Diane Ravitch’s review of a few books about the state of American education is interesting, if only because she’s one of the few people I’ve seen standing athwart the consensus on the topic yelling “Stop!”. (To appropriate W.F. Buckley.) Whether or not you agree with her, I found this point salient:

If we were to improve the teaching profession, then perhaps more of the talented young people who now apply to Teach for America would choose to enter teaching as a career, not as a stepping stone to graduate school or another more remunerative line of work.

While I still feel like there’s little likelihood it will come to pass, I enjoyed accompanying Megan McArdle on a trip to consider how learning would be different in an environment where no one spent time at traditional college campuses.

Tenured academics has worked a great scam. They’ve managed to monetize peoples’ affection for regional football teams, and their desire for a work credential, and then somehow diverted that money into paying academics to work on whatever they want, for the rest of their lives, without any oversight by the football fans or the employers.

(via Mark Larson’s more of what i like)

I’ve been more than a little taken with this basic idea ever since I saw The Game, but I think Aaron Swartz is onto something with this thought:

Billions of dollars are spent making and watching people explore mysterious tunnels, chase down alleys, and fly as if by magic, but there’s hardly a single opportunity to actually do any of these things.

There may be be some who argue about the seriousness of the problem, but I think after reading this piece no one would be able to contest with a clear conscience that there is one. I can’t shake the feeling that the basic premise of this provocative essay is sound:

America’s prison system is a moral catastrophe. The eerie sense of security that prevails on the streets of lower Manhattan obscures, and depends upon, a system of state-sponsored suffering as vicious and widespread as any in human history. Dismantling the system of American gulags, and holding accountable those responsible for their operation, presents the most urgent humanitarian imperative of our time.

That isn’t the truly provocative part of Cristopher Glazek’s thesis, but it’s the part that you need to hear. The other half’s more in the “mind-blowing and interesting to consider” category.

(via The Browser)

L. Alan Sroufe’s argument against medicating children is good. But it also contains the most succinct takedown of the entire psycho-pharmechological complex I can imagine:

Thus, only one question is asked: are there aspects of brain functioning associated with childhood attention problems? The answer is always yes. Overlooked is the very real possibility that both the brain anomalies and the A.D.D. result from experience.

(via The Browser)

Peter W. Singer, not the famous Australian utilitarian philosopher, considers some of the ramifications of the seemingly risk-free war the United States is carrying out in Pakistan.

And now we possess a technology that removes the last political barriers to war. The strongest appeal of unmanned systems is that we don’t have to send someone’s son or daughter into harm’s way. But when politicians can avoid the political consequences of the condolence letter — and the impact that military casualties have on voters and on the news media — they no longer treat the previously weighty matters of war and peace the same way.

(via The Browser)

An interesting and brief little history of product placement. It’s one of those forces that we take for granted today, but this was a new observation to me:

“The Paradox of Product Placement,” in which the titular conundrum is defined: “If you notice, it’s bad. But if you don’t notice, it’s worthless.”

(via @austinkleon)

Jonah Lehrer highlights a topic that I’ve heard a lot of talk about over the last few years, but don’t think ever made it to the blog. He starts with a very interesting premise:

[American football] won’t be undone by a labor lockout or a broken business model — football owners know how to make money. Instead, the death will start with those furthest from the paychecks, the unpaid high school athletes playing on Friday nights. It will begin with nervous parents reading about brain trauma, with doctors warning about the physics of soft tissue smashing into hard bone, with coaches forced to bench stars for an entire season because of a single concussion.

Ross Douthat does a pretty good job pinning down why Americans afford their politicians so little breathing room for their personal life:

But by turning their personal choices to political ends, politicians lose the right to complain when those same personal lives are subject to partisan critiques. They can and should contest these critiques, but they can’t complain about them. In a culture as divided about fundamental issues as our own, the kind of weird attacks that Rick Santorum is enduring come with the vocation he has chosen.

