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I am a deluded throwback to carefree days, and in my attempt to raise a conscious, creative and socially and environmentally responsible child while lacking the means to also finance her conscious, creative and environmentally and socially responsible lifestyle forever, I’d accidentally gone and raised a hothouse serf. Oops.

Reich’s thesis is that some inequality is inevitable, even necessary, in a free-market system. But what makes an economy stable and prosperous is a strong, vibrant, growing middle class. In the three decades after World War II, a period that Reich calls “the great prosperity,” the G.I. Bill, the expansion of public universities and the rise of labor unions helped create the biggest, best-educated middle class in the world. Reich describes this as an example of a “virtuous circle” in which productivity grows, wages increase, workers buy more, companies hire more, tax revenues increase, government invests more, workers are better educated. On the flip side, when the middle class doesn’t share in the economic gains, it results over time in a downward vicious cycle: Wages stagnate, workers buy less, companies downsize, tax revenues decrease, government cuts programs, workers are less educated, unemployment rises, deficits grow. Since the crash that followed the deregulation of the financial markets, we have struggled to emerge from such a cycle.

What if the kid got it in her head that it was a good idea to go into public service, the helping professions, craftsmanship, scholarship or — God help her — the arts? Wouldn’t a greedier, more back-stabby style of early education be more valuable to the children of the shrinking middle class ­ — one suited to the world they are actually living in?

during the last decade, the pendulum of scientific thought has begun its inevitable swing in the other direction. These days, general cognitive mechanisms, not language-specific ones, are all the rage. We humans are really smart. We’re fantastic at recognizing patterns in our environments—patterns that may have nothing to do with language. Who says that the same abilities that allow us to play the violin aren’t also sufficient for learning subject-verb agreement? Perhaps speech isn’t genetically privileged so much as babies are just really motivated to learn to communicate.

If the brain did evolve for language, how did it do so? An idea favored by some scholars is that better communicators may also have been more reproductively successful. Gradually, as the prevalence of these smooth talkers’ offspring increased in the population, the concentration of genes favorable to linguistic communication may have increased as well.

two recent articles, one published in 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of the Sciences and a 2012 follow-up in PLOS ONE (freely available), rebut this approach

More 5inShare Email Print A defendant in the Atlanta Public Schools case turns herself in at the Fulton County Jail on April 2. (David Goldman/AP) Earlier this week at The Atlantic, Emily Richmond asked whether high-stakes testing caused the Atlanta schools cheating scandal. The answer, I would argue, is yes... just not in the way you might think. Tests don't cause unethical behavior. But they did cause the Atlanta cheating scandal, and they are doing damage to the teaching profession. The argument that tests do not cause unethical behavior is fairly straightforward, and has been articulated by a number of writers. Jonathan Chait quite correctly points out that unethical behavior occurs in virtually all professions -- and that it occurs particularly when there are clear incentives to succeed. Incentivizing any field increases the impetus to cheat. Suppose journalism worked the way teaching traditionally had. You get hired at a newspaper, and your advancement and pay are dictated almost entirely by your years on the job, with almost no chance of either becoming a star or of getting fired for incompetence. Then imagine journalists changed that and instituted the current system, where you can get really successful if your bosses like you or be fired if they don't. You could look around and see scandal after scandal -- phone hacking! Jayson Blair! NBC's exploding truck! Janet Cooke! Stephen Glass! -- that could plausibly be attributed to this frightening new world in which journalists had an incentive to cheat in order to get ahead. It holds true of any field. If Major League Baseball instituted tenure, and maybe used tee-ball rules where you can't keep score and everybody gets a chance to hit, it could stamp out steroid use. Students have been cheating on tests forever -- massive, systematic cheating, you could say. Why? Because they have an incentive to do well. Give teachers and administrators an incentive for their students to do well, and more of them will cheat. For Chait, then, teaching has just been made more like journalism or baseball; it has gone from an incentiveless occupation to one with incentives.

Chait refers to violations of journalistic ethics -- like the phone-hacking scandal -- and suggests they are analogous to Major-League steroid use, and that both are similar to teachers (or students) cheating on tests. But is phone hacking "cheating"

Phone hacking was, then, not an example of cheating. It was a violation of professional ethics. And those ethics are not arbitrarily imposed, but are intrinsic to the practice of journalism as a profession committed to public service and to truth.

Psychologists Shannon Rauch and Kimberley Schanz published their work in the journal Computers in Human Behavior. They sampled 623 Internet users (all white, 70 percent students), asking them to indicate the frequency of their Facebook usage. The group then read one of three versions of a Facebook Notes page they were told was written by a 26-year-old named Jack Brown. "Jack" was white and male. The first version of Jack's message contained what the researchers call a "superiority message": It "contrasted the behaviors of black and white individuals, only to find consistent superiority of the whites."

