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Irish Times
6 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Times
Have we no more active rights over life, birth and death?
Stephanie O'Connor, a research officer at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, was awarded this year's Hubert Butler Essay Prize in the Parade Tower of Kilkenny Castle on Saturday. John Banville, honorary patron of the prize, said: 'With courage, clarity and subtle discrimination, Stephanie O'Connor addresses fundamental questions that arise, as she writes, 'at the edges of human life', and presents an argument that affirms the dignity and respect that are due to all of us no less in the process of our 'going hence' than at the moment of our 'coming hither'.' This year marks the fortieth anniversary of the publication of Hubert Butler's first essay collection, Escape from the Anthill , which appeared in 1985- the author's 86th year. It was also the first production from Antony Farrell's Lilliput Press. The essay prize, brainchild of Jeremy O'Sullivan, was founded seven years ago and is now an integral part of the Kilkenny Arts Festival. READ MORE This year's essay theme was the question of how far we can and should control our destinies over lif birth and death, instancing Edgar's stoical monition to his despairing father Gloucester in King Lear : 'Men must endure/Their going hence, even as their coming hither.' Historian Roy Foster, who judged the prize with Catriona Crowe, Nicky Grene and Barbara Schwepcke, said the winning essay 'went straight to the point of asking whether we were any the wiser for the increased options available in an age of reproductive technology and end-of-life planning. 'Stephanie O'Connor concentrated on the legal and moral ethics of keeping a brain-dead woman on life-support for the sake of an unborn infant who will almost certainly not survive. She discusses with compassion and empathy the 'uncanny ambiguity where the dead might remain legally ambiguous', and incisively states the need for 'a new ethical framework, shaped by legislation and public debate': medical ethics being 'the scaffolding by which we try to uphold the human spirit in a world increasingly seduced by the procedural and drawn to the utilitarian'. 'The clarity with which she addresses issues described rightly as intimate and harrowing is deeply impressive, and her definition of 'dignity' as a guiding principle strikes a powerful concluding note.' The winning essay is reproduced below. Have we no more active rights over life, birth and death? ' Men must endure / Their going hence, even as their coming hither .' So speaks Edgar to his blind and broken father, Gloucester, in William Shakespeare's King Lear (Act V, Scene 2), reaching for some scrap of consolation amid the wreckage of betrayal, madness, and loss. It is a fantastic line. It is a fatalistic line. This is not hope. His words carry the chill of stoic resignation, a frail attempt to impose meaning on the brute finality of death, a comfort as thin as the wind on the Cliffs of Moher. To accept that birth and death lie beyond our control. I recently witnessed the death of someone I loved very deeply – a moment of quiet surrender, beyond my control, that left an unfathomable gulf in my life. I desperately wanted them to live, and yet, to be there, as they let go, quietly, peacefully, after years of the struggle with ill health, was a profound and beautiful privilege. In that stillness, death felt less like a rupture and more like a final act of grace. And yet, even after witnessing what is called a ' good death ' – peaceful, dignified, and free from suffering – I find myself questioning whether Edgar's words still hold true. Can we really, in our modern world, still accept that we must simply endure our coming and going? In an age of reproductive technology and end-of-life planning, it would appear we have long since moved into an era where such a fatalistic acceptance of our helpless arrival and helpless departure is no longer passive, but shaped by choice, by law, and by technology. The question is: are we wiser for it? I find I cannot consider the question of our active rights over life, birth and death without revisiting the harrowing case of P.P. v. Health Service Executive (2014) , a case that personally gripped me, and I suspect many others, and would echo through Irish legal and ethical discourse for years to come, making me wonder: What if Edgar's lines are no longer merely literary, but legal? What if, in our era, death itself must await constitutional interpretation? And what if the body, in its going hence, becomes hostage to a cause it never chose? In December of that year, a young Irish woman, only 26 years old – daughter, partner, and mother of two – suffered a catastrophic brain injury and was declared clinically dead. She was 14 weeks pregnant at the time. Her heartbroken family, already reeling from the suddenness and irreversibility of her passing, was told that her body would be kept on life support – not for her