Editorials

     “There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them.” While Joseph Brodsky’s words resonate with many people today, they haven’t stopped the millions of pages that have been going up in flames with the newly enacted book bans spreading rapidly throughout America. In the school year of 2023 to 2024, there was an unprecedented surge of over 10,000 bans in the country as multiple books — including worldwide favorites like Charlotte’s Web and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter — were challenged. With such a spike in the activity, public unrest has been simultaneously growing to the point where people are no longer sure that book banning can still be permitted as lawful behavior.

Shone through the brightly lit torch of Lady Liberty, freedom has become one of America’s greatest virtues. The first amendment of the Constitution protects all of the natural freedoms that should be granted, guaranteed, and protected amongst “We the People”: freedom of speech, thought, press, and assembly. Book banning, though, has begun to restrict these freedoms in ways that directly violate basic rights.

Freedom of speech. Book banning is often taken up by certain personally formed groups or existing organizations who file certain complaints against novels. However, this restricts the artistic freedom that authors wield as well. Throughout time, literature has been used as a form of expression for writers and readers both. Taking this away is silencing people to the point where they cannot share their own beliefs. No controversy should be able to stifle that.

Freedom of thought. Many book bans are established by parents and adults who are concerned about the messages that certain stories may communicate, especially considering how certain thoughts may ring with children. Lots of people think that book bans are necessary for protecting kids from harmful ideas that come from books, but all they’re really doing is narrowing children’s perspectives. By banning specific ideas, these book bans are restricting individuals from being able to select what they want to explore. How does that set them up for the future? Today, one of our most collective goals as a nation is to work against societal close-mindedness, but book bans only cause more of it. When children are taught to omit these ideas, we increase discrimination against things that other people value. How is this right?

The answer is that it isn't, but it will not stop. People will continue to metaphorically burn the pages of our books — they may continue to try and remove their words from existence, but we as a country can strive to always remember them.

In a new report published in the AI Journal this month, researchers at the Imaginary Institute of Artificial Intelligence claim that unnecessary sentence padding words like “please” and “thank you” in ChatGPT queries are heating up data servers. This, in turn, generates emissions almost as impactful as leaving the bedroom lights on for 10 minutes. Their conclusion: the biggest contributor to climate change is not cow burps or car emissions, but sycophantic human politeness. 

The study was inspired by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman’s response to a user on X (formerly Twitter) who asked about the electricity costs associated with people being polite to AI models. Altman responded, “Tens of millions of dollars. Every polite query generates more heat than a handful of coal plants. And you thought AI would end humanity through job loss and automation. Bahhahah." (New York Post, naturally). 

Not to be outdone, Elon Musk chimed in, “This beta human behavior is killing the sigma vibe of the AI bots.” He vowed to release Chat-RudeMuch, a new chatbot designed to ignore queries longer than 6 words. No more asking, “Can you please explain cell division like I am a kindergartener? Thank you very much!” Instead, do “cell division, toddler mode.”

The New Jersey State Department of Education is responding to this finding by urging public schools to introduce a SEL curriculum where kids learn from an early age that “Please, Thank You, and Sorry” may be magical words during “actual” human conversations but AI interactions need to be cold and distant. Holmdel middle schooler Greta Tonedeaf, a climate influencer and AI ethicist, argued, “If humanity goes out due to excessively polite fluff, at least we will be known as a polite species.” 

Polite, Greta? Perhaps. But also, very, very warm.

Holmdel School District Goes Up in Flames (Smoke, Mostly.)

Mahati Kashyap

A deeply concerned parent who had just finished googling “What is Riz, Please?” wrote a strongly worded letter to the school administration questioning why their son came home smelling of molten plastic and slashed hopes. Upon further investigation, the parent was appalled to discover an utterly horrifying twist to the end-of-school-year chaos—the boy had been smoking his Chromebook at school. 

What’s that, you ask? That’s when a student is issued a government-funded piece of tech topped off with infinite access to TikTok, things just naturally combust. Literally. The science teachers revelled in the discovery of this new evidence for Darwin’s theory of “spontaneous combustion of Teen Reason.”

The school administration clapped back, ordering that any TikTok video filmed during the Chromebook combustion include at least three cited sources in perfect MLA format.