The researchers then asked participants, for each version of the post, to rate factors like "how much they agreed with the message," "how accurate they found it," "how much they liked the writer," and, significantly, how likely they were to share the post with others

Their findings? "Frequent users are particularly disposed to be influenced by negative racial messages." The group of more-frequent Facebook users didn't differ from others in their reaction to the egalitarian message. But those users "were more positive toward the messages with racist content -- particularly the superiority message." 

The dominant question in American politics today, scholars say, is the relationship between democracy and the capitalist economy. “And to understand capitalism,” said Jonathan Levy, an assistant professor of history at Princeton University and the author of “Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America,” “you’ve got to understand capitalists.”

The new work marries hardheaded economic analysis with the insights of social and cultural history, integrating the bosses’-eye view with that of the office drones — and consumers — who power the system.

I like to call it ‘history from below, all the way to the top,’

a parallel world of pseudo-academia, complete with prestigiously titled conferences and journals that sponsor them. Many of the journals and meetings have names that are nearly identical to those of established, well-known publications and events.

the dark side of open access,” the movement to make scholarly publications freely available.

The number of these journals and conferences has exploded in recent years as scientific publishing has shifted from a traditional business model for professional societies and organizations built almost entirely on subscription revenues to open access, which relies on authors or their backers to pay for the publication of papers online, where anyone can read them.

Though Britain sent more than 9,000 students to the United States last year — more than ever before — and Germany sent about 9,300, both lagged behind Turkey, which has been sending more than 10,000 students a year to the United States since 2000.

demographics had much to do with the number of Turkish students on U.S. campuses. “There was a baby boom here from the late 1970s to the early 1990s, which is still just reaching the age to go to college,” he said. “Turkey expanded its own educational capacity a lot in the past 20 years. From a few dozen universities, the current figure is 164, and that number keeps growing. But it hasn’t grown fast enough to keep up with the demographic bulge.”

The highly competitive nature of admissions poses a problem for Turkish families, which traditionally place a strong emphasis on education.

Educators unveiled new guidelines on Tuesday that call for sweeping changes in the way science is taught in the United States

The guidelines, known as the Next Generation Science Standards, are the first broad national recommendations for science instruction since 1996. They were developed by a consortium of 26 state governments and several groups representing scientists and teachers.

The focus would be helping students become more intelligent science consumers by learning how scientific work is done: how ideas are developed and tested, what counts as strong or weak evidence, and how insights from many disciplines fit together into a coherent picture of the world.

Hitchens’s beliefs about his advanced cancer and its treatment were, for a man whose fame rested on his scepticism, uncharacteristically optimistic. I hesitate to use the word delusional, as he admitted that he would be very lucky to survive, but he clearly steadfastly hoped, right to the end, that his particular case of advanced cancer might lie on the sparsely populated right side of the bell-shaped curve of outcome statistics.

I wonder if all that medicine – which was, in fact, a form of poison – was worth it. David got ten more years, and two young children. But he also endured a disfiguring, disabling, brutal physical battering from the surgeries and chemo-sessions that tackling a tough brain tumor allow for. I say “allow for” because “required” is not the right word. What the chemo did to Christopher was beyond description – and what’s left of your body, even if the chemo works, can be extremely vulnerable to infections and diseases that can be worse than the cancer.

It seems odder to me for Christians to be as exercized by life-extension as the atheist. Put that down to the strange extremism of Ratzinger’s innovations on the question of “life”.

This is watching the sausage of macroeconomics being made. It's not appetizing. Seemingly small choices in how to handle the data deliver dramatically different results. And it's not hard to see why: The Reinhart-Rogoff data set, according to Herndon-Ash-Pollin's analysis, contained just 110 "country-years" of debt/GDP over 90%, and 63 of those come from just three countries: Belgium, Greece, and the UK. This is a problem inherent to macroeconomics. It's not like an experiment that one can run multiple times, or observations that can be compared across millions of individuals or even hundreds of corporations. In the words attributed to economist Paul Samuelson, "We have but one sample of history." And it's just not a very big sample.

So what to do about it? One response is to dig for more data, and Reinhart and Rogoff have been doing that, going back to 1800 to examine episodes of public debt overhangs. Another is to have different people crunch it in different ways, which is what Herndon-Ash-Pollin did, or assemble different data sets, as several other scholars have done.

But the biggest challenge may be how to present it.

the paper instantly became famous; it was, and is, surely the most influential economic analysis of recent years.

