Picture a university classroom today: a lecturer clicks play on a short video to illustrate a complicated concept in political science, and students watch, take notes, and discuss. This scene has become remarkably common—nearly two-thirds of higher education instructors in the social sciences now use instructional videos as part of their teaching. But with the explosion of AI-generated content, the same question keeps surfacing in faculty meetings and student study groups alike: can we actually trust what we’re watching? The internet is full of slickly produced videos that look authoritative but may be shallow, misleading, or simply wrong. That anxiety…

Late on a Sunday night, when most of Kyiv was already winding down, the phones began to buzz. It was not a text from a friend or a late notification from a messaging app. It was the official state emergency alert system, the one people in wartime Ukraine have learned to trust and to dread. The message that appeared on screens across the capital was unlike anything most residents had seen before: it warned of a “high possibility of nuclear radiation,” a chemical threat to the city, and even street-to-street fighting. The alerts were written partly in English, with spelling…