sake, but to prolong the gestation of her unborn child. For three weeks, the young woman's dead body remained tethered to the apparatus of somatic support, sustained artificially in a state of biological animation, while the medical team monitored the foetus in her abdomen – her heart mechanically pulsing, her organs perfused. Eventually, the High Court permitted what her distressed loved ones had requested from the outset: that the machines be stopped because the woman was dead, and that the treatment was ' unreasonable ', ' experimental ' and therefore unethical. There was, the court found, no realistic prospect that the unborn child would survive, and ' in the best interest of the unborn child ' authorised the withdrawal of ongoing somatic support. She could be allowed, at last, in that long-honoured phrase, to rest in peace. It is worth pausing to consider how we arrived at a point where such a scenario was not only conceivable, but could unfold in reality, and be upheld in law. The answer, in large part, lies in the legacy of Ireland's constitutional recognition of the unborn's right to life. The now-repealed Eighth Amendment, inserted in 1983, was shaped not only by theological conviction but by the moral anxieties of a devout society. It created a legal equivalence between the lives of women and their unborn, and in doing so, an uncanny ambiguity, where the dead might remain legally ambiguous: both people and legally bound vessels burdened by gestational obligations. In practice, creating situations such as P.P. v HSE , where legal obligations forced doctors to override death itself in the interest of potential life. Its repeal, in 2018, returned legislative authority to the Oireachtas, allowing for a new ethical framework shaped by legislation and public debate. However, while progress has been made, the fundamental legal and ethical dilemmas at the heart of P.P. v. HSE remain unsettled, leaving open the possibility that such tragic circumstances could arise again. In a searing editorial at the time, the woman was referred to as a ' cadaveric incubator .' The term is terrible, and its honesty is unmerciful. For what else, legally speaking, was she during those weeks? She was no longer a citizen. No longer a patient. No longer capable of consent. She had become, by a certain line of reasoning, a resource, one whose utility had not yet expired. And yet: this young woman had been someone. Someone who had made choices, who had loves and fears, and who might have left an advance directive had she ever imagined such a grim fate. Her family's grief was compounded not only by her loss but by the State's intrusion into what should have been a sacred and private time of reckoning with death. It brought into sharp focus ethical questions that, while deeply significant, are often approached with caution or even skirted in public discourse – What is life? Who owns death? Who decides its terms? And does the unborn's fragile spark of potential outweigh the dignity owed to the dead? The High Court, to its credit, ruled with sobriety and deference to expert medical consensus that there was no reasonable prospect that the foetus would survive to viability. But it still took weeks of judicial intervention to affirm that a woman who was clinically dead should not be subjected to experimental prolongation. I revisit the case here not to reopen wounds, and indeed, I thought long and hard, hesitant to write at all out of deference to those who lived its reality. But then I recalled something Hubert Butler once said of another historical silence, when atrocities in Yugoslavia went unmentioned because naming them would mean naming our own complicity: '.. silence did not help me ... It became increasingly difficult to be silent .' And so, it is here. We must speak with clarity and compassion about where medicine, law, and human dignity intersect – and where they diverge. In this instance, we were forced to ask ourselves whether a dead woman could be called upon to continue a pregnancy she could no longer consent to, whether she could, as some bioethicists starkly put it, ' be used '. The question was no longer whether the unborn had rights; instead, it was whether the dead had any rights left? It is important to stress here that no argument was presented to diminish the moral status of the unborn. Rather, the arguments were made to try to assert the indivisible dignity and bodily integrity of the already lived life, and the rights of families to mourn without being conscripted into bioethical theatre. In cases such as this, when all evidence points to futility, continuing life support is no longer an act of care – it is an act of fear, driven by legal shadows, not moral light. And it seems, we are no longer mere witnesses to birth and death; we are, increasingly, their stewards. Modern medicine has given us powers that previous generations could never have imagined – the ability to keep bodies functioning after the mind is gone, after death, to intervene in birth and delay death. But these powers