The Best Paragraph I've Read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: One of the first staged train wrecks was done in 1895 by a railroad equipment salesman named A.L. Streeter in Ohio. The wreck used the same formula that nearly all other staged train wrecks would follow for the next 40 years. Organizers would lay a stretch of track, usually anywhere from 1,800 feet to a mile-long, and then get two old steam locomotives and put them at...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: For the past decade, people like me—youngish, urbanish, professionalish—got a sweetheart deal from Uber, the Uber-for-X clones, and that whole mosaic of urban amenities in travel, delivery, food, and retail that vaguely pretended to be tech companies. Almost each time you or I ordered a pizza or hailed a taxi , the company behind that app lost money. In effect, these...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The regulatory state exists because of the practical necessity for a traffic cop to oversee common resources and enforce minimum norms of safety and fairness. This is a dynamic role, requiring government to be an active umpire in a crowded world, adapting to new challenges while keeping its own house in order. But America's massive, convoluted, rigid legal structure m...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: “I need you to take him.” The father on the phone was upset. If his 10-year-old son did not make the team at the $2,500-per-season private baseball club where I coached, the boy would lose friends and the family’s routines would be upended, he argued. They would have to drive to another suburb for ball games. Looking for a deeper, more forceful argument, the dad added...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The historian Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a means of survival, a rite of passage for the nuclear family, a route to self-improvement, and a form of First Amendment expressi...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: IN 2018, TOM CRUISE finally joined Instagram, and fans sure felt the need for speed: He picked up 550,000 followers in less than an hour. Now he's up to 6.5 million followers, and they're greeted by the actor's self-assessment of his own career in his bio. He could have gone with "Three-time Oscar nominee," or "Sold $10 billion worth of movie tickets." But instead, he...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: As Bryan Caplan notes in his 2011 book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, parents have only small effects on their children’s health, life expectancy, education, and religiosity (though studies have found that they have moderate effects on drug and alcohol use and sexual behavior, particularly during the teenage years, as well as how kids feel about their parents). S...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Are you looking to consider the grim realities of war, or to acknowledge the humanity of “the enemy”? Top Gun elides those inconvenient complications. If you are in search of some full-throttle patriotism, however, this film has you covered. Top Gun indulges in its metaphors. A hero who is young and arrogant and attempting to come to terms with his legacy might remind...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Stacey is a hard-liner in a war being waged in homes everywhere as grown-ups attempt to limit smartphone use that they believe can be harmful to kids, even as they struggle to establish healthy habits with their own phones. And, big surprise, the parents aren’t winning. Because it’s not just their children they’re up against, but also a tech industry pushing products...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: When Covid-19 began to sweep across the country in March 2020, schools in every state closed their doors. Remote instruction effectively became a national policy for the rest of that spring. A few months later, however, school districts began to make different decisions about whether to reopen. Across much of the South and the Great Plains as well as some pockets of t...

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The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Every exploit was graded on a sliding scale, and those following the rules most dogmatically were sanctioned most strictly.  Conversely, if your only core value was conventional success, you would never be seen as credible, but you also couldn't be criticized for abandoning the values you never originally possessed."   This paragraph comes from Chuck Klosterman's boo...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: “Tell me about this stain,” 46-year-old Vaughn Smith asks his clients. “Well,” says one of the homeowners, “Schroeder rubbed his bottom across it.” Vaughn knows just what to do about that, and the couple, Courtney Stamm and Kelly Widelska, know they can trust him to do it. They’d been hiring him for years, once watching him erase even a splattered Pepto Bismol stain....

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In the meantime, Chinese studios are getting better at making movies, and they’re not afraid to take an anti-American stance. In 2017’s popular “Wolf Warrior 2,” the Chinese hero Leng Feng saves African villagers from an American mercenary called Big Daddy, who proclaims his people’s supremacy moments before Leng triumphs and kills him. The consequences are asymmetric...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Before I went to Florida, I had thoughtlessly anticipated a convocation of fogies, or at least of people more of my parents’ generation, within range of eighty, or even that of my grandparents, a few of whom I saw wither away years ago at well-appointed but thoroughly depressing old-age enclaves outside of Philadelphia. But many if not most of the people I met in Dayt...

the Best Paragraph I've Read: Your ability to make life more difficult is unmatchable. If an easy solution is available—and I mean a mind-numbingly obvious one—you decide that maybe the fix can’t be so simple and that you’d better let things marinate for a few days, at which point, yes, they’ve now become the nasty thing that you imagined, seeped in a rancid cesspool of indecision and procrastinat...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Justice, as we’re frequently told, is supposed to be blind. But court seats have never been filled by blind picks. “A judge is a lawyer who is a politician who has a friend,” Judge Paul Leahy once told his then-clerk Floyd Abrams, piercing his way to the truth. Liberal presidents pick liberal nominees and conservative presidents pick conservative ones. It’s built into...

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 you,...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: When the brain encounters information, especially during the act of reading and learning, it's searching for and making connections to what is personally relevant and meaningful.  What is relevant and meaningful to an individual is based on his or her cultural frame of reference.  Finding cultural relevance and personal connections give us perspective, engages our att...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: A fighter plane equipped with artificial intelligence could eventually execute tighter turns, take greater risks, and get off better shots than human pilots. But the objective of the ace program is to transform a pilot’s role, not to remove it entirely. As darpa envisions it, the A.I. will fly the plane in partnership with the pilot, who will remain “in the loop,” mon...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: State Rep. Norlin Mommsen's bill would require cameras to be installed in all public school classrooms that are not being used for special education or gym. Parents or legal guardians would be given access to live feeds, which they could access while school is in session. School districts would be required to pay to set up and maintain the cameras. Mommsen told The Ce...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The star of the show was the F-150 Lightning—an electric version of the pickup that belongs to the best-selling vehicle line of any kind in the U.S. since the early nineteen-eighties. In a good year, Ford sells on average nine hundred thousand gas-powered F-series trucks, and earns about forty billion dollars annually from the line. The Lightning, together with the Ma...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Semmelweis Reflex: People tend to reject evidence that doesn’t fit the established worldview. Named for Ignaz Semmelweis, a surgeon who, before the discovery of germs, claimed washing hands could help prevent patient infections. He was ridiculed and locked away in a mental asylum Planck’s Principle: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.” Scientists, being human,...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: YEARS AGO, I asked a friend what kind of case she planned to buy for her shiny new flip phone. She paused, a little offended. “I don't like to buy stuff for my stuff,” she said. Those words drilled directly into my hippocampus, never to depart. She's right! I thought. Don't buy stuff stuff! So simple! ... ... ...  The problem is that certain kinds of stuff simply attr...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The way it works is a little like a crypto-infused and lawsuit-focused GoFundMe, if the crowd stood to profit from their investment. The company takes advantage of a rule created through former President Barack Obama’s JOBS Act, which allowed a private company to crowdfund up to $5 million from Americans, regardless of their wealth. Using the Avalanche blockchain, Ry...