Vox.

The rise of the no-homework movement during the Covid-19 pandemic tapped into long-running disagreements over homework’s impact on students. The purpose and effectiveness of homework have been disputed for well over a century. In 1901, for instance, California banned homework for students up to age 15, and limited it for older students, over concerns that it endangered children’s mental and physical health. The newest iteration of the anti-homework argument contends that the current practice punishes students who lack support and rewards those with more resources, reinforcing the “myth of meritocracy.”

But there is still no research consensus on homework’s effectiveness; no one can seem to agree on what the right metrics are. Much of the debate relies on anecdotes, intuition, or speculation.

Bearing in mind that Vox is a hard-left Narrative media site, nevertheless even a blind pig finds an acorn now and then.

Read it. (If you dare.)

Much has been said about the phenomenon of the ‘trophy wife’ but I haven’t seen much discussion of the corresponding ‘trophy husband’. Of the two, I suspect that the wife is getting the better deal.

The Foundry.

Patrick Ruffini is a Republican pollster with a reputation for deciphering data and spotting trends. His new book, “Party of the People: Inside the Multiracial Populist Coalition Remaking the GOP,” takes a deep dive into one of the biggest political realignments of our lifetime.

Ruffini spoke with The Daily Signal about the demographic changes that are rapidly transforming America’s two biggest political parties—and what it means for the 2024 presidential election and beyond.

“When I first started in politics, Republicans had this reputation as being the country club party,” Ruffini said. “Democrats had this reputation as being the party of the people, the party of the working class.”

He added, “Flash forward almost 20 years, and that trend has completely almost reversed.”

Historically the backbone of the Republican party has been farmers and small businessmen, the first in line to get buttfucked by the Deep State and the coastal Crust. It would be nice to see that world turned upside down.

The Economist.

here is no “i” in team. But there is one in “autopilot”. Despite the growing importance of teamwork in organisations, the processes used to manage employees have carried on much as before. Bosses may wax lyrical about collaboration, but the way they reward, review and recruit has not caught up.

People in organisations have always worked in concert with others. But the emphasis on teams is growing, for a variety of reasons. Technology has made the sharing of ideas and information easier, while hybrid working has made it more vital. (There’s a reason it’s not called Microsoft Silos.) The software industry has spread the gospel of teams—agile, scrums, okrs and all the rest of it—into all kinds of places.

Teams, it turns out, are better at solving complex problems, according to a recent paper by Abdullah Almaatouq of the mit Sloan School of Management. Research also suggests that people have a greater attachment to their work group than to their organisation; you’re less likely to go for lunch with a logo.

The military calls it ‘unit cohesion’ and that’s Old News.

ZMan breaks out the popcorn.

Some movies are on the top-100 list because they are great stories told very well, while others are on the list for their great technological breakthroughs. Some are on the list for their cultural impact. That is the case with Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a comedy about race mixing from 1967. The film had two legends, Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, and a big star at the moment in Sydney Poitier.

The film was viewed at the time as groundbreaking because it featured a mixed-race couple in a positive light. Right around the time the movie was released, the Supreme Court had struck down anti-miscegenation laws in Loving v. Virginia. Of course, the civil rights movement was at its peak, so this was just what white liberals wanted to see, which was white liberals being celebrated for their goodness.

The movie itself is pretty simple. It opens with the couple in question, generic rich white girl and her much older black boyfriend, Sydney Poitier, getting off an airplane and strolling through an airport like lovers on a walk in the park. Keep in mind that this is 1967, but no one in the airport notices, because you see, this is the glorious future where race no longer matters, so get used to it you terrible bigots.

Read it.

According to one estimate I have seen, in 1973 there were only about 13,000 children being homeschooled. Today the number is over 5 million—and may be much higher, as many states do not track the numbers very carefully.

The Washington Post has noticed, and you can tell they are worried about it. (The left has always hated homeschooling, and the teachers unions rightly understand what a threat homeschooling is to their gravy train, as most public schools derive their revenue by how many students are enrolled.)

Me, during football season.

Read it.

