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Nathan Holbert

@snowdaylearninglab.org
1.5K followers 729 following 3.6K posts

Learning Scientist. Maker and designer. Player of games and toys. Dad. Associate Professor @ Teachers College, Columbia University. Pop & Play host tc.edu/popandplay

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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 4h
I've never been so proud
Endless Jeopardy: Ralph Fiennes developed this famous bus
Me: What is the Bone Temple Express?
Endless Jeopardy: That is correct for $800 (Your current score: $800)
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 8h
Exactly. And it’s not just observing what people actually do, it’s also building theories about WHY and (for better or worse) creating systems that nudge users towards optimal behaviors. They’ve skipped the needs analysis entirely!
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Get Equipped With @getequipped.bsky.social · 23h
get equipped with finally high
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 29/09/2026
Fun to be back in the studio recording episodes for the next season of Pop & Play! We're tackling big and small questions about play, pop culture, and learning this season so if you've got some send them our way (a reply here works!). In the meantime, check out S6 tc.edu/popandplay
tc.edu
Pop and Play | Media | Digital Futures Institute (DFI) | Teachers College, Columbia University
Teachers College Digital Futures Institute (DFI) is an interdisciplinary hub for digital innovation, with a mission to advance more just social futures that is driven by research, pedagogy, and public engagement.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 29/09/2026
How to Learn Anything isn't focused on schools (though they do make a regular appearance), but this article captures one reason most of us struggle with the theories and practices of learning: In public conversations, learning is instrumentalized as a means of improving test scores.
nytimes.com
30 Ideas for Fixing U.S. Schools, Ranked by Experts (Gift Article)
Math and reading scores are in a decade-long slump. We asked three dozen experts: What could turn things around?
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 29/09/2026
The gods really do not want me eating salad this year
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Kai Ryssdal @kairyssdal.bsky.social · 28/09/2026
If a sentence in your newscast starts with “President Trump says…” you’re failing your audience.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 29/09/2026
Running around on the Inceptioned Manhattan buildings in Control Resonant is a ton of fun, but disappointed to discover my apartment was lost in the pattern
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Aaron Trammell @aarontram.bsky.social · 13/09/2026
♥️🔥♥️🔥♥️🔥♥️🔥♥️🔥♥️🔥♥️ ITS HERE!!!!! This book is about how game design on a whole, counterintuitively, became less imaginative because of Dungeons & Dragons. We often talk about Dungeons & Dragons as the ultimate fantasy. A pure domain of imagination where absolutely anything is possible.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 28/09/2026
Seems like every day there’s a new video of grandpa snoozing during meetings in the oval.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 28/09/2026
The biggest driver of educational misinformation today is the EdTech industry. If you believe learning is memorization and recall AI is a thrilling innovation. Our book pushes back against those that want to mechanize learning offering methods to find meaning and community in your learning journey.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 28/09/2026
MAHA
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Brendan Davey @brendandavey.bsky.social · 11/09/2025
I find myself thinking about this 1941 Harper's magazine article a lot. Point being, good, happy people don't turn into Nazis. Also, @cuny.edu (represent!) students seldom turn into Nazis. But the "scared spectator" and the "spoiled sons" often do. 🗃️ Archive Link below 👇
Kind, good, happy, gentlemanly, secure people never go Nazi. They may be the gentle philosopher whose name is in the Blue Book, or Bill from City College to whom democracy gave a chance to design airplanes—you’ll never make Nazis out of them. But the frustrated and humiliated intellectual, the rich and scared speculator, the spoiled son, the labor tyrant, the fellow who has achieved success by smelling out the wind of success—they would all go Nazi in a crisis.
Believe me, nice people don’t go Nazi. Their race, color, creed, or social condition is not the criterion. It is something in them.
Those who haven’t anything in them to tell them what they like and what they don’t, whether it is breeding, or happiness, or wisdom, or a code, however old-fashioned or however modern, go Nazi. It’s an amusing game. Try it at the next big party you go to.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 24/09/2026
New book incoming! Everybody has ideas about learning, but much of it is confusing, demoralizing, and flat out wrong. In How to Learn Anything we pull together research on cognition, play, and design to share how we can all create powerful, more meaningful spaces for learning. Coming soooon (ish)!
Publishers Marketplace
Deal Report
Category: Non-fiction: Science/Technology
September 23, 2026
HOW TO LEARN ANYTHING By Matthew Berland, Nathan Holbert
Imprint: Basic, John Murray, NHK
Professors of the learning sciences Matthew Berland and Nathan Holbert's HOW TO LEARN ANYTHING, which translates the latest scientific research on learning into an approachable guide to grappling with new ideas and creating habits that stick, showing that doing, playing, and even failing in community with others can teach us far more than solitary study of any kind, to Brandon Proia at Basic, by Jay Mandel and Dara Kaye at WME (NA).
