Sarah Hoyt understands the dialectic.

I know that schools purport to teach you the skills to survive in the modern world. They actually teach you the schools to survive in the nineteenth century. But here what they don’t teach you that gets passed on and that I’ve run into trouble with (as have other people) in self directed professions:

• You have more in common with people your age than with anyone else. People born within nine months of you have everything in common with you. This has got us to think in generations, which is stupid. To the extent boomers are as portrayed and to the extent that some of them discriminate against past and future generations, it’s the idea that there’s some magical bond between people within x years or each other. (This is mostly seen among leftists who view people as widgets, anyway.) Do I need to tell you there isn’t? The internet should prove that. And yet it was a shock to me to find that most of my friends are either ten years older or ten to twenty years younger than I. I find myself thinking “What is wrong with me?” Of course, nothing is. I’m just not complying with the educational-industrial complex version of it.

• Performing to set task. I’m actually very bad at it. I think it’s a version of standing up to recite for the teacher. When I’m under contract my mind freezes. Back when there was no indie I could force myself to sort of perform, but it wasn’t my best work. Now… let’s say when these two books are delivered, I hope Toni will let me go on a loose rein. I will still deliver books to Baen, probably twice a year. But if she doesn’t want them, I can bring them out myself, and that allows me to work “loose”

Read it.

Just in case you were w0ndering. I know I was.

I think we can safely say that Antwoin and DeShawn  and Le[whatever]a are Democrat names.

Read it.

Compassion is the liberal’s answer to the question of the best life and the best society. Compassion is the last pillar on which liberals can build a political community, because it doesn’t require any shared notions or beliefs: “They rely on what they take to be our natural empathy to forge a togetherness. This dispensation doesn’t depend on any grand theory, and liberals reject both premodern and totalitarian versions of philosophical unity. They notionally reject certainty itself,” though do so with an alarmingly high degree of certitude.

Read it.

They’re not the sharpest knives in the drawer, but they’re not spoons, either.

Read it.

Ben Nelson says the primary purpose of a university isn’t to prepare students for a career. It’s to prepare them for life. And he now has $70 million to prove his point.

Nelson is the founder and CEO of a new experiment in higher education called Minerva Project. He says when it comes to learning, job training is the easy part. With the emergence of online courses, it’s easier and cheaper than ever to acquire the hard skills you need to land a job. “Why would you spend a quarter of a million dollars and four years to learn to code in Python?” he says. “If that’s the role of universities, you’d have to be insane to go to universities.”

Uh, Ben? If you’ve got a job opening and the choice is between somebody who can code in Python and somebody with a Yale degree who can code in Python, which one is going to get hired? This conceit of ‘college is there to teach you how to think’ is obvious BS to anybody who has been to college — including Yale.

The places that really do teach you how to think are law schools — where, ironically, they’re supposed to be teaching you the legal equivalent of coding in Python, but typically don’t. Go figure.

Read it.

You are a political party, and you want to secure the electoral majority. But what happens, as is occurring to the Democrats, when the damned electorate that just won’t live the way—in dense cities and apartments—that  you have deemed is best for them?

This gap between party ideology and demographic reality has led to a disconnect that not only devastated the Democrats this year, but could hurt them in the decades to come. University of Washington demographer Richard Morrill notes that the vast majority of the 153 million Americans who live in  metropolitan areas with populations of more than 500,000  live in the lower-density suburban places Democrats think they should not. Only 60 million live in core cities.

…

As will become even more obvious in the lame duck years, the political obsessions of the Obama Democrats largely mirror those of the cities: climate change, gay marriage, feminism, amnesty for the undocumented, and racial redress. These may sometimes be worthy causes, but they don’t address basic issues that effect suburbanites, such as stagnant middle class wages, poor roads, high housing prices, or underperforming schools. None of these concerns elicit much passion among the party’s true believers.

Read it.

Chapter and verse on why your favorite programming language stinks on ice.

Read it.

Farris and his wife — a certified teacher who he says “had to unlearn all the stuff she’d been taught” in order to educate their kids — are two pioneers of the home-schooling movement as we know it today. Farris fought many of the most prominent home-school battles through the 1980s, when it was illegal to home-school children in many states; he founded the Christian Home School Legal Defense Association in 1983, and his family became a model for home schoolers across the U.S.

Read it.

