“Russell Shaw is the head of school at Georgetown Day School in Washington, D.C.”

ChatGPT thinks I’m a genius: My questions are insightful; my writing is strong and persuasive; the data that I feed it are instructive, revealing, and wise. It turns out, however, that ChatGPT thinks this about pretty much everyone. Its flattery is intended to keep people engaged and coming back for more. As an adult, I recognize this with wry amusement—the chatbot’s boundless enthusiasm for even my most mediocre thoughts feels so artificial as to be obvious. But what happens when children, whose social instincts are still developing, interact with AI in the form of perfectly agreeable digital “companions”?

I recently found myself reflecting on that question when I noticed two third graders sitting in a hallway at the school I lead, working on a group project. They both wanted to write the project’s title on their poster board. “You got to last time!” one argued. “But your handwriting is messy!” the other replied. Voices were raised. A few tears appeared.

I kept my distance and after a few minutes, the students appeared to be working purposefully. The earlier flare-up had faded into the background.

That mundane scene captured something important about human development that digital “friends” threaten to eliminate: the productive friction of real relationships.

Virtual companions, such as the chatbots developed by Character.AI and PolyBuzz, are meant to seem like intimates, and they offer something seductive: relationships without the messiness, unpredictability, and occasional hurt feelings that characterize human interaction. PolyBuzz encourages its users to “chat with AI friends.” Character.AI has said that its chatbots can “hear you, understand you, and remember you.” Some chatbots have age restrictions, depending on the jurisdiction where their platforms are used—in the United States, people 14 and older can use PolyBuzz, and those 13 and up can use Character.AI. But parents can permit younger children to use the tools, and determined kids have been known to find ways to get around technical impediments.

The chatbots’ appeal to kids, especially teens, is obvious. Unlike human friends, these AI companions will think all your jokes are funny. They’re programmed to be endlessly patient and to validate most of what you say. For a generation already struggling with anxiety and social isolation, these digital “relationships” can feel like a refuge.

But learning to be part of a community means making mistakes and getting feedback on those mistakes. I still remember telling a friend in seventh grade that I thought Will, the “alpha” in our group, was full of himself. My friend, seeking to curry favor with Will, told him what I had said. I suddenly found myself outside the group. It was painful, and an important lesson in not gossiping or speaking ill of others. It was also a lesson I could not have learned from AI.

As summer begins, some parents are choosing to allow their kids to stay home and “do nothing,” also described as “kid rotting.” For overscheduled young people, this can be a gift. But if unstructured time means isolating from peers and living online, and turning to virtual companions over real ones, kids will be deprived of some of summer’s most essential learning. Whether at camp or in classrooms, the difficulties children encounter in human relationships—the negotiations, compromises, and occasional conflicts—are essential for developing social and emotional intelligence. When kids substitute these challenging exchanges for AI “friendships” that lack any friction, they miss crucial opportunities for growth.

Much of the reporting on chatbots has focused on a range of alarming, sometimes catastrophic, cases. Character.AI is being sued by a mother who alleges that the company’s chatbots led to her teenage son’s suicide. (A spokesperson for Character.AI, which is fighting the lawsuit, told Reuters that the company’s platform has safety measures in place to protect children, and to restrict “conversations about self-harm.”) The Wall Street Journal reported in April that in response to certain prompts, Meta’s AI chatbots would engage in sexually explicit conversations with users identified as minors. Meta dismissed the Journal’s use of its platform as “manipulative and unrepresentative of how most users engage with AI companions” but did make “multiple alterations to its products,” the Journal noted, after the paper shared its findings with the company.

These stories are distressing. Yet they may distract from a more fundamental problem: Even relatively safe AI friendships are troubling, because they cannot replace authentic human companionship.

Consider what those two third graders learned in their brief hallway squabble. They practiced reading emotional cues, experienced the discomfort of interpersonal tension, and ultimately found a way to collaborate. This kind of social problem-solving requires skills that can be developed only through repeated practice with other humans: empathy, compromise, tolerance with frustration, and the ability to repair relationships after disagreement. An AI companion might simply have concurred with both children, offering hollow affirmations without the opportunity for growth. Your handwriting is beautiful! it might have said. I’m happy for you to go first.

But when children become accustomed to relationships requiring no emotional labor, they might turn away from real human connections, finding them difficult and unrewarding. Why deal with a friend who sometimes argues with you when you have a digital companion who thinks everything you say is brilliant?

The friction-free dynamic is particularly concerning given what we know about adolescent brain development. Many teenagers are already prone to seeking immediate gratification and avoiding social discomfort. AI companions that provide instant validation without requiring any social investment may reinforce these tendencies precisely when young people need to be learning to do hard things.

