The Best Paragraph I've Read...

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...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "I love football. Love it. Love it. I think it’s the last bastion of hope for toughness in America in men, in males." This quote comes from Michigan football coach Jim Harbaugh.  The quote was said in 2015 during an interview with HBO Real Sports. https://footballscoop.com/news/six-things-we-learned-about-jim-harbaugh-on-hbos-real-sports/ Zac and Don discuss whet...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "So I can understand that teachers are nervous about returning to school. But they should take a cue from their fellow essential workers and do their job. Even people who think there’s a fundamental difference between a nurse and a teacher in a pandemic must realize that there isn’t one between a grocery-store worker and a teacher, in terms of obligation. People who w...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: “But they don’t have ‘F-you money’ anymore,” a former reporter said of the Bancrofts. “They’re nice and rich, but not ungodly so. It matters to the younger generation.” This paragraph comes from a 2007 New Yorker article titled "Paper Chase."  It was written by Ben Mcgrath.   https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2007/05/14/paper-chase-3-2 Another Best Paragrap...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "We’re standing at a climate crossroads: the world has already warmed 1.1°C since the Industrial Revolution. If we pass 2°C, we risk hitting one or more major tipping points, where the effects of climate change go from advancing gradually to changing dramatically overnight, reshaping the planet. To ensure that we don’t pass that threshold, we need to cut emissions in...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "There are other ideas, like declaring “platform bankruptcy.” This would involve platforms resetting all of their user and group follower counts to zero and rebuilding communities from the ground up, with the platforms’ current rules in place." This paragraph comes from an editorial in the New York Times by Charlie Warzel.  The editorial is titled: "Facebook Can'...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Members of Heaven’s Gate, a religious cult, believed that as the Hale-Bopp comet passed by Earth in 1997, a spaceship would be traveling in its wake—ready to take true believers aboard. Several members of the group bought an expensive, high-powered telescope so that they might get a clearer view of the comet. They quickly brought it back and asked for a refund. When...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Disney has long been an outfit fueled by nostalgia. That would seem to offer an advantage during a pause; there are, after all, many old movies to re-watch. But Disney’s little secret is that such nostalgia cannot stand on its own — it needs to be continually fed and reinforced. A new set of Star Wars drives longing for the ′70s, a “Beauty and the Beast” remake power...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Whitmer was prepared to govern her state, but the pandemic required something of a different order: minute-by-minute, seat-of-the-pants, lives-in-the-balance decision-making for which there was no model or precedent. She soon realized that the only people who could relate to what she was going through were her fellow governors. In March, she created a group text chai...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "There’s certainly nothing wrong with expecting that all students who graduate from a given school, system, or state have somewhat equivalent academic abilities. So what’s the problem? To put it simply, students are not standardized. Their minds are not standardized. Their abilities are not standardized. Their ambitions are not standardized. Expecting to take the vast...