Scott Russell Sanders:

I wear no watch. I do not hurry.

Freeman Dyson:

At Trinity College, Cambridge, they planted an avenue of trees in the early 18th century, leading up from the river to the college. This avenue of trees grew very big and majestic in the course of 200 years. When I was a student there 50 years ago, the trees were growing a little dilapidated, though still very beautiful. The college decided that for the sake of the future, they would chop them down and plant new ones. Now, 50 years later, the new trees are half grown and already looking almost as beautiful as the old ones. That's the kind of thinking that comes naturally in such a place, where 100 years is nothing.

Arab Proverb:

It is good to know the truth, but it is better to speak of palm trees.

Decius:

There are certain basic pleasures of the ancient world that one has to work very hard to come by today. We've cut ourselves off from things that even our grandfathers took for granted.

Richard Preston:

From the moment he entered redwood space, Steve Sillett began to see things that no one had imagined. He discovered a lost world above Northern California.

Michiru Hoshino:

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Mind in the Forest

Deirdre Walker:

I am not screened because I look like a terrorist. I am routinely screened because I look like someone who will readily comply.

I stepped reluctantly toward the machine and asked her quietly whether I had the right to refuse the search. The screener's face dropped and she appeared stunned, as if my question had been received like a body-blow.

...

Over the last fifteen years or so, many police agencies started capturing data on police interactions. The primary purpose was to document what had historically been undocumented: informal street contacts. By capturing specific data, we were able to ask ourselves tough questions about potentially biased policing. Many agencies are still struggling with the answers to those questions.

I believe what we have here is the beginning of the end of complacency.

Ira Glass:

Not enough gets said about the importance of abandoning crap.

Richard Sennett:

The dismal experiences of many middle-aged job seekers suggest that corporations would rather find conformists among younger workers who haven't been discarded by employers and aren't skeptical about their work.

Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira:

Invariably, simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data.

So, follow the data.

Decius:

Money for me, databases for you.

Do I have the right to refuse this search?

Dan Green, for Armed Forces Journal:

In the long run, because this conflict is not about how many casualties counter-insurgent forces impose on the insurgents but about the will to stay in the fight, foreign counterinsurgents tend to grow weary of the amount of blood and treasure they must expend.

While the Taliban's strategic goals of uniting the Pashtuns, ejecting foreign military occupation and imposing Sharia law are well known, their tactical political program is less well understood and its popularity among many Pashtuns even more so.

While the Taliban will impose their will on villagers if they have to, and they often do so violently, they also have a positive agenda that seeks to entice supporters to their banner. The Taliban practice micropolitics to a remarkably high degree of sophistication. Because the people are unable to hold corrupt or ineffective provincial officials accountable, they often turn to the Taliban to address injustices.

To rob the Taliban of their ability to dispense on-the-spot justice, it is imperative that we make the justice sector a viable and dynamic part of the provincial government.

From a year ago:

All parties agreed that the only solution to Afghanistan's conflict is through dialogue, not fighting.

Elizabeth Rubin, from February 2008:

If you peel back the layers, there's always a local political story at the root of the killing and dying.

Decius:

If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money.

Peter Norvig:

Researchers have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas ...

Paul Graham:

That's barely enough time to get started.

Stewart Brand:

In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

Danny Hillis:

Some people say that they feel the future is slipping away from them. To me, the future is a big tractor-trailer slamming on its brakes in front of me just as I pull into its slip stream. I am about to crash into it.

From a January 2008 town-hall meeting:

Q: President Bush has talked about our staying in Iraq for fifty years.

John McCain: Make it a hundred.

David Kilcullen:

You've got to make a long-term commitment.

Elizabeth Rubin, from the Korengal Valley:

It didn't take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants.

The Taliban's political program

Barbara Elias:

The reason the Taliban have chosen repeatedly not to seek legitimacy through governance or diplomatic compromise has little to do with the incentives offered them and everything to do with how their leaders see the world. The fact is that the Taliban and al Qaeda are neither permanently bound by ideology nor held together merely by a fleeting correspondence of interests. Their relationship is rooted in more complex issues of legitimacy and identity.

The Taliban cannot surrender bin Laden without also surrendering their existing identity as a vessel for an obdurate and uncompromising version of political Islam. Their legitimacy rests not on their governing skills, popular support, or territorial control, but on their claim to represent what they perceive as sharia rule. This means upholding the image that they are guided entirely by Islamic principles; as such, they cannot make concessions to, or earnestly negotiate with, secular states.

Since the Taliban won't give al Qaeda up, the United States has little choice but to destroy al Qaeda, and since the Taliban cannot be meaningfully split or co-opted, Washington, unfortunately, has no real option but to prepare itself for a long struggle in the region.

Mark Twain:

When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.

