The Best Paragraph I've Read...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Stacey is a hard-liner in a war being waged in homes everywhere as grown-ups attempt to limit smartphone use that they believe can be harmful to kids, even as they struggle to establish healthy habits with their own phones. And, big surprise, the parents aren’t winning. Because it’s not just their children they’re up against, but also a tech industry pushing products...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: When Covid-19 began to sweep across the country in March 2020, schools in every state closed their doors. Remote instruction effectively became a national policy for the rest of that spring. A few months later, however, school districts began to make different decisions about whether to reopen. Across much of the South and the Great Plains as well as some pockets of t...

Share your comment about the 90's.  What did we get right or wrong?  What do you remember about the decade?  Please share your name and where you're from.  We hope to post a compilation podcast of your comments. Click Here.  Look for the plus button to make your recording.  The Best Paragraph I've Read: The internet was coming.  The internet was coming.  The...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "Every exploit was graded on a sliding scale, and those following the rules most dogmatically were sanctioned most strictly.  Conversely, if your only core value was conventional success, you would never be seen as credible, but you also couldn't be criticized for abandoning the values you never originally possessed."   This paragraph comes from Chuck Klosterman's boo...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: “Tell me about this stain,” 46-year-old Vaughn Smith asks his clients. “Well,” says one of the homeowners, “Schroeder rubbed his bottom across it.” Vaughn knows just what to do about that, and the couple, Courtney Stamm and Kelly Widelska, know they can trust him to do it. They’d been hiring him for years, once watching him erase even a splattered Pepto Bismol stain....

The Best Paragraph I've Read: In the meantime, Chinese studios are getting better at making movies, and they’re not afraid to take an anti-American stance. In 2017’s popular “Wolf Warrior 2,” the Chinese hero Leng Feng saves African villagers from an American mercenary called Big Daddy, who proclaims his people’s supremacy moments before Leng triumphs and kills him. The consequences are asymmetric...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Before I went to Florida, I had thoughtlessly anticipated a convocation of fogies, or at least of people more of my parents’ generation, within range of eighty, or even that of my grandparents, a few of whom I saw wither away years ago at well-appointed but thoroughly depressing old-age enclaves outside of Philadelphia. But many if not most of the people I met in Dayt...

the Best Paragraph I've Read: Your ability to make life more difficult is unmatchable. If an easy solution is available—and I mean a mind-numbingly obvious one—you decide that maybe the fix can’t be so simple and that you’d better let things marinate for a few days, at which point, yes, they’ve now become the nasty thing that you imagined, seeped in a rancid cesspool of indecision and procrastinat...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Justice, as we’re frequently told, is supposed to be blind. But court seats have never been filled by blind picks. “A judge is a lawyer who is a politician who has a friend,” Judge Paul Leahy once told his then-clerk Floyd Abrams, piercing his way to the truth. Liberal presidents pick liberal nominees and conservative presidents pick conservative ones. It’s built into...

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,...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: When the brain encounters information, especially during the act of reading and learning, it's searching for and making connections to what is personally relevant and meaningful.  What is relevant and meaningful to an individual is based on his or her cultural frame of reference.  Finding cultural relevance and personal connections give us perspective, engages our att...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: A fighter plane equipped with artificial intelligence could eventually execute tighter turns, take greater risks, and get off better shots than human pilots. But the objective of the ace program is to transform a pilot’s role, not to remove it entirely. As darpa envisions it, the A.I. will fly the plane in partnership with the pilot, who will remain “in the loop,” mon...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: State Rep. Norlin Mommsen's bill would require cameras to be installed in all public school classrooms that are not being used for special education or gym. Parents or legal guardians would be given access to live feeds, which they could access while school is in session. School districts would be required to pay to set up and maintain the cameras. Mommsen told The Ce...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: The star of the show was the F-150 Lightning—an electric version of the pickup that belongs to the best-selling vehicle line of any kind in the U.S. since the early nineteen-eighties. In a good year, Ford sells on average nine hundred thousand gas-powered F-series trucks, and earns about forty billion dollars annually from the line. The Lightning, together with the Ma...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Semmelweis Reflex: People tend to reject evidence that doesn’t fit the established worldview. Named for Ignaz Semmelweis, a surgeon who, before the discovery of germs, claimed washing hands could help prevent patient infections. He was ridiculed and locked away in a mental asylum Planck’s Principle: “Science progresses one funeral at a time.” Scientists, being human,...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: YEARS AGO, I asked a friend what kind of case she planned to buy for her shiny new flip phone. She paused, a little offended. “I don't like to buy stuff for my stuff,” she said. Those words drilled directly into my hippocampus, never to depart. She's right! I thought. Don't buy stuff stuff! So simple! ... ... ...  The problem is that certain kinds of stuff simply attr...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: "The way it works is a little like a crypto-infused and lawsuit-focused GoFundMe, if the crowd stood to profit from their investment. The company takes advantage of a rule created through former President Barack Obama’s JOBS Act, which allowed a private company to crowdfund up to $5 million from Americans, regardless of their wealth. Using the Avalanche blockchain, Ry...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Our bedtimes were filled with stories: “Guess How Much I Love You.” “The Day the Crayons Quit.” “Ramona Quimby, Age 8.” “Madeline.” Now she is 11 and more interested in TikTok than in 12 little girls in two straight lines who lived in a house that was covered in vines. And while she certainly can read, she really doesn’t like to. As someone who comes from a family of...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Michigan was part of a wave of states that implemented teacher accountability measures, based on the studies that showed students learned more when they were in classrooms with highly effective teachers. Before the reforms, determining which teachers were superstars was nearly impossible, because virtually all teachers were rated as effective. Having a four-category r...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Bitcoin is also easy to lose. Conventional money comes full of safeguards: paper currency is distinctively colored and has a unique feel; centuries of design have gone into folding wallets and zippered purses. And once your money is deposited in a bank you have a record of what you own. If you lose your statement, the bank will send you another. Forget your online pas...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Satire is "the use of humor, irony, exaggeration, or ridicule to expose and criticize people's stupidity or vices, particularly in the context of contemporary politics and other topical issues." This paragraph is the result of a Google Search for the definition of the word "Satire." Zac and Don discuss satire in our society.  They do this by discussing the role of pho...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: For brand-building, it makes sense that TIME has steered away from bad guys; “Person of the Year” today sounds a lot like an endorsement, in part because TIME’s original idea has proven so catchy and reproducible. But it also leaves Americans the poorer for it: The point is to identify people who matter and let readers — and citizens — process that how they will. Give...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Some states have eliminated language requirements for high school students: In Oklahoma and Texas they can opt instead for computer coding, while in California they can choose visual and performing arts classes or technical education. One in five Americans speaks a language other than English at home, yet we have abandoned building our foreign language skills and cede...

The Best Paragraphs I've Read: Abstraction: There are scales of explanation. A human can be considered a person, mammal, collection of cells, collection of stardust. Sometimes the reason people can’t see eye to eye is that they’re unwittingly considering things at different levels of abstraction. Scope Neglect: We evolved for the small scale of tribal life, so we can’t comprehend the big numbers t...

The Best Paragraph I've Read: Some proponents of National Divorce say not to worry — it can all be worked out amicably without any unpleasantness, like, you know, the war that killed roughly 700,000 people the last time a region of the U.S. tried to secede. But if we are going to split up because we are irreparably divided and can’t even agree on bathroom policies or pronouns, how are we going to...