James' World 2

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A family eating hotpot at a restaurant in Beijing. China’s population is projected to contract sharply this century.Credit…Gilles Sabrié for The New York Times

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Amazon Sidewalk shares your Internet with smart homes — and surveillance devices. (Washington Post illustration/iStock)

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A F/A-18 Super Hornet military jet captured this infrared video from several miles away of an unidentified flying object moving at high speed. (To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science)

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There’s one line from Twitter power user Chrissy Teigen’s latest mea culpa that I haven’t been able to get out of my head. Teigen, who recently returned to the platform less than a month after announcing she was quitting it forever, tweeted an apology to media personality Courtney Stodden, who had accused her of harassing them online when they were just 16 years old.

“I’m mortified and sad at who I used to be,” Teigen wrote to her 13.6 million followers last week. “I was an insecure, attention-seeking troll. I am ashamed and completely embarrassed at my behavior but that is nothing compared to how I made Courtney feel.”

It was the next bit, though, that’s been haunting me: “I have worked so hard to give you guys joy and be beloved and the feeling of letting you down is nearly unbearable.” There’s something deeply telling about Teigen’s admission that she works hard to “be beloved” — which, as writer Bolu Babalola notes, “is not the same as working to be a good person.”

The vast majority of people on social media aren’t mega-celebrities attempting to charm ginormous audiences while also carrying on strange and vicious vendettas. But Teigen’s failure to leave a site that makes her feel terrible — and her bald-faced attempts to “be beloved,” which tend to backfire spectacularly — are emblematic of how a lot of people have felt about social media lately, and especially over this past year.

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Most folks love learning, regardless of whether or not school is “their thing.” Sometimes it’s just a matter of finding the right teacher for your learning style—or maybe even the right medium.

For auditory learners, podcasts can be excellent vehicles for processing knowledge that’d be less digestible in more visual mediums like video or even the written word. The American education systems tends to fail students in myriad ways, requiring continual education after the fact to learn the truth behind what we were taught in history, art, science, language, literature, and math. Privileged gatekeepers deciding who and what gets taught can result in the denial of diverse voices and perspectives.

Podcasts radically shift the dynamics around who gets to teach, and who gets to learn. A lot of the most beloved and popular shows, like Radiolab and Dan Carlin’s Hardcore History, basically boil down to what you wish your science or history class had been like in the first place. Many others, like 1619 and You’re Wrong About, aim to correct the misinformation in many accepted cultural narratives from both our near and distant pasts.

Now, obviously, podcasts can’t replace a world-class, bonafide, IRL, teacher-to-student relationship. But they can teach us more than a few vital lessons.

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Listen, and you might learn a thing or two.

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