I managed to forget to post last week, so here is a super-sized edition of the Weekly reads, including looks at the benefits of gossip, arguments for and against Jonathan Kozol, what makes a child prodigy, the conservative case for football and more. Enjoy!
Poor Kids Who Do Everything Right don’t do better than rich kids who do everything wrong— “Even poor kids who do everything right don’t do much better than rich kids who do everything wrong. Advantages and disadvantages, in other words, tend to perpetuate themselves. You can see that in the above chart, based on a new paper from Richard Reeves and Isabel Sawhill, presented at the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston’s annual conference, which is underway.”
Have You Heard? Gossip Is Actually Good and Useful – – ““Hearing gossip communicates norms of the group,” lead study author Elena Martinescu told me in an email, “but individuals who receive this information will use it to reflect on themselves: Do they personally respect the norm? What can they expect if they break it?”” The Atlantic
Did Zen philosophy create the kamikaze? – Christopher Harding – – “In contemporary Western memory, still stocked for the most part by wartime propaganda imagery of mad, rodent-like Japanese, those final weeks are a swirl of brainwashed fanaticism, reaching its apotheosis as hundreds of kamikaze planes slammed into the US ships closing in around Japan’s home islands. Three thousand raids and innumerable scouting missions were launched during the climax of the conflict, designed to show the US the terrible cost it would pay for an all-out invasion of Japan.” Aeon
Stop Developing Drugs for the Cancer That Killed My Mother – – “Scientists need to abandon the assumption that every medical challenge must be overcome by a direct attack. An easier, albeit imperfect, route to improved patient outcomes may be available today with medicine’s existing arsenal. Drugs approved for other cancers might have helped my mother. We didn’t know it then, but she wasn’t as alone with her diagnosis as she sounded on the phone.” Nautilus
Savage Inconsistencies: Kozol’s Intellectual Confusion–Kozol has acquired hundreds of thousands of fans over the years, as evidenced by the sales of his books. It is not clear what influence he has had on public policy, but it is likely that he has influenced teachers—negatively. According to a study of course syllabi in a variety of education. schools in the early 2000s, Savage Inequalities is one of the two most frequently assigned books.10 Kozol’s writings may well have helped to encourage several generations of urban teachers to spend more class time denouncing social injustice than teaching academic subject matter and helping to give their students access to the majority culture. Pioneer Institute
Segregation Now: The Resegregation of America’s Schools – – “Tuscaloosa’s schools today are not as starkly segregated as they were in 1954, the year the Supreme Court declared an end to separate and unequal education in America. No all-white schools exist anymore—the city’s white students generally attend schools with significant numbers of black students. But while segregation as it is practiced today may be different than it was 60 years ago, it is no less pernicious: in Tuscaloosa and elsewhere, it involves the removal and isolation of poor black and Latino students, in particular, from everyone else. In Tuscaloosa today, nearly one in three black students attends a school that looks as if Brown v. Board of Education never happened.” ProPublica
Why MOOCs are Failing the People They’re Supposed to Help – “And yet, despite the steady spread of the MOOC movement and the growing acceptance among university administrators that quality online education doesn’t have to be an oxymoron, enthusiasm for MOOCs has waned in the past year. Last winter, Thrun himself expressed some doubts. “We were on the front pages of newspapers and magazines, and at the same time, I was realizing, we don’t educate people as others wished, or as I wished,” he told Fast Company in an interview. “We have a lousy product.” (He later told the Times that his enthusiasm had not actually declined as much as he might have indicated.)” New Yorker
What Makes a Child a Prodigy? The Case of 7-Year-Old Painter Aelita Andre – – “Stand before any abstract painting—try a Jackson Pollock or a Cy Twombly— and it’s inevitable someone will say: My child could have done that. For many, the dripping splatters or scribbles seem haphazard and simplistic, not unlike something an average toddler might do with a set of finger paints. And as contemporary art becomes more conceptual, it’s harder to know what makes a piece of art great: the object itself, the story behind it, or both? Seven-year-old Australian abstract painter Aelita Andre, whose latest exhibition opened in Manhattan last week, embodies what one art historian calls the “my kid could do that” impulse. Once again, the media seems taken with the idea that a child’s art may be a joke on a self-important art world.” The Atlantic
Pro-Lifers’ Existential Crisis – – “The other branch, let’s call them “absolutists,” believe the best way to stop abortion is to, well, stop abortion. That means in all cases, preferably with an across-the-board law. Personhood measures fall in this category because they would mean that “unborn human beings” meet the legal definition of a “child.” This wing is motivated by the fact that no matter how many incremental restrictions are passed, there will still be some women somewhere who will manage to follow all the rules and get an abortion.” The Atlantic
The Creepy New Wave of the Internet by Sue Halpern | – “It is already possible to buy Internet-enabled light bulbs that turn on when your car signals your home that you are a certain distance away and coffeemakers that sync to the alarm on your phone, as well as WiFi washer-dryers that know you are away and periodically fluff your clothes until you return, and Internet-connected slow cookers, vacuums, and refrigerators. “Check the morning weather, browse the web for recipes, explore your social networks or leave notes for your family—all from the refrigerator door,” reads the ad for one.” The New York Review of Books
The Conservative Case for Football – “Football has a funny way of cutting the legs out from under conservative doctrine. A Republican who wails for an unfettered free market might, in his next breath, ask the feds to tinker with the college postseason. “Politicians, especially Republicans, don’t believe in affirmative action unless it’s for their football team,” said J.C. Watts, a former Oklahoma quarterback and GOP congressman.” Grantland
The Mysterious World of the Deaf by Gavin Francis | – “Experts in language acquisition say that the first three years of a child’s life are the most crucial in developing the conceptual frame to build fluent language. By the time Miss Black began to learn language and Sign language is as delicate, sensitive, and complete a means of expression as any spoken language that critical period was past. She didn’t say as much, but she’d been living with the consequences of that delay ever since. It was there in her lack of involvement with the hearing world, in her inability to find satisfying work, in the clumsy handwriting with which she communicated.” The New York Review of Books