have brought with them difficult questions: just because we can act, does it mean we should? In cases such as P.P. v HSE , where a woman declared clinically dead was kept on somatic support for the sake of her unborn child who has no chance of survival, and against her family's wishes, we see how the boundaries between life, death, and duty blur and just how complicated these questions can become. When we ask if we have no more active rights over life, birth and death, but instead are forced to confront the clash between medical possibility, legal obligation, and human dignity. Is this not best answered by opposing principles, but by turning toward the moral terrain where those principles collide: a space requiring not only legal interpretation, but imagination, conscience, and care. This is not a simple clash between religion and secularism, or between tradition and progress. Nor is this tragic paradox in any way confined to Ireland. This case is only one of a number of rare, tragic, high-profile, and contentious medico-legal cases, which have gone before courts around the world in recent years. Some are cases where pregnant women, have been clinically diagnosed as brain-dead but are kept ' alive ' artificially, to preserve the life of the unborn until such time that a Caesarean section can be carried out. In such cases of maternal-foetal conflict , the pregnant woman's interests conflict with the interests of the foetus because clearly, to allow the mother's death would result in the unborn dying because its intensive care support would be withdrawn. Again, I stress that what I write here is in no way a debate about the moral status of the foetus, nor a contest between the right to life and the right to die. It is, instead, an attempt to consider how we act when the old moral frameworks no longer fit – and how we honour the living and the dead when the answers aren't written down. For while P.P. v HSE may bear the peculiar imprimatur of our constitutional and religious legacy, the underlying conflict is something more intimate and harrowing – between technological capacity and moral restraint – the redefinition of the human identity in an age of technical possibility. And across Europe and beyond, similar cases have arisen to highlight the global resonance of these issues and underscore the universality of the dilemma: the collision between medical capability and moral uncertainty, between the language of law and the needs of grief. Instances where medical possibility outpaces ethical consensus, and where law, unsure of its footing, stumbles into the most private regions of life and death. In Texas, the high-profile case of Marlise Muñoz in 2013 echoed with chilling familiarity: a brain-dead woman, pregnant, was kept on life support against her family's wishes due to state laws protecting the unborn. In Germany, the debate continues over how to balance prenatal life with posthumous dignity in the absence of explicit legal directives. Even in secular France, the Vincent Lambert case in 2019, though not involving pregnancy, laid bare the painful entanglements of familial love, legal ambiguity, and medical endurance. These are not the accidents of jurisdiction, but the growing pains of a civilisation increasingly unsure how to interpret the sacred in the age of the mechanical. The principles of medical ethics – autonomy, beneficence, non-maleficence, and justice – known collectively as the Beauchamp and Childress framework, form the quiet architecture by which medicine seeks to balance power with compassion, and are not merely philosophical ornaments. They are the scaffolding by which we try to uphold the human spirit in a world increasingly seduced by the procedural and drawn to the utilitarian. Each principle carries distinct weight and, when in tension, reveals the intricacy of end-of-life decision-making: Respect for autonomy, in the context of P.P. vs HSE , becomes paradoxical. It affirms the individual's right to have meaningful agency and moral authority over the most fundamental aspects of their existence – how they are born, how they live, and how they die. This includes making decisions about their own body and life, including the choice to refuse life-prolonging treatment or to seek medically assisted death. It means honouring a competent person's wish to die with dignity, even when that wish contradicts societal norms or professional instincts to preserve life using systems that neither knew us nor will mourn us. But the dead have no will – they once had one. Is it beyond our moral imagination to give it voice and let it be heard? Interest Theory allows for the possibility of posthumous rights, including, for example, the right to have one's remains treated with dignity, the right to have one's wishes regarding burial or cremation respected, or the right to protect one's reputation from posthumous defamation. But in the age of technology, has society chosen to limit the principle of posthumous autonomy and posthumous moral and legal rights? The right to die a natural death