The Best Paragraph I've Read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "When I heard that you could 3-D-print a building, I imagined something akin to a “Star Trek” replicator—a machine that would whir briefly and then spit out a fully formed house. The actual process is messier and more laborious, and, at the moment, it is largely used to construct walls, while conventional methods are used for foundations, floors, roofs, and finishes....

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The world is closer to catastrophe than ever: the Doomsday Clock, the metaphorical measure of challenges to humanity, was reset to 90 seconds before midnight on Tuesday. The science and security board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said the move — the closest to widespread calamity humanity has ever been judged to be — was "largely, though not exclusively"...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "There’s just so many institutions that connect us. whether It’s the university of California. weather it’s the us government. whether it’s having served in a military branch. And our institutions have been under attack. Without strong institutions, without believing that we are all working in the agency of something bigger than ourselves, we all Turn very individuali...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Following established guidelines about prescription drugs would seem to be an obvious course of action, especially for the professionals that do the prescribing.  Yes doctors and their family members are less likely than other people to comply with those guidelines, according to a large-scale study co-authored by an MIT economist." This paragraph comes from an articl...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The larger concern when it comes to NYU’s sacking of Maitland Jones is that we’ve normalized a college culture where students imagine that studying 10 hours constitutes a full week’s academic work. Whether or not students have other interests or responsibilities, treating college as an expensive multiyear holiday isn’t good for students, colleges or the taxpayers who...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "At least three petitions on Change.org seek to sleigh Ms. Carey’s 1994 holiday hit, “All I Want for Christmas is You.” One begs the Federal Communications Commission to ban it from radio and calls it “the bane of shoppers, retail workers and pedestrians.” A representative for the singer declined to comment. The pop diva encourages people to start playing her song the...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Unfortunately, my experience at Dons Restaurant was not nearly as pleasant. The tacos were really bad, and the Coke was overly salty. The atmosphere was quiet, but it was also quite sweaty. The worst part, however, was the mean service. I wouldn't recommend Dons Restaurant to anyone." This paragraph comes from ChatGPT.  It was created by artificial intelligence after...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive.  Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Thanks to a group of anonymous benefactors, students educated in the city's K-12 school system receive paid tuition at almost any college in the state. Other cities have similar initiatives, but the Kalamazoo Promise is unusually generous. It's also one of the few programs of its kind to have been robustly evaluated — in this case by Timothy Bartik, Brad Hershbein, an...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "You got a better theory? Have at it. Maybe the evidence emerging over coming hours and days will illuminate new possibilities. For now, though, it’s worth reflecting that election night surprises — and even murky, inconclusive results—are themselves a vindication of democratic culture. Operatives, journalists, the politicians themselves — they are all frauds when the...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It’s a transition away from more than a decade of “gee-whiz” projects—think self-driving cars, flying cars, metaverses and crypto—all fueled by seemingly limitless cash and venture-backed meal-replacement slurries . The task at hand now: the sometimes-boring but always-important work of building and expanding businesses that actually make money, by delivering things p...

There is no paragraph or article this week.  Instead, Zac and Don speak with their longtime friend and colleague Chad Swett who is on the verge of retiring from education.  The three discuss whether education and students have changed over the past twenty-five years.  They also seek Chad's advice for teachers remaining in the profession along with his proudest moments in the classro...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The past two decades, however, have witnessed a resurgence in door-to-door. Tom Karren, the founder of Vantage Marketing, which has more than a thousand reps selling pest control, said, “Twenty-two years ago, I was told after my first summer on the doors—by my family, my professors, my mentors—that door-to-door was a dying industry. Now it’s at least fifty times bigg...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The cost of raising a child through high school has risen to more than $300,000 because of inflation that is running close to a four-decade high, according to a Brookings Institution estimate. It determined that a married, middle-income couple with two children would spend $310,605—or an average of $18,271 a year—to raise their younger child born in 2015 through age...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city - or should I say, "our city." I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes. It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, foo...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Under scenarios deemed likely by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a connection between ocean currents and discharge would increase the overall discharge rate in one region of the continent by some 10% by the end of the century. But to emphasize the idea being tested, the modelers used human influences almost three times larger. Even thoug...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. My wife can’t drive my car, which limits our transit options. And when I’m at the wheel, I can’t hold a cold, delicious slushie in one hand, at least not safely. But despite the inconvenience, I love a manual transmission. I love the feeling that I am opera...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Technology is disrupting the market for education just as it has disrupted the market for news. We do not yet know how the industry will shake out, but a few points can be made with confidence. Online education offers tremendous savings both in terms of money and of time. Online education will also increase the quality of education for many but not all courses, especi...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The movement, known as E.A. to its practitioners, who themselves are known as E.A.s, takes as its premise that people ought to do good in the most clear-sighted, ambitious, and unsentimental way possible. Among other back-of-the-envelope estimates, E.A.s believe that a life in the developing world can be saved for about four thousand dollars. Effective altruists have...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Non-Americans Are Sharing The Quintessential "American" Things They've Always Wanted To Experience." This paragraph comes from BuzzFeed in an article titled: "Non-Americans Are Sharing The Quintessential "American" Things They've Always Wanted To Experience, And The Responses Are Honestly So Funny."  The article is written by Hannah Dobrogosz.  You can read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: A shirt would only muffle the Liver King’s message: that the modern world has made men unconscionably soft, and that the only way to fight back is by living more like our earliest, most-jacked ancestors. The way to accomplish this, according to the Liver King, is by following his nine “ancestral tenets” (sleep, eat, move, shield, connect, cold, sun, fight, bond), doin...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The Libermans’ theory is that, in terms of stuff that America’s big wealth can invest in, people are more appealing than the current catalogue of middling venture-capital funds, shipping firms, and companies selling toothbrushes by mail. Instead of putting money into a fund for startups, investors would be free to find an ingenious entrepreneur and invest in her entir...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In any case, an airplane is just transportation. A big ship is a floating manse, with a hierarchy written right into the nomenclature. If it has a crew working aboard, it’s a yacht. If it’s more than ninety-eight feet, it’s a superyacht. After that, definitions are debated, but people generally agree that anything more than two hundred and thirty feet is a megayacht,...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Milk is still pasteurized and homogenized, as Chamberlain’s carton boasted, but it’s also been lionized and demonized, canonized and eulogized, weaponized and publicized. Got Milk? Milk has left society in general and sports in particular polarized. “It has been argued about for at least the past ten thousand years,” writes Mark Kurlansky in his 400-page history of mi...

The Best Paragraph I've Read It was a sticky Thursday afternoon in the middle of summer break when dozens of teenagers walked through the doors of their high school. One of the world’s most dominant teams was about to start math practice. There was probability in one classroom and pre-algebra next door, code-breaking down the hall and number theory around the corner. And there were few adults to b...