We all know the story about algorithms and work the past few years. Service jobs across the country are increasingly being managed with the help of mathematical models of customer demand, revolutionizing everything from taxi driving to food delivery, home cleaning, and laundromats. I have argued that the increased autonomy and flexibility of these jobs means that algorithms are taking over unions as the primary driver of workers’ rights in the 21st century.

But now, startups are starting to move up the corporate ladder, using algorithms to improve and disrupt professions that up until recently have seemed almost completely insulated from the efficiencies of computation.

Read it.

More than money, Soylent saves time. It’s not just preparing, cooking and eating food that you can cut out of your life. You don’t have to shop for food or wait to be served in restaurants. Some of those who’ve experimented with the meal-free lifestyle say it saves them at least an hour every day, effectively adding another day to the week. If like many people you feel you’re always harassed and busy, this must seem an enormous benefit. Yet it’s far from clear that free time is what consumers of Soylent truly want.

Read it.

One of the arguments of my friend’s book is that idolatry of elective democracy as the political and ethical summum bonum inevitably leads to an absence of any sense of limitation in the political class. As he points out, the founding fathers of the American republic were decidedly not democrats, and indeed feared democracy as an inevitable gravedigger of freedom; but We the people (meaning the few of us here assembled) did not find a formula for limiting the power of We the people, because no such formula exists. As the doctor in Macbeth says, “Therein the patient/ Must minister to himself”: in other words, if a man has no inner sense of limitation, no mere constitution is going to restrain him.

Modern politicians, having been given the mandate of heaven (vox populi vox Dei), do not accept limitations of their authority or their moral competence, even if, in practice, only a third or even a quarter of the eligible voters have voted for them. Procedural correctness is all that is necessary for such a man to feel justified in pursuing his own moral enthusiasms at other people’s expense.

Ross Douthat turns over a rock.

First, we now have a clear sense of the legal arguments that will be used to justify the kind of move Obama himself previously described as a betrayal of our political order. They are, as expected, lawyerly in the worst sense, persuasive only if abstracted from any sense of precedent or proportion or political normality.

Second, we now have a clearer sense of just how anti-democratically this president may be willing to proceed.

Ross Douthat got a gig writing at the New York Times, presumably because nobody bought the idea anymore that David Brooks is really a conservative.

Sara Hoyt reminds us of certain Eternal Truths.

Revolutions like the US, which changed governance but didn’t presume to change the way people worked, in their minds and hearts, don’t turn into cannibal feasts. OTOH revolutions like the French, where people descended/aspired to changing the names of the weekdays and the months, in order to construct a completely different humanity, inevitably end up in a pile of blood-soaked corpses.

…

But the SJWs believe it does. They believe someone who is born with more victim cards, even if the person was in fact born very wealthy and never experienced a day’s hardship, immediately can judge them and tell them when they’re exhibiting “privilege” which is a taint that attaches to other seemingly arbitrary characteristics, no matter how poor or downtrodden people born with them are.

“SJW” means “Social Justice Warrior” and you know who they are.

Gavin McInnes responds to the New York Times.

Liberals love blacks but they love them like a fantasy football team, not like human beings. Black poverty is the crux of the leftist argument. The ethos goes: if you’re a Democrat, you want to help the impoverished African-Americans. If you’re a Republican, you want them to be attacked by German shepherds. As far as actual black culture goes, liberals are disappointed that they aren’t all wearing corduroy blazers with elbow patches and listening to NPR.

Nicholas Kristof, eat your heart out.

One of the reasons white, middle-class liberals are so out of touch when it comes to their favorite race is they don’t go near them. They don’t send their kids to remotely urban schools and they make sure their homes are as far away from the loveable Negro as possible. Sure, they have a black friend, but it’s a mulatto girl who grew up white and champions her black power beliefs because her white friends enjoy it. Liberals’ black friends don’t really have black friends themselves because they’re freaks. In black America, watching Doctor Who is like being Doctor Who.

Playing golf with Obama is about as close as they’re willing to stretch.

Read it.

Or you could watch “Grimm” on ABC.

Read it.

Jonathan Touboul is a mathematician and a neuroscientist. He holds a PhD in math from France’s prestigious École Polytechnique, where he won a prize for his thesis on how to simulate neurons in the brain. He publishes papers with titles like “Pulsatile localized dynamics in delayed neural-field equations in arbitrary dimension” and “The propagation of chaos in neural fields.”

Recently, though, Touboul has been thinking about hipsters. Specifically, why hipsters all seem to dress alike. In his line of work, there are neurons that also behave like hipsters. They fire when every neuron around them is quiet; or they fall silent when every neuron around them is chattering.