is supported by the right to respect for autonomy. But many states, including Ireland, invalidate a woman's advance directive if she is pregnant because of the compelling legal right to life of the foetus. Often, irrespective of whether the woman's wishes are known or not, courts will use a best interests test or substituted judgment standard. Some will argue, understandably, that beneficence – our duty to do good – extends most urgently to the vulnerable unborn. But beneficence, if severed from context, becomes blind and can even lead to tyranny. In trying to preserve a hypothetical life, we may violate an actual death. In doing so, we may dishonour both. Regarding non-maleficence, a dead person experiences no physical harm from continued somatic support because they are dead. However, if we consider posthumous rights, it could be argued that somatic support of a decomposing dead body potentially violates the cultural norms of dignity and respect that society confers to dead human bodies. Regarding the principle of (social) justice, intensive somatic support is expensive and it is arguable that the State should not direct such limited resources, for an indefinite time to the care of one dead individual, even when balanced against the costs of caring for a baby for a prolonged time in a neonatal intensive unit care if gestation were not delayed to allow the foetus to mature further in utero. When making decisions, particularly in situations involving maternal-foetal conflict, doctors must balance these ethical principles with professional practice guidelines and responsibilities under the law. But in navigating, we encounter the limits of law in matters that are deeply human. The law may compel action, but there are moments when law, though meticulously reasoned, proves insufficient to capture the full scope of human experience or embody compassion. Yes, legality can codify duties, define rights, and offer structure to our moral instincts. Still, even the most carefully constructed legal frameworks cannot fully account for love, grief, or the emotional, ethical, moral and familial complexity of life-and-death decisions, let alone the unspoken complexities that shape human lives. In cases like P.P. v HSE , and many others, the boundaries of law meet the raw edge of human sorrow. What follows is not merely a legal question but an ethical reckoning with what it means to honour the dead, to protect the unborn, and to listen to the quiet dignity of those who mourn. And where competing rights, such as the sanctity of life or the rights of the unborn, are applied as absolutes, is it possible that they can obscure more than they resolve, especially when they collide with the dignity owed to the dead? It raises the question – when we cling to principles too tightly, do we risk losing sight of the person? As Hubert Butler observed, ' Science has enormously extended the sphere of our responsibilities, while our consciences have remained the same size .' In an age where the dead can be biologically sustained long after meaning has ebbed away, the question is not just what we can do, but what we should do – and why. Is there a point at which the machinery of law must yield to the compassion of humanity, where rigid adherence gives way to moral judgment grounded not in statutes, but in empathy, respect, and care? It is in this space – between what the law allows and what decency demands – that our truest responsibilities begin. Dignity is an elusive but crucial concept. It's not simply the absence of suffering, nor merely the preservation of respect for autonomy. Dignity might serve as a middle path – a humane principle in the absence of consensus, reminding us that medicine is not only a technical craft but also a humane one. In the bleak world of King Lear , mortal lives are at the mercy of fate and indifferent, as Shakespeare's characters are cast from birth to death with little control, their will overwhelmed by storm, folly, despair and madness. Today, medical ethics, biotechnology, and law offer tools that challenge this fatalism. Edgar's stoic call to ' endure ' in King Lear was a balm for despair, but in our modern context, endurance is no longer passive. It is curated, legislated, and medicalised. When endurance means tethering a dead woman to machines for weeks against her family's wishes, it is no longer stoicism – it becomes imposition. In this, perhaps, Edgar's words still hold – not as a declaration of helplessness, but stripped of its fatalism, it becomes a call to humanity. A reminder of the deep humility required at the edges of human life. Yes, men must endure their going hence – but not in silence, not without dignity, and not without the right to be mourned as more than a vessel. Whether we are choosing to end treatment, to intervene in birth, or to withhold the breath of a machine, we are not gods. Our agency is real, but it is bounded by mortality, by ethics, and by love. Yes, men must endure their going hence. But we, the living, must also ensure they may go in peace.
