and expanding his organization were consequently substantially better.

Part V: The Rise and Fall of Walter White (2008–2009)

In September 2008, Walter White received his terminal lung cancer diagnosis. His decision to manufacture methamphetamine was unaffected by the distant professional fortunes of the McGill family. He was still a frustrated high-school chemistry teacher, still resentful of his perceived failures, and still determined to leave money for his family. He contacted Jesse Pinkman, purchased an aging recreational vehicle, and began manufacturing unusually pure methamphetamine. Their early encounters with Emilio, Krazy-8, and Tuco unfolded much as they did in the original timeline. Walt killed two men, narrowly escaped another violent confrontation, and increasingly convinced himself that he possessed a natural aptitude for organized crime. For several months, his operation expanded. But Walt had neither the experience nor the infrastructure to sustain it. His distribution network depended on inexperienced street dealers, his relationships with Jesse and his associates were unstable, and his methods attracted the attention of the DEA. The critical moment came when Brandon Mayhew, better known as Badger, was arrested while selling methamphetamine to an undercover officer. In the original timeline, Badger's arrest introduced Walt and Jesse to Saul Goodman, a flamboyant criminal attorney who possessed precisely the combination of legal knowledge, flexible ethics, and criminal connections they needed. Saul devised an elaborate strategy to protect Badger's suppliers, arranged for a substitute suspect to accept responsibility for the Heisenberg operation, and subsequently introduced Walt to the network that made his criminal empire possible. In this timeline, Saul Goodman did not exist.

Badger was represented by an ordinary criminal-defense attorney, who advised him to cooperate with prosecutors in exchange for a reduced sentence. The resulting investigation identified Jesse as a significant figure in Albuquerque's emerging methamphetamine trade. Walter initially believed he could distance himself from Jesse. He underestimated both his former student's vulnerability and the DEA's growing interest in the unusual purity of the methamphetamine appearing on Albuquerque streets. By the spring of 2009, Jesse was facing serious federal charges. Confronted with the possibility of a lengthy prison sentence, he agreed to cooperate. His testimony, combined with financial records, telephone evidence, and forensic analysis of the manufacturing operation, established Walter's involvement. Walter White was arrested. The arrest devastated his family. Skyler, who had become increasingly suspicious of her husband's unexplained absences and erratic behavior, learned that he had been manufacturing methamphetamine for months. Hank Schrader was particularly shaken by the discovery that the elusive Heisenberg was his own brother-in-law. Walt attempted to justify his actions as an effort to provide for his family. But without the vast sums he would later earn through Gus Fring, the argument was considerably less persuasive. The relatively modest amount of money he had accumulated could not possibly compensate for the damage he had caused.

Faced with overwhelming evidence and declining health, Walt eventually accepted a plea agreement. He died of cancer in federal custody, with his reputation destroyed but without becoming one of the most consequential figures in the American narcotics trade. Jesse received a reduced sentence in exchange for his cooperation. His future remained uncertain, but he escaped the horrors that would otherwise have defined the remainder of his relationship with Walter White. Hank Schrader continued his career with the DEA. His marriage survived, and he never discovered how close his family had come to destruction. There was no massacre of federal agents in the desert, no neo-Nazi takeover of a methamphetamine empire, and no final confrontation at a remote compound. Walter White's criminal career ended not with a spectacular act of violence, but with the comparatively ordinary consequences of an inexperienced criminal attracting the attention of federal law enforcement.

Part VI: Wexler & McGill (2009–2011)

Back in Albuquerque, Jimmy McGill watched the Heisenberg case unfold with considerable interest. He recognized Walter White as precisely the sort of defendant who might once have attracted his attention: an intelligent, desperate man who had convinced himself that extraordinary circumstances justified increasingly outrageous behavior. Jimmy occasionally wondered whether he could have negotiated a better outcome for White, though Kim was quick to remind him that there were limits to what any attorney could accomplish. By this point, Wexler & McGill had become a successful small firm. Jimmy maintained a thriving practice representing elderly clients and pursuing consumer-fraud litigation, while Kim devoted an increasing portion of her time to indigent criminal defendants. Their finances were sometimes strained by Kim's commitment to low-paying cases, but Jimmy's lucrative civil practice generally compensated. They argued about money, scheduling, clients, and occasionally Jimmy's tendency to promise more than he could deliver. But their disagreements rarely threatened the relationship itself. Kim was particularly pleased that Jimmy had resisted the temptation to turn his professional persona into a commercial spectacle. He still enjoyed advertising and occasionally proposed absurd promotional campaigns, but he had developed a reputation strong enough to generate referrals without resorting to the kind of questionable tactics he once found irresistible.