In fact, Reinhart-Rogoff quickly achieved almost sacred status among self-proclaimed guardians of fiscal responsibility; their tipping-point claim was treated not as a disputed hypothesis but as unquestioned fact.

the truth is that Reinhart-Rogoff faced substantial criticism from the start, and the controversy grew over time. As soon as the paper was released, many economists pointed out that a negative correlation between debt and economic performance need not mean that high debt causes low growth. It could just as easily be the other way around

"This type of stuff probably happens all the time. What's unusual here is that someone checked it," says Ray Panko, a professor at the University of Hawaii and the elder statesman of small coterie of research academics who study—yes—Excel errors. Panko's meta-analysis of several such studies, he claims, indicates that 84 percent of spreadsheets contain some kind of materially significant error.

There are ample anecdotes to support Panko and Powell's claims

 In 2012, JP Morgan discovered that it had been grossly miscalculating a risk-management measure—possibly for years—due to a mischievous Excel formula.

Seated at a drafting table with his back to his subject, the artist, Gil Zamora, asks the women a series of questions about their features. “Tell me about your chin,” he says in the soft voice reminiscent of a therapist’s. Crow’s feet, big jaws, protruding chins and dark circles are just some of the many physical features that women criticized about themselves. After he finishes a drawing of a woman, he then draws another sketch of the same woman, only this time it is based on how someone else describes her. The sketches are then hung side by side and the women are asked to compare them. In every instance, the second sketch is more flattering than the first.

The video, shot in a loft in San Francisco, has become a sensation online. The three-minute version has been viewed more than 7.5 million times on the Dove YouTube channel, and the version that is twice as long has been viewed more than 936,000 times.

Dove executives said the campaign resulted from company research that showed only 4 percent of women consider themselves beautiful

An online video, presented in three- and six-minute versions, shows a forensic sketch artist who is asked to draw a series of women based only on their descriptions. Seated at a drafting table with his back to his subject, the artist, Gil Zamora, asks the women a series of questions about their features. “Tell me about your chin,” he says in the soft voice reminiscent of a therapist’s. Crow’s feet, big jaws, protruding chins and dark circles are just some of the many physical features that women criticized about themselves. After he finishes a drawing of a woman, he then draws another sketch of the same woman, only this time it is based on how someone else describes her. The sketches are then hung side by side and the women are asked to compare them. In every instance, the second sketch is more flattering than the first.

The video, shot in a loft in San Francisco, has become a sensation online. The three-minute version has been viewed more than 7.5 million times on the Dove YouTube channel, and the version that is twice as long has been viewed more than 936,000 times.

Dove executives said the campaign resulted from company research that showed only 4 percent of women consider themselves beautiful.

If you already live in the heartland, the message is to stay. If you come from the heartland and have left, the message is to return. But what if you’re one of the tens of millions of people who can’t stay in or go home to the heartland because your home — your roots — are in the BosWash corridor of the Northeast or the urbanized areas of the West Coast? …

is this even possible in a place where paying my mortgage and other bills requires that my wife and I — like my equally striving neighbors — devote ourselves to high-stress work during nearly every waking hour of our days? If I were independently wealthy, perhaps the good life that Dreher describes would be a possibility in the Philadelphia suburbs. But alas…

There are trade-offs in all things, and no perfect solution, geographical or otherwise. Thing is, life is short, and choices have to be made. It’s not that people living in these workaholic suburbs are bad, not at all; it’s that the culture they (we) live in defines the Good in such a way that choosing to “do the right thing” ends up hollowing out your life, leaving you vulnerable in ways you may not see until tragedy strikes.

I do not consider myself a religious person in the usual sense, but there is a religious aspect to some highs. The heightened sensitivity in all areas gives me a feeling of communion with my surroundings, both animate and inanimate. Sometimes a kind of existential perception of the absurd comes over me and I see with awful certainty the hypocrisies and posturing of myself and my fellow men. And at other times, there is a different sense of the absurd, a playful and whimsical awareness. Both of these senses of the absurd can be communicated, and some of the most rewarding highs I’ve had have been in sharing talk and perceptions and humor.

Cannabis brings us an awareness that we spend a lifetime being trained to overlook and forget and put out of our minds. A sense of what the world is really like can be maddening; cannabis has brought me some feelings for what it is like to be crazy, and how we use that word ‘crazy’ to avoid thinking about things that are too painful for us

It’s not every day that someone stumbles upon a major new strategic thinker during family movie night. But that’s what happened to Michael Chwe, an associate professor of political science at the University of California, Los Angeles, when he sat down with his children some eight years ago to watch “Clueless,” the 1995 romantic comedy based on Jane Austen’s “Emma.”

In 230 diagram-heavy pages, Mr. Chwe argues that Austen isn’t merely fodder for game-theoretical analysis, but an unacknowledged founder of the discipline itself: a kind of Empire-waisted version of the mathematician and cold war thinker John von Neumann, ruthlessly breaking down the stratagems of 18th-century social warfare.

Or, as Mr. Chwe puts it in the book, “Anyone interested in human behavior should read Austen because her research program has results.”