History Readings

Over the past week we’ve seen the big differences between cluster liberals and network liberals. Cluster liberals (like cluster conservatives) view politics as a battle between implacable opponents

Network liberals share the same goals and emerge from the same movement. But they tend to believe — the nation being as diverse as it is and the Constitution saying what it does — that politics is a complex jockeying of ideas and interests. They believe progress is achieved by leaders savvy enough to build coalitions.

a long-simmering tension between researchers in science-based anthropological disciplines — including archaeologists, physical anthropologists and some cultural anthropologists — and members of the profession who study race, ethnicity and gender and see themselves as advocates for native peoples or human rights.

the long-range plan of the association would no longer be to advance anthropology as a science but rather to focus on “public understanding.”

He attributed what he viewed as an attack on science to two influences within anthropology. One is that of so-called critical anthropologists, who see anthropology as an arm of colonialism and therefore something that should be done away with. The other is the postmodernist critique of the authority of science. “Much of this is like creationism in that it is based on the rejection of rational argument and thought,” he said.

On the math test last year, students in Shanghai scored 600, in Singapore 562, in Germany 513, and in the United States 487. In reading, Shanghai students scored 556, ahead of second-place Korea with 539. The United States scored 500 and came in 17th, putting it on par with students in the Netherlands, Belgium, Norway, Germany, France, the United Kingdom and several other countries. In science, Shanghai students scored 575. In second place was Finland, where the average score was 554. The United States scored 502 — in 23rd place — with a performance indistinguishable from Poland, Ireland, Norway, France and several other countries.

Manhattan increased its density of people with college degrees by 7,500 people per square mile in the last decade. That’s just the increase in density of just people with college degree

they are getting more exclusive as increasingly you need to be in the educated elite to be able to live there (or at least to make it worth living there)

That some — even now — are honoring secession, with barely a nod to the role of slavery, underscores how divisive a topic the war remains, with Americans continuing to debate its causes, its meaning and its legacy.

“our people were only fighting to protect themselves from an invasion and for their independence.”

When Southerners refer to states’ rights, he said, “they are really talking about their idea of one right — to buy and sell human beings.”

sheds light on the relationship between cities and three underlying types of workforce skills--physical skills of the sort used in manufacturing, analytical or cognitive skills, and social intelligence skills like the ability to direct teams, form entrepreneurial new businesses and organizations, and mobilize both people and resources behind common causes and objectives

Larger cities not only draw more educated and innovative people, but more people with the critical social skills required to turn new ideas into successful enterprises and industries.

author of “How Rude!: The Teenager’s Guide to Good Manners” (Free Spirit Publishing, 1997), went further. “I would be the first to say that there has been an absolute collapse of civility in the past generation or two,” Mr. Packer said. “So much of communications is once removed that it adds a layer of distance and anonymity that can only worsen manners.

the major causes of incivility were anonymity, stress, lack of time, lack of restraint and insecurity.

we’re certainly seeing greater stress and more ability to lash out anonymously through the Internet and texting. “The more volatile the mixture, the more uncivil we become,

“We are both ruder and more civil than in times gone by,” said Pier M. Forni, a professor of Italian literature at Johns Hopkins University and also co-founder of the university’s Civility Initiative. Professor Forni gives the example of the pregnant woman. “Fewer people may give up their seat on the bus for her, which shows a decline in civility,” he said. “But when she steps into the workplace, the number of people who take her seriously is much higher than in my father’s time. “We are more accepting of people who look different and the disabled, and we have a higher ecological awareness,” Professor Forni said. But he also acknowledged that what we classically think of as courtesy is on the decline. This ranges from a certain deference to authority and age to graciously allowing someone to merge into your lane of traffic.

to dismiss signs of courtesy as mere symbols and to argue that what matters is not the outward trappings misses the point

when a mother corrects her son for chewing with his mouth open, and tells him people don’t like looking at half-chewed food, “she has given him a rule of table manners, but also a fundamental notion of all ethical principles — actions have consequences for others. Good manners are the training wheels of altruism.

The truth is that Latin America has matured and become more equal in recent decades, even as the distribution in the United States has become steadily more unequal.

Would we really want to be the kind of plutocracy where the richest 1 percent possesses more net worth than the bottom 90 percent? Oops! That’s already us. The top 1 percent of Americans owns 34 percent of America’s private net worth, according to figures compiled by the Economic Policy Institute in Washington. The bottom 90 percent owns just 29 percent.

for most of American history, income distribution was significantly more equal than today. And other capitalist countries do not suffer disparities as great as ours.

it's hard to determine which course of study is most infested with cheating. But I'd say education is the worst. I've written papers for students in elementary-education programs, special-education majors, and ESL-training courses. I've written lesson plans for aspiring high-school teachers, and I've synthesized reports from notes that customers have taken during classroom observations. I've written essays for those studying to become school administrators, and I've completed theses for those on course to become principals. In the enormous conspiracy that is student cheating, the frontline intelligence community is infiltrated by double agents.

