The Best Paragraph I've Read...

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...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The childhood mental-health crisis risks becoming self-perpetuating: “The worse that the numbers get about our kids’ mental health—the more anxiety, depression, and suicide increase—the more fearful parents become. The more fearful parents become, the more they continue to do the things that are inadvertently contributing to these problems.” This paragraph comes from...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "This spring, America took an involuntary crash course in remote learning. With the school year now winding down, the grades from students, teachers, parents and administrators is already in: It was a failure." This paragraph comes from the Wall Street Journal in an article titled: The Results Are in for Remote Learning: It Didn't Work.   https://www.msn.com/en-u...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The whole nature of crises is that they’re new and shocking.  And inevitably, as soon as you’ve thought about and lived with the crisis for a while, it becomes the new normal... ... ...  And what I think is interesting is that, particularly among the younger generations, the existence of some form of existential crisis—be it fiscal, environmental, democratic...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The cost of keeping children out of classrooms is high, educationally and socially. Lost instructional time is hard to recapture; some high-school students may drop out. Schools provide meals, social services, and, for many students, a safe haven, and they allow parents to go to work." This paragraph comes from the New Yorker in an essay titled: The Complex Question...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: “Via the Artemis Accords, we hope that the future will look a lot more like “Star Trek,” and a lot less like “Star Wars” by getting ahead of these issues.” This paragraph comes from a Reuters article.  The article discusses the recent Artemis Accords that America has proposed concerning who gets to use the Moon and low earth orbit.  You can read the full art...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Epidemiology is a science of possibilities and persuasion, not of certainties or hard proof. “Being approximately right most of the time is better than being precisely right occasionally,” the Scottish epidemiologist John Cowden wrote, in 2010. “You can only be sure when to act in retrospect.” Epidemiologists must persuade people to upend their lives—to forgo travel a...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Our situation in this pandemic is analogous to war, in which there is a long tradition of volunteers risking their health and lives on dangerous missions for which they understand the risks and are willing to do so in order to help save the lives of others." This paragraph comes from a letter written by thirty-five members of congress.  The representatives are u...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: We came to believe that our recent history is the range of what is possible, and now we are watching charts where the y axis can't keep up with events. For its part, the future is not awaiting our wise counsel. That is the wealthy man's folly, to believe that people want your wisdom. The future is concerned with itself. The people in that time will abide your wisdom i...

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,...