Interesting articles this week include a look at the impact of the Mann Gulch fire, creativity, immigration, and more.
Fascinating Facts and Trivia.
Normally, I will post these on Friday, but because we missed last week due to the short week start of school, this week will be Wednesday.
Today’s intellectuals: too obedient? | Features | Times Higher Education – “The responsibility of the intellectuals, however, is hardly being met. Social docility, strong convictions of one’s personal impotence, infinite procrastination, plus, one surmises, the regular protestation that people must be able to get on with their proper job – their research and teaching – these excuses and tendencies prevent our noticing that the end of the world is nigh. So it is likely that the noble and long-standing idea of the university as the redoubt of original and perhaps uncomfortable thought and as the guardian of a nation’s best notions of itself will dissolve and dislimn into a dozen or so busy little enterprises that are narrowly obedient to governmental shopkeepers. Then the slow cataclysm of an elderly and failing economy together with the irresistible destruction of our habitat as nature exacts revenge upon feckless human waste will reduce the citadel of reason to ruins.” Times Higher Education
It’s Still Not the End of History – “Twenty-five years ago this summer, Francis Fukuyama announced the “end of history” and the inevitable triumph of liberal capitalist democracy. His argument was simple: Democracy would win out over all other forms of government because the natural desire for peace and well-being set nations on a path to progress from which it was impossible to divert. If a state—even a Communist state—wished to enjoy the greatest prosperity possible, it would have to embrace some measure of capitalism. Since wealth-creation depends on the protection of private property, the “capitalist creep” would invariably demand greater legal protection for individual rights.” The Atlantic
My Own Personal Nothingness – Issue 16: Nothingness – “o understand anything, as Aristotle argued, we must understand what it is not, and Nothingness is the ultimate opposition to any thing. To understand matter, said the ancient Greeks, we must understand the “void,” or the absence of matter. Indeed, in the fifth century B.C., Leucippus argued that without the void there could be no motion because there would be no empty spaces for matter to move into. According to Buddhism, to understand our ego we must understand the ego-free state of “emptiness,” called śūnyatā. To understand the civilizing effects of society, we must understand the behavior of human beings removed from society, as William Golding so powerfully explored in his novel Lord of the Flies.” Nautilus
Seeking Facts, Justices Settle for What Briefs Tell Them – “Kannon K. Shanmugam, a lawyer with Williams & Connolly who argues frequently before the court, said the justices’ quandary was a common one.“The Supreme Court has the same problem that the rest of us do: figuring out how to distinguish between real facts and Internet facts,” he said. “Amicus briefs from unreliable sources can contribute to that problem.”” New York Times
What it feels like to be the last generation to remember life before the internet – “Harris is the author of “The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We’ve Lost in a World of Constant Connection,” a new book about how technology affects society. It follows in the footsteps of Nicholas Carr, whose “The Shallows” is a modern classic of internet criticism. But Harris takes a different path from those that have come before. Instead of a broad investigation into the effects of constant connectivity on human behaviour, Harris looks at a very specific demographic: people born before 1985, or the very opposite of the “millennial” demographic coveted by advertisers and targeted by new media outlets.” Leo Mirani, Quartz
In Maryland, a Soviet-Style Punishment for a Novelist – “A 23-year-old teacher at a Cambridge, Md. middle school has been placed on leave and—in the words of a local news report—”taken in for an emergency medical evaluation” for publishing, under a pseudonym, a novel about a school shooting. The novelist, Patrick McLaw, an eighth-grade language-arts teacher at the Mace’s Lane Middle School, was placed on leave by the Dorchester County Board of Education, and is being investigated by the Dorchester County Sheriff’s Office, according to news reports from Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The novel, by the way, is set 900 years in the future. “ The Atlantic
America Is Not For Black People – “The United States of America is not for black people. We know this, and then we put it out of our minds, and then something happens to remind us. Saturday, in the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson, Mo., something like that happened: An unarmed 18-year-old black man was executed by police in broad daylight.” Deadspin
Who rules America? – “The analysts found that when controlling for the power of economic elites and organized interest groups, the influence of ordinary Americans registers at a “non-significant, near-zero level.” The analysts further discovered that rich individuals and business-dominated interest groups dominate the policymaking process. The mass-based interest groups had minimal influence compared to the business-based interest groups.” The Hill
Making the Case for Teaching Students to Debate – Education Week – “Research supports this development. It has been demonstrated already that debaters in high school show improved academic performance and fewer disciplinary and behavioral problems than non-debaters. Student debaters also have a much higher likelihood of attending and graduating from college than their non-debater peer groups. But research also tells us that middle school is a period of considerable brain growth with the shift from concrete to abstract processing and growing capabilities in problem solving, planning, and critical thinking. Debate can support and enhance brain development as an activity requiring and honing these skills.” Education Week
