Trump, hillbillies and race - The Washington Post - 0 views
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We all now know that Trump’s rise has been fueled by the alienation and anger of the country’s white working class. That cohort has seen its incomes stagnate, cities crumble and dreams vanish. But Vance gets underneath the data and shows us what these impersonal forces mean to actual people. He describes the abandoned children, the poor work habits, the drug abuse, the violence, the rage. But he does it with sympathy and love.
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For Vance, the problem is ultimately cultural, one of values, attitudes and mores. “We hillbillies must wake the hell up,” he writes, and “stop blaming Obama or Bush or faceless companies and ask ourselves what can we do to make things better.”
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His own life story — coming from low expectations, dysfunctional relationships and persistent poverty to end up a graduate of Yale Law School and a Silicon Valley executive — demonstrates that grit can conquer all.
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Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire | Marc Parry | News | The Guardian - 0 views
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Elkins emerged with a book that turned her initial thesis on its head. The British had sought to quell the Mau Mau uprising by instituting a policy of mass detention. This system – “Britain’s gulag”, as Elkins called it – had affected far more people than previously understood. She calculated that the camps had held not 80,000 detainees, as official figures stated, but between 160,000 and 320,000. She also came to understand that colonial authorities had herded Kikuyu women and children into some 800 enclosed villages dispersed across the countryside. These heavily patrolled villages – cordoned off by barbed wire, spiked trenches and watchtowers – amounted to another form of detention. In camps, villages and other outposts, the Kikuyu suffered forced labour, disease, starvation, torture, rape and murder.
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“I’ve come to believe that during the Mau Mau war British forces wielded their authority with a savagery that betrayed a perverse colonial logic,” Elkins wrote in Britain’s Gulag. “Only by detaining nearly the entire Kikuyu population of 1.5 million people and physically and psychologically atomising its men, women, and children could colonial authority be restored and the civilising mission reinstated.” After nearly a decade of oral and archival research, she had uncovered “a murderous campaign to eliminate Kikuyu people, a campaign that left tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, dead”.
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lkins knew her findings would be explosive. But the ferocity of the response went beyond what she could have imagined. Felicitous timing helped. Britain’s Gulag hit bookstores after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan had touched off debate about imperialism. It was a moment when another historian, Niall Ferguson, had won acclaim for his sympathetic writing on British colonialism. Hawkish intellectuals pressed America to embrace an imperial role. Then came Bagram. Abu Ghraib. Guantánamo. These controversies primed readers for stories about the underside of empire.
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Spurs coach Gregg Popovich 'sick to my stomach' after US election | Sport | The Guardian - 0 views
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“He is in charge of our country,” Popovich said in a lengthy and impassioned press conference speech before Friday’s 96-86 win over the Pistons. “That’s disgusting.”
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Popovich spoke for several minutes, even telling a reporter who tried to interrupt at one point that he wasn’t finished.
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He said: “I’m a rich white guy and I’m sick to my stomach thinking about it,” said Popovich, a graduate of the US air force academy and the next coach of the US Olympic men’s basketball team. “I can’t imagine being a Muslim right now or a woman or an African-American, Hispanic, a handicapped person. How disenfranchised they might feel. For anyone in those groups that voted for him, it’s just beyond my comprehension how they ignore all that.”
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Richard Rorty's 1998 Book Suggested Election 2016 Was Coming - The New York Times - 0 views
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Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands of times, generating a run on the book
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It’s worth rereading those tweeted paragraphs:[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. … One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
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His basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting.
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Aide to Md. lawmaker fabricated article on fraudulent votes for Clinton - The Washingto... - 0 views
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Del. David E. Vogt III (R-Frederick) said he terminated Cameron Harris “on the spot” after learning that he was the mastermind behind ChristianTimesNewspaper.com and its fabricated Sept. 30 article, which reported that there were tens of thousands of “fraudulent Clinton votes found” in an Ohio warehouse.
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Harris, who graduated from Davidson College in North Carolina in May, had worked for the Republican delegate since June. He did not return a call for comment, but he apologized in a Twitter post to “those disappointed by my actions” and called for a “larger dialogue about how Americans approach the media” and other issues.