Washington Post
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Washington Post
‘Putting Myself Together' displays Jamaica Kincaid's distinct gifts
Summing up her philosophy of writing in the introduction to 'The Best American Essays 1995,' Jamaica Kincaid wrote that an essay has 'principles': 'You state, you build on your statement, you sum up.' But, she wondered, 'how could I express any truth about myself or anything I might know in the form of state, build, and sum up when everything about me and everything I knew existed in a state of rage, rage, and more rage. I came into being in the colonial situation. It does not lend itself to any literary situation that is in existence.' Kincaid's life's work — not by design, but through a combination of fiery ambition and random luck — has been to create her own situation. Born Elaine Potter Richardson in St. John's, Antigua, in 1949, she was sent by her mother to work as an au pair in Scarsdale, New York, at the age of 16; within a few years she quit her job, changed her name, moved to New York City and found work as a freelance writer. Through a series of happenstances, she befriended William Shawn, the editor of the New Yorker, and became one of the magazine's first Black staff writers, contributing unsigned Talk of the Town pieces that grew increasingly loose and improvisational. Kincaid eventually segued into fiction — first a book of short stories, 'At the Bottom of the River,' and then the novels that established her reputation in the 1980s and '90s: 'Annie John,' 'Lucy,' 'The Autobiography of My Mother.' During those same decades, she married William Shawn's son, the composer Allen Shawn, and moved with him to Bennington, Vermont, where she's lived ever since. She has also taught for many years at Harvard. Kincaid's genius lies in the way she explicitly, unwaveringly foregrounds the facts of her life — that she's a Black immigrant from the Caribbean who has spent her entire adult life on intimate terms with an elite and rarefied sliver of White America. On the subjects of her childhood, Black popular culture and the experience of travel, Kincaid stands within the intensity and richness of the transnational Black experience; as an observer of White people in the United States and England, she specializes in prying away the surface normality to peer closely at what is underneath. 'Diana Ross was the special one,' she wrote in the Village Voice in 1976. 'Not only was she a young woman who conveyed the innocence of a girl, but she was a black person who had mastered, without the slightest bit of self-consciousness or embarrassment, being white. … Black people always say that they have one face for white people and when they are by themselves they are real. I have never for a moment thought that there was a Diana Ross more real than the one I could see.' What stands out if you read many of her pieces at once — like the essays now collected in 'Putting Myself Together,' which stretch back more than 50 years — is the instantly recognizable quality of her sentences, which use repetition as a kind of accumulative force, declaring her intent to take up space on the page and in your mind. Here's a sentence about the walk to Robert Frost's house in Vermont: 'Going backward, going back along the path that has become familiar in your mind's eye, especially if it has been a recent encounter, always seems unfamiliar and so even more frightening, for it should be familiar, but the way back is a new way too and will have its own pleasures and anxieties.' Not every reader can tolerate that kind of prose, and critics have at times complained that Kincaid's work feels mannered, eccentric, even deliberately obscure. I admire it, and find it appropriate: There's a searching quality in Kincaid's writing that is commensurate with her lifelong desire to find a new form, and a new way of life, because the old ways make no sense to her. This is not to say that 'Putting Myself Together' is a completely rewarding book. For some reason — not explained anywhere I could find — Kincaid's Talk of the Town pieces from the New Yorker, which appeared as a separate book, 'Talk Stories,' in 2001, aren't reprinted here. Instead, 'Putting Myself Together' collects Kincaid's earliest non-New Yorker work up until 1978 and then leaps forward to 1989, when she was already a well-known novelist able to publish on any subject she wanted. It's an awkward arrangement, because the Talk of the Town pieces are such a pivotal part of the emergence of her voice and sensibility. Publishing the rest of her nonfiction this way might make 'Putting Myself Together,' which includes interviews and Kincaid's introductions to several books, among other things, seem like the outtakes and deleted tracks in a box set: for Kincaid completists only. That's unfortunate, because only when you read 'Putting Myself Together' and 'Talk Stories' side by side can you see the complete evolution of Kincaid as an artist and a thinker. The Talk pieces are breezy and witty and acid-tongued, but what's most interesting about them is the dissonance between Kincaid's perspective and the staid personality of the magazine. It's only in longer essays that you begin to grasp her creative and intellectual range. This is especially true on the subject of gardens and gardening, which has been the focus of her life since the late 1990s. The best piece in 'Putting Myself Together,' the one everyone must read, is the quietly incendiary 'Sowers and Reapers,' which begins with the story of how Kincaid offended Frank Cabot, the founder of the Garden Conservancy, at an event in Charleston, South Carolina, by pointing out that the famous gardens of the American South (most notably at Thomas Jefferson's Monticello) were built and maintained by enslaved people. As she writes, the smell of their flowers is 'the sweet stench that makes up so much of American history.' The essay ends with her, a Black woman, hiring White men in Vermont to build a large decorative wall for her own garden. 'How glad was my spirit,' Kincaid writes, 'when, at the end of all this, Ron Pembroke presented me with a bill, and I in turn gave him a check for the complete amount, and there was nothing between us but complete respect and admiration and no feeling of the injustice of it all.' She ends with a warning more potent now than when she wrote it in 2001: 'The garden is not a place to lose your cares; the garden is not a place of rest and repose. Even God did not find it so.' It's this kind of meditation on the ironies and absurdities of a displaced life — a life she invented for herself, with no models — that makes Jamaica Kincaid so singularly important. Jess Row's most recent book is the novel 'The New Earth' (2023). His new collection of short stories, 'Storyknife,' will be published in the summer of 2026.
