February 2012
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How Meritocracy Divides Us - NYTimes.com →
Have a read of Ross Douthat’s review of Charles Murray’s book “Coming Apart”…. I’m thinking of ordering it. Anyone else like to read it?
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Mindful Eating as Food for Thought - NYTimes.com →
“Lately, though, such experiments of the mouth and mind have begun to seep into a secular arena, from the Harvard School of Public Health to the California campus of Google. In the eyes of some experts, what seems like the simplest of acts — eating slowly and genuinely relishing each bite — could be the remedy for a fast-paced Paula Deen Nation in which an endless parade of new diets never...
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January 2012
11 posts
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Is Banking Bad? - No, says Nicholas Kristof -... →
Good news! You’ve been given moral free reign to go work for the big-time capitalists….
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Udacity - Educating the 21st Century →
ok, guys, I’ve signed up for
CS 101: BUILDING A SEARCH ENGINE
Learn programming in seven weeks. We’ll teach you enough about computer science that you can build a web search engine like Google or Yahoo!
What about you?
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“He concluded by telling the crowd that he couldn’t continue teaching in a...”
– Tenured Professor Departs Stanford U., Hoping to Teach 500,000 Students at Online Start-Up - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education
more re Joan Didion....
I did on post on her “Why I Write” two years ago — which you may or may not remember — see http://kday.tumblr.com/day/2010/10/31
More recently the Atlantic published this article — “The Autumn of Joan Didion” — which summarized her importance for women of my generation.
Didion’s genius is that she understands what it is to be a girl on the cusp of...
it's 1995 and Joan Didion is dissecting Newt... →
A must-read blast from the past…
The piece opens with a long list of the books and thinkers who have influenced Newt, including:
an Omaha entrepreneur named Herman Cain (“who’s the head of Godfather Pizza, he’s an African-American who was born in Atlanta and his father was Woodruff’s chauffeur”)
And later….
The real substance of Mr. Gingrich’s political presence derives from his...
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all new learning looks at first like chaos
prolixcorpuslibris:
from adrienne rich’s latest, Tonight No Poetry Will Serve
powers of recuperation
iv.
bridges trajectories arched
in shelter rendezvous
two banks to every river two directions
to every bridge
twenty-eight chances
every built thing has its unmeant purpose
v.
all new learning looks at first
like chaos
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“We’d do well to heed Henry David Thoreau: “We are in great haste to construct a...”
– A Misguided Use of Money - Room for Debate - NYTimes.com
re the effectiveness of digital technologies in American classrooms
December 2011
5 posts
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“The rioters and the social class to which they mainly belong thus have genuine...”
– Barbarians on the Thames by Theodore Dalrymple - City Journal
An interesting take on the causes of the UK riots…
I’ve enjoyed Dalrymble’s articles over the years, but have never searched his info on the internet until now. So I didn’t know that Theodore Dalrymple is a pen...
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“While eight flying reindeer are a hard pill to swallow, our Christmas story...”
– Six To Eight Black Men - Esquire — David Sedaris in 2002 describing the Dutch Santa Claus and his elves (slaves?) — an essay I was led to by this recent Slate feature on Holland in the holidays.
Zwarte Piet: Holland’s favorite racist Christmas tradition. - Slate Magazine via kwout
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Thinking of you, Sam, reading “The Underworld”…. I must read him myself. Embarrassing I haven’t so far in life….
Martin Amis on Don DeLillo in the New Yorker:
I love the work of Don DeLillo. That is to say, I love “End Zone” (1972), “Running Dog” (1978), “White Noise” (1985), “Libra” (1988), “Mao II” (1991), and the first and last sections of “Underworld” (1997)....
November 2011
4 posts
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“At every institution studied, from research universities to small colleges, some...”
– Our Universities: Why Are They Failing? by Anthony Grafton | The New York Review of Books
A long review of several books out critiquing the American university system…. with lots of points that deserve attention.
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“These two forms of inequality exist in modern America. They are related but...”
– The Wrong Inequality - NYTimes.com
Thanks, Sam, for pointing me to this David Brooks column.
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October 2011
5 posts
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A Shamelessly Self-Centered Collection of Links:... →
maxappleton:
Recommend watching these short videos of physicist Richard Feynman speaking about science and humanity dubbed over some beautiful imagery - it’s some pretty moving, compelling, and fascinating stuff. As good an argument on behalf of science as anything I’ve seen:
Part 1 - Beauty
Part 2 -…
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Coffee Health Benefits: How Coffee Might Save Your... →
Okay, I’m going back for a second cup of coffee immediately. After all, I’ve got to start squeezing more into my day after reading these statistics. Could this all be true? (too good….) Click on the article link for all the scientific references.
cc licensed ( BY NC ND ) flickr photo shared by Martin Gommel
1. Drinking more than three cups of coffee a day reduces the...
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Trivia Quiz for Kuma Cambodia project
The trivia quiz for which I was collecting questions finally took place last night — and there weren’t too many complaints about the questions (and answers).
