New Yorker magazine alert thread

Paleo diet article was good

a lot of good stuff lately, e.g. the one about the civil rights act and old-school feminists

also the one about the atlanta teaching scandal

yeah i enjoyed the men and one

lol n/h, the menand one

the sad thing about the atlanta teaching scandal is after investigation/prosecuting atlanta administrators and teachers for cheating, the state is instituting statewide THE SAME POLICIES THAT LED TO THE CHEATING IN THE FIRST PLACE

pretty much the entire country is in some form or other. it does touch on what seems to me one of the bigger misunderstandings, this complete faith in data in fields where we understand so little the idea that analysis of this unprecedented data could yield certainty is absurd. keep waiting for someone to tie common core, prism, wall st quants, etc together (even if only in piecemeal fashion, like a bizarro gladwell), only some w/ enough actual understanding of how data can be useful and why so not just some clueless moron like jill lepore or joe morgan or some angry humanities crank like wieseltier. the closest i've seen of late was that thing carlo rovelli wrote but even there you're talking like a three sentence aside (mixed feelings about that piece in general).

a friend is an economist whose work is critical of attempts to yoke teacher evaluation to test scores, he spends a lot of space pointing out the problems with and limits of the sort of data that school "reformist" types swear by

i'm gradually moving from science to education and trust me i get the comfort of data, 'you can never have too much data' is damn near a mantra of mine in the lab, but the faith in data (or more accurately testing) i come across in education policy sometimes makes me want to laugh. i mean i'll run a battery of different kind of assays on something before i feel comfortable w/ the results and this is dealing w/ stuff that doesn't possess nearly the confounding factors and we have much more ability to measure than children and learning. i'm totally on board w/ doing the testing and analysis, but pretending to know it will tell us anything nevermind tell us a lot and then basing policy on this new 'knowledge' seems ridiculous to me even before you get in the ponzi scheme aspect of perpetual improvement and the possibility (to me at least, i don't know nearly as much about education policy and history as a lot of ppl here) that this is all in reaction to a crisis that might not even exist.

yeah that was my favorite quote from that article, the one from the mathematician who was like I don't get the magical thinking about data that exists in education these days. it was so nice to have someone just say that. a mathematician, even! I want to quote that article in every single faculty meeting this year.

the crisis is the same one the Reagan administration identified in 1983 and it's often painted pretty xenophobically. I wish in one of the presentations I've had to sit through a principal or administrator would acknowledge that it is a good thing when kids in other countries get more access to education. and that it's good for everyone in the world. the whole we don't learn math and science well enough to dominate brown and yellow people take on the crisis is kind of whatever to me. the way poor kids get educated compared to the way rich kids get educated in this country is a fucking disgrace, as is the de facto racial segregation in public schools, but as the article points out, you can't address those things in schools alone.

half the time w/ testing data they don't even know what it is they're measuring

"half the time"

lol

the crisis is the same one the Reagan administration identified in 1983 - haha 'a nation at risk', yeah i wrote a paper on that and the sandia report. i've read stuff that suggests it was a kind of deliberate subversion of reagan's actual education goals, yr basic 'the federal govt has no role in education' stuff along w/ 'unless it's enforcing school prayer' wacko addendums. still a crock of shit study.

Is the site's search broken for everyone else?

yes it just says loading

The MathBabe blog has some interesting posts on education and testing:

http://mathbabe.org/category/education/

http://www.theawl.com/2014/07/all-the-new-yorker-story-roundups-you-should-read-while-the-stories-are-still-unlocked-as-well-as-all-the-new-yorker-stories-they-link-to

i wish the lists were more descriptive but this one seems pretty classic + solid (a lot of them are just decent articles from the last 10-20 years):
http://www.businessinsider.com/8-new-yorker-stories-you-should-read-2014-7

the businessinsider link isn't showing the articles for free for me. links like this still say "This article is available to subscribers only, in our archive viewer. Get immediate access to this article for just $1 a week by SUBSCRIBING NOW."

has the free thing ended or is it because im uk-based?

ah. seems it's just the older articles, they don't seem to have been transferred to text and have to be read through the 'archive viewer' which doesn't work for me. no mind, i was only after them to send-to-kindle

Radical feminists vs. transgender women and Chicago false arrest articles both excellent this week.

I've linked to this in the transgender thread, but Julia Serano's comments on the article about trans-exclusionary radical feminists (for which she was interviewed) are worth reading as a supplement: http://juliaserano.blogspot.com/2014/07/two-articles-related-to-femininity-and.html.

deleted the disgraceful iphone app today, thank u god for comprehensive web content #blessed

not sure if there are legal issues or not, seems like prob not considering theyre already in the web, but putting all the back issues on the web and out of that horrible viewer shd be pretty doable, their formatting is very consistent over the years

Just read the Gladwell piece from the other week about organized crime. Amazing that he completely ignores race. Like, he's baffled that organized crime worked as a ladder to middle-class legitimacy for Irish, Italians, Jews, but hasn't done the same for black Americans. He attributes it to better policing, less corruption, pretty much everything but race. Seems clueless even by Gladwell standards.

there was so much abt that was that was just like what exactly are u saying here buddy

Gladwell is contractually obligated to stare in childlike bemusement at things that are painfully obvious to most everyone else.

yeah it was obviously all about race but he seemed kinda shy to say it, even tho... he was saying it

On the plus side, it made me interested in reading the book he was talking about.

new yorker articles that are basically long summaries of other people's books are weird imho

"hey did u read that article derived the book, it was pretty crazy *presents one factoid from article*, makes u think"

I love articles that are long summaries of books that I would otherwise never read at all. I mean isn't that pretty much the entire model of most "____ review of books" publications?

yes, my fave kind of article too.

i like the ones where elizabeth kolbert tears open buttholes
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/11/16/hosed

i don't mean that levitt and dubner are buttholes; i mean that their buttholes are wider now.

and torn

good issue so far, really looking forward to the specter piece on GMOs

The article about the drag queen luchador was good enough to make up for another stupid Lena Dunham piece.

"Adam Gopnik on the history of pedestrianism"
^^^ I see what u did there?

lol

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/law-3

this week is fulla good stuff

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/10/06/law-3

Jesus Fucking Christ this story

Just got around to the Alex Ross essay on the Frankfurt School from last month. Good read. And yeah that Rikers piece is so good -- not just the reporting, but her writing is very pared back, if anything she underdramatizes it, which makes it more powerful.

but her writing is very pared back, if anything she underdramatizes it, which makes it more powerful.

definitely. i was summarizing the rikers story for my gf last night, and as i was listing off all of the events it sounded so crazy and unconscionable.

yeah it made me sick to my stomach

Shortly after Mathew's eighteenth birthday, Bobby presented him with a plaque inscribed with the words "Son Who Shattered His Father's Dream."

yea that was ice cold

I mean I feel for the father, what with his son going to Duke and whatnot