The Best Paragraph I've Read...

Shameless Self Promotion this Week! Zac & Don discuss the book Zac recently wrote, Crypto School 2: Privot to A.I. While they discuss moments from the book, they also talk about AI in schools and wonder if education has fully considered what they should be doing with the technology. They also discuss unanswered questions, the role of principals, and if there is a good way to teach character ed...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The name of this fall’s most obnoxious classmate: SixSeven. Math teacher Cara Bearden braces herself for any equation that yields the two numbers, knowing her students will immediately scream them right back at her. “SIX Sevennnnnn,” they squeal with a palms-up, seesaw handgesture that looks somewhere between juggling and melon handling. The meme is ripping...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: “The gunpowder will come. Nothing can stop it—the same old story over and over. Man will increase, and men will fight. The gunpowder will enable men to kill millions of men, and in this way only, by fire and blood, will a new civilization, in some remote day, be evolved. And of what profit will it be? Just as the old civilization passed, so will the new. It may ta...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "A place that was once entirely utilitarian is now a place to line up to get into. On social media, people profess their love for  the Pennsylvania convenience store Wawa  and  talk about Target  like it’s a habit-forming substance. Recently, I saw a guy at a bar wearing $300 pants and a sweatshirt with a logo for Kirkland Signature, the Costco house brand. W...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The windswept town of Ellendale, N.D., population 1,100, has two motels, a Dollar General, a Pentecostal Bible college—and a half-built AI factory bigger than 10 Home Depots. Its more than $15 billion price tag is equivalent to a quarter of the state’s annual economic output. The artificial-intelligence boom has ushered in one of the costliest building spree...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Crossing the border can be a little daunting the first time, some said. “Took us three years to work up enough nerve,” Ken Foshaug, a retired Coast Guard engineer who was staying at a nearby Sleepy Hollow R.V. park with his wife, told me. “All the guys holding guns and checking you out. Plus the whole thing of going to a foreign country to let someone drill into your...

This week Zac & Don discuss all of Season 5 of the Against the Rules Podcast. This is the podcast by Michael Lewis. You can listen to individual episodes and the entire season here: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/against-the-rules-with-michael-lewis/id1455379351 Zac & Don wonder about what it means to be a sports fan when there is such a heavy emphasis on sport gambling. They also d...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: This year, a team of researchers from Ohio State University and Oregon State University found that success in competitive youth sports might have more to do with money and opportunity than with talent and hard work.  The researchers determined that 70 percent of 10th-grade high school students from families with high socioeconomic status played a high school sport, wh...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: the big packaged food brands that dominated Americanpantries and refrigerators for decades are struggling as consumers spend less on brand-name cookies, spaghetti sauce and cream cheese. The companies are grappling with a number of stressors. Shoppers, feeling pinched by higher food prices over the past two years, are cutting back or trading down to less expensive...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Gen Z became the first generation in history to go through puberty with a portal in their pockets that called them away from the people nearby and into an alternative universe that was exciting, addictive, unstable, and - as I will show - unsuitable for children and adolescents. Succeeding socially in that universe required them to devote a large part of their consci...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The likelihood that AI may soon make lots of workers redundant is well known. What is much less discussed is the hope that AI can set the world on a path of explosive growth. That would have profound consequences. Markets not just for labour, but also for goods, services, and financial assets would be upended. Economists have been trying to think through how AGI coul...

This is Part II of our Lonesome Dove discussion. Zac & Don discuss more of their favorite quotes while also wondering why the story does not get told from a Native American perspective. They wonder if the story gets a little too "Hollywood" and if they have interest in reading the sequels. Lots of spoilers.

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The Buc-ee’s representatives tried to outline the planfor about 300 locals packed into the cafeteria at Palmer Lake Elementary School on Dec. 3. But they were met with jeers. “We don’t want your Buc-ee’s, we don’t need your Buc-ee’s, we don’t desire your Beaver Nuggets,” lifelong Palmer Lake resident Alexandria Olivier shouted from the front, waving her arms angri...

Zac & Don are reading Lonesome Dove. This week they reflect on the first third of the book. They wonder how a book can be so interesting while very little seems to be happening. They also wonder how authentic the characters are to those who lived in Texas during the late 19th century. They also try and speculate why a book written in the 1980's has been picking up in sales across the country r...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Perot was the most successful third-party candidate in modern history. You helped run his campaigns and build the Reform Party. What advice do you have for Musk when it comes to building a new party? My basic advice is: Go to rehab and then focus on creating a new political party from a position of seriousness, not of anger, not of retribution, not of retaliation....

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "President Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the healthsecretary, set forth their vision on Thursday for how to “make America healthy again” with the release of an expansive report on a crisis of chronic disease in children. The report lays the blame on ultra processed foods, chemical exposures, stress, lack of physical activity and excessive use of prescripti...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Let’s say there’s another pandemic. This time, a lethal disease spreads through contact with other people’s fecal matter. Precision toilet cleaning becomes a matter of life and death. In the wake of this pandemic, an aptitude test—callit the T.I.Q.—is developed to measure one’s ability to rotate brushes three-dimensionally inside holes. Kids who score highly...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "In a Reddit forum for people interested in buying American-made products, a commenter asked: “Is a completely made in USA life possible?” One person responded that it would require living like Ted Kaczynski, the infamous recluse known as the Unabomber who lived a primitive lifestyle in a remote cabin." This paragraph comes from the Wall Street Journal....

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The Washington Post declared 2019 the Year of the Chicken Sandwich, which the paper translated into Latin — anno pulli —presumably so time travelers from the past could understand what was going on here. As a society, we had reached peak fried-chicken sandwich. LOL. Not even close. If, six years ago, the fried-chicken sandwich was a noveltyworth standing in line f...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "College track and field once was a major spectator sport. Meets at Hayward Field were events. In 1970, Steve Prefontaine’s freshman year at Oregon, he competed in Pac-8 dual meets against Washington, Cal, UCLA, Washington State and Oregon State. Eugene Register-Guard printed pre-meet form charts that fans brought with them as they filled the stadium. Dual meets engag...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: We’re so used to trying things for ourselves that it seems bizarre to imagine us ever stopping. And yet, more and more, it’s becoming clear that artificial intelligence can relieve us of the burden of trying and trying again. A.I.systems make it trivially easy to take an existing thing and ask for a new iteration. The technology is still developing, and yet already an...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: When we use nicknames with people we don’t know—calling Eisenhower “Ike,” for example—it imports a fondness or intimacy to the relationship, as if they are part of the family. Boys, in particular, get nicknames from their teammates, their roommates, their fraternity brothers, their co-workers. They are a common aspect of close-knit, bonding culture: You can expect...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Political movements succeed when they build a vision of the future that is imbued with the virtues of the past. Franklin D. Roosevelt pitched his expansive view of government as a sentinel for American freedoms: of speech, of worship, fromwant, from fear. Decades later, Ronald Reagan recast government as freedom’s nemesis rather than its protector. Abundance, too,...

The Best Paragraph I've Read:   Modern life often prizes prepackaged conveniences. We buyready made products, eat frozen pizzas and replace what’s broken instead of fixing it. The more successful we become, the more likely we are to outsource jobs that we might have once done ourselves. Yet the effort of involvement is what gives meaning to so much of life. This paragraph comes from an essay i...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "In which domains are elite practitioners celebrating the kids being better than ever before? Would love to read about a few instances." This paragraph comes from Patrick Collinson thread on X. You can read the full thread here: https://x.com/patrickc/status/1903957601274253747 Zac & Don talk about the skills and activities that young people are bett...