Have I ever told you how much I love David Brooks? (Yes, yes I have.) It’s because he says sensible things like this:

In sum, in the progressive era, the country was young and vibrant. The job was to impose economic order. Today, the country is middle-aged but self-indulgent. Bad habits have accumulated. Interest groups have emerged to protect the status quo. The job is to restore old disciplines, strip away decaying structures and reform the welfare state. The country needs a productive midlife crisis.

Egypt’s changed a lot this year, but as Adam Shatz’s reporting makes clear, not as much as most optimists hoped it would.

The young people who launched the revolution are still protesting, but they have been outflanked by the hard men, the soldiers and Islamist politicians now calling the shots. The Mubarak regime was replaced by a military junta, the 20-member Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (Scaf), headed by Field Marshal Muhammed Hussein Tantawi.The Scaf has all but declared war on Tahrir, assailing protesters calling for civilian rule as ‘enemies’ of the revolution which it perversely claims to embody.

I link to this in part because it so accurately supports a point I made recently: revolutions don’t really work.

Fascinating review from Stephen Holmes of Luke Harding’s book on Russia. To the extent that this portrait has been painted elsewhere, I’ve never seen it. A minor example:

Because ‘never show weakness’ is the most pressing imperative of any chronically insecure regime, the Putin government decided to do what took minimal effort: seize control of the principal platform on which the government’s many shortcomings could be displayed. The Kremlin has monopolised nationwide television news not in order to impose a party line or because it hopes to persuade a cynical and disillusioned public to swallow the official version of events, but because it fears what might follow if the regime’s critics are seen to get away with disclosing the criminality and ridiculing the folly of the country’s ruling circles on national TV.

Oliver Burkeman’s column is always worth paying attention to, but this line in the latest one was too good not to share:

Anger [about grammatical mistakes] delivers ego-enhancing pleasure; so does strengthening the boundaries of group membership – and carping about language is far more socially acceptable than explicit class snobbery or nationalism (not to mention less bother than confronting actual atrocities).

An interesting theory about the evolutionary value of humor:

The initial emotional response to any discovery of error in your understanding of the world has got to be “uh oh.” But in humor, the brain doesn’t just discover a false inference, it almost simultaneously recovers and corrects itself. It gets the joke. The pleasure of the punch line is enhanced by that split second of negativity just before the resolution.

I’m not sure I completely buy this theory, but I did think about it a lot while watching a two-and-half year old cousin laugh on Thanksgiving. Though in that context the theory that came to my mind is its value as a primitive form of communication and in-group bonding.

(via The Browser)

This is another one of those stories I ignored the first five times I saw it. But it actually raises some very interesting issues about the nature of McDonald’s, modern food production, and economics, and thus worthwhile regardless of the defensibility of its core conceit.

(John Gruber is the reason I actually read it)

Hugh Roberts offers a relatively thorough and careful political history of Libya during Gaddafi’s reign, and the events that led to his removal. (This detail will likely scare most people away, it nearly scared me off.) His most interesting assertion, especially to inattentive observers like myself is this:

The intervention tarnished every one of the principles the war party invoked to justify it. It occasioned the deaths of thousands of civilians, debased the idea of democracy, debased the idea of law and passed off a counterfeit revolution as the real thing. Two assertions that were endlessly reiterated – they were fundamental to the Western powers’ case for war – were that Gaddafi was engaged in ‘killing his own people’ and that he had ‘lost all legitimacy’, the latter presented as the corollary of the former. Both assertions involved mystifications.

Ross Douthat’s latest column raises an interesting idea I’d never fully considered:

In meritocracies, though, it’s the very intelligence of our leaders that creates the worst disasters. Convinced that their own skills are equal to any task or challenge, meritocrats take risks that lower-wattage elites would never even contemplate, embark on more hubristic projects, and become infatuated with statistical models that hold out the promise of a perfectly rational and frictionless world.

A thought-provoking discussion of what authenticity means around travel. Much to like, including this:

I think we need to keep in mind that the backpackers you’re talking about, who go to new areas and beat new paths by living close to the people and close to the earth and so on, they are in a sense—and this isn’t my line, this is from an old book I came across—the shock troops of the mass tourism industry. They’re the ones who go into a place that has no infrastructure for tourism and basically create the market for other people to come in behind them.

(via mlarson)