Critical Issues in Literature

"n northern Alaska, the temperature at some permafrost sites has risen by more than 4 degrees Fahrenheit since the 1980s, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported in November. And in recent years, many spots have reached record temperatures. "Arctic shows no sign of returning to reliably frozen region of recent past decades," NOAA wrote in its annual Arctic Report Card last year. The consequences of this warming could have ripple effects around the world. To explain why, Douglas takes me deeper down into the tunnel. "This is really an amazing feature," he says, shining his flashlight up to the ceiling. Crispy grass is dangling upside-down above our heads. "It's green grass - from 25,000 years ago," he exclaims. "It has been preserved that way for 25,000 years." The permafrost is packed with the remains of ancient life. From prehistoric grass and trees to woolly mammoths and woolly rhinoceroses, just about every creature that lived on the tundra over the past 100,000 years is buried and preserved down in the permafrost. And all this life is made of carbon. So there's a massive amount of carbon buried down here. "The permafrost contains twice as much carbon as is currently in Earth's atmosphere," Douglas says. "That's 1,600 billion metric tons." In fact, there's more carbon in the permafrost, Douglas says, than all the carbon humans have spewed into the atmosphere since the Industrial Revolution - first with steam trains, then with coal plants, cars and planes."

"Welcome to the Chronicle, an online source for sharing new findings and ideas about youth mentoring.  The goal of the Chronicle is to encourage active dialogue around evidence-based practice in youth mentoring in ways that improve the practice of youth mentoring."

"Below, we review the highlights of this research, first discussing different approaches to youth mentoring and then summarizing the research on (1) the effects of mentoring relationships on self-esteem, (2) factors that predict variation in relationship effectiveness, and (3) the processes through which these relationships exert such effects."

"Discussion and analysis of screenplays, scripts, and story structure for filmmakers and novelists, based on the blogger's book: "THE MORAL PREMISE: Harnessing Virtue and Vice for Box Office Success"."

"Six qualities that make you a good mentor for teens"

In this first part of a two-part series, we use resources in The Times to help students explore difficult ethical questions related to patient autonomy, physician autonomy and scarce resources, such as: * Should fertility clinics be required to offer services to gay or lesbian couples? * Should parents have the right to refuse lifesaving medical care for their children because of religious beliefs? * Should limits be placed on the amount of money the government spends on any one patient's health care?

One of the most difficult challenges in the field of bioethics is balancing the needs of individual patients against the welfare of society. In Part II of a two-part lesson series, we ask students to do just that: to balance the interests of patients against each other and in relation to the broader population. Using resources in The Times, we have students consider complex questions, like: * How should scarce health care resources, such as livers for transplant, be allocated? * Should organ donors be paid? * What limits, if any, should be placed on the field of human "genetic engineering"? * Should lithium be added to the drinking water supply if it can be proved to lower suicide rates in the larger population?"

Adolescence comes with a thorny problem: Teenagers suddenly yearn for privacy just when their lives are expanding to include a range of risky new opportunities. Whether or not they have something worrisome to hide, normally developing tweens often start to shut their bedroom doors and become cagey about their time online. And when teenagers act aloof, their parents often feel tempted, if not duty bound, to secretly search bedrooms and surreptitiously scan online activity to ensure that their child isn't engaged with drugs, drinking or digital misdeeds."

"A good Black Mirror episode either grounds a futuristic, high-tech, high-concept premise in a relatable context, or it steers the story into unexpected, emotionally resonant places. The best ones, like "San Junipero" or "Be Right Back," do both. Only one of the new episodes, "ArkAngel," succeeds on that metric. "

"Alison Gopnik, a psychology and philosophy professor at the University of California, Berkeley, thinks parents-especially middle-class parents-view their children as entities they can mold into a specific image. "The idea is that if you just do the right things, get the right skills, read the right books, you're going to be able to shape your child into a particular kind of adult," she says. Alison has researched children's development for decades, and thinks modern views of what it means to be a parent don't align with the way children learn and grow."

"What is it that makes you...you? NPR's Shankar Vedantam explores new research that suggests the labels we use to categorize people affect not just who they are now, but who they'll be in the future."

"When I ask the group why they think these types of books are so popular with teens, they tell me it has a lot to do with relatability. "There tends to be a common teen-angst thing, like: 'Oh the whole world is against me, the whole world is so screwed up,' " Will explains. Teenagers are cynical, adds Aaron Yost, 16. And they should be: "To be fair, they were born into a world that their parents kind of really messed up." Everyone here agrees: The plots in dystopia feel super familiar. That's kind of what makes the books scary - and really good. Think of it like this: Teen readers themselves are characters in a strange land. Rules don't make sense. School doesn't always make sense. And they don't have a ton of power."

It seemed like a good idea at the time. Not so much afterward, when I got driven downtown in handcuffs for spray-painting "Corporate Deathburgers" across a McDonald's. I earned myself a long night in jail for my lack of judgment. But my family and friends - and perhaps most important, my college, the University of Michigan - never learned about the episode (until now). Because in 1985, a college student could get a little self-righteous, make a bad decision, face consequences and then go home, having learned a "valuable lesson." These days I work as the senior communications officer at another college, where I spend a healthy fraction of my time dealing with students who've made mistakes of their own. I recognize myself in them: intellectually adventurous, skeptical, newly aware of life's injustices. They're also different from me in many ways: less Grateful Dead and Dead Kennedys, much more technology. That's the important bit. Because for all of the supposed liberating power of their digital devices, they might as well be wearing ankle monitors. Technological connectedness has made it much harder for them to make mistakes and learn from them. Today's students live their lives so publicly - through the technology we provide them without training - that much simpler errors than mine earn them the wrath of the entire internet"

ARE THE CHINESE the very worst people in the world? Are we the most off-putting, tunnel-visioned, robotically competitive, and academically frightening? Consider the recent media firestorm around Amy Chua's Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, a book that was excerpted in The Wall Street Journal under the now infamous headline "Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior." In case you are the only person in America who hasn't yet read it, this is Chua's recipe for raising successful children: Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:    * attend a sleepover    * have a playdate    * be in a school play    * complain about not being in a school play    * watch TV or play computer games    * choose their own extracurricular activities    * get any grade less than an A    * not be the #1 student in every subject except gym and drama    * play any instrument other than the piano or violin    * not play the piano or violin Cue the much-documented howl emanating from a gazillion online commenters, many crying child abuse. From my perspective, both Chua's defenders and detractors misconstrue Tiger Mother, but first let's acknowledge that of course the book wouldn't have inflamed readers so much if they didn't harbor the troubling suspicion that-at least in these nosebleedingly high-stakes times for upper-middle-class children-Chua was right."

"How do you define success for your kids? This is what the Tiger Mom debate boils down to. What do we want for our children, and what does their success (or lack thereof) mean for our own identities? No matter how you feel about Amy Chua, author of "Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother" and ground zero for the current battle over the best way to parent, you have to give her credit for being willing to ask these hard questions, and you have to really examine her answers."