The Best Paragraph I've Read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Our bedtimes were filled with stories: “Guess How Much I Love You.” “The Day the Crayons Quit.” “Ramona Quimby, Age 8.” “Madeline.” Now she is 11 and more interested in TikTok than in 12 little girls in two straight lines who lived in a house that was covered in vines. And while she certainly can read, she really doesn’t like to. As someone who comes from a family of...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Michigan was part of a wave of states that implemented teacher accountability measures, based on the studies that showed students learned more when they were in classrooms with highly effective teachers. Before the reforms, determining which teachers were superstars was nearly impossible, because virtually all teachers were rated as effective. Having a four-category r...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Bitcoin is also easy to lose. Conventional money comes full of safeguards: paper currency is distinctively colored and has a unique feel; centuries of design have gone into folding wallets and zippered purses. And once your money is deposited in a bank you have a record of what you own. If you lose your statement, the bank will send you another. Forget your online pas...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Satire is "the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues." This paragraph is the result of a Google Search for the definition of the word "Satire." Zac and Don discuss satire in our society.  They do this by discussing the role of pho...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: For brand-building, it makes sense that TIME has steered away from bad guys; “Person of the Year” today sounds a lot like an endorsement, in part because TIME’s original idea has proven so catchy and reproducible. But it also leaves Americans the poorer for it: The point is to identify people who matter and let readers — and citizens — process that how they will. Give...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Some states have eliminated language requirements for high school students: In Oklahoma and Texas they can opt instead for computer coding, while in California they can choose visual and performing arts classes or technical education. One in five Americans speaks a language other than English at home, yet we have abandoned building our foreign language skills and cede...

The Best Paragraphs I've Read: Abstraction: There are scales of explanation. A human can be considered a person, mammal, collection of cells, collection of stardust. Sometimes the reason people can’t see eye to eye is that they’re unwittingly considering things at different levels of abstraction. Scope Neglect: We evolved for the small scale of tribal life, so we can’t comprehend the big numbers t...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Some proponents of National Divorce say not to worry — it can all be worked out amicably without any unpleasantness, like, you know, the war that killed roughly 700,000 people the last time a region of the U.S. tried to secede. But if we are going to split up because we are irreparably divided and can’t even agree on bathroom policies or pronouns, how are we going to...

https://melmagazine.com/en-us/story/six-flags-dining-pass Dylan’s first bite into a turkey hotdog called the “Thanksgiving Dog” felt nothing short of life-changing. “It was amazing,” he says. “It’s a turkey dog topped with cranberry sauce, stuffing and a slathering of mayonnaise, which I know sounds awful, but it was so good. I ended up eating way too many of them, and now I can’t even smell turke...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: This week Zac and Don discuss their favorite exchanges from a recent Conversations with Tyler podcast.  During the podcast Professor Tyler Cowen interviewed General Stanley McChrystal.  You can listen to the podcast episode here: https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/stanley-mcchrystal/   Zac and Don use Professor Cowen's podcast to talk about different aspects...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Work isn’t just our livelihood. It can be a source of structure, belonging and meaning in our lives. But that doesn’t mean our jobs should dictate how we spend most of our waking hours. For several generations, we’ve organized our lives around our work. Our jobs have determined where we make our homes, when we see our families and what we can squeeze in during our dow...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: A school board in northern Michigan plans to send a protest over sportsmanship following a soccer player's 16-goal record-setting game against a winless team. The backlash over Kevin Hubbell's performance continued Monday night at a meeting of the Kingsley board. Members didn't take a formal vote, but there was clear support for sending a letter to the Benzie Central...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In my experience, if you see a CEO chasing press, that person’s company is probably headed for trouble. The energy spent burnish­ing your image could almost always be better spent managing your people, ferreting out problems, clearing obstacles, honing processes, talking to customers, selecting vendors, recruiting team members and working on new initiatives. With Manh...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The most elementary tenet of economics is the relationship between supply, demand, and prices. If there's suddenly less of something that a lot of people want, it's going to get more expensive. At the same time, having competition in the marketplace encourages suppliers to increase supply and lower prices in order to win a larger share of buyers in the market. Indeed,...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: For Benjamin, the very possession of these books formed his identity as a reader, writer, and human being — even if he hadn’t read all of them. They sat proudly on his shelves as symbols, representing the knowledge that he still aspired to gain or the cities he had traveled, where he encountered a book in a previously unknown shop. Collecting books was his way of inte...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In Phoenix, where a drought has lasted for 27 years so far, one source of water—the Colorado River—may soon dry up. The city is also getting hotter, with a record number of days over 110 degrees Fahrenheit in 2020. At the same time, the population continues to expand. Over the last decade, Phoenix grew faster than any other American city, and Arizona was one of the fa...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The chief executive of Domino's Pizza has complained that the company can’t hire enough drivers.  Lyft and Uber claim to have a similar problem.  A McDonald's franchise in Florida offered $50 to anybody willing to show up for an interview.  And some fast-food outlets have hung signs in their windows saying, "No one wants to work anymore."  The idea that the United Sta...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Men are abandoning higher education in such numbers that they now trail female college students by record levels. At the close of the 2020-21 academic year, women made up 59.5% of college students, an all-time high, and men 40.5%, according to enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse, a nonprofit research group. U.S. colleges and universities had 1.5 mi...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It’s not just individual patients who are in the dark,” said Martin Gaynor, a Carnegie Mellon economist who studies health pricing. “Employers are in the dark. Governments are in the dark. It’s just astonishing how deeply ignorant we are about these prices.” This paragraph comes from the New York Times in an article titled: "Hospitals and Insurers Didn't Want You to S...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: If the U.S. government was caught up short by the dramatic denouement of its 20-year war in Afghanistan, viewers of the three major networks must have been taken entirely by surprise. Out of a combined 14,000-plus minutes of the national evening news broadcast on CBS, ABC, and NBC last year, a grand total of five minutes were devoted to Afghanistan, according to Andre...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It sucks that college sports over the past decade-plus has chosen to give up what makes it special. I’m not talking about amateurism — the fact that players can now make money is long overdue. I’m talking about the regional flair, the communities, the charm and the history. There’s a connection with alumni and your opponent. The vast majority of us care more about our...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Almost every teacher I know has noticed the same sinister reality this summer: Kids have come back to the classroom. But the classroom hasn’t come back to the kids. Far from it. More to the point, they are back, they are sitting at their desks, but in many ways they now embody the detached, lifeless malaise of a hipster zombie incapable of showing the slightest patina...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Survivalist school instructors across the country say there has been an increasing interest in their wilderness and urban-disaster preparedness courses from Americans worried about climate change . As rising temperatures bring more wildfires , droughts and destructive storms , those types of courses are no longer the domain of campers and hunters. One of these schools...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "There seems to be an urge to do things differently, to rear young men without the same certainties and biases that previously we absorbed by rote. Mine’s not the first generation of parents to be thinking about all this, and fretfully. In the 60s, the 70s, the 80s, the 90s, the 00s, there were many mothers and some fathers who looked at each other and asked: what oug...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "This school would probably not attract many of today’s Ivy League elite. But they are not the ones who require better and cheaper alternatives. It is striking how most major institutions of higher learning are many decades or centuries old, and how reluctant they are to change their models or to become significantly more inclusive. Am I sure that my “fantasy universi...