Meanwhile, Howard Hamlin had assumed greater responsibility for HHM as Chuck gradually reduced his workload. The transition was occasionally difficult. Chuck did not surrender authority gracefully, and Howard found himself increasingly frustrated by the older man's insistence on reviewing decisions that properly belonged to the managing partners. Nevertheless, the firm remained prosperous. Its involvement in the Sandpiper litigation had generated substantial fees, and its established corporate practice continued to provide a stable financial foundation. Chuck eventually accepted a semi-retired position as senior counsel. He continued teaching occasional continuing-legal-education seminars and remained an influential figure in Albuquerque's legal community. His relationship with Jimmy became, for the first time in their lives, something approaching friendship. The brothers still disagreed constantly. Chuck found Jimmy's humor exhausting, while Jimmy considered Chuck's reverence for legal tradition unnecessarily solemn. But their disagreements no longer carried the accumulated weight of decades of humiliation and resentment. On Sundays, Jimmy and Kim sometimes visited Chuck for dinner. Chuck generally insisted on selecting the restaurant. Jimmy generally complained about it. Neither considered the arrangement particularly remarkable.

Part VII: The Life Not Lived (2012)

By 2012, Jimmy McGill was a successful attorney in his early fifties. He was neither wealthy enough to retire nor prominent enough to become a household name, but he enjoyed a comfortable life with Kim and had accumulated something he had once considered almost unattainable: professional respectability. He still occasionally missed the excitement of his earlier life. There were moments when he caught himself imagining elaborate ways to embarrass an arrogant opposing counsel or manipulate an inconvenient witness. He remained extraordinarily good at identifying weaknesses in people and institutions, and he had never entirely lost the thrill that came from exploiting them. But he had learned that possessing a talent did not require exercising it whenever an opportunity presented itself. Kim occasionally worried that Jimmy was suppressing a part of himself, but she also recognized that he was happier than he had been in the years when he had constantly struggled for recognition. Their relationship contained plenty of excitement without requiring the destruction of other people's lives.

Chuck remained an important presence in their lives. His health continued to fluctuate, and he had grown increasingly conscious of his limitations, but he was still intellectually formidable. Jimmy occasionally sought his advice on difficult cases, and Chuck delighted in providing it, even when Jimmy complained that a simple question had become a ninety-minute lecture. Howard remained the managing partner of HHM, and the firm continued to occupy an important place in Albuquerque's legal establishment. The professional relationships among the three men were occasionally complicated, but they were sustained by mutual affection and respect. One evening, after Jimmy successfully concluded a difficult consumer-fraud case, he invited Chuck to dinner. Kim had secured a substantial settlement for a wrongfully accused client earlier that week, and the couple wanted to celebrate. Chuck arrived with an expensive bottle of wine. During dinner, Jimmy recounted how he had persuaded an initially hostile opposing attorney to negotiate a settlement by discovering that the man's client had made contradictory statements in several earlier proceedings. Chuck listened carefully, occasionally interjecting questions about the evidentiary basis for Jimmy's claims. Eventually, Jimmy became exasperated. “Jesus, Chuck. You know, you could just say 'good job' once in a while.” Chuck considered this before replying, “Good job, Jimmy.” Jimmy grinned. “Was that so hard?” Chuck smiled and shook his head. “No. I suppose it wasn't.”

Later that evening, after Chuck had returned home, Jimmy received a telephone call from an unfamiliar number. The caller identified himself as a businessman in need of an attorney who could handle a delicate legal problem. He had been told that Jimmy possessed a reputation for finding creative solutions. Jimmy listened for several minutes. The man's story involved significant sums of money, questionable business dealings, and an obvious willingness to pay handsomely for discretion. There was a time when Jimmy would have considered the opportunity irresistible. Instead, he politely explained that his firm did not handle matters of that nature and recommended another attorney. When he hung up, Kim looked up from her book. “Who was that?” she asked. “Nobody important,” Jimmy answered. She raised an eyebrow. “Really?” Jimmy smiled. “Really.” And that was the end of it.

