The Best Paragraph I've Read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Consider: only between 10 and 30 percent of second-hand donations to charity shops are actually resold in store. The rest disappears into a machine you don’t see: a vast sorting apparatus in which donated goods are graded and then resold on to commercial partners, often for export to the Global South. The problem is that, with the onslaught of fast fashion, these don...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Comes from a new book titled Mountain Top: The Inside Story of Michigan's 1997 National Title Climb. The authors are Nick Baumgardner & Mark Snyder. You can purchase the book here. Zac and Don are joined by co-author Mark Snyder. They discuss Michigan's 1997 championship football season. Marks shares some of his favorite coach and player anecdotes. They discuss the pr...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Steady growth in Internet shopping has been accompanied by steady growth in returns of all kinds. A forest’s worth of artificial Christmas trees goes back every January. Bags of green plastic Easter grass go back every spring. Returns of large-screen TVs surge immediately following the Super Bowl. People who buy portable generators during weather emergencies use them...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Plaintiffs’ lawyers are pitching school boards throughout the country to file lawsuits against social-media companies on allegations that their apps cause classroom disciplinary problems and mental-health issues, diverting resources from education. Nearly 200 school districts so far have joined the litigation against the parent companies of Facebook, TikTok, Snapchat...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It’s not the wedding professionals’ fault that weddings are expensive. The fact is that weddings are luxuries, not necessities. It costs a lot to make something look nice; it costs even more to make it feel nice—to make sure all your guests are comfortable, and well fed, and entertained. A wedding is not a photograph of a wedding. A wedding—a good wedding—is immersive...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: A tourist is a temporarily leisured person who voluntarily visits a place away from home for the purpose of experiencing a change. This definition is taken from the opening of "Hosts and Guests," the classic academic volume on the anthropology of tourism. The last phrase is crucial: touristic travel exists for the sake of change. But what, exactly, gets...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The idea of building a desalination plant in Mexico has been discussed in Arizona for years. But now, a $5 billion project proposed by an Israeli company is under serious consideration, an indication of how worries about water shortages are rattling policymakers in Arizona and across the American West. On June 1, the state announced that the Phoenix area, the fastest-...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Listen, the US is a big dumpster fire. At least, it's easy to feel that way with the constant horrible news — and any and all apathy and distress we feel is valid. But we often tend to forget about the good things about America. So, when Reddit user u/hippiechick725 asked, "What's the best thing about the US?" and a bunch of people from other countries or those who ha...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Inside the repurposed warehouse, human superballs fling themselves from unwieldy plastic rings and bars suspended from steel scaffolding, while others scurry up the trio of towering, curved (better known as “warped”) walls looming in the corner, the tallest of which stands a foreboding 14' 8". On the rear wall, there is a peg board, navigated by ninjas who insert and...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Is wrestling real? Is it fake? The answer to both questions is, paradoxically, yes. The outcome of each contest is scripted. The body slams and submissions are choreographed. Sworn enemies are, in all likelihood, friends. But the Undertaker (Mark Calaway) really did throw Mankind (Mick Foley) off the top of that steel cage during a 1998 King of the Ring pay-per-view m...

Zac and Don speak with Melissa Middleton as she gets ready to retire from education. They ask her about the changes she has seen in education. They ask her about being a librarian, books bans, whether students are losing an interest in reading, and more!

The Best Paragraph I've Read: As many economists, including Sarah House of  Wells Fargo , have argued, “you don’t even need to actually default on the debt for there to be real damage in the economy.” At Bloomberg Economics, a team led by Chief US Economist Anna Wong modeled a scenario where a protracted standoff leads to elevated market stress, and Treasury is forced to cut social spending to...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The Best Paragraph I've Read: Did they plan to study specifically with one of us? Was our institution particularly strong in the academic disciplines that interested them? Most of them couldn’t really tell me why they wanted Duke. They just knew that they should want it. It would validate them. It would impress their friends. Translation: It was highly ranked — curren...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Do you get a promotion every year, in your job?” Antetokounmpo answered, after a long pause in which he placed his head in his hands. “No, right? So every year you work is a failure? Yes or no. No? Every year you work, you work towards something, towards a goal, which is to get a promotion, to be able to take care of your family, provide a house for them, or...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: After some observation, researchers concluded these generative agents were able to "produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors."  AI avatars named Isabella Rodriguez and Tom Moreno, for instance, debated the town's upcoming election. When Isabella asked Tom what he thought of Sam Moore, the candidate running for mayor of Smallville, Tom replied with h...

This week Zac and Don talk with Don's student teacher Sam Posey. They talk about college teacher preparation programs and meeting the requirements to be a teacher. They talk about why the teaching profession seems unappealing to Sam's generation. They discuss whether we should prepare future teachers differently. They also talk about being a student teacher and some of the challenges that go with...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "In louisiana, it takes $1,485 and roughly 2,190 days to become an interior designer. In Washington, it takes $319 and 373 days to become a cosmetologist. The District of Columbia requires $740 to become an auctioneer, and a college degree to watch children for someone else. (Having and watching your own children continues to be an unlicensed affair.) In Kansas, you h...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Forty years ago, the most anxious kids in America were those in low-income households. Beginning in the late 1990s, that flipped, according to the researcher Suniya Luthar. In a series of studies, she found that rich teens in high-achieving schools were the most anxious and depressed. One possibility she explored was that the most rigorous schools created an environm...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The printing press had fooled the world with too many books especially of ancient and scholastic learning that were either obsolete, irrelevant, or misleading for the pursuit of true knowledge.  He compared  the proliferation of books to the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel. This paragraph comes from the Marginal Revolution blog.  You can read the full pos...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The ways we socialize and date, commute and work are nearly unrecognizable from what they were three years ago. We’ve enjoyed a global pandemic, open employer-employee warfare, a multifront culture war, and social upheavals both great and small. The old conventions are out (we don’t whisper the word cancer or let women off the elevator first anymore, for starters). T...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "But fairness matters. The U.S. economy is the envy of the world because of its core tenets of free markets, robust legal frameworks, and capitalism. The protections against arbitrary seizure attract investment and enable risk-taking. And vigorous open competition between companies drive innovation forward. Banning a company based on hypotheticals—preying on fear and...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Underpinning Bed Bath & Beyond's success was an innovative way of doing business. In addition to deliberate clutter, stores were designed with a "racetrack" floor plan that looped around the store so customers would walk by all the merchandise. Instead of grouping shopping baskets at the entrance, they placed them throughout the store. Messrs. Eisenberg and Feinstein...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: How important is luck?  Few questions more reliable divide conservatives and liberals.  As conservatives correctly observe people who amass great fortunes are almost always extremely talented and hard-working.  But as liberals also rightly note countless others have those same qualities yet never earned much.  In recently years social scientists have discovered that c...

The Best Paragraph I've Heard: Comes from the a16z Podcast.  In this episode Disney CEO Bob Iger is interviewed about running and managing a creative company with creative people.  You can listen to the full episode here: https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/creators-creativity-and-technology-with-bob-iger-L98rXqw2 Zac and Don are joined by Lake Orion High School head principal Dr. Danie...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: MEDIEVAL MONKS WERE, in many ways, the original LinkedIn power users. Earnest and with a knack for self-promotion, they loved to read and share inspiring stories of other early Christians who had shown remarkable commitment to their work. There was Sarah, who lived next to a river without ever once looking in its direction, such was her dedication to her faith. James...