The Best Paragraph I've Read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Nationwide, just over a million children, mostly girls, participate in cheer each year (some estimates are even higher), more than the number who play softball or lacrosse. And almost every part of that world is dominated by a single company: Varsity Spirit. It’s hard to cheer at the youth, high school or collegiate level without putting money in the company’s pocket...

The Best Paragraph I've Read "When should you give up? You certainly don’t want to give up too soon on finding your way out of the woods, and call the ski patrol unnecessarily. Similarly, you don’t want to give up on your dreams before they’re realized, or on your relationships because they’re sometimes troublesome; you want to be a reliable, determined, heroic individual—someone with grit, who fo...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Sperling's conundrum is familiar to many people with parents facing down their golden years: After they've acquired things for decades, eventually, those things have to go. As the saying goes, you can't take it with you. Many millennials, Gen Xers, and Gen Zers are now facing the question of what to do with their parents' and grandparents' possessions as their loved o...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The concept of a citizen council—a democratic forum with roots in ancient Greece—is straightforward: a selected group of people come together to discuss a matter of public policy, with the goal of making proposals or clarifying public attitudes. Hélène Landemore, a professor at Yale and the author of “Open Democracy,” which argues for a more inclusive system of partic...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Educators sometimes assume Gen Z digital natives already know how to type because they’re so familiar with tech. After all, nearly half of teens say they are online “almost constantly,” according to a survey from Pew Research Center. But while today’s students have greater access to laptops, tablets and smartphones, that access doesn’t automatically translate into ty...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In his recent advisory on parents’ mental health, the United States surgeon general, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, said out loud what many parents might have only furtively admitted: Parenting today is too hard and stressful. Of course, there have always been concerns about families’ well-being. And while some of today’s parents’ fears are newer — cellphones, school shooti...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: If everyone outside hard-core engineering, math or pre-med courses can easily get an A, the whole system loses meaning. It fails to make distinctions between different levels of achievement or to motivate students to work hard on their academic pursuits. All the while, it allows students to pretend—to themselves and to others—that they are performing exceptionally...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: When we think about inequality, the first images that come to mind are often of poverty, unfairness, and social injustice. But what if we’re looking at inequality all wrong? Consider another economy. In this economy, the Gini coefficient is a whopping 0.6—much higher than in the U.S. or just about any country in the world. Living in this economy must be miserable,...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "A lot about the world feels dark right now. We’re reeling from a turbulent presidential race. Processing an attempted assassination. Divided by protests—and a barrage of images on social media that feeds our anxieties. Sometimes, it seems as though we’re living in the worst of times. The truth is, we’re really not." This paragraph comes from an essay in...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It’s as if Kidd and his fellow-marauders never stopped sailing. These days, pirates are everywhere. The five “Pirates of the Caribbean” films have collectively grossed billions. And then there are the shows, games, memes, bars, festivals, and rum bottles. Three major sports teams are named for them—the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Las Vegas Raiders, and the Tampa Bay B...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Is a Spin Magazine cover from 25 years ago. You can view it here. Zac & Don discuss the 25th anniversary of the Spin Magazine with Axl Rose on it. They also share their lists of other things that they think "The World Needs Now..." including Salad Bars, 3 Sport Athletes, Jumping Jacks, Glass Bottles, and more!

Don went to the Olympics! Zac & Discuss what it was like to be in Paris during the Olympics. They also discuss what it is like to attend a night of track and field events.

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Once an emblem of summer — and the object of poolside fawning — the American lifeguard has somehow become an endangered species. This paragraph comes from the Business Insider. The article is titled: "Lifeguard shortage: nationwide problem means closed pools, no swimming." The author is Kelli Maria Korducki. You can read the full article here: https://ww...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term." This paragraph comes from President Joe Biden. You can r...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In 2015, Nick Rogers, now a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh, conducted an ethnography of a pickup-basketball game. Like an anthropologist who heads into the bush to live with tribe members, Rogers became one of the game’s regulars. During breaks, he took hurried notes on his iPhone. (Nice work, if you can get it.) Rogers wanted to understand the parado...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It’s the replay, caught with super-slo-mo cameras, that makes it exactly the kind of weird I like: We see the hand approaching the face and then the impact. BAM! Phillips’s face is briefly displaced off his skull, his neck skin stretching, his face in this moment deformed like a rubber mask—that’s how unlike a face it looks!—and then suddenly it snaps back on. And...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The use of performance-enhancing drugs, a.k.a. PEDs, remains something of a shadow world—but it may not remain so for long. Consider the shifting landscape of what’s now edging toward the mainstream in health care. Cannabis as a cancer therapy. Psychiatrists testing out psychedelics. MDMA being studied for use in treating PTSD. The gap between our society’s embrac...

The Best Paragraph I've read: Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building? If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Dating back to 2020, when the pandemic upended American education overnight, many schools have adopted a more lenient approach to grading. Some eliminated zeros or removed penalties for late work. Many teachers report “giving grace” to struggling students. Others say they have felt pressure from administrators to limit failure rates. Higher grades have come even a...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Having worked in most facets of the entertainment industry since 1974, from a bottom-rung production assistant to the top of NBCUniversal’s headquarters at 30 Rock, I agree that the problems in today’s workplace are real. But I also think many management experts have identified the wrong problem. The real problem is that too many of us, young and not so youn...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "SarahRachul grew up in the 1990s, during the so-called “Disney Renaissance”, when Disney debuted a string of critically successful films and re-released its earlier classics on VHS. Merchandising reached new heights: 7,000 products were released to promote 1997’s Hercules alone. It was, Rachul says, “almost like you couldn’t avoid having [Disney] as part of...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Education has changed drastically over the years, but you might be surprised at the absolutely wild things that were once deemed "normal" when your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were in school." This paragraph comes from BuzzFeed. The article is titled: "Imagine The Lawsuit If That Happened Today" Older Adults Reveale...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: As Beth Linker explains in her book “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America” (Princeton), a long history of anxiety about the proximity between human and bestial nature has played out in this area of social science. Linker, a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that at the onset of the twentieth century the United States became gripped...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Dachshunds, the German dog breed known for their distinctive long bodies and short legs, face an uncertain future if proposed changes to an animal protection law are approved, Germany’s kennel club said. A draft of the bill, from the German Ministry of Food and Agriculture, was published in February and aims to combat “torture breeding,” or breeding to produ...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Across the street, another strip was torn down to make way for a Raising Cane’s and a Chipotle, both also equipped with drive-throughs. This part of town was never exactly the height of urban design; it had long been sprawly, car-oriented, and not great for walking. But the redevelopment gave it another character entirely. Before, the businesses there were d...