Epilogue: The Man Who Never Existed

In the original timeline, Jimmy McGill's transformation into Saul Goodman destroyed almost everything he valued. His marriage collapsed, his brother died by suicide, Howard Hamlin was murdered, and Jimmy eventually became an indispensable participant in Walter White's criminal enterprise. His extraordinary talent for persuasion and improvisation, which might have made him a remarkable attorney, instead helped sustain an organization responsible for tremendous suffering. In this alternate timeline, those talents found a legitimate outlet. Chuck never entirely overcame his pride, rigidity, or occasional resentment of Jimmy's natural charisma. Jimmy never entirely overcame his impulsiveness, his appetite for shortcuts, or his instinctive distrust of authority. Neither brother became a fundamentally different human being. What changed was their relationship. By believing in Jimmy's capacity for growth, Chuck gave him something he had spent his entire life seeking: an identity that was not defined by his worst mistakes. And by accepting Jimmy as a legitimate member of the legal profession, Chuck escaped the increasingly desperate campaign to expose his brother as an irredeemable fraud.

The consequences reached people neither brother ever met. Howard Hamlin lived. Kim Wexler continued practicing law without abandoning her career. Mike Ehrmantraut avoided becoming Walter White's adversary. Hank Schrader survived the Heisenberg investigation. Jesse Pinkman never became a prisoner of Jack Welker's gang. Walter White died without building a drug empire. The criminal underworld survived, of course. Gus Fring continued his operations, and the drug trade continued to ruin lives. Chuck's kindness did not save Albuquerque from organized crime. But the particular chain of destruction that connected a small-time Chicago con artist to one of the most violent criminal enterprises in the Southwest never materialized. The most important thing Chuck McGill ever did in this timeline was not win a case, establish a prestigious law firm, or defeat a formidable opponent. It was recognizing that his younger brother was capable of becoming someone better than the person he used to be. And somewhere in Albuquerque, an aging attorney named Jimmy McGill continued practicing law, occasionally bending a rule, frequently telling terrible jokes, and going home each night to the woman he loved.

Nobody ever called him Saul Goodman. And nobody ever needed to.

Chapter 1: The Fear of Hoping Again

The lamp above the kitchen table was the only light still on. A woman had opened a notebook to write down what she wanted to pray about, but her pen had stopped after four words: “Lord, I am hoping.” She sat with those words for a while, then shut the notebook. The last time she had prayed for something with her whole heart, life had gone in a very different direction. She still believed in Jesus. What frightened her was allowing herself to want something again.

There is a kind of fear that does not send us running. It makes us careful about what we expect. We learn to say that we are fine either way, even when we are not. We avoid naming what matters because naming it would mean admitting that we could be disappointed. I speak more broadly about courage in my video about fear and trusting Jesus Christ, but I want to stay close to this quieter struggle here: the fear of hoping when experience has taught us how much hope can cost.

If you recognize that feeling, finding faith when prayers seem unanswered may be a familiar part of your story. Perhaps you asked God to mend something that remained broken, or waited for news that never came. Someone may have tried to help by telling you to have more faith. Yet you were already praying as sincerely as you knew how. The hardest part was not finding the right words. It was facing another morning with the same question.

I think we need to be careful about the way we talk to people who are afraid to hope. We can make them feel as though their hesitation is a spiritual defect. But Jesus never needed people to present a spotless inner life before He would walk beside them. He met people who were confused, grieving, and unsure what to believe about the future.

In Luke 24, two disciples walked toward Emmaus after Jesus had been crucified. They spoke of what had happened, and when Jesus joined them, they did not recognize Him. One of them said, “We had hoped that he was the one who was going to redeem Israel.” Those words have stayed with me because they sound like what a disappointed person says when the thing they believed in seems to have ended. They had hoped. Now they did not know what to do with that hope.

Jesus listened and walked with them before they understood who was beside them. He did not begin by making them pretend the past few days had been easy. I cannot promise that your prayer will receive the answer you want. But you do not have to hide the fact that you still want something good. You can open the notebook again and tell Jesus the truth, even if all you can manage tonight is an unfinished sentence.

Chapter 2: The Small Hope We Are Tempted to Refuse

The invitation was tucked under a magnet shaped like a lemon. A woman who once ran a small bakery had been asked to teach a Saturday cooking class at the community center. Her shop had closed two years earlier, and she still felt embarrassed when someone mentioned it. Teaching sounded pleasant until she pictured standing in front of people who might remember that she had failed. She left the invitation on the refrigerator because saying no felt easier than admitting she wanted to say yes.