The proliferation of AI companions reflects a broader trend toward frictionless experiences. Instacart enables people to avoid the hassles of the grocery store. Social media allows people to filter news and opinions, and to read only those views that echo their own. Resy and Toast save people the indignity of waiting for a table or having to negotiate with a host. Some would say this represents progress. But human relationships aren’t products to be optimized—they’re complex interactions that require practice and patience. And ultimately, they’re what make life worth living.

In my school, and in schools across the country, educators have spent more time in recent years responding to disputes and supporting appropriate interactions between students. I suspect this turbulent social environment stems from isolation born of COVID and more time spent on screens. Young people lack experience with the awkward pauses of conversation, the ambiguity of social cues, and the grit required to make up with a hurt or angry friend. This was one of the factors that led us to ban phones in our high school last year—we wanted our students to experience in-person relationships and to practice finding their way into conversations even when doing so is uncomfortable.

This doesn’t mean we should eliminate AI tools entirely from children’s lives. Like any technology, AI has practical uses—helping students understand a complex math problem; providing targeted feedback when learning a new language. But we need to recognize that AI companions are fundamentally different from educational or creative AI applications. As AI becomes more sophisticated and ubiquitous, the temptation to retreat into frictionless digital relationships will only grow. But for children to develop into adults capable of love, friendship, and cooperation, they need to practice these skills with other humans—mess, complications, and all. Our present and future may be digital. But our humanity, and the task of teaching children to navigate an ever more complex world, depends on keeping our friendships analog

I used to give feedback for everything. That engineer who preferred written communication? Feedback. The developer who worked strange hours but always delivered? Feedback.

Until one of them asked me: “Sorry, but how is this affecting my work or the team?”

I had nothing. I was just personally uncomfortable with their style because it was different from mine.

That’s when I realized something that changed how I manage: no impact, no feedback. If someone’s behavior isn’t actually affecting outcomes, I need to keep my mouth shut.

Here’s what happens in most organizations: we hire talented people with different backgrounds and working styles. Then we spend enormous energy trying to sand down their edges until everyone acts the same way. We call it “culture fit” or “professional development,” but often it’s just personality policing.

The solution is simpler than you think: stop giving feedback unless you can prove it matters. Before giving feedback, ask yourself:

1. Is there a measurable impact on work outcomes? Are deadlines being missed? Is quality suffering?
2. Is it affecting team collaboration? Are others unable to work effectively with this person? Are team goals being compromised?
3. Is it creating a hostile environment? Is someone being disrespectful? Is psychological safety being damaged?

If you can’t point to a specific, concrete impact, then what you have isn’t feedback — it’s a preference. And preferences aren’t performance issues.

Also… when we give feedback about every little thing that bothers us, we create feedback fatigue. It’s like the boy who cried wolf — when everything is “an opportunity for growth,” nothing is. People stop listening. Worse, they start second-guessing every natural instinct, every authentic behavior. We reduce psychological safety as team members start hiding their authentic selves. We lose the variety of perspectives by accidentally optimizing for homogeneity. And we damage trust — people feel micromanaged and criticized for just being themselves.

This doesn’t mean becoming a manager who never gives feedback. When behavior genuinely impacts outcomes (e.g., missed deadlines, poor quality, team dysfunction) that feedback is crucial. The difference is you can point to specific consequences, not just discomfort.

Sometimes a behavior genuinely bothers you but has no measurable impact. Their communication style feels abrupt. Their work schedule makes you anxious. Their approach to problem-solving is completely different from yours.

This is where you need to manage yourself, not them. Our discomfort with difference often masquerades as concern for the team. But teams don’t need everyone to act the same way — they need everyone to contribute effectively toward shared goals.

The point of feedback isn’t to create an army of clones who all work, think, and communicate identically. It’s to help people be more effective in their roles and help teams achieve their objectives.

Next time you’re tempted to give feedback, pause. Look for the impact. If you can’t find it, save your breath (and their time).

Because sometimes the behavior that needs changing isn’t theirs. It’s yours.

- by Eli K P William

Read at Aeon

On a grey November afternoon, clad in a borrowed—and somewhat smelly—fencing outfit, I spent two hours going through the basics of the aspiring duellist: saluting before putting on the protective mask, pinching the grip of the sword with the thumb and index finger, gliding back and forth while keeping the feet planted. But this wasn’t the kind of fencing you see at the Olympics—the dazzling speed of the athletes, electronic scoring, and seemingly nonsensical rules. The instructions came with a twist: our back hand, we learned, could be used to grab the opponent’s sword and disarm them, or even to wield a second weapon. We could move in whatever direction we chose. We could aim for pretty much any part of the body.

