Sample writing
The System
Your daughter sits in a beanbag chair with a tablet and noise-canceling headphones. The system decides what she learns. There is no teacher in the building. Not one.
Writing
Selected work.
Long-form essays, investigations, and a sample chapter from Still Human. Readable inline. Nothing gated.
Featured · Book sample
Essays and investigations
Analysis · April 5, 2026 · 9 min
Investigation · April 3, 2026 · 5 min
Investigation · April 5, 2026 · 4 min
More coming
Recent long-form.
The reading lesson inside the two-hour day
What the Alpha School coverage keeps missing, and why it matters more than the test scores. Inside the K–3 literacy stack of a school with no certified reading teachers.
Read →The evidence problem
Two weeks of reading every study Amira Learning cites to justify the millions of dollars states are spending. The distance between marketing and data is not a rounding error.
Read →When the privacy page and the partnership page disagree
Amira Learning says it does not share student data with Claude. Anthropic’s own customer story page describes how Amira uses Claude in detail. Both of these things cannot be true.
Read →Ongoing series
New pieces on the evaluation gap publish regularly at the Still Human Substack and on LinkedIn. This page mirrors the long-form essays worth the extra minutes.
Also by Josh Durey
Nonfiction · Amazon 2023
Nonfiction · Kindle 2023
Fiction · Leanpub
A Course on the Science of Reading
A foundational primer for teachers new to the Science of Reading. Published on Amazon, August 2023.
Ancient Korea for Kids
A short history of Korea written for upper-elementary readers. Published on Amazon Kindle, August 2023.
Wordfallen
Experimental fiction on Leanpub. Themes of language as a living system. A parallel creative project.