The Best Paragraph I've Read...

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...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Pandemic school is clearly not working well, especially for younger children—and it’s all but impossible for the 20 percent of American students who lack access to the technology needed for remote learning. But what parents are coming to understand about their kids’ education—glimpsed through Zoom windows and “asynchronous” classwork—is that school was not always wor...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "When Justin Posey was 11, he became obsessed with the Victorio Peak treasure, a hoard of perhaps thousands of gold bars supposedly found by a hunter named Milton Noss in a hilltop cavern in New Mexico in 1937. Before Noss was able to recover most of the gold he had seen, the shaft leading to it caved in; after World War II, the U.S. government seized the whole area,...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "WASHINGTON, D.C., United States—On Wednesday morning, this normally bustling capital city became a ghost town as most of its residents embarked on the long journey to their home villages for an annual festival of family, food, and questionable historical facts. Experts say the day is vital for understanding American society and economists are increasingly taking note...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Politicians lie to get us into wars; generals lie about how well things are going; soldiers lie about what they did during their service. In 1782, when George Washington awarded ribbons and badges to valorous Revolutionary War troops, he was already worrying about pretenders. “Should any who are not entitled to these honors have the insolence to assume the badges of t...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "American democracy: Maybe this one is premature, but so far the U.S. has held a closely contested election under pandemic conditions. Turnout was much higher than usual, and so far there hasn’t been much election-related violence. Could it be that the system really works?" This paragraph comes from a blog post by Tyler Cowen at www.marginalrevolution.com.  The blog p...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The worlds of both economics and business have adopted the view that without a simplifying, unitary objective, an organization will be unable to make robust, consistent, and societally optimal decisions. Luminaries such as economics Nobel laureate Milton Friedman and superstar finance professor Michael Jensen have made the argument so convincingly that it has effecti...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: On paper, sloane, a buoyant, chatty, stay-at-home mom from Fairfield County, Connecticut, seems almost unbelievably well prepared to shepherd her three daughters through the roiling world of competitive youth sports. She played tennis and ran track in high school and has an advanced degree in behavioral medicine. She wrote her master’s thesis on the connection between...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The 50 richest Americans now hold almost as much wealth as half of the U.S., as Covid-19 transforms the economy in ways that have disproportionately rewarded a small class of billionaires. New data from the U.S. Federal Reserve, a comprehensive look at U.S. wealth through the first half of 2020, show stark disparities by race, age and class. While the top 1% of Americ...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Since we are on Zoom for at least five hours a day... I am able to listen to the class. The teacher treats the class like they are middle school–aged kids. She is very strict in correcting what I see as normal 6-year-old behavior. " "We’re three weeks into school, and my daughter (who loves school and does not typically complain) is miserable and bored in her English...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: If you're worried about the short-term economic outlook, I have bad news: The long-term outlook is worse.  That's what emerges from the latest long-term budget outlook released by the Congressional Budget Office last week.  It contained this sobering number: The agency expects annual economic growth to average just 1.6% over the next three decades - down by...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Warren went to talk to Susie's father to get his blessing.  This, he already knew, would be easily had.  But Doc Thompson took a while - quite a while - to get to the point.  He started by explaining that Harry Truman and the Democrats were sending the country straight to hell.  Pouring money into Europe after the war through the Marshall Plan and...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "America’s fractious and tragic response to the COVID-19 pandemic has made the nation look more like a failed state than like the richest country in world history. Doom-scrolling through morbid headlines in 2020, one could easily believe that we have lost our capacity for effective crisis response. And maybe we have. But a major crisis has a way of exposing what is br...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: During the public comment period of the Lincoln City Council meeting on Aug. 31, Ander Christensen stood at the lectern and dared to speak truth to power... ... ... “We have been casually ignoring a problem that has gotten so out of control that our children are throwing around names and words without even understanding their true meaning, treating things as though th...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: When I was a child, doctors giving vaccine shots used to hand out candy or a little toy to take the sting and fear out of the shot. A similar idea could rescue the U.S. economy when one or more COVID vaccines are approved by the FDA and widely available for mass uptake... … ... The “adult” version of the doctor handing out candy to children, fortunately, points toward...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Honestly, I don't envy students entering college.  Course work without campus life sounds efficient, but unexciting.  It also seems like something that should be cheap - basic calculus hasn't changed since the 17th century, and course materials and lectures are widely available online for free.  But another 17th-century creation, Harvard University, say...

The Best Paragraphs I've Read: "It is puzzling that Aaron Burr is sometimes classified among the founding fathers.  Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Adams, Franklin, and Hamilton all left behind papers that run to dozens of thick volumes, packed with profound ruminations.  They fought for high ideals.  By contrast Burr’s editors have been able to eke out just two volumes of his lette...