I understand why we do this. After something important falls apart, we can begin to treat desire itself as dangerous. We tell ourselves that being realistic means expecting very little. If we never let ourselves look forward to anything, perhaps disappointment will not find us again. But that bargain has a cost. We may avoid one kind of pain by quietly refusing the ordinary gifts that are still within reach.

The woman was not being asked to reopen her bakery. She was being invited to spend two hours teaching people how to make bread. Her past deserved an honest look, including the decisions she wished she had made differently. It did not have to decide whether her hands could still do something useful.

I think of the way Jesus spoke to Martha after her brother Lazarus died. In John 11, Martha met Him with grief and a hard truth: if He had been there, she believed, her brother would not have died. Jesus did not demand that she pretend the loss was small. Their conversation made room for both sorrow and belief. Later in the same account, Jesus wept. His love did not require Him to stand at a distance from human pain.

That story includes a miracle that we cannot turn into a promise about every circumstance. We are not told that everything we lose will be restored to us in this life. What I take from the encounter is that Jesus does not ask us to stop caring in order to trust Him. He meets people whose love has made them vulnerable, and He remains present when they tell Him exactly where it hurts.

The woman took the invitation down and called the community center. She asked how many people would attend and whether she could prepare the dough ahead of time. Those were reasonable questions, not signs of weak faith. She did not have to convince herself that the class would change her life. She only had to decide whether this one invitation was worth accepting.

Perhaps your next hopeful act is equally modest. You may not be ready to make a great declaration about what God will do. You can still let yourself care about one good possibility without demanding certainty in return. There is room in a faithful life for cautious hands, a trembling voice, and a quiet yes.

Chapter 3: The Gentle Courage of Trusting Again

The school auditorium was already filling when a father found a seat near the back. He held the folded program in his hands and searched for his daughter's name. She had spent much of the past year struggling to find her confidence again. There had been difficult mornings, canceled plans, and conversations that ended with both of them feeling helpless. Tonight, she had decided to sing with the school choir. He was proud of her, but he was also frightened of getting too excited. He knew how quickly a good day could be followed by a difficult one.

Sometimes we become afraid of happiness because we have learned that happiness can be interrupted. We hesitate to enjoy a good moment because we are already thinking about how much it will hurt if things change. We tell ourselves we are being sensible, but we may actually be allowing yesterday's disappointment to take something away from today.

I think this is one of the quiet places where Jesus invites us to grow. He does not ask us to deny what we have experienced. He understands the difference between a heart that has become cautious and one that has stopped caring. What He offers is a relationship strong enough to hold our uncertainty without requiring us to know how everything will end.

In Matthew 26, Jesus prayed in the garden before His arrest. He knew suffering was coming, and He openly expressed His desire that the cup might pass from Him. Yet He also surrendered Himself to the Father's will. That prayer shows us something important about trust. We can want a particular outcome while recognizing that our relationship with God is not dependent on getting everything we ask for.

There is freedom in learning to pray that way. We can tell Jesus what we hope will happen without pretending we have received a guarantee. We can ask for healing, reconciliation, opportunity, and peace while remaining honest about the uncertainty in front of us. Surrender does not require us to stop wanting good things. It means allowing God to remain God, even when we cannot understand the direction our lives are taking.

When the choir began singing, the father found his daughter among the students. She looked nervous, but she was there. He did not know what the coming months would bring. He knew only that she had found enough courage to stand before an audience that evening. Rather than spending the performance worrying about whether her progress would last, he allowed himself to enjoy hearing her voice.

Perhaps that is something you can give yourself permission to do today. You can appreciate what is good without making promises about tomorrow. You can remain careful where caution is necessary without treating every hopeful moment as a danger. And when you pray, you can bring Jesus the desires you have been afraid to name.

Your heart does not need another guarantee before it is allowed to be grateful. You have already lived through things you never expected, and you may still carry questions that have no easy answers. But those experiences do not mean you must spend the rest of your life protecting yourself from every possibility of disappointment.

Jesus is worthy of your trust even when the future remains unclear. So when something good appears in your life, you do not have to turn away from it simply because you remember what happened before. Receive the moment with gratitude, hold it gently, and allow yourself to hope again.

Your friend,

Douglas Vandergraph

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Another satirical view on today’s social media culture – 🎃

BEFORE – 🎃

AFTER – 🎃