Krill, writes Gordon Peake, are “the least zeitgeisty creatures imaginable”: small, shrimp-like crustaceans whose total population numbers in the hundreds of trillions. Until recently, krill has mostly served as a snack for whales. Now, however, krill is “the latest iteration of capitalism on the frozen frontier,” a health supplement whose market is valued at roughly a billion dollars. Peake spends weeks aboard the Allankay with a crew of vegan activists devoted to ending the krill trade. His dispatch is a brisk history of extractive capitalism in the Antarctic, a fascinating study of an utterly uncool creature, and an uproarious account of a reluctant sailor earning his sea legs. Take the journey with him.

I contemplated the fillets of pink salmon defrosting on my kitchen counter, not too far from the shelf where I keep my supplements, including krill oil, part of my long-established daily routine of taking elixirs with vague but impressive claims about “improved heart health” and “enhanced brain function.” Labels depicting regal seabirds and majestic trawlers and a barmy sense that the more expensive the supplement, the more potent it must be also guided my “decision-making.” I told Hammarstedt I was the sort of fellow who enabled such an industry to exist. He responded with an offer: I should go down to Antarctica to see the krill business for myself.

For today’s high schoolers, a typical school day from a decade ago must seem like something from the Dark Ages. These days, students are issued digital textbooks instead of physical ones, they learn how to conduct chemistry experiments through apps that simulate a science lab, and they take standardized tests on a Chromebook. All of this is the result of many years of frenzied investment in ed tech, capped by a pandemic that forced virtual learning. The overwhelming majority of schools nationwide provide each student with their own laptop or tablet.

All of these screens have changed the dynamic of the classroom. When a student is supposed to be using their school-issued iPad to diligently take notes during math class, they might instead be messaging a friend. Across the country, some parents and teachers are mounting a backlash against screens in the classroom. In April, the Los Angeles school board voted to stop giving devices to its youngest students and implemented screen-time limits for all grades.

But other schools are pulling back on ed tech for an entirely different reason. Chromebooks, like essentially all other consumer electronics, need RAM, or random-access memory. So do the data centers that power every conversation with a chatbot. The AI industry is using so many memory chips that it’s led to a global shortage, making gadgets much more expensive. For an individual consumer, the memory crunch—RAMaggedon, if you will—means having to spend a few hundred dollars more on a new computer. But school districts, many of which are already cash-strapped, buy hundreds or thousands of computers every year. The administrators I spoke with for this story told me that they have had to scramble to acquire all the electronics they now need. As RAMaggedon drags on, they said, something has got to give.

[Read: If you need a laptop, buy it now]

Schools started picking up on the memory shortage last winter, months before most of the country. They have to figure out bulk orders for laptops and tablets long before the academic year begins. Many of them turn to third-party vendors, which have typically provided quotes that are locked in for a month, giving technology directors time to secure the funds from their districts to make purchases that can run millions of dollars. As memory prices have soared, Mark Samberg, the chief technology officer of Chatham County Schools in North Carolina, is hearing a different message from his vendors. “Now quotes are going to be good for 48 hours, a week, or 14 days,” he told me.

Samberg scooped up the Chromebooks he could find. Other districts have been less lucky. In March, a Chromebook vendor warned Homewood-Flossmoor High School in Illinois that its prices would be going up soon. Steve Richardson, the district’s IT director, quickly placed an order, only to be eventually told it couldn’t be fulfilled because memory chips were on back order. “We were kind of in dire straits,” Richardson told me. In 2023, Chromebooks cost the school $353 a piece. The price rose to $400, then $412, and then $427. The most recent batch that Richardson purchased, in August, cost $508 each. But the district needed them to ensure that every student had a Chromebook ahead of the PSAT, which is now entirely digital.

So far, schools have been willing to stomach the costs to continue giving every student a device. Districts initially decided to implement “one to one” policies on the premise that technology can be an equalizing force in the classroom; many educators and administrators still believe that. Dorann Avey, the board chair of the State Educational Technology Directors Association, told me that she is concerned that RAMaggedon will widen the digital divide. Devices are not for “just writing papers,” she said. “We’re trying to prepare students to learn different software that is workplace- and workforce-appropriate.”

That has meant making difficult trade-offs. Because of the extra spending on laptops for students, Homewood-Flossmoor didn’t buy any new smart whiteboards or computers for teachers this year. In Texas, the Paradise Independent School District has considered asking students to bring in their own laptop or tablet, Director of Technology Doug Bryant told me.

