Fascinating Facts and Trivia.

Sylvia Plath’s Last Poems

Sylvia Plath submitted her last two poems, Balloons and Edge to the New Yorker on February 4, 1963. They are regarded as her last two poems as Plath died on February 11 of the same here.

 

Edge

The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come so far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
Her blacks crackle and drag

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Travel Guide for African Americans During Jim Crow

Slate has a fascinating look at a travel guide published for African-American travelers during the era of Jim Crow:

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a guide that helped African-American travelers identify friendly hotels, restaurants, and mechanics when they were on the road.  Harlem postal employee and publisher Victor H. Green published the Book annually from 1936 to 1964.

As historian Cotton Seiler points out, the Green Book flourished during a time when cars were getting cheaper, and travel by automobile was becoming more common. For black drivers, however, freedom of the road had its limits. These travelers had to navigate segregated accommodations, couldn’t join AAA, and received disproportionate levels of attention from the police and local racists.

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Student Exercise and Attention Deficit Disorder

An interesting piece from The Atlantic calls for more research into exercise and brain function for students:

The Danish study I cited in my earlier piece, which shows that kids concentrate better after biking or walking to school, is far from the only research showing positive cognitive benefits from cycling, and not just for school-age kids. And yet these connections are only beginning to be adequately explored.

A recent article in Bicycling magazine, "Riding Is My Ritalin," looked at the effects of cycling on ADHD in children and adults, telling the story of one young man who has been using an intense road cycling regimen to treat his own attention disorder. As the article points out, researchers were looking at the link between physical activity and attention deficit as long ago as the 1970s.

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13 Key Questions (and Answers) about Gun Violence

automatic_gun_silhouette_clip_art_18177Want to know more about gun violence in the United States? The Atlantic has one of the best primers available on the subject. One key finding:

What has worked to reduce gun violence?

This is not an easy question to answer, because crime rates can decline for a wide range of reasons. For example, violent crime rates declined sharply all across the country in the mid-1990s, regardless of whether a given area had tightened its gun laws. So based on a naive interpretation of the numbers, any attempt at reducing gun violence in 1995 would have appeared successful by 1998. Then there is the problem of comparing different states or cities: Circumstances differ, and what works in Memphis may fail in Detroit.

Nonetheless, there are some plausible methods for isolating the different factors, using comparison groups or other controls. The most thorough summary is a 2008 meta-analysis where the authors reviewed every prior American gun violence reduction study, examining both the reported effectiveness and the strength of the statistical evidence.

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Will Student Loans Be the Next Housing Crisis?

Jay Bowen of the Foundation for Economic Education argues that it’s only a matter of time before massive defaults of federal student loans start occurring in the UnitedRita_web States:

The meteoric rise in tuition costs is partly due to more students receiving blind encouragement to borrow large sums of money for school. With the government spigot open wide, universities have realized that as much as they charge, the students will be able to borrow that and more. This has led to large college bureaucracies that are inefficient.

Student debt of this magnitude can have important social consequences. Recent graduates, struggling to pay off their loans, may delay buying a house or getting married. Before the student loan bubble bursts and taxpayers are on the hook for billions, the government needs to quit overspending and exit the lending market.

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