Banana equivalent dose (BED) is an informal unit of measurement of ionizing radiation exposure, intended as a general educational example to compare a dose of radioactivity to the dose one is exposed to by eating one average-sized banana. Bananas contain naturally occurring radioactive isotopes, particularly potassium-40 (40K), one of several naturally occurring isotopes of potassium. One BED is often correlated to 10?7 sievert (0.1 ?Sv); however, in practice, this dose is not cumulative, as the potassium in foods is excreted in urine to maintain homeostasis.[1] The BED is only meant as an educational exercise and is not a formally adopted dose measurement.

Happy Birthday to My Brother the Socialist.

Peter Zeihan.

The US is blessed with one of the most prolific water networks in the world, yet it operates at sub-optimal levels. You’ve all heard my thoughts on the Jones Act, so you can probably guess where the blame falls once again.

Something will have to change as the US reshores its industry and attempts to build out its manufacturing footprint. Thankfully, reviving water transport in the US is a low-hanging fruit. All it requires is some amendments to the Jones Act and its regulations on waterborne commerce.

If we can manage that, we’ll all enjoy some nice economic growth thanks to reduced product transport costs and a boost to US manufacturing.

Next to the Davis-Bacon Act, the Jones Act is the worst piece of fascist legislation ever dumped on an unsuspecting nation.

L.A. Cathedral.

My local church.

“The 2024 election is already being rigged. They’re doing it right in front of you.” — Scott Adams

The Guardian.

Irving Finkel, assistant keeper of ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures at the British Museum, has speculated that the fact games sharpen our mind-reading skills – forcing us to put ourselves in our opponent’s shoes – is why they have been such an enduring feature of culture. He even goes so far as to suggest that they developed in tandem with human consciousness. Imagining how someone else might move and planning accordingly provided a tool to explore the inner lives of others, an essential skill for a social animal. Finkel is responsible for decoding the rules behind one of the very first board games in recorded history: the 4,500-year-old Royal Game of Ur, which was rediscovered during excavations in the 1920s. Players compete to race pieces around the board using pyramid-shaped dice.

The Economist.

A line of research shows the benefits of an “innovation” that predates computers: handwriting. Studies have found that writing on paper can improve everything from recalling a random series of words to imparting a better conceptual grasp of complicated ideas.

For learning material by rote, from the shapes of letters to the quirks of English spelling, the benefits of using a pen or pencil lie in how the motor and sensory memory of putting words on paper reinforces that material. The arrangement of squiggles on a page feeds into visual memory: people might remember a word they wrote down in French class as being at the bottom-left on a page, par exemple.

One of the best-demonstrated advantages of writing by hand seems to be in superior note-taking. In a study from 2014 by Pam Mueller and Danny Oppenheimer, students typing wrote down almost twice as many words and more passages verbatim from lectures, suggesting they were not understanding so much as rapidly copying the material.

Sometimes the old ways are best.

Read it.

The four men charged are 25-year-old Rakiem Savage, 31-year-old Ronald Byrd, 30-year-old Haneef Palmer and 32-year-old Malik Palmer, according to 6ABC in Philadelphia. They face charges of conspiracy, robbery and theft of government money, among other charges the report says.

‘Rakiem’? ‘Haneef’? ‘Malik’? I think that there is more here that is being reported.

Read it.

The niceties of hoplite warfare may be abstruse, but as an analogy, it works with depressing frequency in modern politics as both sides adapt their principles to their feelings rather than the other way round. In recent days, the Left (generally quick to equate speech with violence as in Labour’s plans to criminalise misgendering) has been remarkably relaxed about calls to eradicate Israel from the map being heard on the streets of London, while the Right, generally quick to point out that “facts don’t care about your feelings, snowflake” is happy to use the intimidation felt by the Jewish community as a reason for mass arrests and the banning of future protests.

We have the technology.

Washington Free Beacon.

A few years ago, David Brooks wrote a column in which he took a friend without a high school degree to a sandwich shop. “Suddenly,” he recounted, “I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named ‘Padrino’ and ‘Pomodoro’ and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.”

