Skip to main content

Kevin Nguyen

Kevin Nguyen

Features Editor

Features Editor

Kevin Nguyen is the features editor at The Verge. Previously, he was an editor at GQ.

More From Kevin Nguyen

The best movie about the pandemic yet is still not a very good movie

Eddington hilariously and diligently evokes 2020 but has learned nothing from it.

Kevin NguyenCommentsComment Icon Bubble
K
External Link
Kevin Nguyen
How to get students to stop using AI.

James D. Walsh’s excellent New York Magazine piece about college students cheating their way through school with ChatGPT has provoked a lot of education discourse, much of which reluctantly surrenders that AI is here and that there’s no way to stop people from using it. The takes have ranged from sheepishly accepting that reality to wholeheartedly embracing it — reimagining curriculum, the campus, the entirety of the liberal arts. But in Ted Gioia’s excellent newsletter The Honest Broker, he proposes a different solution. What if we just shut down cheating by making things analog?

Once you get past the flexing about Oxford (sounds like a nice school), Gioia’s answers are actually smart and obvious: Make students write things by hand. Grill students verbally. Raise the difficulty of tests (and also mandate they be handwritten or oral). What he’s outlined is as much a rebuke of AI in the classroom as it is a doubling down of how education used to be: test kids on what they know, and leave it up to them to figure out how to succeed. Maybe they would figure out a new way to cheat, but at least they would be thinking creatively.

5 Ways to Stop AI Cheating

[honest-broker.com]

K
External Link
Kevin Nguyen
“Recurring Screens.”

In poet Nora Claire Miller’s short, moving essay, she draws a line from the very first screensaver (SCRNSAVE, 1983) to the tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time (Madeleine L’Engle, 1962) to her family’s flight during the Holocaust (Austria, 1938). I particularly loved this bit about taking apart her grandmother’s iMac:

I took the Strawberry apart thirty-nine times. (I kept count.) I didn’t really know what I was doing. I cut my hands open on the logic board more than once. There’s still dried blood on the hard drive. But despite my best efforts at modernization, the Strawberry has refused to accept any of my updates. It only wants to exist in 1999, to connect to an old internet that hardly exists anymore. These days it mostly runs screen savers. Warp is still my favorite.

Recurring Screens

[The Paris Review]

Tall Tales is a critique of AI — so why do people think it was made with AI?

A Thom Yorke side project is catching unnecessary flak. The artist explains how it came to be.

K
External Link
Kevin Nguyen
The story everyone at The Verge is reading today.

We’re mostly DMing each other to say that the younger generation is cooked. At New York, James D. Walsh surveys the zoomers who are using AI to do all of their college homework — a trend that is obvious and no less alarming. Take the story of Wendy, for example: she used ChatGPT to write an essay arguing that the use of technology is hampering students’ ability to think. The irony is lost on her.

Later, I asked Wendy if she recognized the irony in using AI to write not just a paper on critical pedagogy but one that argues learning is what “makes us truly human.” She wasn’t sure what to make of the question. “I use AI a lot. Like, every day,” she said. “And I do believe it could take away that critical-thinking part. But it’s just — now that we rely on it, we can’t really imagine living without it.”

What’s in the box?

What is the Vietnamese diaspora? The latest issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly tries to answer that question with a fake cigar box.

Imagining the scale of the Vietnam War

Can the impact of a conflict be measured? Can we reckon with what’s quantifiable?

Kevin Nguyen
The 7 writing apps I used to start and finish my book

Can you ever use too much software? Yes, but hear me out first.

K
External Link
Kevin Nguyen
Before A24 there was Napoleon Dynamite.

(Well, Fox Searchlight technically.) It’s been over twenty years since Jon Heder starred in one of the most unexpected indie film breakouts, and its success came from a savvy combination of word of mouth and a very online marketing campaign.

K
The Verge
Kevin Nguyen
Is Anora a broom? Because it swept last night.

Director Sean Baker started the evening with zero Oscars under his belt, and left with four — for original screenplay, film editing, director, and best picture. (Not to mention Mikey Madison’s win for best actress.) Last fall, The Verge spoke with Baker about how he made Anora’s scant $6 million budget look like a film made for $50 million.