1. 6051 – As of today, 4,454 U.S. troops have died in Iraq and 1,597 in Afghanistan, including 948 in Afghanistan since Barack Obama took office. Lets get these guys home soon. Happy Memorial Day.
2. The End of an Era – After four years in the classroom, this will be my last official week as a “teacher.” It’s definitely bittersweet. While I’m ready for a change and really looking forward to law school, I can honestly say that becoming a teacher was the best decision I ever made.
3. College Bound – Congrats again to Emmett Knowlton, who yesterday became a high school graduate. Take my word for it brother, your best days are behind you and it only gets worse from here on out…
4. Bats – Just when I thought I had seen it all, this week a family of bats moved into my house and began shitting all over my room. It’s this type of crap (no pun intended) that really gets me excited about going home.
5. Marathon Training: Week 3 – For the first time in a long time I actually felt like a real runner this week. I ran four times and three of those runs were over five miles. How do you like that?
6. A Terrible Idea - About six months ago, after I finished the Angkor Wat Half Marathon, I promised myself that I would never again put myself through the pain of running a race while completely out of shape. Then a few days ago I heard about a half marathon in Phnom Penh on June 18 and decided to bail on that promise. I’ll probably be even more out of shape than I was last time around, but at least I know what I’m getting myself into.
7. Can Two People Share a Mind? – Wow! That’s really all I can say about the article on conjoined twins that appeared in yesterday’s NY Times Magazine. The two girls are joined at the head and share parts of their brian which has fascinating implications. Just read the two sentences below…
The results of the test did not surprise the family, who had long suspected that even when one girl’s vision was angled away from the television, she was laughing at the images flashing in front of her sister’s eyes. The sensory exchange, they believe, extends to the girls’ taste buds: Krista likes ketchup, and Tatiana does not, something the family discovered when Tatiana tried to scrape the condiment off her own tongue, even when she was not eating it.
You can read the entire article here: Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind? Do it, it’s definitely worth reading.
8. Franzen Commencement Speech - What is it about Kenyon College that lends itself to great commencement speeches? Last week, Freedom author Jonathan Franzen delivered a classic about technology and love…
There is no such thing as a person whose real self you like every particle of. This is why a world of liking is ultimately a lie. But there is such a thing as a person whose real self you love every particle of. And this is why love is such an existential threat to the techno-consumerist order: it exposes the lie.
This is not to say that love is only about fighting. Love is about bottomless empathy, born out of the heart’s revelation that another person is every bit as real as you are. And this is why love, as I understand it, is always specific. Trying to love all of humanity may be a worthy endeavor, but, in a funny way, it keeps the focus on the self, on the self’s own moral or spiritual well-being. Whereas, to love a specific person, and to identify with his or her struggles and joys as if they were your own, you have to surrender some of your self.
The big risk here, of course, is rejection. We can all handle being disliked now and then, because there’s such an infinitely big pool of potential likers. But to expose your whole self, not just the likable surface, and to have it rejected, can be catastrophically painful. The prospect of pain generally, the pain of loss, of breakup, of death, is what makes it so tempting to avoid love and stay safely in the world of liking.
And yet pain hurts but it doesn’t kill. When you consider the alternative — an anesthetized dream of self-sufficiency, abetted by technology — pain emerges as the natural product and natural indicator of being alive in a resistant world. To go through a life painlessly is to have not lived. Even just to say to yourself, “Oh, I’ll get to that love and pain stuff later, maybe in my 30s” is to consign yourself to 10 years of merely taking up space on the planet and burning up its resources.
You can read the adapted NY Times piece here: Liking is for Cowards, Go With What Hurts or listen to the Kenyon College speech streaming here: Kenyon College
9. Democrats Give More B’s – Something to consider next time you pick your classes — according to a recent study, the political orientation of your professor is likely to affect the way he/she grades.
A new study by Talia Bar and Asaf Zussman looked at patterns in how Republican and Democratic college professors graded students. It is based on a data set of grades, courses and SAT scores of 17,062 students at an unnamed “elite university.” The researchers then determined the political affiliation of the professors assigning those grades, based on listings on local voter registration rolls (for the 511 professors who were registered with a party, anyway). The authors were interested in whether Democrats professors gave out a more egalitarian distribution of grades, since liberals believe more strongly than conservatives “in the justification for governmental action to reduce inequality.”And their hunch appears to be right.
As you can see, the grading distribution for Democratic professors is relatively flat, meaning there was little variety in grades assigned to students with different SAT scores. The Republican line is steeper, meaning that Republicans had more variance in their grading: They gave both more A’s and more D’s than Democrats did; Democrats tend to give a lot of B’s.
(Grading on a Partisan Curve: Economix Blog)
10. What I’m Listening to This Week - One Republic featuring B.O.B. – The Good Life Remix. I heard this is gonna be the “song of the summer.” I don’t know what any of the other contenders are, but I’m a fan…