Rights also to John Murray (UK); and to NHK (Japan).
Translation: Alex Levenberg
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 24/09/2026
Being too lazy to know your own zip code or phone number (famously designed to be easy to remember) is not like forgetting long division. And your super duper plagiarism machines (famously crap at math) are not a calculator.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 24/09/2026
New book incoming! Everybody has ideas about learning, but much of it is confusing, demoralizing, and flat out wrong. In How to Learn Anything we pull together research on cognition, play, and design to share how we can all create powerful, more meaningful spaces for learning. Coming soooon (ish)!
Publishers Marketplace
Deal Report
Category: Non-fiction: Science/Technology
September 23, 2026
HOW TO LEARN ANYTHING By Matthew Berland, Nathan Holbert
Imprint: Basic, John Murray, NHK
Professors of the learning sciences Matthew Berland and Nathan Holbert's HOW TO LEARN ANYTHING, which translates the latest scientific research on learning into an approachable guide to grappling with new ideas and creating habits that stick, showing that doing, playing, and even failing in community with others can teach us far more than solitary study of any kind, to Brandon Proia at Basic, by Jay Mandel and Dara Kaye at WME (NA).
Rights also to John Murray (UK); and to NHK (Japan).
Translation: Alex Levenberg
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 24/09/2026
I want this now please!
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 24/09/2026
Kids repurposing tech to meet their extremely unique needs leaving adults baffled is one of my absolute favorite reoccurring stories
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 23/09/2026
“Of prices!”
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 23/09/2026
“Of prices!”
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Renee DiResta @noupside.bsky.social · 23/09/2026
New work featured in New Public!: There is no neutral feed algorithm. Each one makes source, ranking, & content diversity choices. @jonathanstray.com & I started MySky so you can see - and change! - these settings. Check it out here on Bluesky, in "Feeds" # newpublic.substack.com/p/meet-the-a...
newpublic.substack.com
🎛️📲 Meet the algorithm you can actually control and understand
Jonathan Stray and Renée DiResta introduce MySky, a feed that shows its work
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 23/09/2026
First poutine, universal healthcare, and now this!?
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 23/09/2026
So they’re learning cursive again in New Jersey… [looks around at world burning and crumbling] Sure.
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Prisonculture @prisonculture.bsky.social · 22/09/2026
Let's hire teens in the city and put them to work reaching out to various local cultural organizations to advise them how they can create actual teen friendly spaces at their organizations. The city has a department of youth services. Let the youth lead.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 22/09/2026
Just came across this photo I took in 2015 of a talk by Masayuki Uemura on the development of the NES. Why the Zapper? Americans love guns.
A slide that reads: Conception of new design as a result of market analysis. 4. Bundling the NES Zapper. Americans in general are interested in gun.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 22/09/2026
What a loser
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 22/09/2026
Just came across this photo I took in 2015 of a talk by Masayuki Uemura on the development of the NES. Why the Zapper? Americans love guns.
A slide that reads: Conception of new design as a result of market analysis. 4. Bundling the NES Zapper. Americans in general are interested in gun.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 21/09/2026
There it is. Why bother with fiddly nudges to culture and carefully worded guidelines when you can just hijack the US science apparatus yourself and drive it right over the cliff.
arstechnica.com
Russel Vought will reportedly be given veto power over all NIH grants
Pending move comes over the objections of the NIH director.
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Missing The Point @missingthept.bsky.social · 21/09/2026
President Trump is 0-2 against pools.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 21/09/2026
Many people are saying.
Pixelated yellow text that reads: You are a true party master!
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 20/09/2026
Honestly probably Adventure. The first game where I was like, “I HAVE to figure this out”
A 2D yellow blocky castle with grey grounds. A black gate is closed. A yellow square is next to the castle. A yellow key is above the square.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 20/09/2026
This is a beautiful and challenging read. It’s impossible to be a parent. It’s impossible to be a kid. We do our best, because we must. Honesty, empathy, responsibility, love are all we have.
nytimes.com
In Fighting for Every Black Child, Did I Betray My Own? (Gift Article)
A decade ago, I made a decision about my daughter’s education that I hoped would challenge New York City’s separate and unequal school system. Now 16, she thinks I made the wrong choice.
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Radley Balko @radleybalko.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
From 2021 to 2025, Stephen Miller was making $567K/year as head of his America First "think tank." He owns $100K-$250K in Palantir stock alone. His estimated net worth: ~$2 million. The immigrants he's deporting to third-party countries to be tortured and disappeared don't get an attorney at all.
