The Parents in My Classroom– Recently, one of my ninth grade English students told me her parents rewarded her for making the honor roll by allowing her to text them during class. “They like to know what I’m doing in the classroom as it’s happening live,” she said. “We have a cellphone policy,” I reminded her.
He died in a Jewish ghetto. How did his long-lost art end up on a bench in San Francisco?–
The university monopoly must be broken–In the decades since Vannevar Bush’s report, the idea of meritocratic universities, open to all, gradually metamorphosed into “college for all”, and even “Yale or jail”. In light of America’s deeply entrenched small-d democratic passions, it was perhaps inevitable that the notion of universities being open to anyone with ability would eventually come to mean that everyone should attend one. unherd.com
UNESCO’s Quest to Save the World’s Intangible Heritage–Unesco is best known for its prestigious list of World Heritage sites. But its most interesting endeavor might be a survey of humanity’s cultural practices. For two decades, the U.N. agency has been cataloguing the world’s intangible heritage, a label that it has applied to everything from truffle hunting to capoeira. www.newyorker.com
Can We Deliberate, Please?–Indeed, the most striking feature of the six hours of group deliberation was the palpable wish to maintain among themselves the bipartisan comity that so many of them said they yearned for in our public life. Many of the proposals felt so technocratic that the participants weren’t clear about which side, if either, they were likely to benefit. At times, however, the discussion veered toward the third rail of voter fraud. democracyjournal.org
The Case Against Children–Probably because they have encountered the term “antinatalism,” or similar-sounding ones like “child-free,” in the New York Times or the Washington Post, on NPR or the BBC or CNN, all of which have asked in the past few years whether people should still have children with the planet heating up so severely. Generally, these articles and news segments conclude that it’s fine to have kids, as individual self-denial isn’t what big social changes are made of—a conclusion that frustrates many antinatalists, who argue that making the world better is just one of the numerous benefits of abstaining from procreation, but not the primary one. The point is that if people stopped having babies, there would no longer be anyone new whom we might need to protect from climate change, or who would be obliged to try to solve it. The point is that the planet would be better off without people, and that people would be better off not being people. harpers.org
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