First I lay out the sections of an assignment—introduction, problem statement, methodology, literature review, findings, conclusion—whatever the instructions call for. Then I start Googling. I haven't been to a library once since I started doing this job. Amazon is quite generous about free samples. If I can find a single page from a particular text, I can cobble that into a report, deducing what I don't know from customer reviews and publisher blurbs. Google Scholar is a great source for material, providing the abstract of nearly any journal article. And of course, there's Wikipedia, which is often my first stop when dealing with unfamiliar subjects. Naturally one must verify such material elsewhere, but I've taken hundreds of crash courses this way. After I've gathered my sources, I pull out usable quotes, cite them, and distribute them among the sections of the assignment. Over the years, I've refined ways of stretching papers. I can write a four-word sentence in 40 words. Just give me one phrase of quotable text, and I'll produce two pages of ponderous explanation. I can say in 10 pages what most normal people could say in a paragraph. I've also got a mental library of stock academic phrases: "A close consideration of the events which occurred in ____ during the ____ demonstrate that ____ had entered into a phase of widespread cultural, social, and economic change that would define ____ for decades to come." Fill in the blanks using words provided by the professor in the assignment's instructions.

women who have succeeded on the more corporate East Coast tend to be more fiscally conservative, perhaps because they have had to work longer, and sometimes harder, to make money. Many spent decades fighting for parity as the only woman in a particular department on Wall Street. “It takes longer to make it in finance,” Ms. Hanson said from her office in Greenwich, Conn. “Compensation is still reasonably obscene here, but it’s not a windfall, like if you were employee No. 5 or even 500 at Google.

Only 12 percent of black fourth-grade boys are proficient in reading, compared with 38 percent of white boys, and only 12 percent of black eighth-grade boys are proficient in math, compared with 44 percent of white boys.

“There’s accumulating evidence that there are racial differences in what kids experience before the first day of kindergarten,” said Ronald Ferguson, director of the Achievement Gap Initiative at Harvard. “They have to do with a lot of sociological and historical forces. In order to address those, we have to be able to have conversations that people are unwilling to have.” Those include “conversations about early childhood parenting practices,” Dr. Ferguson said. “The activities that parents conduct with their 2-, 3- and 4-year-olds. How much we talk to them, the ways we talk to them, the ways we enforce discipline, the ways we encourage them to think and develop a sense of autonomy.”

creativity is not a solitary process. It happens within networks. It happens when talented people get together, when idea systems and mentalities merge.

The crucial fact about the new epoch is that creativity needs hubs. Information networks need junction points. The nation that can make itself the crossroads to the world will have tremendous economic and political power.

the U.S. is well situated to be the crossroads nation. It is well situated to be the center of global networks and to nurture the right kinds of networks. Building that America means doing everything possible to thicken connections: finance research to attract scientists; improve infrastructure to ease travel; fix immigration to funnel talent; reform taxes to attract superstars; make study abroad a rite of passage for college students; take advantage of the millions of veterans who have served overseas.

he United States now arguably has a more unequal distribution of wealth than traditional banana republics like Nicaragua, Venezuela and Guyana

From 1980 to 2005, more than four-fifths of the total increase in American incomes went to the richest 1 percent.

The richest 0.1 percent of taxpayers would get a tax cut of $61,000 from President Obama. They would get $370,000 from Republicans,

Tuesday’s vote continued a trend, reaching a record low percentage of self-described liberals who voted for Republican candidates for the House of Representatives, and a record low percentage of conservatives who voted for Democratic candidates.

this is the first time in the history of exit polling that moderates were not the largest ideological voting block. They were trumped by conservatives.

Instead of moving toward the middle, we are drifting toward the extremes.

Admissions officers are chasing not so much a more perfect student as a more perfect class. In a given year, this elusive ideal might require more violinists, goalies, aspiring engineers or students who can pay the full cost of attendance. Colleges everywhere want more minority students, more out-of-state students and more students from overseas.

Over the last 15 years, he says, growing applicant pools reflected an earnest push for greater diversity among the wealthiest institutions.

To each applicant, Chicago assigns a “fit” rating based on holistic measures — say, intellectual curiosity or evidence that a student applied a favorite subject to life.

"The rich alone use imported articles, and on these alone the whole taxes of the General Government are levied... Our revenues liberated by the discharge of the public debt, and its surplus applied to canals, roads, schools, etc., the farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of his country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings,

legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property, only taking care that their subdivisions go hand in hand with the natural affections of the human mind

if subdividing property is not sufficient then “ to tax the higher portions of property in geometric progression as they rise” might help.

You can think of patriotism as a kind of status socialism—a collectivization of the means of self-esteem production. You don’t have to graduate from an Ivy or make a lot of money to feel proud or special about being an American; you don’t have to do a damn thing but be born here.

Cultural valorization of “American-ness” relative to other status markers, then, is a kind of redistribution of psychological capital to those who lack other sources of it.

people want high-status figures to invest in building the brand of their shared identity—a sort of status redistribution as noblese oblige

I think I'm deeply uncomfortable with any sort of populism. No matter the target--bankers or the poor--it seems to require its leaders to say, "There's nothing wrong with you America." 

In saying that I don't mean to ignore the difference in power, but to contest the notion of powerlessness as some sort of moral cleaning agent, and finally to contest the notion of powerlessness itself. There must be some way to acknowledge, all at once, the outer crookedness of deceptive lending, and then the inner crookedness of trying to get something for nothing.I was trying to get at some of this in the Jon Stewart thread, but the notion that Americans are pure, and what's really wrong with this country, has everything to do with aliens--the media, the Muslim, the poor, the illegal, the rich, the elites--but nothing to do with the natives strikes me as comfort food.