Because he is a mathematician, Touboul began to look for a way to explore this idea using equations. In other words, he constructed a mathematical model. His key insight is that people (and neurons) do not instantly perceive what is mainstream. There’s a delay. And in situations where the delay is large enough, the contrarians can inadvertently synchronize with each other.

“In wanting to oppose the trends, there actually emerges some sort of hipster loop,” Touboul said.

Read it.

Considering what they’re apparently be taught, shutting the University down sounds like a win for the students, their parents, and the taxpayers of Michigan.

Oh, and minorities, too.

Read it.

After all, he is the Magic Negro, n’est pas?

Sarah Hoyt reflects.

I came to understand, particularly through changing cultures, that manners are more than a senseless form.  They are things people do to let each other know that they belong – that they are part of the group.

Humans are a social animal.  Little meaningless rituals are built in to us, as a way of saying “I belong in the nest, don’t throw me out.”  Also, while manners are slightly different in each country (for instance, I think Americans would think I was out of my raving mind if I asked “Do I have permission to enter this room” – except in SFF, where they’d probably stake me through the heart.  While Portuguese would find it bizarre for a shop attendant to thank them for buying something.) they are also not entirely meaningless.  They are things that get automated, at a trained-in level, so you don’t have to think about it and don’t unwittingly offend someone.  I could be dead tired, for instance, or in the hospital, but if someone does some minor favor for me, I’m going to say “Thank you” out of automated reflex.  And that thank you lets the other person – no matter how tired or dead on their feet THEY are – know their action was seen and appreciated.

As Heinlein put it, it makes things run smoother.  In the same way, I might not be aware of the shopper coming out of the store behind me, both arms loaded with parcels.  But I am aware someone is behind me, and at this point it is a reflex to hold the door open so they pass.  When I’m the one on the receiving end of this kindness, that manners-reflex is much appreciated.

Read it.

Once upon a time, food was about where you came from. Now, for many of us, it is about where we want to go—about who we want to be, how we choose to live. Food has always been expressive of identity, but today those identities are more flexible and fluid; they change over time, and respond to different pressures. Some aspects of this are ridiculous: the pickle craze, the báhn-mì boom, the ramps revolution, compulsory kale. Is northern Thai still hot? Has offal gone away yet? Is Copenhagen over? The intersection of food and fashion is silly, just as the intersection of fashion and anything else is silly. Underlying it, however, is that sense of food as an expression of an identity that’s defined, in some crucial sense, by conscious choice. For most people throughout history, that wasn’t true. The apparent silliness and superficiality of food fashions and trends touches on something deep: our ability to choose who we want to be.

…

Not so long ago, food was food. (I’ve lost count of the number of conversations I’ve had with people in the industry, debating some point backward and forward, that end with someone shrugging and saying, “It’s just food.”) That’s not true anymore. Food is now politics and ethics as much as it is sustenance. People feel pressure to shop and eat responsibly, healthfully, sustainably. At least, that’s the impression you get from what’s written and said about food culture—that it’s a form of surrogate politics. To some, it’s not even surrogate politics; it’s the real deal, politics at its most urgent and consequential. Alice Waters presents the case beautifully: “Eating is a political act, but in the way the ancient Greeks used the word ‘political’—not just to mean having to do with voting in an election, but to mean ‘of, or pertaining to, all our interactions with other people’—from the family to the school, to the neighborhood, the nation, and the world. Every single choice we make about food matters, at every level. The right choice saves the world.”

Read it.

For those of you who don’t have a librarian or professional activist in your life, Banned Book Week (a combination of words which allows for no tasteful acronym) is an annual program sponsored by the American Library Association that “celebrates the freedom to read” by discussing attempts to “censor or ban books.”  To be fair, this organization and many of the bloggers and journalists who write about the occasion do from time to time discuss historical examples of actual censorship. However, their main focus is on more recent events, primarily examples of people challenging a book’s presence on a library’s shelf or on their child’s school reading list. You see, this too is censorship and a threat to our freedom, according to the ALA.

Read it.

Remembrance Day has been observed in the United Kingdom, and throughout the Commonwealth, since 1919. It was originally intended to honor those killed in the Great War, and has since been expanded to recognize British and other Commonwealth soldiers who have died in subsequent conflicts. Armistice Day is November 11, but in England, the main observance takes place on Remembrance Sunday, the Sunday closest to November 11.

Read it.

