The Best Paragraph I've Read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Inside the repurposed warehouse, human superballs fling themselves from unwieldy plastic rings and bars suspended from steel scaffolding, while others scurry up the trio of towering, curved (better known as “warped”) walls looming in the corner, the tallest of which stands a foreboding 14' 8". On the rear wall, there is a peg board, navigated by ninjas who insert and...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Is wrestling real? Is it fake? The answer to both questions is, paradoxically, yes. The outcome of each contest is scripted. The body slams and submissions are choreographed. Sworn enemies are, in all likelihood, friends. But the Undertaker (Mark Calaway) really did throw Mankind (Mick Foley) off the top of that steel cage during a 1998 King of the Ring pay-per-view m...

Zac and Don speak with Melissa Middleton as she gets ready to retire from education. They ask her about the changes she has seen in education. They ask her about being a librarian, books bans, whether students are losing an interest in reading, and more!

The Best Paragraph I've Read: As many economists, including Sarah House of  Wells Fargo , have argued, “you don’t even need to actually default on the debt for there to be real damage in the economy.” At Bloomberg Economics, a team led by Chief US Economist Anna Wong modeled a scenario where a protracted standoff leads to elevated market stress, and Treasury is forced to cut social spending to...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The Best Paragraph I've Read: Did they plan to study specifically with one of us? Was our institution particularly strong in the academic disciplines that interested them? Most of them couldn’t really tell me why they wanted Duke. They just knew that they should want it. It would validate them. It would impress their friends. Translation: It was highly ranked — curren...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Do you get a promotion every year, in your job?” Antetokounmpo answered, after a long pause in which he placed his head in his hands. “No, right? So every year you work is a failure? Yes or no. No? Every year you work, you work towards something, towards a goal, which is to get a promotion, to be able to take care of your family, provide a house for them, or...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: After some observation, researchers concluded these generative agents were able to "produce believable individual and emergent social behaviors."  AI avatars named Isabella Rodriguez and Tom Moreno, for instance, debated the town's upcoming election. When Isabella asked Tom what he thought of Sam Moore, the candidate running for mayor of Smallville, Tom replied with h...

This week Zac and Don talk with Don's student teacher Sam Posey. They talk about college teacher preparation programs and meeting the requirements to be a teacher. They talk about why the teaching profession seems unappealing to Sam's generation. They discuss whether we should prepare future teachers differently. They also talk about being a student teacher and some of the challenges that go with...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "In louisiana, it takes $1,485 and roughly 2,190 days to become an interior designer. In Washington, it takes $319 and 373 days to become a cosmetologist. The District of Columbia requires $740 to become an auctioneer, and a college degree to watch children for someone else. (Having and watching your own children continues to be an unlicensed affair.) In Kansas, you h...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Forty years ago, the most anxious kids in America were those in low-income households. Beginning in the late 1990s, that flipped, according to the researcher Suniya Luthar. In a series of studies, she found that rich teens in high-achieving schools were the most anxious and depressed. One possibility she explored was that the most rigorous schools created an environm...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The printing press had fooled the world with too many books especially of ancient and scholastic learning that were either obsolete, irrelevant, or misleading for the pursuit of true knowledge.  He compared  the proliferation of books to the confusion of languages at the Tower of Babel. This paragraph comes from the Marginal Revolution blog.  You can read the full pos...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The ways we socialize and date, commute and work are nearly unrecognizable from what they were three years ago. We’ve enjoyed a global pandemic, open employer-employee warfare, a multifront culture war, and social upheavals both great and small. The old conventions are out (we don’t whisper the word cancer or let women off the elevator first anymore, for starters). T...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "But fairness matters. The U.S. economy is the envy of the world because of its core tenets of free markets, robust legal frameworks, and capitalism. The protections against arbitrary seizure attract investment and enable risk-taking. And vigorous open competition between companies drive innovation forward. Banning a company based on hypotheticals—preying on fear and...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Underpinning Bed Bath & Beyond's success was an innovative way of doing business. In addition to deliberate clutter, stores were designed with a "racetrack" floor plan that looped around the store so customers would walk by all the merchandise. Instead of grouping shopping baskets at the entrance, they placed them throughout the store. Messrs. Eisenberg and Feinstein...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: How important is luck?  Few questions more reliable divide conservatives and liberals.  As conservatives correctly observe people who amass great fortunes are almost always extremely talented and hard-working.  But as liberals also rightly note countless others have those same qualities yet never earned much.  In recently years social scientists have discovered that c...

The Best Paragraph I've Heard: Comes from the a16z Podcast.  In this episode Disney CEO Bob Iger is interviewed about running and managing a creative company with creative people.  You can listen to the full episode here: https://a16z.simplecast.com/episodes/creators-creativity-and-technology-with-bob-iger-L98rXqw2 Zac and Don are joined by Lake Orion High School head principal Dr. Danie...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: MEDIEVAL MONKS WERE, in many ways, the original LinkedIn power users. Earnest and with a knack for self-promotion, they loved to read and share inspiring stories of other early Christians who had shown remarkable commitment to their work. There was Sarah, who lived next to a river without ever once looking in its direction, such was her dedication to her faith. James...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "When I heard that you could 3-D-print a building, I imagined something akin to a “Star Trek” replicator—a machine that would whir briefly and then spit out a fully formed house. The actual process is messier and more laborious, and, at the moment, it is largely used to construct walls, while conventional methods are used for foundations, floors, roofs, and finishes....

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The world is closer to catastrophe than ever: the Doomsday Clock, the metaphorical measure of challenges to humanity, was reset to 90 seconds before midnight on Tuesday. The science and security board of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said the move — the closest to widespread calamity humanity has ever been judged to be — was "largely, though not exclusively"...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "There’s just so many institutions that connect us. whether It’s the university of California. weather it’s the us government. whether it’s having served in a military branch. And our institutions have been under attack. Without strong institutions, without believing that we are all working in the agency of something bigger than ourselves, we all Turn very individuali...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Following established guidelines about prescription drugs would seem to be an obvious course of action, especially for the professionals that do the prescribing.  Yes doctors and their family members are less likely than other people to comply with those guidelines, according to a large-scale study co-authored by an MIT economist." This paragraph comes from an articl...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The larger concern when it comes to NYU’s sacking of Maitland Jones is that we’ve normalized a college culture where students imagine that studying 10 hours constitutes a full week’s academic work. Whether or not students have other interests or responsibilities, treating college as an expensive multiyear holiday isn’t good for students, colleges or the taxpayers who...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "At least three petitions on Change.org seek to sleigh Ms. Carey’s 1994 holiday hit, “All I Want for Christmas is You.” One begs the Federal Communications Commission to ban it from radio and calls it “the bane of shoppers, retail workers and pedestrians.” A representative for the singer declined to comment. The pop diva encourages people to start playing her song the...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Unfortunately, my experience at Dons Restaurant was not nearly as pleasant. The tacos were really bad, and the Coke was overly salty. The atmosphere was quiet, but it was also quite sweaty. The worst part, however, was the mean service. I wouldn't recommend Dons Restaurant to anyone." This paragraph comes from ChatGPT.  It was created by artificial intelligence after...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It was a good book, the student told the 14 others in the undergraduate seminar I was teaching, and it included a number of excellent illustrations, such as photographs of relevant Civil War manuscripts. But, he continued, those weren’t very helpful to him, because of course he couldn’t read cursive.  Had I heard him correctly? Who else can’t read cursive? I asked the...