The Best Paragraph I've Read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Thanks to a group of anonymous benefactors, students educated in the city's K-12 school system receive paid tuition at almost any college in the state. Other cities have similar initiatives, but the Kalamazoo Promise is unusually generous. It's also one of the few programs of its kind to have been robustly evaluated — in this case by Timothy Bartik, Brad Hershbein, an...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "You got a better theory? Have at it. Maybe the evidence emerging over coming hours and days will illuminate new possibilities. For now, though, it’s worth reflecting that election night surprises — and even murky, inconclusive results—are themselves a vindication of democratic culture. Operatives, journalists, the politicians themselves — they are all frauds when the...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: It’s a transition away from more than a decade of “gee-whiz” projects—think self-driving cars, flying cars, metaverses and crypto—all fueled by seemingly limitless cash and venture-backed meal-replacement slurries . The task at hand now: the sometimes-boring but always-important work of building and expanding businesses that actually make money, by delivering things p...

There is no paragraph or article this week.  Instead, Zac and Don speak with their longtime friend and colleague Chad Swett who is on the verge of retiring from education.  The three discuss whether education and students have changed over the past twenty-five years.  They also seek Chad's advice for teachers remaining in the profession along with his proudest moments in the classro...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The past two decades, however, have witnessed a resurgence in door-to-door. Tom Karren, the founder of Vantage Marketing, which has more than a thousand reps selling pest control, said, “Twenty-two years ago, I was told after my first summer on the doors—by my family, my professors, my mentors—that door-to-door was a dying industry. Now it’s at least fifty times bigg...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The cost of raising a child through high school has risen to more than $300,000 because of inflation that is running close to a four-decade high, according to a Brookings Institution estimate. It determined that a married, middle-income couple with two children would spend $310,605—or an average of $18,271 a year—to raise their younger child born in 2015 through age...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Welcome to the year 2030. Welcome to my city - or should I say, "our city." I don't own anything. I don't own a car. I don't own a house. I don't own any appliances or any clothes. It might seem odd to you, but it makes perfect sense for us in this city. Everything you considered a product, has now become a service. We have access to transportation, accommodation, foo...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Under scenarios deemed likely by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a connection between ocean currents and discharge would increase the overall discharge rate in one region of the continent by some 10% by the end of the century. But to emphasize the idea being tested, the modelers used human influences almost three times larger. Even thoug...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: I drive a stick shift. It’s a pain, sometimes. Clutching and shifting in bumper-to-bumper traffic wears you out. My wife can’t drive my car, which limits our transit options. And when I’m at the wheel, I can’t hold a cold, delicious slushie in one hand, at least not safely. But despite the inconvenience, I love a manual transmission. I love the feeling that I am opera...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Technology is disrupting the market for education just as it has disrupted the market for news. We do not yet know how the industry will shake out, but a few points can be made with confidence. Online education offers tremendous savings both in terms of money and of time. Online education will also increase the quality of education for many but not all courses, especi...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The movement, known as E.A. to its practitioners, who themselves are known as E.A.s, takes as its premise that people ought to do good in the most clear-sighted, ambitious, and unsentimental way possible. Among other back-of-the-envelope estimates, E.A.s believe that a life in the developing world can be saved for about four thousand dollars. Effective altruists have...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Non-Americans Are Sharing The Quintessential "American" Things They've Always Wanted To Experience." This paragraph comes from BuzzFeed in an article titled: "Non-Americans Are Sharing The Quintessential "American" Things They've Always Wanted To Experience, And The Responses Are Honestly So Funny."  The article is written by Hannah Dobrogosz.  You can read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: A shirt would only muffle the Liver King’s message: that the modern world has made men unconscionably soft, and that the only way to fight back is by living more like our earliest, most-jacked ancestors. The way to accomplish this, according to the Liver King, is by following his nine “ancestral tenets” (sleep, eat, move, shield, connect, cold, sun, fight, bond), doin...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The Libermans’ theory is that, in terms of stuff that America’s big wealth can invest in, people are more appealing than the current catalogue of middling venture-capital funds, shipping firms, and companies selling toothbrushes by mail. Instead of putting money into a fund for startups, investors would be free to find an ingenious entrepreneur and invest in her entir...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In any case, an airplane is just transportation. A big ship is a floating manse, with a hierarchy written right into the nomenclature. If it has a crew working aboard, it’s a yacht. If it’s more than ninety-eight feet, it’s a superyacht. After that, definitions are debated, but people generally agree that anything more than two hundred and thirty feet is a megayacht,...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Milk is still pasteurized and homogenized, as Chamberlain’s carton boasted, but it’s also been lionized and demonized, canonized and eulogized, weaponized and publicized. Got Milk? Milk has left society in general and sports in particular polarized. “It has been argued about for at least the past ten thousand years,” writes Mark Kurlansky in his 400-page history of mi...

The Best Paragraph I've Read It was a sticky Thursday afternoon in the middle of summer break when dozens of teenagers walked through the doors of their high school. One of the world’s most dominant teams was about to start math practice. There was probability in one classroom and pre-algebra next door, code-breaking down the hall and number theory around the corner. And there were few adults to b...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: One of the first staged train wrecks was done in 1895 by a railroad equipment salesman named A.L. Streeter in Ohio. The wreck used the same formula that nearly all other staged train wrecks would follow for the next 40 years. Organizers would lay a stretch of track, usually anywhere from 1,800 feet to a mile-long, and then get two old steam locomotives and put them at...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: For the past decade, people like me—youngish, urbanish, professionalish—got a sweetheart deal from Uber, the Uber-for-X clones, and that whole mosaic of urban amenities in travel, delivery, food, and retail that vaguely pretended to be tech companies. Almost each time you or I ordered a pizza or hailed a taxi , the company behind that app lost money. In effect, these...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The regulatory state exists because of the practical necessity for a traffic cop to oversee common resources and enforce minimum norms of safety and fairness. This is a dynamic role, requiring government to be an active umpire in a crowded world, adapting to new challenges while keeping its own house in order. But America's massive, convoluted, rigid legal structure m...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: “I need you to take him.” The father on the phone was upset. If his 10-year-old son did not make the team at the $2,500-per-season private baseball club where I coached, the boy would lose friends and the family’s routines would be upended, he argued. They would have to drive to another suburb for ball games. Looking for a deeper, more forceful argument, the dad added...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The historian Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a means of survival, a rite of passage for the nuclear family, a route to self-improvement, and a form of First Amendment expressi...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: IN 2018, TOM CRUISE finally joined Instagram, and fans sure felt the need for speed: He picked up 550,000 followers in less than an hour. Now he's up to 6.5 million followers, and they're greeted by the actor's self-assessment of his own career in his bio. He could have gone with "Three-time Oscar nominee," or "Sold $10 billion worth of movie tickets." But instead, he...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: As Bryan Caplan notes in his 2011 book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, parents have only small effects on their children’s health, life expectancy, education, and religiosity (though studies have found that they have moderate effects on drug and alcohol use and sexual behavior, particularly during the teenage years, as well as how kids feel about their parents). S...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Are you looking to consider the grim realities of war, or to acknowledge the humanity of “the enemy”? Top Gun elides those inconvenient complications. If you are in search of some full-throttle patriotism, however, this film has you covered. Top Gun indulges in its metaphors. A hero who is young and arrogant and attempting to come to terms with his legacy might remind...