Category: issues

Eric Grundhauser tells the story of what may have been the weirdest drug hoax of the 20th century.

“Intolerant is an effective slur, but critics who deploy it fail to recognize that intolerance is often desirable,” argues Alan Levinovitz. Something did go wrong at Middlebury, but it certainly wasn’t due to students’ intolerance. Indeed, higher education couldn’t function without intolerance.”

“A 1930s baseball bat, 1950s tennis racquet and 1980s skateboard – all totems of San Diego’s rich sporting history – are being swapped out for comics, movie props and souvenirs of today’s pop culture in a major shift at Balboa Park.”

Barry Hessenius: “If we really want to maximize our effectiveness and increase our chances of saving the NEA, we need to use social media and any other tool we have to enlist the support of neighbors, friends, co-workers, local media and businesses to join the effort in communicating with Congress.  Every single person in the arts ought to enlist the support of one person outside the arts to make that phone call or write that letter or email.”

This will probably not end well for consumers. “Companies like AT&T and Verizon already give special treatment to their own video services, and T-Mobile lets select providers slip past its data limits, a practice called zero rating. At stake today is the ability of smaller companies to compete with internet service providers themselves.”

Not all of the directors in this piece agree, but at least one thinks it might happen soon: “I think right now is a very encouraging time because doors are being opened and people are realizing that women are powerful and we have a right to be here and we can tell really good stories. That’s always been the case, but I think now people are really, fully believing in women.”

The NEA budget is worth almost 8 million taco bowls at Trump Tower (but it’s worth less than a single Picasso).

This is probably not the last word, but GOPers in important positions don’t think this is a good plan. And, despite Pat Buchanan’s glee at the budget cuts, “The contours of the political battle itself have changed since those earlier fights in the 1980s and ’90s. The arguments then were over ideology, taste, free speech and the size of government; today they are about economic investment, federal priorities and how people feel about Mr. Trump remaking America to his liking.”

“We think of our minds as like computers: Information comes up and then gets filed into various folders. Instead, we need to really engage with material, and discover what connections there are with what we already know. Self-quizzing can help with that, because you’re explaining things to yourself — making that information meaningful.”

“Lawmakers unveiled plans on Tuesday aiming to eliminate college debt for more than 390,000 students in the University of California and California State University systems. Their plan also calls to reduce costs for the roughly 80,000 students receiving aid to attend the state’s community colleges. The plan has been reported as the most “generous” and “ambitious” from any state; perhaps it will act as a catalyst for what’s become a nationwide problem: As of 2015, seven in 10 college seniors graduating from public and nonprofit colleges in the United States had student loan debt, with an average of $30,100 per borrower, according to the Institute for College Access and Success.”