Category: ideas

“Too often, in practice, bilingual education has been a disaster in America. However, the problem has been one of implementation, not of philosophy. Worldwide, it has been shown endlessly that children learn to read more quickly when first taught in their native language and are gently transitioned into the dominant one.”

“The passionate, sometimes rhythmic, language-like patter that pours forth from religious people who ‘speak in tongues’ reflects a state of mental possession, many of them say. Now they have some neuroscience to back them up. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania took brain images of five women while they spoke in tongues and found that their frontal lobes — the thinking, willful part of the brain through which people control what they do — were relatively quiet, as were the language centers. … The women were not in blind trances, and it was unclear which region was driving the behavior.”

“If a new report is indeed correct, much of the accepted wisdom about saving America’s orchestras–which rests on the idea that if people can just be lured into the concert hall, they’ll buy tickets and come back–is wrong. And that explains why, decades after the alarums were first rung, the knell still sounds and the debate within the classical-music set remains much the same.”

“The London School of Economics is embroiled in a row over academic freedom after one of its lecturers published a paper alleging that African states were poor and suffered chronic ill-health because their populations were less intelligent than people in richer countries. Satoshi Kanazawa, an evolutionary psychologist, is now accused of reviving the politics of eugenics by publishing the research which concludes that low IQ levels, rather than poverty and disease, are the reason why life expectancy is low and infant mortality high.”

Daydreaming about the future of your favorite city is not a new pasttime, but when the city is New York, which on the surface would appear to be at maximum density already, the game becomes both difficult and fascinating. Ten New York architectural firms gave it a shot this month, and the results were as dreamlike as they were diverse.

Election Day looms in the U.S., and when the polls close on Tuesday evening, more than $2 billion will have been spent to urge, cajole, and frighten Americans into voting one way or the other. And all this for a midterm election! What does this orgy of political spending teach us about our democracy? Well, maybe this: “the demagogue’s secret is to make himself as stupid as his audience so that they believe they are as clever as he really is.”

“Trying to quantify religious experience by counting the number of times a person reports attending church, the most commonly used index of religious involvement, is like trying to measure a sunbeam with a ruler: It may be possible, but the essential character of the experience is lost in the process. It is like trying to quantify the aesthetic experience of listening to a Beethoven symphony by counting the number of times a listener smiles.”

“The idea that American historians are refusing to study the illustrious dead — let alone that they are doing so because they are ‘anti-American’ — is too bizarre for sane people to indulge.”

How do you suck the fun right out of Hallowe’en, a holiday seemingly designed to encourage frivolity? It’s easy, really: just sic a bunch of academic types on it. “They find Halloween to be ‘a site of some considerable discursive ‘struggle’ between, amongst other things,national identity and globalization, childhood independence and moral panic, carnival and asceticism.'”