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Matthew Kirschenbaum @mkirschenbaum.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
More to the point, once again we seem to be just happily jettisoning decades of work on ideas like distributed cognition and network actors in order to do a hard reset on the binaries that have already done a great deal more harm than any AI agent has yet to do.
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videogame history @vghistory.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
the space tablet, print ad, imagery (1982) archive.org/details/byte...
prominent text: welcome to the third dimension
underneath: an image of a kinda george lucas-lookin' mf (wearing a black cape), using a very small space shuttle on a space table to co-ordinate the 3d image on his apple II screen in wire frame. he is looking back at you intensely (away from what he is doing), giving the whole image a twilight zone vibe.
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Sarah J. Jackson @sjjphd.bsky.social · 19/09/2026
Don’t forget, this is how the Kennedy center dismantling started. The folks at your institution doing equity work might be the first targeted, but the institutions themselves are always the target. Hope folks have learned this now.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 19/09/2026
Exactly like his last time in office, everything is as bad or worse than we said it could be.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 18/09/2026
Many people should be tried and convicted for this war crime. Negligence, hubris, ego, and blood thirsty ghouls all contributed to the murder of these children and over 1000 civilians in the initial days of this pointless war.
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Jason Leopold @jasonleopold.bsky.social · 18/09/2026
HUGE EXCLUSIVE from @bloomberg.com Inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School Pentagon investigators discovered that flawed intel, outdated imagery & overreliance on AI contributed to a missile strike that killed 123 children in Minab 🎁 www.bloomberg.com/graphics/202...
bloomberg.com
Inside the US ‘Kill Chain’ That Destroyed an Iranian School
Pentagon investigators have discovered that flawed intelligence, outdated imagery and an overreliance on AI contributed to a missile strike that killed 123 children in Minab.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 10/09/2026
I don't think AI is going to kill us all on the account of a super intelligent decision we can't possibly comprehend. But it might wipe us out when it decides "delete global water supply" is the correct response to a request to return a case of La Croix.
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Kieran Healy @kjhealy.co · 18/09/2026
This is the far more likely pathway for how AI will end us all, btw. Not via some superintelligent swarm of paperclip maximizers, but by a cascading sequence of dumb fuckups driven by human beings who have arranged things to be fast-moving and catastrophically fragile while also being really lazy.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 18/09/2026
Google Scholar get out of here with this "Quick read" shit! Never has a company torched its reputation so quickly and entirely.
A screenshot from a google scholar search. On the side we see links for the HTML and PDF versions of articles, as well as a new link that says "Quick read"
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 18/09/2026
Modified tweet from Catholic Images That Go Hard that now shows a young pope, wearing a hat, and holding a drink. It now says "what I wouldn't give for a Green Orb"
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 18/09/2026
Hammond: When we have control again... Party House cat: You never had control, that's the illusion!
Screenshot from the game Party House from UFO 50. Three pixel art t-rexes surround a “social climber”. They stand in a pixel art house. The bottom says “who gets the blame?”
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 18/09/2026
I think a lot about my education professor Dr. Write who used to tell us over and over again, “your classroom is not the most important thing in your students lives.” Seems relevant while working on a syllabus quiz about how to send a proper email with my middle schooler this morning at 7am.
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 18/09/2026
Hammond: When we have control again... Party House cat: You never had control, that's the illusion!
Screenshot from the game Party House from UFO 50. Three pixel art t-rexes surround a “social climber”. They stand in a pixel art house. The bottom says “who gets the blame?”
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 18/09/2026
Some of these examples are worrying, but in the form of “we designed a system to accomplish its task no matter what and it’s now doing things we don’t like to accomplish pointless tasks.” Not AGI, just short sighted design.
arstechnica.com
Covert uploads and megalomania: OpenAI details new "misaligned" agent incidents
Model maker commits to new framework for reporting misaligned models.
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Charles Logan @charleswlogan.bsky.social · 17/09/2026
Same Northwestern:
dailynorthwestern.com
Uihlein family to donate $35 million for Northwestern football
The Uihlein family has committed to donating $35 million to Northwestern over the next three years to “support the continued growth and success of its football program,” the University announced Tuesd...
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Nathan Holbert @snowdaylearninglab.org · 17/09/2026
Yo dawg meme: Yo dawg, I heard you like AI so I put AI in your AI and oh shit now I've caused the apocalypse
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Mayor Zohran Kwame Mamdani @mayor.nyc.gov · 16/09/2026
17 new public bathrooms. Across all five boroughs. Because you can’t wait — and you shouldn’t have to.
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