The Best Paragraph I've Read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "I have a routine, just like nature. That extends to what I eat. I’ve had the same supper for 10 years, even on Christmas Day: two pieces of fish, one big onion, an egg, baked beans and a few biscuits at the end. For lunch I have a pear, an orange and four sandwiches with paste. But I allow myself a bit more variety; I’ll sometimes have soup if it’s cold.   When I go...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "There is a summit. And then there is everything below it.  Can close ever be good enough?  Revelations from a team of respected researchers have thrust that question into the open like never before, putting special attention on the world’s highest mountains and most acclaimed climbers.  By asking a simple-sounding question — What is the summit? — the researchers are...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: As the global population approaches eight billion, and science discovers increasingly promising ways to slow or reverse aging in the lab, the question of human longevity's potential limits is more urgent than ever.  When their work is examined closely, it's clear that longevity scientists hold a wide range of nuanced perspectives on the future of humanity.  Historical...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "If there’s an “It” breed of the 21st century so far, it’s these dogs, with their squat figures, flat faces, and outsize bat ears. American Kennel Club registrations for the breed have risen steadily for over a decade, growing by 830 percent since 2009. At around 20 pounds and perfectly sized for carry-on luggage, Frenchies have been marketed as the dog best suited to...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: To fully understand progress, we must contrast it with non-progress. Of particular interest are the technologies that have failed to live up to the promise they seemed to have decades ago. And few technologies have failed more to live up to a greater promise than nuclear power. In the 1950s, nuclear was the energy of the future. Two generations later, it provides only...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The one case in which I think I can see the finger of God in contemporary history is Churchill's arrival at the premiership at that precise moment in 1940.  Churchill put his remarks... far more poetically three years later in the final lines of his book The Gathering Storm, the first volume of his war memoirs.  Recalling the evening of Friday, 10 May 1940,...

Th Best Paragraph I've Read: "To Ms. Hostetter's backers, the entire affair is being overblown by an intolerant mob of woke liberals who have no respect for the privacy of someone's personal politics.  Yet Ms. Hostetter's politics, while personal, are hardly private..." This article comes from the New York Times.  The article is titled: "A Teacher Marched to the Capitol.  When she Got Home, the Fi...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Bruce Sacerdote, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, noticed something last year about the Covid-19 television coverage that he was watching on CNN and PBS. It almost always seemed negative, regardless of what was he seeing in the data or hearing from scientists he knew. When Covid cases were rising in the U.S., the news coverage emphasized the increase. When...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "We have become a country with vanishingly few paths out of poverty, or even out of the working class. We’ve allowed the majority of our public schools to founder, while expensive private schools play an outsize role in determining who gets to claim a coveted spot in the winners’ circle. Many schools for the richest American kids have gates and security guards; the me...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: On April 12, 2117, the field-modulator brake-valve in the Door belonging to Mrs. Richard Hanshaw depolarized for reasons unknown. As a result, Mrs. Hanshaw's day was completely upset and her son, Richard, Jr., first developed his strange neurosis. It was not the type of thing you would find listed as a neurosis in the usual textbooks and certainly young Richard behave...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Each year, March Madness opens a fire hose of cash, as gamblers, advertisers and television networks try to get in on the action. Americans wagered an estimated $8.5 billion in 2019 on the NCAA’s Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, as March Madness is formally known. Television networks paid $1.1 billion to broadcast the games. And businesses spent an estimated...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The time parents spend in the presence of their children has not changed much, but parents today spend more of it doing hands-on child care. Time spent on activities like reading to children; doing crafts; taking them to lessons; attending recitals and games; and helping with homework has increased the most. Today, mothers spend nearly five hours a week on that, compa...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Big League Advance uses a proprietary algorithm to project the performance and earning potential of players, in order to establish the set amount it would be willing to pay a player in exchange for each percentage point of future major league earnings that player is willing to give up.  For instance, if Big League Advance offers a minor leaguer 100,000 up front for 1%...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The size of the problem is difficult to measure, says Penn State professor Linda Treviño, coauthor of the 2012 book Cheating in College. Part of the challenge is defining what constitutes cheating. Is it getting an answer to a homework problem from a friend, peeking at a classmate’s paper during an exam, paying someone to take a test for you, plugging in answers from...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: For our first case, the moderator projected a picture of a smiling girl in a yearbook photo, with a cartoon thought bubble that read “Kill All Men.” Facebook had removed the post for violating its hate-speech rules, which ban attacks based on “sex, gender identity.” To many, this seemed simplistic. “It’s a joke,” one woman said. “There has to be an exception for humor...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The International Olympic Committee's pursuit of urban events to lure a younger audience saw street dance battles officially added to the medal events program at the 2024 Paris Games.  Also confirmed for Paris by the IOC executive board were skateboarding, sport climbing, and surfing. Those three sports will make their Olympic debuts at the Tokyo Games which were...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In the past decade or so, genetic engineering has undergone its own transformation, thanks to CRISPR—shorthand for a suite of techniques, mostly borrowed from bacteria, that make it vastly easier for biohackers and researchers to manipulate DNA.  Crispr allows its users to snip a stretch of DNA and then either disable the affected sequence or replace it with a new one...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Meaningful work” is an expression that had barely appeared in the English language before the early nineteen-seventies... “Once upon a time, it was assumed, to put it bluntly, that work sucked...”  That started to change in the nineteen-seventies, both McCallum and Jaffe argue, when managers began informing workers that they should expect to discover life’s purpose i...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The day after New Year’s, John Reichert of Boulder, Colo., had a heated argument with his 14-year-old son, James. “I’ve failed you as a father,” he told the boy despairingly. During the long months of lockdowns and shuttered schools, Mr. Reichert, like many parents, overlooked the vastly increasing time that his son was spending on video games and social media. Now, J...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Last week, many asked whether the assault on the Capitol, fueled by Trump and his many political and media enablers, was the start of something or an end.  It is neither, of course. It is a moment when we each get to decide how we want to proceed." This paragraph comes from Ken Burns who made a guest appearance on Politico's Playbook.  The paragraph and more can be r...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "People in many countries are longing for the good old days. When asked if life in their country is better or worse today than 50 years ago, 31% of Britons, 41% of Americans and 46% of the French say it’s worse. Psychologists say that this kind of nostalgia is natural and sometimes even useful: Anchoring our identity in the past helps give us a sense of stability and...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Experimental studies support the idea of a ‘successful’ dark personality, but only up to a point. One study found that people with psychopathic personality traits win more points on a negotiation task where they are required to compete with a partner, but fewer points on a task that involves cooperation. Those with dark traits are more likely to ‘defect’ in the class...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Cities on fire, elected leaders endorsing violence, homicides surging—­­to a normal American, these are apocalyptic signs. To Peter Turchin, they indicate that his models, which incorporate thousands of years of data about human history, are working.  He has been warning for a decade that a few key social and political trends portend an “age of discord,” civil unrest...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Kirkland also has a passionate and loyal fan base — not something you typically find with a private label brand. One guy even got a Kirkland Signature tattoo on his left arm and held his 27th birthday party at the Costco food court. Kirkland’s success defies our intuition and experience. Shouldn’t lower prices lead to lower quality products? How can they offer rock-b...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Is it still cool to memorize a lot of stuff? Is there even a reason to memorize anything? Having a lot of information in your head was maybe never cool in the sexy-cool sense, more in the geeky-cool or class-brainiac sense. But people respected the ability to rattle off the names of all the state capitals, or to recite the periodic table. It was like the ability to d...