A common solution has been to extend the lifetime of a laptop. Instead of replacing a device every four years, schools are opting for seven or eight to reduce how many units they need to purchase in a given year. But that introduces new problems: Older computers sometimes aren’t able to update to the latest operating system, which could create cybersecurity risks. Schools are already a top target for hackers, because they store lots of sensitive personal information but have limited resources. Plus, as a device gets older, its battery degrades and may ultimately need to be replaced. That costs “time and money,” Avey said. “But it’s still less money than buying brand-new devices.”

All of this may not be enough. Multiple administrators told me that they are already considering rolling back their one-to-one device policies because of RAMaggedon, and the challenges for schools are poised to mount. Heading into this school year, some districts were able to skirt the worst of the memory shortage by buying Chromebooks before prices really started to soar. Aaron Smith, the CTO of Loudoun County Public Schools, told me that he sought special permission from his school board to commit to purchasing nearly 24,400 Chromebooks in February instead of May. Memory prices jumped so quickly over that time span that the decision ultimately saved the district $1.66 million, he said. But Smith and other technology directors may not have the same luck as they begin looking to purchase gadgets for the next school year. An executive at Micron, one of the world’s largest RAM manufacturers, recently warned that there’s “no line of sight” to the end of the memory shortage. If schools wait to buy, prices could end up going up even more. But buying early might mean devices will languish in storage for months as the warranty clock ticks away.

RAMageddon will force schools to scrutinize which tech purchases actually improve learning, and which don’t. The fallout will reach far beyond Chromebooks. “We’re not going to be able to afford the servers that we thought we were,” said Samberg, the Chatham County Schools CTO. Those servers power functions such as security cameras, badge readers, and account logins—and every one of them needs RAM.

This article was my submission to the Fordham Institute’s 2026 Wonkathon contest, which asks what rules and regulations should govern the use of technology in the schools. You can read my article on their website here.

Charting the Course is a series from Education Progress featuring pro-excellence education commentary, news, and policy analysis.

1. Frictionless Surfaces

Much talk about how edtech can or should be used in the schools reminds me of a particular type of high school physics problem. They’re the ones that begin with “Assuming a frictionless surface…,” and they often describe a scenario where an object’s velocity stays constant because it isn’t encountering any resisting forces. Despite describing conditions that do not exist in the real world, these models still work — i.e., produce close-enough answers — because the effects of the friction that they assume away are usually small, and so can be factored in afterward.

Popular arguments and programs in favor of edtech adoption frequently make similar assumptions. The problem is that friction in the classroom, the home and the schools is of a different kind than the forces assumed away in those basic physics problems. An edtech product might show clear gains in a controlled setting: maybe it’s a supervised pilot, or a particularly motivated school or classroom adopting a device for a clear, limited purpose. Those results then get touted at trade shows or advertised to an Assistant Superintendent for Curriculum & Instruction, who usually exists in a procurement regime that incentivizes constantly adopting new technologies — mostly just software now — because the future of learning always had to be digital.

Yet all of these new software packages are getting loaded onto one-to-one laptops and tablets that students are now using in class and are expected to use at home. And neither in the classroom nor at home are those frictional forces as minimal as they are in the physics problems. Distractions, multitasking, and the glowing pull of machines that are literally built to do everything are the main forces acting on the object. They are the new learning environment we built.

2. Abstracting and Idealizing

All reasoning abstracts: it leaves things out, and research (especially education research) has to as well. One way it can go awry, though, is through idealization: reasoning about agents by attributing capacities that real humans lack, and then treating those capacities as the standard.1 Edtech’s evidentiary habits do both. They (and we) frequently reason about a kind of student that doesn’t really exist, and then appeal to implementation problems to explain why new learning software hasn’t worked. But the flaws are in the way we model edtech generally.

What education policymakers need is a revolution in the old sense of the word: a turning back. Instructional software should have to prove it beats analog materials under conditions students actually learn in. And the decision whether it has or has not must sit with individual districts; not with vendors, nor outsourced to some state agency list of products keyed to ESSA evidence tiers that don’t have enough to say about real classroom conditions. What states should do is establish a clear standard — like “Any instructional software purchase must carry the burden of proof against an analog comparator under deployment conditions” — and then ensure that district-level adoption decisions follow it.

3. Software and Noise

Why the special standard for edtech, i.e. new educational software, when hardly any educational product, analog or digital, has been subject to such a regime?