This was historical fencing, an approach that seeks to recreate the way people fought centuries ago by interpreting ancient documents. Also known as Historical European Martial Arts, or HEMA, it simulates the life-or-death feel of combat that would have been commonplace in the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and up to the early modern era.

I had been cast in an amateur theatre production of The Three Musketeers, playing a guard of the scheming Cardinal de Richelieu. To make our stage fighting look convincing, the actors had committed to training weekly for the next four months. Understanding the strange blend of decorum and brutality that defined historical duels was exactly what we needed.

Teaching us that day was David Farley Chevrier, a medical librarian with degrees in medieval and classical studies and a passion for Scottish dress. In his free time, he oversees a small historical section at a Montreal fencing club, Escrime Mont-Royal, specializing in the smallsword, a weapon introduced in the seventeenth century.

Things got stressful when Farley Chevrier demonstrated basic attacks, parries (for defence), and ripostes (for striking back). Before I was able to absorb them, it was time to spar. I saluted my opponent, put my mask on, and found myself en garde, a weapon pointed at me. Mildly panicked, I clumsily went after them, figuring the best defence was offence. Which was, I later learned, the surest way to lose.

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Originally, swordplay was “an art that taught you how to use weapons that can do real harm in an efficient way,” says Orlando Di Ciccio, who owns and teaches at a historical fencing school in the Mohawk territory of Kahnawà:ke. HEMA is more rigorous than live-action role playing, or LARP, whose aficionados can occasionally be spotted in parks, engaging in foam-sword duels. It’s also not always as geared to education as historical re-enactment. Since the goal is to save yourself from a fatal blow, HEMA fighting can look slow and messy.

“It’s a game of chess with swords,” says Véronique Meunier, who practises HEMA at two clubs. “You’re trying to analyze your opponent, trying to find out how he’s going to react to something.” Meunier started out learning Olympic fencing as a child. “I liked it, I liked the sport of it, I liked the rush of adrenaline, but I hated the rules,” she recalls. “Here comes historical fencing: you don’t have [the same] rules, it’s fun, it’s more wild, it’s more to the core.”

It was a James Bond scene that sparked Meunier’s interest. Die Another Day (2002) features a breathless duel between Bond and villain Gustav Graves. The fight starts as a conventional match at a London fencing club but builds up into spectacular, over-the-top combat as the opponents leap through the building, swapping their modern épées for older, heavier swords on display. “I was like: ‘Okay, I’d really like to do that,’” Meunier says.

When Die Another Day came out, the historical fencing community was still small and relatively obscure, and Meunier wouldn’t have known where to look for teachers. Years later, she wound up connecting with a club and buying her first rapier, at the Salon de la Passion Médiévale, a three-day fair in Quebec with exhibition fights, concerts, and plenty of merchandise. (She has since acquired seven small swords, three more rapiers, one sabre, and more.)

In the spirit of historical accuracy, HEMA weapons are generally steel replicas of what fighters would have used in the past. Popular ones include the longsword, a heavy weapon with a cruciform hilt permitting a two-hand grip; the long and thin rapier, a civilians’ favourite in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and its nimbler version, the smallsword; and the sabre, typically a single-edged curved sword often used by the cavalry and tracing its origins to West Asia. Modern fencing swords—foils, épées, and sabres—descend from some of these weapons, but they were developed for competing, not killing, and tend to be lighter.

While it remains a niche hobby, HEMA is attracting more fans through dedicated social media accounts, blogs, and podcasts. In 2020, a UNESCO-commissioned report estimated the number of practitioners to be at least 16,000 globally, an 85 percent increase over the previous five years. Survey responses from twenty-eight countries showed most practitioners are male, with a high proportion of adults between twenty-five and forty. Most HEMA organizations—from informal groups to for-profit schools—were created after 2010.

There is no international federation today that can claim to represent everyone, nor a standardized list of approved weapons (though, according to the survey, the longsword is the most popular). But regional umbrella bodies, tournament circuits, and rankings have emerged in recent years, a shift that’s not welcomed by all. Farley Chevrier, for one, is not a fan. “In order to have a competition, you need rules. So you’re getting further and further from a true martial art, and you’re getting into a sport,” he says.

