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Where Islam Meets America
Is a conservative religious liberal-arts college an oxymoron? Rollo Romig on Muslim Zaytuna College: http://nyr.kr/194KmI0
Photograph by Justin Sullivan
(Source: newyorker.com)
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Why guaranteeing a Green Card to all foreign-born science graduates is a bad idea→
John Cassidy on immigration reform: http://nyr.kr/14p5xSS
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Cartoon by Bruce Eric Kaplan. For more from this week’s issue: http://nyr.kr/UocU9e
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"Homework is an institution roundly disliked by all who participate in it… Does this mean that we would be better off getting rid of it?"
— In Comment this week, Louis Menand asks how much homework matters, and whether we would be better off getting rid of it: http://nyr.kr/SM7lk6 -
"When a seven-foot yellow-feathered bird who is subject to depressions attempts to seat himself upon the letter “h” and fails, it is no longer simply an event in children’s television, or even in the media. It is part of the intellectual history of a generation, who are already in important ways the children of “Sesame Street”…. Small children from poor or middle-class families who watch “Sesame Street” do better on cognitive tests and in first grade than children who do not watch it. Children who watch it frequently do better than children who watch it rarely. Children who begin to watch it at the age of three learn more rapidly than children who begin at four…."
— From the archive, Renata Adler writes in defense of Big Bird and children’s programming in 1972: Read more -
Mary Hawthorne on the value of translation, with insight from Lydia Davis, Arthur Goldhammer, and David Bellos: http://nyr.kr/P8v5gz
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Margaret Talbot with the case against single-sex classrooms: http://nyr.kr/Oa4TwA
What has changed since the nineties is the notion of who single-sex education is supposed to help most. In the nineties, it was girls. … But that did not turn out to be the long-term problem.
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Six lessons from the misreporting of the health-care decision→
…then there is the matter of how we learned about the decision—and the media reports, notably by CNN and Fox News, that got it wrong. There are lessons there, several of which were drawn out in a seven-thousand-word post Tom Goldstein, of SCOTUSblog, wrote about how the story unfoldedbetween 10:06 and 10:15 A.M. E.T. on Thursday, June 28th. Some of them we already know—for example, that SCOTUSblog itself did an exemplary job. But there’s more, too, with some conclusions that go beyond this case.
Click-through for six lessons to take away from the misreporting: http://nyr.kr/Mgu6VR
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In the current issue of the magazine, Nathan Heller explains how the Technology/Entertainment/Design (TED) conference franchise has turned ideas into an industry. Part of the reason, Heller claims, are certain elements common to many of these talks. In this video, we break down the arc of TED talk.
Click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/L6uM0i
(Source: newyorker.com)
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In Defense of Cursive→
“A knowledge of cursive may not be “relevant” to the modern world, but it is essential to a visceral sense of the past, and an ability to examine the literature, correspondence, and history contained in original documents.”
As many U.S. schools begin to phase out the teaching of cursive, Judith Thurman writes in defense of script: http://nyr.kr/MLREak