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Harris told the Times that he created fake news to earn money. After investing $5 for the domain name, he earned about $22,000 in online advertising revenue.
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As Jobs Vanish, Forgetting What Government Is For - The New York Times - 0 views
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for all our love of rugged individualism, government played a large and underappreciated role in reshaping the American economy before — and it could do so again.
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The government also played a crucial role on the other side of this transformation: bolstering workers’ human capital. From the Land-Grant College Act of 1862, which created a network of public universities, to the offer in the G.I. Bill of Rights to pay for the college education of veterans returning from World War II, the federal government invested aggressively in higher education.
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Between 1910 and 1940, the high school graduation rate of American 18-year-olds increased to 50 percent from 9 percent.
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'A House Divided Against Itself Cannot Stand': Ken Burns' Stanford Commencement Address - 0 views
Social Club at Harvard Rejects Calls to Admit Women, Citing Risk of Sexual Misconduct -... - 0 views
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Social Club at Harvard Rejects Calls to Admit Women, Citing Risk of Sexual Misconduct
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This week, that silence was broken when an official with the group, the Porcellian Club, said that admitting women could increase the chances of sexual misconduct.
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“Forcing single-gender organizations to accept members of the opposite sex could potentially increase, not decrease, the potential for sexual misconduct,
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Via Meadia: Walter Russell Mead's Blog | The American Interest - 0 views
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With declining profits and grueling 70-hour work weeks, law has long since left behind its genteel heyday as a fulfilling and patrician lifestyle. The legal profession is just one of many undergoing seismic changes in the face of transformational technologies and new economic realities. No doubt many enterprising young lawyers will find creative ways of dealing with these changes, but in the meantime, we wish the 45,000 students graduating law school this year the best of luck.
To Make America Great Again, We Need to Leave the Country - Elliot Gerson - The Atlantic - 1 views
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When Americans travel abroad, they are often surprised at how well other countries do the things we used to think America does best. In fact, one reason so many American businesses still lead the world is because they benchmark the competition and emulate best practices. But suggest to an American politician that we should try to learn from other countries, and he will look at you like you are from Mars. It is somehow unpatriotic even to raise such comparisons.
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The U.S. is, for too many, the only country that matters; experiences anywhere else are irrelevant
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New statistical evidence of this appears almost weekly. When it comes to student performance in mathematics, we are now 25th among the 34 advanced economies, and behind many developing countries as well. In college attendance, our previous preeminence has long faded; we are now 9th in percentage of younger workers with two-year or four-year degrees, and 12th in college graduation rate. In health, we are 37th in infant mortality and equally low in life expectancy. In environmental performance, we are 61st. In the percentage of people below the poverty line, we are 21st. Even when it comes to the "pursuit of happiness," enshrined in our Declaration of Independence as one of the noble goals of government, our citizens are only the 15th most satisfied with their lives.
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What Americans Keep Ignoring About Finland's School Success - Anu Partanen - National -... - 0 views
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there are certain things nobody in America really wants to talk about.
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"Oh," he mentioned at one point, "and there are no private schools in Finland."
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Only a small number of independent schools exist in Finland, and even they are all publicly financed. None is allowed to charge tuition fees. There are no private universities, either. This means that practically every person in Finland attends public school, whether for pre-K or a Ph.D.
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Who Should Teach Our Children? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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college teachers do a good job because of qualities that they already have when they complete their undergraduate education: a high level of intelligence, enthusiasm for ideas and an ability to communicate. In this regard, they are like those who go into other knowledge-based professions
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Moreover, as in other knowledge-based professions, college faculties can be trusted to do their jobs well with minimal external supervision, assessment and in-service training
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These reflections lead me to a simple proposal. Adopt the same model for grade school and high school teaching that works for colleges. Currently, few of the best students from the best colleges are grade school or high school teachers. (The most encouraging data merely suggest that high school teachers may be a bit above average, while grade school teachers are considerably below average)
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Seeking Academic Edge, Teenagers Abuse Stimulants - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Adderall, an amphetamine prescribed for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder that the boy said he and his friends routinely shared to study late into the night, focus during tests and ultimately get the grades worthy of their prestigious high school in an affluent suburb of New York City. The drug did more than just jolt them awake for the 8 a.m. SAT; it gave them a tunnel focus tailor-made for the marathon of tests long known to make or break college applications.
