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The Daily Creative is an exercise in the continual practice of spontaneous creativity through short exercises. Each "assignment" should take no more than 15-20 minutes. There are no registrations, no prizes, just a community of people producing art daily.

"A collection of 15 writers - some alive, some long gone - reading their own words (all fiction, with the exception of William Faulkner, whose Nobel Prize speech is included because it's now often taught alongside his novels and stories, and Joan Didion's memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking). " Authors collected: Anne Sexton, David Foster Wallace, Dorothy Parker, Flannery O'Connor, Frank O'Hara, James Baldwin, Jeffrey Eugenides, Joan Didion, Kurt Vonnegut, Marilynne Robinson, Saul Bellow, Truman Capote, William Faulkner, Zadie Smith

"What Makes a Great Teacher? Image credit: Veronika Lukasova Also in our Special Report: National: "How America Can Rise Again" Is the nation in terminal decline? Not necessarily. But securing the future will require fixing a system that has become a joke. Video: "One Nation, On Edge" James Fallows talks to Atlantic editor James Bennet about a uniquely American tradition-cycles of despair followed by triumphant rebirths. Interactive Graphic: "The State of the Union Is ..." ... thrifty, overextended, admired, twitchy, filthy, and clean: the nation in numbers. By Rachael Brown Chart: "The Happiness Index" Times were tough in 2009. But according to a cool Facebook app, people were happier. By Justin Miller On August 25, 2008, two little boys walked into public elementary schools in Southeast Washington, D.C. Both boys were African American fifth-graders. The previous spring, both had tested below grade level in math. One walked into Kimball Elementary School and climbed the stairs to Mr. William Taylor's math classroom, a tidy, powder-blue space in which neither the clocks nor most of the electrical outlets worked. The other walked into a very similar classroom a mile away at Plummer Elementary School. In both schools, more than 80 percent of the children received free or reduced-price lunches. At night, all the children went home to the same urban ecosystem, a zip code in which almost a quarter of the families lived below the poverty line and a police district in which somebody was murdered every week or so. Video: Four teachers in Four different classrooms demonstrate methods that work (Courtesy of Teach for America's video archive, available in February at teachingasleadership.org) At the end of the school year, both little boys took the same standardized test given at all D.C. public schools-not a perfect test of their learning, to be sure, but a relatively objective one (and, it's worth noting, not a very hard one). After a year in Mr. Taylo

"We're excited to announce the Grand Prize of the 2011 What's Your Story? Internet safety video contest!"