Because laptops and tablets are different from textbooks and worksheets. The latter are designed to do one thing, but laptops and tablets are designed to do… everything.2 The nature of the digital device is to not specialize for any particular task, but to maximize use cases across domains. So they’re good for answering emails, watching short-form videos, playing video games, browsing the web, and so on. Moreover, digital devices and the apps on them are designed to maximize how much each individual uses them. The essence of their design is to capture our attention, and so the frictions are latent in the products themselves. Attentional derailment devices, of a sort.

The field of education already struggles to get clean signals. Multiple large meta-analyses have shown that education research, broadly speaking, suffers from serious epistemological problems. This ranges from the methods it uses to produce knowledge to the standards it holds peer-reviewed research to. The latter is part of a larger replication crisis in the social sciences, and the former also directly impedes getting better, more efficient practices to teachers and schools.

Now, more and more learning is being done through broader and more “personalized” learning software packages. Whatever that will ultimately mean for education research, I suspect the end result will be more noise and more opaque signals. When we consider current research into edtech, however, the idealized student-user implicit in much of it frequently adds a layer of bias to the results. Where it might be possible to cut through noise with enough data, a bias resulting from an idealized model user will keep distorting results no matter how large the sample. All of this, to me, suggests the more reasonable attitude to take toward edtech adoption is a default skepticism of any software’s claims to improve learning.

4. District Decisions, State Standards

So what would carrying the burden of proof look like? State education agencies could supply a common protocol for carrying out on-site pilots under real conditions: some classrooms could use the new software program, while comparable classrooms would use the analog materials that the edtech claims to effectively replace. Every purchase request would have to name the analog comparator being replaced alongside the evidence that emerged from the classroom deployment trial. Lacking either, the request would be denied. A similar test could be required for any software contract renewal, too, which would prevent schools getting locked in to products that frequently get worse or bloated over time.

Districts could also start with weaker, more feasible versions of the analog standard by conducting the test during summer learning programs, or in supplemental instructional periods with students that are lagging or struggling more than their peers. (They could even start by comparing new edtech products to ones they already use.)

But because the standard would only apply to student-facing edtech, it would not prevent teachers and administrators from using cutting-edge technologies to improve everything happening around and behind instructional time. AI-powered software obviously has immense potential to streamline administrative processes, and teacher-facing diagnostics and planning tools are already starting to arrive. The risk will be that these products get bundled with less-effective, flashy student-facing ones, locking schools into entire “systems” that end up eating budgets and employee time with little benefits to show. Districts should thus require student-facing components to be priced and bundled separately.

5. Slow Progress is Good Progress

Maybe the country is already too far-down the edtech rabbit hole to make a strict “analog comparator standard” feasible. But there are nearly 14,000 districts that are at least able to try some version of it. While the standard won’t undo years of one-to-one rollouts overnight, perhaps it does not need to.

All that’s needed is to get the ball rolling in the right direction again, making sure to factor in the friction this time. That will be the first step toward restoring a healthy technological environment in the schools.

When I first started writing for the internet, I learned very quickly that paragraphs here work very differently than they do in books.

Paragraphs in books tend to follow the rules we learned in school: they should be about a single topic, they should begin with a sentence introducing the topic, and the sentences that follow should develop the argument about that topic, until you’re finally ready to talk about something else.

“How long should a paragraph be?” I remember asking my high school English teacher.

“As long as it has to be,” came the response.

And in that moment the student was enlightened.

Enlightened enough, at least, to get through my five-paragraph high school essays, my maybe-thirty-paragraph term papers in university, all the way to my (too-many-paragraphs-to-count) dissertation in grad school.

So, when I first started writing for the internet, I tried writing in the same way I had been trained to all those years ago. Much to my dismay, I found that readers were not as enthusiastic about the paragraphs that my English teachers had taught me to love.

As you can see from the paragraphing of this very article, I did eventually come to embrace a more internet-native way of writing. Now, much to the delight of my editor, I hit the “Enter” button with gleeful abandon, even if it pains a small part of me to do so.

However, as I’ve started once again to write material destined to be printed on paper, the ghost of the traditional single-topic paragraph has come back to haunt me, and I’ve had to unlearn some of the habits I’ve worked so hard to inculcate for online writing.

All this put some questions in my mind: Where do our ideas about paragraphs come from? And why does the internet-native paragraph work so differently from its traditional cousin?

As is so often the case, the answer begins in Ancient Greece.

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Pilcrows and rubricators

The paragraph is not found in nature.

It is a human invention, one which began as a horizontal stroke written at the beginning of a line of text, extending under the first few letters.