A big part of the fun for Farley Chevrier is what he calls “social archaeology”—digging into old books to figure out how people used to fight hundreds of years ago. According to the 2020 report, efforts to study older swordplay techniques have been documented in Europe since the mid-1500s. (The earliest known depiction of a fencing match was found in Egypt, in a temple built by Ramses III around 1200 BC.) In the late nineteenth century, a new-found enthusiasm for everything medieval inspired some fencers to resurrect old fight books and put them into practice. That push ended with the world wars, and only decades later was the hobby revived.

Farley Chevrier owns about three dozen modern editions of fencing manuals that he studies to inform his teaching methods. “It’s not just looking at pictures and going, ‘Oh, that looks good, let’s try to do that,’” he says. “It’s really reading the manuals and understanding how you translate eighteenth-century writings into an actual lesson.”

That takes patience. The way he describes it, many authors (fencing masters, retired army men) seem to have just jotted down whatever came to mind. One of Farley Chevrier’s go-to books is a 1736 treatise by Pierre Jacques François Girard, a former French navy officer, which includes twelve essential tips on how to save one’s life. The book is part of seventy documents that were digitized and shared online by the French HEMA federation. On a global scale, scholars and practitioners collaborate on an online library, called Wiktenauer, that features books, manuscripts, and translations, a testament to the central role of historical documents in the practice.

In Kahnawà:ke, Di Ciccio also relies on old manuals to teach his students how to fight with the longsword, one period and one style at a time. “We’re learning the terminology, we’re learning the context, we’re learning the history, we’re learning the movement,” he says.

Recently, he’s been showing them the techniques of Fiore de’i Liberi and Philippo di Vadi, Italian masters of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, whose approach involves trying to throw adversaries off balance in close-quarter combat. That technique was handy for skirmishes, where you had to be ready for the next person coming at you.

Specializing in one style may result in messy fights when students of different masters meet up at tournaments, Di Ciccio says. But then, that is exactly what would have happened in Europe in those days, when wars brought to the battlefield enemies with different techniques and weapons that they could learn from—if they survived.

I never cared much about swords, but the first time I held one in class, it felt thrilling, empowering—until I had to fight with it, that is. Still, that first impression left me wondering: Why does a weapon that has long ceased being useful on the battlefield or the street still hold such sway?

Di Ciccio, who grew up in Italy, believes it’s the symbol. The sword conjures the hero figure in children’s stories, values of bravery and honour that are steeped in knighthood, he says. In an era of fast consumption, it’s reassuring to connect with something that’s timeless. “It makes you feel like something you’re doing is not going to go to waste in time and just be replaced by something new,” he says. “That value stays, it’s part of the cultural heritage.”

Duels once served a practical purpose: in the sixth century, they started being recognized in Europe as a judicial proceeding, known as trial by combat, to settle disputes, retired Olympic fencer Richard Cohen writes in his book By the Sword: A History of Gladiators, Musketeers, Samurai, Swashbucklers and Olympic Champions. The outcome was in the hands of God: winning a duel, even by proxy, was proof of integrity. While judicial duels were abandoned or abolished, duels continued among knights as a way to resolve grievances. Eventually, they gave way to a frenzy of private, and illegal, honour duels that swept through Western Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The chivalric ideal (or myth, critics would say), promoted in medieval literature, fuelled the popularity of honour duels in European culture. Chivalry was a code of conduct that emerged between the late eleventh and the twelfth century to rein in knights, the horse-bound, armoured warriors who fought for noblemen. Pledges such as loyalty, courtesy, or protecting the weak came to define how the warrior elite should behave but also had a broader influence on society.

In France, noblemen jumped at the opportunity to defend their honour, however benign the offence, as a way to distinguish themselves as a class and display their ancestral values, says Julien Perrier-Chartrand, a French studies professor at Concordia University. After the late-eighteenth-century French Revolution decimated the monarchy and diminished aristocrats’ clout, intellectuals and politicians took up the mantle.

Over time, duelling became more codified. The practice divided writers and philosophers from England to Russia, who passionately wrote about either its merits or its silliness. Though pistols became the more common weapon of choice, the allure of the swordfight endured in literature, especially in the nineteenth century, when Romanticism and the invention of cheap paper ushered in the era of historical novels—action-packed books full of musketeers, crusaders, and outlaws, Cohen writes.

The movie industry joined right in. From the first swashbucklers of the 1910s to Gladiator and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, onscreen duels never get old. They might not be authentic, but they are fun to watch. US Olympic fencers credit movies such as the Star Wars franchise and The Princess Bride for attracting them to the sport. Di Ciccio has a fondness for The Legend of Zorro.

Realistic fights usually make for bad entertainment, but there are exceptions. A favourite among historical fencers is The Duellists, a 1977 movie by Ridley Scott where fighting takes centre stage. Two rival Napoleonic officers feud for years. There is a rawness to their duels—agonizing waits that make the scenes uncomfortable to watch. And that’s the point.