In recent years, the company has gotten noticeably good at something that wasn’t always its focus — developing technology products to get pizzas to people more easily.

Yeah, well, it’s still Domino’s pizza….

Don Boudreaux, a Real Economist, explains it all to you.

The typical voter devotes more time to learning how to program his TV’s remote control than how to assess how each candidate’s likely actions while in office will affect society. Voters’ inattentiveness to the substance of public-policy questions is rational: If public policies will be whatever they will be regardless of how, or even if, you vote, why spend your valuable time learning the details of public-policy issues? Better that you spend that time learning about matters that you can individually control.

Most voters are therefore rationally uninterested in the substantive details of public policies. So, voters instead pay attention only to the most superficial aspects of political questions. And politicians — whose expertise is in campaigning and winning elections — cater to this disinterest by serving up only brainless campaign ads.

Can’t say he’s wrong.

Edward Mendelson speaks for all right-thinking people.

Read it.

Evolution has been caught in the act, according to scientists who are decoding how a species of Australian lizard is abandoning egg-laying in favor of live birth.

Read it.

Onboard the Galatea, a ship that is 80m (260ft) long, the GLA have been finding out what happens if the satellite system goes wrong.

Martin Bransby demonstrates a GPS failure by pulling the plug on the ship’s receiver.

Within a few seconds, alarms start to sound on the bridge as one by one the instruments stop working.

“This is the gyrocompass – it steers the ship – you can see it starting to fail,” says Mr Bransby.

“If we walk over here, this is the radar, and that’s not working either. This is the dynamic positioning: it holds the ship’s position, that’s not working.

“The electronic chart display becomes unusable. Even the ship’s clock stops working.”

In a series of tests, the GLA have found that almost every bit of kit on the boat uses GPS – even the onboard satellite entertainment system.

Mr Bransby says: “You can imagine standing watch on this ship, it’s the middle of the night, it’s dark, it’s foggy, you are in the English Channel, and then this happens.

“What do you do? You’re in a right mess, basically.”

Read it.

Like the fact that you can unlock your iPhone with your fingerprint? Well, maybe not:

A Circuit Court judge has ruled that a criminal defendant can be compelled to give up his fingerprint, but not his pass code, to allow police to open and search his cellphone.

The question of whether a phone’s pass code is constitutionally protected surfaced in the case of David Baust, an Emergency Medical Services captain charged in February with trying to strangle his girlfriend.

Judge Steven C. Frucci ruled this week that giving police a fingerprint is akin to providing a DNA or handwriting sample or an actual key, which the law permits. A pass code, though, requires the defendant to divulge knowledge, which the law protects against, according to Frucci’s written opinion.

Read it.

A feminist in the strict and proper sense may be defined as a woman who envies the male role.

The Other McCain doubles down:

Making equality into a moral principle and a political objective always has the result of  of inflaming irrational resentment. People ask why feminists are always so angry; it is because the egalitarian mind sees injustice everywhere. If the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. If the only ideology you have is feminism, every problem looks like patriarchal oppression. Any attempt to placate feminists is as doomed as Neville Chamberlain’s attempts to appease Hitler. Feminists are totalitarians who crave unlimited power and can never be satisfied with partial success or compromise. Grant feminists every demand they make today, and tomorrow they will return with a new list of demands. One day it’s “peace for our time,” the next day the Stukas are dive-bombing Warsaw.

Pro and con.

Read it.

Over the weekend, it came out that two giant pharmacy chains, Rite Aid and CVS, had started blocking Apple Pay, the massively hyped new payment system from Apple that has received much praise for its ease of use. The product had worked for about a week before the two companies started blocking such near field communication (NFC) payments (which also takes out other NFC payment options like Google Wallet). While Rite Aid gave a vague and slightly ridiculous explanation — that it is “still in the process of evaluating our mobile payment options” — pretty much everyone knows the truth. A bunch of retailers, led by Walmart, have been creating their own mobile payment system called CurrentC, which cuts out the credit card companies. But, it also builds in all the tracking and spying features of store loyalty cards, expanded across all merchant partners. Apple Pay lets people remain anonymous.

Thar’s gold in them there data.

I’d hate to stop shopping at Walmart, but if they don’t take Apple Pay, it could happen.

Read it.

A new working paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research, “More Recent Evidence on the Effects of Minimum Wages in the United States,” concludes, “We see the evidence as still pointing to disemployment effects for low-skilled workers from raising the minimum wage.” Further, “we conclude that the best evidence still points to job loss from minimum wages for low-skilled workers — in particular for teens.”