Ecological Intervention: Prospects and Limits – “This essay seeks to extend the already controversial debate about humanitarian intervention by exploring the morality, legality, and legitimacy of ecological intervention and its corollary, ecological defense. If the legacy of the Holocaust was acceptance of a new category of “crimes against humanity” and an emerging norm of humanitarian intervention, then should the willful or reckless perpetration of mass extinctions and massive ecosystem destruction be regarded as “crimes against nature” or “ecocide” such as to ground a new norm of ecological intervention or ecological defense?” Carnegie Council
The Civil Rights Movement Is Going in Reverse in Alabama | New Republic – “But the implications of this go far beyond partisanship. Because of increasingly racially polarized voting patterns in the South, party has become a stand-in for race. As University of California at Irvine law professor Rick Hasen recently wrote in the Harvard Law Review, “The realignment of the parties in the South following the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s has created a reality in which today most African American voters are Democrats and most white conservative voters are Republicans.” “ New Republic
Toward a Conservative Policy on Climate Change – – “Because conservatives, for the most part, are less concerned about climate change than environmentalists are, it may seem that workable solutions are more likely to come from the left. That assumption is incorrect. If politicians and policy analysts on the right were to look more carefully at the problem, they would realize that conservatism offers much more tenable approaches — and they might just be able to stop running from the issue.” The New Atlantis
Some interesting reads you might enjoy this week.
Machine Grading and Moral Learning – The New Atlantis – “Responding to and evaluating students’ written work does more than just describe students, or distinguish them. Grading is also pedagogical: it corrects and informs, rewards and reinforces someone’s understanding of the world. Because it has the potential to change a student, grading is a moral hazard. Grading well requires knowing what human beings are for and educating them accordingly; how and why one grades is a confession of one’s beliefs about the ultimate destiny of man. A professor is an architect of the intellectual life, making castles of minds and cathedrals of culture — or slums and factories, as the case may be.” The New Atlantis
Yuppie Prohibition League Denounces Pot Legalization | Rolling Stone – “No, actually, by making it legal, we’re deciding that letting people get high is a lesser evil compared to a person’s life being derailed forever by a pointless and intrinsically hypocritical marijuana arrest. But Brooks/Brown/Scarborough wouldn’t know anything about that, apparently.” Rolling Stone
Virtualsity, by Michael Barron – “What music can we expect to hear from these new digital instruments? If a generation of people who grew up listening to plugged-in instruments and guitar solos have moved onto the computer, what happens when a generation of musicians who have learned to sample and manipulate automated audio clips are given the tools for expressive digital instrumentation? A new musical genre, perhaps, or new variations on the familiar. It’s a chicken-and-egg question, but it may take only one virtualoso to hatch the answer.” Harper’s
Obama’s “Limited” Mission in Iraq – The New Yorker – “There can be no doubt about Obama’s intentions. Even with ruthless fighters from the Islamic State in Iraq and al-Sham (ISIS) overrunning large parts of northern Iraq, the President has clearly demonstrated in recent weeks that he is deeply reluctant to use U.S. firepower in an effort to halt their advance. Spurning calls from the Iraqi government, and from the Kurds, to shore up American forces and carpet bomb the militants, he instead dispatched a few hundred military advisers to Iraq, saying that they’d assess the situation and report back. (George Packer has written about the people fleeing ISIS, and Dexter Filkins has urged American military support.)” The New Yorker
The War Photo No One Would Publish – The Atlantic – The Iraqi soldier died attempting to pull himself up over the dashboard of his truck. The flames engulfed his vehicle and incinerated his body, turning him to dusty ash and blackened bone. In a photograph taken soon afterward, the soldier’s hand reaches out of the shattered windshield, which frames his face and chest. The colors and textures of his hand and shoulders look like those of the scorched and rusted metal around him. Fire has destroyed most of his features, leaving behind a skeletal face, fixed in a final rictus. He stares without eyes. On February 28, 1991, Kenneth Jarecke stood in front of the charred man, parked amid the carbonized bodies of his fellow soldiers, and photographed him. The Atlantic
Former UN Secretary General Kofi Annan is among the people who believe that we need to consider eating insects as a more sustainable means of feeding the world. David Cooper writes:
Kofi Annan places his faith in the power of education and rational argument. He recommends taking different approaches for different audiences. In the West, the environmental benefits of entomophagy should be stressed, including the need for much smaller amounts of feed, water and land to produce a kilo of crickets than a kilo of beef. Other constituencies may be more persuaded by the promise of nutritional benefits, the guarantee of food security, or learning how important insects are in many cuisines across the world.