The Best Paragraph I've Read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "A lot about the world feels dark right now. We’re reeling from a turbulent presidential race. Processing an attempted assassination. Divided by protests—and a barrage of images on social media that feeds our anxieties. Sometimes, it seems as though we’re living in the worst of times. The truth is, we’re really not." This paragraph comes from an essay in...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It’s as if Kidd and his fellow-marauders never stopped sailing. These days, pirates are everywhere. The five “Pirates of the Caribbean” films have collectively grossed billions. And then there are the shows, games, memes, bars, festivals, and rum bottles. Three major sports teams are named for them—the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Las Vegas Raiders, and the Tampa Bay B...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Is a Spin Magazine cover from 25 years ago. You can view it here. Zac & Don discuss the 25th anniversary of the Spin Magazine with Axl Rose on it. They also share their lists of other things that they think "The World Needs Now..." including Salad Bars, 3 Sport Athletes, Jumping Jacks, Glass Bottles, and more!

Don went to the Olympics! Zac & Discuss what it was like to be in Paris during the Olympics. They also discuss what it is like to attend a night of track and field events.

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Once an emblem of summer — and the object of poolside fawning — the American lifeguard has somehow become an endangered species. This paragraph comes from the Business Insider. The article is titled: "Lifeguard shortage: nationwide problem means closed pools, no swimming." The author is Kelli Maria Korducki. You can read the full article here: https://ww...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term." This paragraph comes from President Joe Biden. You can r...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In 2015, Nick Rogers, now a sociologist at the University of Pittsburgh, conducted an ethnography of a pickup-basketball game. Like an anthropologist who heads into the bush to live with tribe members, Rogers became one of the game’s regulars. During breaks, he took hurried notes on his iPhone. (Nice work, if you can get it.) Rogers wanted to understand the parado...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It’s the replay, caught with super-slo-mo cameras, that makes it exactly the kind of weird I like: We see the hand approaching the face and then the impact. BAM! Phillips’s face is briefly displaced off his skull, his neck skin stretching, his face in this moment deformed like a rubber mask—that’s how unlike a face it looks!—and then suddenly it snaps back on. And...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The use of performance-enhancing drugs, a.k.a. PEDs, remains something of a shadow world—but it may not remain so for long. Consider the shifting landscape of what’s now edging toward the mainstream in health care. Cannabis as a cancer therapy. Psychiatrists testing out psychedelics. MDMA being studied for use in treating PTSD. The gap between our society’s embrac...

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...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Dating back to 2020, when the pandemic upended American education overnight, many schools have adopted a more lenient approach to grading. Some eliminated zeros or removed penalties for late work. Many teachers report “giving grace” to struggling students. Others say they have felt pressure from administrators to limit failure rates. Higher grades have come even a...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Having worked in most facets of the entertainment industry since 1974, from a bottom-rung production assistant to the top of NBCUniversal’s headquarters at 30 Rock, I agree that the problems in today’s workplace are real. But I also think many management experts have identified the wrong problem. The real problem is that too many of us, young and not so youn...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "SarahRachul grew up in the 1990s, during the so-called “Disney Renaissance”, when Disney debuted a string of critically successful films and re-released its earlier classics on VHS. Merchandising reached new heights: 7,000 products were released to promote 1997’s Hercules alone. It was, Rachul says, “almost like you couldn’t avoid having [Disney] as part of...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Education has changed drastically over the years, but you might be surprised at the absolutely wild things that were once deemed "normal" when your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents were in school." This paragraph comes from BuzzFeed. The article is titled: "Imagine The Lawsuit If That Happened Today" Older Adults Reveale...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: As Beth Linker explains in her book “Slouch: Posture Panic in Modern America” (Princeton), a long history of anxiety about the proximity between human and bestial nature has played out in this area of social science. Linker, a historian of medicine at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that at the onset of the twentieth century the United States became gripped...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Dachshunds, the German dog breed known for their distinctive long bodies and short legs, face an uncertain future if proposed changes to an animal protection law are approved, Germany’s kennel club said. A draft of the bill, from the German Ministry of Food and Agriculture, was published in February and aims to combat “torture breeding,” or breeding to produ...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Across the street, another strip was torn down to make way for a Raising Cane’s and a Chipotle, both also equipped with drive-throughs. This part of town was never exactly the height of urban design; it had long been sprawly, car-oriented, and not great for walking. But the redevelopment gave it another character entirely. Before, the businesses there were d...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "When you look at the role that trash talk plays in creating group bonds, it has very clear applications in creating a sense of “us versus them.” When you talk crap about a rival, you’re reinforcing a sense of identity. You’re reinforcing who we are and who they are. One theory about why trash talk works to throw people off their game is that it leverages a f...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Organizations are trying to protect themselves from lawsuits, but the whole administrative apparatus comes with an implied view of human nature. People are weak, fragile, vulnerable and kind of stupid. They need administrators to run their lives. They have to be trained never to take initiative, lest they wander off into activities that are deemed by the authorities t...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Need some NCAA Tournament bracket advice? How about just picking by mascot? Zac & Don use the Wall Street Journal's NCAA Tournament historical mascot data to pick their entire bracket. They found the mascot data from an article titled: "Cats vs. Birds: The Whimsical Way to Fill Out Your NCAA Tournament Bracket." The article is written by Rosie Et...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "So we're like lab rats?" asked Cassie. "Just a bunch of kids being experimented on? This is terrible! We're kids! We're precious. Our parents tell us at least ten times a day how special we are! We get hugs for flushing the toilet, and allowances if we remember to wash our hands! Your experiment doesn't make me feel special. It make...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Filling out brackets for the NCAA tournament is a rite of March. It’s also a famously inexact science, where the grandmother who picks teams based on their mascots has as good a chance of winning as the analytics geek who spent hours poring over team sheets. You could reference the Madness Machine , The Wall Street Journal’s bracket generator based on reams of dat...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: KLAY THOMPSON was skeptical at first. This was back in 2018, when Warriors coach Steve Kerr had arranged for the motivational speaker Tony Robbins to visit practice. Robbins spoke about many things that day, but what stuck for Thompson was Robbins’s habit of keeping his pool just above freezing and jumping in every morning. Robbins swore it was the best way to sta...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The arc of corporate life used to be predictable. You made your way up the career ladder, acquiring more prestige and bigger salaries at every step. Then, in your early 60s, there was a Friday-afternoon retirement party, maybe a gold watch, and that was that. The next day the world of meetings, objectives, tasks and other busyness faded. If you were moderately restle...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Lynn Shelmerdine passes oil rigs and tumbleweed on her way to work. Most men she knows drive pickup trucks and quite a few wear cowboy hats. But she’s emphatic that her part of Montana, despite being in Mountain time, is the Midwest rather than the Wild West. It’s “family, family, family and I think that’s what Midwestern people are—family comes first and wo...