The literal meaning of Ancient Greek parágraphos is ‘written beside’, which is an apt description. Sometimes the parágraphos was adorned in some way, either with a dot or circle, or else forked at one end, as in the following example:

The parágraphos was used to signal the end of a section, such as a chapter of a longer text, or the end of one speaker’s dialogue in a drama.1

Later medieval scribes inherited the convention of writing something beside the text to indicate a break of some sort. For this they used the letter C, which stood for the Latin word capitulum, literally ‘little head’.

Capitulum is also the source of the English word chapter, which refers to a section of text as well, albeit a rather larger one.2

The C of the medieval scribes later acquired a line drawn through it, and eventually, through a convoluted sequence of forms and uses, this assemblage evolved into ¶, the “new paragraph” symbol used by proofreaders to this day, at least when they’re working by hand. This symbol has a name too, which shows up from time to time in crosswords and the like: pilcrow, a term distantly related to paragraph.3

These new-paragraph marks were not written along with the rest of the text. Instead, they were added later, in red ink, by a separate scribe called a rubricator — so named because he wrote in ruber, the Latin for ‘red’.4

Early printers inherited these customs. When they came to the beginning of a new paragraph, they left a space for the rubricator to add the ¶ symbol. Unfortunately for the rubricator’s job security, the existence of the blank space to mark a new paragraph made the ¶ redundant — and, since hand rubrication was expensive, the blank was often left unfilled.

This blank is the origin of the modern practice of using indentation to begin paragraphs. At first, to save space, a new paragraph would often begin on the same line as the previous one. Only in 1499 did Aldus Manutius (a friend of the Dead Language Society) first start marking paragraphs consistently with a blank space and a line break.5

That’s how paragraphs came to look like they do today. But how did they come to mean what they do today — and why does that meaning differ between page and screen?

The rise of the paragraph

The ancient Greek parágraphos didn’t correspond to any particular division of a text: it marked the end of something, which could be the portion of a play spoken by one character, an item in a list, or even just a single sentence.6

But there were ideas in ancient Greek thought about how to divide a text into parts. The division closest to the modern idea of a paragraph is the rhetorical unit called the period.

Technically, however, the ancient period corresponds to a modern sentence — and indeed gives its name, in some English dialects, to the bit of punctuation that ends a modern sentence — but the periods favoured by ancient writers were much longer than modern sentences.7

The period has its origins in ancient rhetoric — representing a group of prose that ends with a break for breathing. For Aristotle, the period should be bounded conceptually by how much material a reader or listener could hold in mind without needing a break:

By a period I mean a portion of speech that has in itself a beginning and an end, being at the same time not too big to be taken in at a glance. (Aristotle, Rhetoric 3.9, 1409a–b; trans. W. Rhys Roberts).

But the theorizing about the rhetorical divisions of a text occurred parallel to the development of signs to mark the divisions of a text. It took the print revolution to connect the two.

In particular, writers of practical texts — as opposed to literary ones — used the visual separation of the paragraph to match the conceptual division between, say, steps in an operation. This was already happening in the 15th century, the earliest days of print.8

Another factor behind the rise of the paragraph as a meaningful division of a text was the decline in the length of sentences. The longer, Latinate sentences popular in the English Renaissance grew gradually shorter over the centuries, as the reading public came to be composed more and more of the middle classes.9

Middle-class readers lacked the taste for the periodic style of sentence favoured by those with a Latin education. As sentences grew shorter, the ideas in sentences needed to be connected more explicitly. The paragraph was the perfect tool for the job.10

Even so, it wasn’t until the nineteenth century that an explicit ideology arose surrounding what the paragraph should mean. The most popular and influential expression of this ideology came from the Scottish philosopher Alexander Bain, who devised a set of rules for writing paragraphs.

There were six such rules, which he introduced in his 1866 textbook English Composition and Rhetoric. Here they are, in a modernized form:11

1. Explicit reference. Within a paragraph, it should be obvious how each sentence relates to the previous one.

2. Parallel construction. Sentences expressing similar ideas should have similar structures.

3. Topic sentence. The first sentence should introduce what the paragraph is about, although Bain allows the occasional preparatory sentence to precede it.

4. Consecutive arrangement. Each sentence in the paragraph should be in its logical position given what the paragraph is trying to do.

5. Overall unity. The paragraph should be about one single topic and should not feature digressions.

6. Subordination. The amount of space devoted to each aspect of a topic should be in proportion to its importance. Don’t spend too many words on minor matters.

Taken together, Bain’s six rules imply that paragraphs must have a particular shape. They must begin with a sentence informing us what they are about, and they must proceed in a logical fashion until the author has exhausted what there is to say about the topic.

