New Orts #106

January 25 MMXXVI

A central Florida middle school was sent into lockdown on Tuesday ​[Dec.9 2025] after an automated weapons detection system mistook a musical instrument for a gun.

Seminole County school officials said Lawton Chiles Middle School in Oviedo ​[Florida] was placed under a brief “Code Red” lockdown after the AI spotted a student holding a clarinet like a rifle​.

Story here.

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I was young for my class. And I read a lot. Maybe that was enough to make the grade school bullies mad, though I certainly didn’t ask. Nor do I remember exactly what they did, only that I was terrified. And that not for one second did I consider telling my parents or a teacher. Instead, every recess, I hid in our second-grade classroom.

I don’t know what made me decide it was enough. Going outside was scary. But hiding forever, even more so.

So I made a plan. Go to the yard and stand right by the teacher. Then take one step out into the yard. Just one. The next day, two. Then three.

I remember the color of the grass, the knot in my throat, the exertion it took to move my feet. The next week, I was five steps past the teacher. Then ten. Then far enough to play with my friends. The bullies saw me, and they didn’t come back. They were looking for fear.

— Monika Bauerlein, CEO of Mother Jones, in an email soliciting donations, December 30, 2025

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Anyone’s close world of family and friends composes a group smaller than almost all sampling errors, smaller than almost all rounding errors, a group invisible, at whose loss the world will not blink. Two million children die a year from diarrhea, and 800,000 from measles. Do we blink? Stalin starved 7 million Ukrainians in one year, Pol Pot killed 1 million Cambodians, the flu epidemic of 1918 killed 21 or 22 million people ... shall this go on?
— Annie Dillard, in Harper’s Magazine, January 1998

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