Wall Street Journal
3 days ago
- Health
- Wall Street Journal
When a Pool Is a Safe Space
Jill Bialosky's essay 'Finding Therapy in a Pool Lane' (Review, Aug. 2) really resonated with me. I, too, found survival and healing while swimming laps in a pool. No one can see you cry when you're in the water. Catey Bartolucci
Yahoo
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
My Generation's Obsession With ChatGPT Is Bigger Than Cheating — It's Changing Who We Are
In tenth grade, I laughed when a classmate of mine told me that his entire essay on The Great Gatsby was written by ChatGPT. What could a robot possibly have to say about a literary masterpiece written a century before the robot was even conceived? At the time, I didn't fully know what ChatGPT was; I'd heard many references swirling with increasing frequency through our school hallways, but not having had any firsthand experience with this mysterious technology, I thought of it more as a punchline to a joke. I had no idea at all what it was capable of. Not long after my friend's confession to me, he got caught. He received an ominous email from the head of the English Department and the principal of the school; his initial reaction was to try to rope me into his debacle. 'Can I please just say you wrote it?' he begged me. I have the reputation of being a somewhat decent writer, one with a moral compass (hence his idea that my potential association would somehow make things better for him), and he thought this excuse would be more palatable than the notion that a robot did his homework for him. More from SheKnows Gen Z Is Bragging About 'Getting Cracked' on TikTok - & It May Not Mean What You Think Out of sheer curiosity, I asked to read the essay that he feared would trigger his professional downfall. My expectations were low, but when I read it, I was shocked. The pages of literary analysis in front of me were coherent and convincing — and certainly not written by my friend (he is a very smart student, but one without any interest in writing or literature). A few days later, my curiosity still unquenched, I opened up the ChatGPT website, and on a whim, I made an account (NOT, of course, with my school email). A guilty thrill surged through me as I did this. I felt like I was dealing with some sort of contraband, some foreign technology from aliens millions of miles away. I was overcome by a sense of shame as I created a password. But it all happened so easily, and ultimately, I pushed ahead with it. I tested the machine, asking it to write a poem in the style of Lana Del Rey. The results were no 'Summertime Sadness,' but I was thoroughly impressed by how quickly and convincingly the computer produced its facsimile. Then came the real moment of truth. I'd already done my bio assignment for the next day, and I was curious to see if ChatGPT could match my accomplishment. Robot-free, the homework had taken me a good two hours. How long might it take the machine? I pasted in my homework question (no typing necessary), and hit enter. Within mere seconds, the software produced a long bullet point that was smart, but still wouldn't work for the short answer format required. Nonetheless, it had plenty of potential, and — I soon discovered — the small issue of its composition was eminently fixable. I simply typed in a new missive: Turn the answer into short sentences. Less than 10 seconds later, I was reading a computer-derived, full-sentence-answer that was not just serviceable, it was actually good. I'm a member of Gen Z; I've grown up in a smart home with smartphones and a smart car. But nothing could have prepared me sufficiently for what I'd just witnessed. I could not begin to wrap my head around the seductive reality that — in less than a minute — a computer had produced a completed homework assignment, one that I'd spent the past two hours working on; and the machine had done at least as good a job as I had done — without ever showing up for a single class. I made a pact with myself — right there, despite any possible temptation — that I'd never use ChatGPT (even in a pinch), partly because I value my writing above pretty much everything else I do (I certainly don't want a computer putting words in my mouth), and partly because I'm not inherently a cheater. Still, I could see why this new technology would be an enticing proposition to just about anyone human, maybe because they're too tired to work after a long day of other stuff, or maybe they just want an easy fix when faced with an impossible deadline. Either way, temptation is temptation. And the statistics bear out the fact that ChatGPT's lure, especially for my generation, is very real — and it's growing exponentially. According to a Pew Research study, roughly one in four teens now admits to using ChatGPT for their schoolwork, a number that's doubled in just a year. Twenty-nine percent say it's okay to use ChatGPT to solve math problems, and 18 percent say the same thing about using it to write essays. Clearly, this is a matter not just of temptation, but also of understanding the definition of cheating — in a new world