Perhaps somebody ought to send a copy of this paper to Hillary Clinton. She seems to be a common-sense-denier.

Read it.

It’s an idea echoed everywhere from “Friends” to “Girls”: Young people want to live in cities. And, we’re told, a lot of them (at least the cool ones) do.

It’s a common assumption. But it’s also wrong.

Between 2010 and 2013, the number of 20- to 29-year-olds in America grew by 4 percent. But the number living in the nation’s core cities grew 3.2 percent. In other words, the share of 20-somethings living in urban areas actually declined slightly.

This trend has occurred in supposedly hot cities like San Fransisco, Boston, New York and D.C., notes demographer Wendell Cox. Chicago and Portland, Ore., both widely hailed as youth boom-towns, saw their numbers of 20-somethings decline, too.

Funny how facts keep putting sand in the gears of the Narrative.

Only 17 percent of Millennials identify the urban core as where they want to settle permanently. Another survey, by the Demand Institute (funded by the Conference Board and Neilsen), found that 48 percent of 20-somethings hoped to move to the suburbs one day. And contrary to popular myth, they hoped to own a single-family home. Sixty-one percent seek more space.

These findings may actually understate the suburban preference. As people age, particularly entering the child-bearing period between 30 and 50, they long have displayed a distinct tendency to move to suburban areas.

Well, there goes the neighborhood….

Steve Sailer looks behind the curtain.

As I’ve joked before, when I became interested in the quantitative literature on educational achievement in ninth grade in 1972, the racial rankings went:

1. Orientals
2. Caucasians
3. Chicanos
4. Blacks
Today, the order is:

1. Asians
2. Whites
3. Hispanics
4. African-Americans

…

What I hadn’t guessed in 1988 was that the powers that be in Chicago would simply unload their unwanted public housing project residents on the rest of the Midwest via Section 8 vouchers, with the federal government ready to persecute for discrimination any two-bit burgh that tried to resist. That seemed a little too cynical for even me to imagine in 1988.

Read it.

Dappled across the grasslands below was an archipelago of forest islands, many of them startlingly round and hundreds of acres across. Each island rose ten or thirty or sixty feet above the floodplain, allowing trees to grow that would otherwise never survive the water. The forests were linked by raised berms, as straight as a rifle shot and up to three miles long. It is Erickson’s belief that this entire landscape—30,000 square miles of forest mounds surrounded by raised fields and linked by causeways—was constructed by a complex, populous society more than 2,000 years ago. Balée, newer to the Beni, leaned toward this view but was not yet ready to commit himself.

…

Like people everywhere, Indians survived by cleverly exploiting their environment. Europeans tended to manage land by breaking it into fragments for farmers and herders. Indians often worked on such a grand scale that the scope of their ambition can be hard to grasp. They created small plots, as Europeans did (about 1.5 million acres of terraces still exist in the Peruvian Andes), but they also reshaped entire landscapes to suit their purposes. A principal tool was fire, used to keep down underbrush and create the open, grassy conditions favorable for game. Rather than domesticating animals for meat, Indians retooled whole ecosystems to grow bumper crops of elk, deer, and bison. The first white settlers in Ohio found forests as open as English parks—they could drive carriages through the woods. Along the Hudson River the annual fall burning lit up the banks for miles on end; so flashy was the show that the Dutch in New Amsterdam boated upriver to goggle at the blaze like children at fireworks. In North America, Indian torches had their biggest impact on the Midwestern prairie, much or most of which was created and maintained by fire. Millennia of exuberant burning shaped the plains into vast buffalo farms. When Indian societies disintegrated, forest invaded savannah in Wisconsin, Illinois, Kansas, Nebraska, and the Texas Hill Country. Is it possible that the Indians changed the Americas more than the invading Europeans did? “The answer is probably yes for most regions for the next 250 years or so” after Columbus, William Denevan wrote, “and for some regions right up to the present time.”

Read it.

MANY people think that the key to success is to cultivate and doggedly maintain an optimistic outlook. This belief in the power of positive thinking, expressed with varying degrees of sophistication, informs everything from affirmative pop anthems like Katy Perry’s “Roar” to the Mayo Clinic’s suggestion that you may be able to improve your health by eliminating “negative self-talk.”