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“Everyone in school either has a prescription or has a friend who does,” the boy said.
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Pills that have been a staple in some college and graduate school circles are going from rare to routine in many academically competitive high schools, where teenagers say they get them from friends, buy them from student dealers or fake symptoms to their parents and doctors to get prescriptions.
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The Psych Approach - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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In Paul Tough’s essential book, “How Children Succeed,” he describes what’s going on. Childhood stress can have long lasting neural effects, making it harder to exercise self-control, focus attention, delay gratification and do many of the other things that contribute to a happy life.
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more recently, attention has shifted to the psychological reactions that impede learning — the ones that flow from insecure relationships, constant movement and economic anxiety.
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KIPP discovered that three-quarters of its graduates were not making it through college. It wasn’t the students with the lower high school grades that were dropping out most. It was the ones with the weakest resilience and social skills. It was the pessimists.
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What Drives Success? - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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It may be taboo to say it, but certain ethnic, religious and national-origin groups are doing strikingly better than Americans overall.
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These facts don’t make some groups “better” than others, and material success cannot be equated with a well-lived life. But willful blindness to facts is never a good policy.
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Comprehensive data published by the Russell Sage Foundation in 2013 showed that the children of Chinese, Korean and Vietnamese immigrants experienced exceptional upward mobility regardless of their parents’ socioeconomic or educational background.
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On Defensive, JPMorgan Hired China's Elite - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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An era of financial deregulation in Washington coincided with a roaring economy in China, enabling questionable hiring practices to escape government scrutiny. The hiring became so widespread over the last two decades that banks competed over the most politically connected recent college graduates, known in China as princelings.
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The S.E.C. and the Brooklyn prosecutors have bolstered enforcement of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, which effectively bans United States corporations from giving “anything of value” to foreign officials to gain “any improper advantage” in retaining business. JPMorgan would have violated the 1977 law if it had acted with “corrupt” intent.
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The investment banking unit experimented with a program that would have offered well-connected hires a one-year contract worth $70,000 to $100,000. The program, internal documents said, might offer “directly attributable linkage to business opportunity.”
Luc Levesque of Trip Advisor, on Frequent Evaluations - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Q. How do you hire? What questions do you ask? A. I’ll start by asking right away: “Tell me a bit about you. Walk me from the last page of your résumé to the front page. How did you transition from job to job? I really want to understand, why did you leave? What was the motivation? How did you find the next job? Did you get poached? Did you get bored?” So I want to really understand the transitions between jobs and paint a picture.
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I’m looking for what I call “signals of excellence.” I’ve had by far the most success with somebody who’s very talented and has these kind of signals in their history. So did they graduate with honors? Did they have a side project, like a start-up? Are there certain things they’ve done that they excelled at — things that make them better than everyone else?
A Lesson From Cuba on Race - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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Those issues relate to what another writer here, George Yancy, in writing about the Trayvon Martin case, referred to as a “white gaze” that renders all black bodies dangerous and deviant. Unless we dismantle this gaze and its centuries-strong cultural pillars, it will be difficult to go past the outrage on race.
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our unjust economic system. Under this system, people compete for basic goods and services in what seems to be a fair and non-discriminating market. But since they enter this market from vastly different social circumstances, competition is anything but fair. Those who already possess goods have a much better chance of renewing their access to them, whereas those who don’t have little chance of ever getting them.
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an examination of the recent history of Cuba does in fact provide valuable lessons about the complex links between economic justice, access to basic goods and services, racial inequality, and what Gutting refers to as “continuing problems about race.”
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Inequality Is a Choice - NYTimes.com - 0 views
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within poor and middle-income countries, is inequality getting worse or better? Are we moving toward a more fair world, or a more unjust one?
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Starting in the 18th century, the industrial revolution produced giant wealth for Europe and North America.
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the gap between the rich and the rest, as a global phenomenon, widened even more, right up through about World War II.
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