- Via Alexis Madrigal, this piece by Beau Cronin on what it means to say a machine “thinks like a brain” is required reading, particularly if you enjoyed my Bloggingheads chat with Alexis. (You haven’t watched it yet? What are you waiting for?)
- This piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom on the economic limits of education and reparations is just so goddamn good.
How can I revere education as I do and refuse to accept it as the gospel that will save us from persistent, intractable inequality? It is precisely because I revere education – formal and informal – that I refuse to sell it as a cure for all that ails us.
Degrees cannot fix the cumulative effect of structural racism that doesn’t just reinforce the link between family wealth and returns to educational attainment in the labor market but exists as a primary function of that link.Exactly right, and so well put.
- Mark Harris puts his finger on my own frustration with comic book movies: constantly feeling like I’m never actually experiencing the movie I want to see, just being sold the next movie. I find it exhausting to finally shuffle dutifully into the theater after months of being marketed to, watching the movie, and realizing that those two hours are themselves just more marketing. I just want to get to the thing itself. Harris’s essay also lends credence to the fact that fan service is one of the worst things ever to happen to pop culture. Getting what you think you want is not the same as getting what will make you happy.
- Noah Millman has some thoughts on my Tom Friedman barrel-shooting. A couple of commenters on my post had a thought similar to Noah’s– maybe everyone can’t be above average, by definition, but everyone should have some skills that they are above average in that they can monetize. Which, first, I just doubt that’s true. It’s pleasant to imagine, but does that sound like real life to you? It sounds like the kind of fantasy we put on posters in middle schools more than reality. Secondly: if we’re going to reward a greater diversity of skills, abilities, and strengths than we do, great. You’re banging my drum. But recognize: this is literally the opposite of what the education reform movement is trying to do now. By pushing more and more standardized tests and more standardized curricula like the Common Core, the education reform movement is narrowing the definition of a valuable human being, not widening it. A prominent proponent of the education reform movement? Why, Tom Friedman, naturally. Here he is, praising the Common Core. So somebody could try to rescue the Friedman “everybody has to be above average” argument by making it about valuing a diversity of skills, but that somebody ain’t Tom Friedman.