But the truth is that positive thinking often hinders us. More than two decades ago, I conducted a study in which I presented women enrolled in a weight-reduction program with several short, open-ended scenarios about future events — and asked them to imagine how they would fare in each one. Some of these scenarios asked the women to imagine that they had successfully completed the program; others asked them to imagine situations in which they were tempted to cheat on their diets. I then asked the women to rate how positive or negative their resulting thoughts and images were.

A year later, I checked in on these women. The results were striking: The more positively women had imagined themselves in these scenarios, the fewer pounds they had lost.

Read it.

The problem is that tattoos are indicia of stupidity; this is essentially fraudulent, like hymen reconstruction surgery.

Read it.

Hint: Power and money.

Glenn Reynolds once commented on the seeming paradox of liberals who are terrified at the prospect that libertarians might take power and leave them alone. Actually, liberals probably do want to be left alone; they just don’t have any intention of leaving you alone. Liberals hunger for power so that they can enrich themselves, in many cases, but more generally, so they can remake the world according to their own preferences. This doesn’t mean that they will have to change, but it does mean that you will have to change. As long as liberals’ hunger for power is stronger than conservatives’ desire to be left in peace, the Left will continue to dominate our public life.

Read it.

I rather suspect that Wall Street could come up with 100 insane things that NBC News believes, with not much effort.

Joel Pollak is disappointed.

You had to feel just the slightest tinge of jealousy watching the members of the Canadian parliament give a lengthy standing ovation to Sergeant-at-Arms Kevin Vickers, the 58-year-old who killed a terrorist and defended democracy on Wednesday. Imagine if we in the United States still had the self-confidence to celebrate our heroes. Imagine if we could, even for just a moment, cheer for them–and each other. For who and what we are.

When President Barack Obama announced in May 2011 that Osama bin Laden had been killed, there were no such celebrations–at least among the country’s leaders.

Sure, students gathered spontaneously in front of the White House, waving American flags and shouting “U-S-A!” Yes, the midshipmen ” target=”_blank”>whooped through the night.

But our politicians–even while taking political credit–would not celebrate America, lest someone take offense.

Read it.

Marcin Jakubowski, the owner of a small farm in northwestern Missouri, is an agrarian romantic for high-tech times. A forty-one-year-old Polish-American, he has spent the past five years building industrial machines from scratch, in a demonstration of radical self-sufficiency that he intends as a model for human society everywhere. He believes that freedom and prosperity lie within the reach of anyone willing to return to the land and make the tools necessary to erect civilization on top of it. His project, the Global Village Construction Set, has attracted a following, but among the obstacles he has faced is a dearth of skilled acolytes: the people who show up at his farm typically display more enthusiasm for his ideas than expertise with a lathe or a band saw.

Steve Sailer asks an inconvenient question.

At Rice U., there used to be a jock-only major called Commerce. But, in a bout of post-Sixties idealism, the professors revolted and made Rice get rid of the phony, non-academic Commerce major. During my four years at Rice in the late 1970s, the football team won 7 games and lost 37. Cause and effect?

But what if instead of Commerce, jocks were channelled into, say, African-American Studies? What kind of vicious racist hater would complain about the academic worthiness of African-American Studies?

Steve Sailer looks at urban living.

One reason people moved in large numbers to the suburbs after WWII was because they were quieter for sleeping, especially in summer when you needed to keep your windows open. Lower density means less noise means more hours of sleep per night means happier, more productive days.

Before suburbanization, really rich families simply went some place cool for the entire summer. Affluent families sent the wife and kids away for the summer while the husband stayed home, as in The Seven Year Itch.

For example, in the 1920s, my father lived in Oak Park, Illinois, just west of Chicago. Oak Park is about as famously suburban as any place in America — the house next door was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright and native son Ernest Hemingway derided Oak Park for its broad lawns and narrow minds.

Read it.

The dastards.

Read it.

And why not?

“It’s very apparent that the attitude of the northern part of the state is that they would just love to saw the state in half and just let us float off into the Caribbean,” Stoddard said. “They’ve made that abundantly clear every possible opportunity and I would love to give them the opportunity to do that.”

Sounds like a  plan.

Read it.

Fortunately, my son is now homeschooled—or, technically, attends a private online school. He uses online lessons and offline texts and workbooks to learn, coached by his mother and me. The lessons are means to an end; he takes them as needed, and can take as much or little time as necessary, until he demonstrates his mastery of a topic in a unit assessment test. Then he moves on. Find your vocabulary set a breeze? Then skip the review lessons. Stumped by long division? Then spend a few hours working it out.

Funny how that works.