You may recognize this theory of paragraph construction from high school English class. I certainly do. But it is very different from how almost everyone actually writes, at least on the internet.

When writing on the internet, I find myself operating by a theory of the paragraph that goes something like this: start a new paragraph when the current paragraph is getting “too long”.

What constitutes “too long”? There doesn’t seem to be any strict rule, but I find I end up pressing “Enter, Enter” every 30–50 words when writing for the internet.

My editor is stricter still: between my first draft of an article and the one you end up reading, dozens of new paragraph breaks have come into being. (Editor’s note: only 5 new paragraph breaks have come into being!)

How far we have fallen from Bain’s six rules!

As it turns out, however, this hyper-paragraph-osis isn’t just an internet thing.

We are all journalists now

Short paragraphs were originally a journalism thing — at least, a thing journalism promoted, dating back to the 20th century and beyond.12

As Willard Grosvenor Bleyer wrote in Newspaper Writing and Editing, an influential journalism textbook from 1913,

One of the distinctive peculiarities of newspaper style is the brevity of the paragraph. The width of newspaper columns permits about seven words in a line. The result is that a paragraph of the length usual in prose style generally, i.e., from 150 to 250 words, would occupy from 20 to 35 lines and would appear disproportionately long for its width. Paragraphs that are long, or appear to be so, make a piece of writing look solid and heavy, hence uninviting to the rapid reader. In newspaper work, accordingly, it has come to be recognized that shorter paragraphs are more effective. Paragraphs of from 50 to 150 words are considered the normal type for newspaper writing.13

As a consequence, Bleyer continues, “what would be subdivisions, each with a sub-topic, in the common type of longer paragraphs, become independent paragraphs in newspaper style.”14 As a result, the unit corresponding to Bain’s unitary paragraph is, in journalism, a group of adjacent paragraphs.

This is more or less the house style of the internet.15 The innovation of the screen was to make the old journalistic convention a “default setting” across genres.16 The feeling of heaviness that attended reading the seven-word lines of newspaper columns seems to be inherent to any kind of reading on screens.

Today, however, print journalism is often given more space to breathe than the old columns had. As a result, the paragraphing in newspapers and magazines is often less aggressive than the custom Breyer described. When news organizations run the same article in print and online editions, the print version is often paragraphed much less aggressively.17

Despite what your English teacher may once have told you, the paragraph doesn’t have any sacred or immutable meaning. It is there to serve the needs of the reader of the text.

These needs depend on the genre of the text as well as the physical details of how the text is delivered. The result is that ideal paragraph length can be very different depending on what you’re reading — and where you’re reading it.

To give a personal example from this very Substack, the denser and more technical the topic, the more aggressively the article is paragraphed.

My editor and I are humbly adapting Aristotle’s principle: the paragraphs shrink so that they’re never too big to be taken in at a glance. It’s just that reading on electronic devices — or reading about technical topics — brings us to “too big” remarkably quickly, often after only two or three sentences.

What do you think? Do you approve of these shorter, internet paragraphs? Or should we all be pressing “Enter” much less often?

Works cited

• Aristotle (1924). Rhetoric. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts.

• Bleyer, Willard Grosvenor (1913). Newspaper Writing and Editing.

• Harris, Neil (2020). Costs We Don’t Think About: An Unusual Copy of Franciscus de Platea, Opus restitutionum (1474), and a Few Other Items. In Cristina Dondi (ed.), Printing R-Evolution and Society 1450–1500: Fifty Years that Changed Europe, 511–540.

• Johnson, William A. (1994). The Function of the Paragraphus in Greek Literary Prose Texts. Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik 100: 65–68.

• Oxford English Dictionary (OED), online edition, s.vv. full stop, period, pilcrow, rubric.

• Robotham, Andrew T. & Nathalie Pignard-Cheynel (2024). You Said Digital First! A Five-Dimensional Definition According to Journalists from Three Swiss Newspapers. Journalism Practice 18(7): 1702–1721. Published online in 2022.

• Shearer, Ned A. (1972). Alexander Bain and the Genesis of Paragraph Theory. Quarterly Journal of Speech 58(4): 408–417.

• Tebeaux, Elizabeth (2011). Technical Writing and the Development of the English Paragraph 1473–1700. Journal of Technical Writing and Communication 41(3): 219–253.

The People Holding Up the Internet. Amazing to see how much of the modern internet still depends on the volunteer work of individual people. 4 billion phones rely on the time zone database, a text file edited by just two people in their spare time.