Want to see how many you can answer?
Round 1: Travel - a visual round where you have to identify tails of airline planes
Round 2: Singapore
Round 3: Steve Jobs/Apple
Round 4: Sport (where Sam provided all of the questions)
...
September 2011
5 posts
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“Perhaps no place in any community is so totally democratic as the town library....”
– Library Quotes, Sayings about Public Libraries
Thinking about you, Sam, and democracy….
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Building a High-Quality Teaching Profession:... →
Compares practices around the world…
Here’s a blurb on how Singapore manages their teachers.
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“Basing life’s meaningfulness on the existence of a deity not only leaves all...”
– The Meaningfulness of Lives - NYTimes.com
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“If federal capitals score badly on power and culture, they excel themselves on...”
– SINGAPORE, CAPITAL OF THE WORLD | More Intelligent Life
Thanks, Sam, for pointing this out… Yes, Singapore will rule the world…..
August 2011
7 posts
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“The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 in John Wiley & Sons Inc v....”
– Court Rules First Sale Doctrine Only Applies to Works Manufactured in U.S.
That’s a lot of textbooks to ship over and sell on eBay…..
Interestingly, Sam “rents” his college textbooks via some online dealer.
The implication for libraries being able to lend books printed in...
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Open University research explodes myth of 'digital... →
[Bold added]
So Prensky was right the first time – there really is digital native generation? No, certainly not – and that’s what’s important about this study. It shows that while those differences exist, they are not lined up on each side of any kind of well-defined discontinuity. The change is gradual, age group to age group. The researchers regard their results as confirming those who have...
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“It’s a great psychological truth that if we don’t teach our children how to be...”
– Alone in the crowd - an interview with Sherry Turkle.
Appreciating solitude… an incredibly valuable lesson. (What taught you that? Staying out in the middle of nowhere during the summers? Moving foreign countries every couple of years? Is becoming a serious reader a cause or a consequence...
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Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology... →
I’ve had this book on my shelf for months, but yesterday finally got the spur I needed to open it…. which was listening to the podcast of Sherry Turkle talking at the London School of Economics back in June.
Ties in so well with the Tech 101 course I’m helping to teach to middle schoolers.
Quotes I scribbled down (as I multi-tasked by doing library database work while...
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“A better name for the child pornography bill would be The Encouragement of...”
– The Legislation That Could Kill Internet Privacy for Good - Conor Friedersdorf - Politics - The Atlantic
And here’s a link to where you can easily send your congress representatives a message about this…
(Thx, Sam)
July 2011
12 posts
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George Packer: The Debt-Ceiling Fight Continues :... →
The sociologist Max Weber, in his 1919 essay “Politics as a Vocation,” drew a distinction between “the ethic of responsibility” and “the ethic of ultimate ends”—between those who act from a sense of practical consequence and those who act from higher conviction, regardless of consequences. These ethics are tragically opposed, but the true calling of politics requires a union of the two. On its...
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Death and Budgets - David Brooks - NYTimes.com →
David Brooks can always be counted on for pointing the way to great longer reads… and this column is a good example.
I hope you had the chance to read and reread Dudley Clendinen’s splendid essay, “The Good Short Life,” in The Times’s Sunday Review section. Clendinen is dying of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or A.L.S.
——-
As Daniel Callahan and Sherwin B. Nuland point out...
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Books of The Times - In ‘Wrestling With Moses,’... →
Robert Moses and Jane Jacobs are the subject and the author of two of the most indelible nonfiction books of the 20th century: Robert Caro’s biography of Moses, “The Power Broker” (1974) and Jacobs’s own “Death and Life of Great American Cities” (1961). If you want to know about these towering oppositional figures, those are the bedrock texts, and neither feels remotely like homework: they’re as...
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“I remember looking up and seeing bits of me and my clothes in the tree, which I...”
– Bomb Took 3 Limbs From Giles Duley, but Not His Can-Do Spirit - NYTimes.com
Optimism and spirit way beyond normal….
Makes me think of Restrepo, which we recently watched…..
By the way, here is Sebastian Junger’s tribute in Vanity Fair to his co-director Tim Hetherington, who...
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Journalist Publishes the Thailand Expose for Which... →
“What does [Andrew] Marshall’s lengthy expose—published just days before Thailand’s general election—reveal? The documents indicate that Crown Prince Vajiralongkorn, who is next in line to the throne, has health problems, that an increasingly influential Queen Sirikit supports the Yellow Shirt movement that helped oust prime minister Thaksin Shinawatra in a 2006...
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Library Project Two: The Dewey Decimal System
mappleton:
The newest instalment in being my mother’s graphic design “servant,” I illustrated a series of posters that organise sections of the library according to the dewey decimal system.
• • •
The design was originally based off a Dewey set made by Susanna Ryan but needing different colour co-ordination and some illustration changes, we got permission to remake it. The original:
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