where robots get intimately involved in that process. ChatGPT is the easiest way out. It can do anything from writing an essay to solving an equation. But for teens who — by definition — are still learning how to write and think, getting a computer to do our work for us is just about the worst thing for developing our brains. My generation was one of the first to have screens placed in front of us before we could even read or write, and now, AI is calling our names. AI is especially vocal in the wee hours of the morning when a big paper or assignment is due later that day. I know this from watching my friends and classmates over FaceTime as a deadline approaches with the coming morning. To be sure, kids who are inclined to cheat will always find a way to do it, whether robots exist or not. But now cheating is so much easier — and, by extension, so much more irresistible. Beyond the moral crisis of more widespread cheating, the effects of ChatGPT are detrimental to education itself. That fact is evident even when ChatGPT is used for legitimate purposes. For example, ChatGPT can be helpful for taking notes or summarizing articles, but research shows that teens who use it that way fail to absorb information as well as they would if they were taking the notes themselves. In a study conducted by the University of Pennsylvania, a group of high schoolers was divided in half before a math test: One group was allowed to use AI to study, and the other was not. While the group allowed to use AI did much better on practice tests, the group without access to AI outperformed the AI group on the actual test — when AI was no longer available to either group. Compounding the issue of compromised education is the larger existential question of my generation's very future. From the front lines of teen AI-usage, I see a dark horizon off in the distance, but getting closer constantly. The future is a place where writing and thinking — if not entirely terminated as we know them — have certainly morphed into a shadow of what they once were. And our collective identity is collateral damage. Learning to write is how we also learn to define ourselves. Writing is not just an outlet for our thoughts, it's also a means by which we figure out who we are — through self-expression, deliberate reflection, and the verbal exploration of ideas and perspectives. Literacy helps form our ability to think and to question the world around us. But AI threatens to undermine our individual voices and our authentic human thoughts, replacing all of that with a computer-driven generic brand of 'perfection.' In order to speak for ourselves, we must think for ourselves, and in order to think for ourselves, we have to put some distance between us and the computers threatening to take our thoughts away. The alternative to that sort of action could be detrimental to society itself. As for my friend who got busted for his AI essay on The Great Gatsby, he did not end up getting expelled or even suspended. Instead, he was given a stern warning — and then forced to write the essay himself. He complied, and did a decent job on it. Even if the computer hit all the right points, my friend's essay turned out to have a lot more humanity. Mistakes, grammatical or analytical, can be a beautiful thing, especially at our age, when the emphasis should be more on learning than on mere performance. The larger story of ChatGPT promises a far less happy ending. To understand that, I need look no further my Gatsby friend, who soon went back to using ChatGPT for his other assignments. And he's not alone; the number of people using it in my grade is only growing. This is a widespread problem, to which I don't profess to have a solution. But what I do know is this: The technology at stake is moving quickly, and we don't have much time to figure it out. Best of SheKnows These Raw & Beautiful Breastfeeding Photos Show There's No 'Right' Way to Nurse 'But I Hate School': What To Do When Your Teen Dreads Going Back Rugged Meets Romantic in These 'Quiet Western' Names: All the Charm, None of the Grit Solve the daily Crossword
New York Times
06-05-2025
- General
- New York Times
‘Modern Love' Podcast: A Mother's Fierce, Extravagant Love (Encore)
In honor of Mother's Day this week, we revisit the story of one mom who went to extraordinary lengths to make sure her daughter always felt her love, even after she was gone. Each time Genevieve Kingston reached a milestone — a birthday, her first period, high school graduation — she'd reach into the box her mom had packed for her and pull out the note and gift that went with that occasion. Her mom had known she was dying of cancer, so during Kingston's childhood, she'd poured an incredible amount of care and creativity into the project. Today we hear Kingston's essay about the discoveries the box held for her, from her first birthday without her mom at age 12, until she turned 30. Now, the box is nearly empty. We also hear a mother's 'Tiny Love Story' (a Modern Love essay in miniature) about trying to connect with her teenage son, and get his surprisingly thoughtful reaction.