Brooks concluded that “American upper-middle-class culture (where the opportunities are) is now laced with cultural signifiers that are completely illegible unless you happen to have grown up in this class. They play on the normal human fear of humiliation and exclusion. Their chief message is, ‘You are not welcome here.'” Well, this is hardly a new phenomenon in America or otherwise, but it’s also only a superficial explanation of what separates the upper-middle class from everyone else. There are also real habits and real pieces of knowledge that enable some kids to get ahead. And they matter a lot more than whether you know different words for Italian meat.

Washington Free Beacon.

Children “require a lot of work and a lot of resources,” writes the economist Melissa S. Kearney. And “having two parents in the household generally means having more resources to devote to the task of raising a family.” This includes working for pay, supervising kids, and much else.

That is the simplest argument for, as the title of Kearney’s book phrases it, a “two-parent privilege”: an advantage to growing up in an intact family. The privilege is denied to a large number of American children, disproportionately those who already face other disadvantages. As of 2019, 84 percent of kids whose moms had four years of college, but only 60 percent of kids whose moms had a high school degree or some college, lived with married parents. The racial gaps are even starker: Even among kids whose moms have a high-school education or less, about two-thirds of white kids, but only about one-third of black kids, have married parents.

New Atlas.

The extraordinary Hadrian X bricklaying robot rocks up to a building site looking like a regular truck, then extends a 32-m (105-ft) boom arm and starts precisely laying up to 300 large masonry blocks an hour. It’s pretty remarkable to watch.

Watch it.

I found this video both fascinating and inspirational. Your Mileage May Vary.

Who so richly deserve it.

If you are not familiar with the 5 points of Calvinism (T.U.L.I.P.) read here before proceeding.

Then read the Babylon Bee analysis of Taylor Swift.

Read it.

Here’s a list of neglected but eminently useful words that visitors to this site — and we, to be downright honest — would like to bring back into fashion. You’re right — some never have been in fashion, but perhaps they deserve to be. Many submissions have been edited for content, grammar and especially for accuracy. Not all these words will make our list of top choices, but there’s a great deal of quality here, most are wonderful additions to anyone’s vocabulary, and all could use some exercise.

Steve Sailer.

The world-historical question at the moment is whether American Jews — who are, arguably, the single most influential politically mobilizable group in the modern globe — will figure out that Woke anti-white hatred is inherently anti-Semitic. Or will they assume the solution must be tripling down yet again on promoting racist anti-white hatred as the only way to unify the Coalition of the Fringes?

I could see it going either way.

Read it.

Four Republican presidential candidates are slated to attend a closed-door summit in Utah today sponsored by Sen. Mitt Romney and his 2012 presidential running mate, former House speaker Paul Ryan.

Former United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, former Vice President Mike Pence, Former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum are scheduled to attend the event in Park City where they can make their case to a network of “influential” donors, the Washington Post reported.

The usual second-tier suspects.

ZMan has some fun.

Since the wrecking ball known as Donald Trump swung through the walls of conservatism almost a decade ago, there has been a desperate attempt to either rebuild the wall or fill the void left by the old conservatism. The Never Trump project was mostly an effort to chase the barbarians out of the city so the good people can rebuild the wall and restart the old politics. For the most part, this project has failed as the massive hole in the wall remains.

A good recent example of this is this post by neoconservative writer Mathew Continetti in Commentary Magazine. He claims that the populists supporting nationalist policies and candidates are actually Marxists. This has become a popular theme with the East Coast Straussians, of which the neocons are a part. It is a hilariously insane line of thought, owing to the steep decline in the human capital we see everywhere in politics, but especially in the neoconservative subculture.

On the other hand, the project to recreate the old dynamic of Left and Right, has quietly plodded along with a new generation looking to create a New Right. Many are just the hucksters we have come to expect in this age. These are the people who live on social media and front-run whatever is happening at the moment. Others are rejects from the old conservative rackets hoping for a fresh start. These are the buzzards that arrive at the end of every movement.