“That’s how it should be done,” says Farley Chevrier. “There’s no stage flair. It’s dirty. And they’re not rushing. You see they’re scared.”

The fighting spirit is something Iokennoron McComber is aiming to reignite in Kahnawà:ke. Ardimento (which means “boldness” in Italian), the school founded by DiCiccio that McComber helped bring to the community, offers longsword and broadsword programs; one day, McComber hopes to add Mohawk weapons, such as the tomahawk, to the curriculum.

As the Mohawk community reconnects with its language, songs, and other traditions that colonial influences suppressed, McComber wants to remind his people they are warriors too, who helped defend against invading American forces in the War of 1812. “We’ve adapted. I live in a house with all the modern amenities like anybody else,” he says. “But my spirit and the spirit of my people is not crushed. So I just want to bring it back.”

McComber’s attraction to swords goes back to childhood, when he watched He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, and he and his friends would try to forge their own swords from fence posts. It was decades later, in 2021, that he attended Di Ciccio’s outdoor fencing classes in a nearby town. He and another Kahnawà:ke resident liked them so much they bought longswords after the second session. When the weather turned cold, they invited Di Ciccio to teach in a gymnasium in their community. Now, more than half of the dozen or so of the school’s regulars (including McComber himself) take part in competitions.

McComber, who is forty-five, worries younger generations may have grown too soft from having everything—food, ad-free entertainment—at their fingertips. Fencing, he’s observed, can restore a sense of pride. “There’s a lot of change in some of the personalities,” he says. “We had one student come in who was very shy, couldn’t make eye contact. Now he holds his head high, and he has a swagger when he walks.”

A few weeks after that first workshop and before we choreographed our fights, my acting troupe worked on honing our reflexes, occasionally practising with regulars at the school. One evening, I found myself at a loss, almost frozen, as a much bigger opponent moved decidedly in my direction, his sword pointed at me.

No matter that the danger wasn’t real. I called off the fight, shaken and upset. I was angry too. As a woman, I’ll spend my whole life looking over my shoulder when walking alone at night. There is something empowering facing off an attacker, even if only at swordfighting practice. But I wasn’t there yet.

The Three Musketeers opened on March 27 last year. By then, I, too, had a swagger as I strode onstage holding my rapier, swinging it toward D’Artagnan’s head, or fencing off Athos while backing down a set of stairs. Even though I was acting, it mattered to me that the fighting looked real, that the audience got a feel of what duels are about: a brutal landing in the here and now, looking another human in the eye and summoning survival instincts you didn’t know you had.

This isn’t just my favorite piece about gaming this year; it’s my favorite piece about gaming in memory. (No, you don’t need to be familiar with the Pokémon series. Anything this Gen-Xer knows about it comes from rap lyrics.) Joseph Earl Thomas happens to be a competitive Pokémon player and an astute cultural critic, which makes his remit far wider than a mere subculture story: In interrogating why Pokémon’s competitive scene has always looked blessedly different from other games’, he brings all of himself to the project, in the best way possible.

It’s also nice that New Orleans is, much like Outkast’s Aquemini, another Black experience. I bumped into this dude at Louis Armstrong Park who looked like Wayne in his Carter III era; we were both quacking back at the ducks, and he offered me weed as we watched them play (“Nah, I’m good,” I said reflexively.) We compared the qualities of cuteness between turtles and geese—which, in miniature, we agreed, are their own kind of Pokémon. Then we talked about Jordans for twenty-four minutes, as we both had on crisp thirteens in opposing color schemes. On the street, this woman with a friend who looks like my daughter’s mom stared me dead in the face as we passed each other, took off her headphones playing what sounded like GloRilla, looked me up and down and said, “Mm-hmmm,” and my new friend with the wrong color thirteens on watched her walk away and said the same thing. That’s how it felt to be in New Orleans, mixed-up, of course, with memories of Kanye’s post-Katrina George Bush beef, and Sarah Broom’s hundred-year inscription against dilapidation in The Yellow House, and even my last visit, during the New Orleans Poetry Festival, where I predictably fell in love with a poet and roamed the streets bedecked in Mardi Gras beads behind (or in front of?) a handful of friends from VONA and had forgotten that other forms of joy even existed. All of which is to say that sure, I’m working this Pokémon tournament, but it’s also easy to recall the comment that Arthur Jafa once made about how twerking is its own form of Black virtuosity, be it at Magic City or elsewhere; we all make sacrifices for our art, for the greater good and all that.