Rory Stewart:

When we are not presented with a dystopian vision, we are encouraged to be implausibly optimistic. This misleads us in several respects simultaneously: minimising differences between cultures, exaggerating our fears, aggrandising our ambitions, inflating a sense of moral obligations and power, and confusing our goals. All these attitudes are aspects of a single worldview and create an almost irresistible illusion.

It is a language that exploits tautologies and negations to suggest inexorable solutions. It makes our policy seem a moral obligation, makes failure unacceptable, and alternatives inconceivable. It does this so well that a more moderate, minimalist approach becomes almost impossible to articulate. Afghanistan, however, is the graveyard of predictions.

Know Thine Enemy | Foreign Affairs

Judith Hertog, in Exquisite Corpse:

Childhood language acquisition experts claim that multilingual children develop more versatile brains than monolingual children: once children learn how to switch back and forth between languages, they also develop talents for other kinds of mental gymnastics. So I thought I was raising cosmopolitan, multilingual, superior children who'd be at home anywhere in the world and who'd nimbly slink between languages, cultures, and realities. But it didn't really worked out as I envisioned. Instead, we are raising a confused American toddler, and a daughter who, according to her school's assessment, is falling between the language cracks.

I cling to Dutch because I'm afraid that if I speak English to my children, they are hearing a translation of me instead of my real self. And I hope that by making my children speak Dutch, I can reconnect them to my own childhood. But in the middle of every slow laborious sentence, I consider the futility of my attempt and ask myself: Why do I hold on to this irrational nostalgia?

But when I listen to my voice in English, I hear not myself, but a pathetic, phony woman with a Dutch accent trying to sound like an American "mom." With every sentence an existential crisis, I often prefer silence. And in the silence I feel my children slip away from me.

I find other people's errors very reassuring. It makes me feel better about my own deficiencies. I'm always on the lookout for mistakes, and when someone who's supposed to know better slips up, my heart does a little victory jiggle.

... I feel the victory rush comfortably spreading through my body. I can't help smiling. This is all I've wanted her to acknowledge. She's an imposter, a swindler, just like me. And now that we are both exposed, my anger dissipates. For a few moments we are silent in mutual understanding: neither of us will ever feel completely comfortable in English, but we will have to keep up the impossible pretense that we are enough at home in it to teach it to others. For a moment I imagine Mrs. Schwab becoming my friend. We will talk about what it's like to always keep up a facade, to always feel incompetent. With each other we'll be able to let our guards down.

Birgit Mampe, Angela D. Friederici, Anne Christophe, and Kathleen Wermke:

Human fetuses are able to memorize auditory stimuli from the external world by the last trimester of pregnancy, with a particular sensitivity to melody contour in both music and language. Newborns prefer their mother's voice over other voices and perceive the emotional content of messages conveyed via intonation contours in maternal speech ("motherese"). Their perceptual preference for the surrounding language and their ability to distinguish between prosodically different languages and pitch changes are based on prosodic information, primarily melody. Adult-like processing of pitch intervals allows newborns to appreciate musical melodies and emotional and linguistic prosody. Although prenatal exposure to native-language prosody influences newborns' perception, the surrounding language affects sound production apparently much later. Here, we analyzed the crying patterns of 30 French and 30 German newborns with respect to their melody and intensity contours. The French group preferentially produced cries with a rising melody contour, whereas the German group preferentially produced falling contours. The data show an influence of the surrounding speech prosody on newborns' cry melody, possibly via vocal learning based on biological predispositions.

Mother Tongue: a moving account of interlingual farrago from a mother who wants smart children

John McWhorter, in World Affairs Journal:

Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem.

Who argues that we must preserve each pod of whales because of the particular songs they happen to have developed?

The main loss when a language dies is not cultural but aesthetic. In many Amazonian languages, when you say something you have to specify, with a suffix, where you got the information.

O'Reilly:

Now there are more than 2,500 documented programming languages!

Peter Norvig:

Researchers have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.

Michael Chabon:

If only there were a game, whose winning required a gift for the identification of missed opportunities and of things lost and irrecoverable, a knack for the belated recognition of truths, for the exploitation of chances in imagination after it is too late!

Douglas Haddow:

We are a lost generation, desperately clinging to anything that feels real, but too afraid to become it ourselves. We are a defeated generation, resigned to the hypocrisy of those before us, who once sang songs of rebellion and now sell them back to us. We are the last generation, a culmination of all previous things, destroyed by the vapidity that surrounds us.

The Cosmopolitan Tongue: The Universality of English

David Foster Wallace:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, "Morning, boys, how's the water?" And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, "What the hell is water?"

If you're automatically sure that you know what reality is and who and what is really important -- if you want to operate on your default-setting -- then you, like me, will not consider possibilities that aren't pointless and annoying. But if you've really learned how to think, how to pay attention, then you will know you have other options.

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

And the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on the fuel of fear and contempt and frustration and craving and the worship of self.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, that we have to keep reminding ourselves, over and over: "This is water, this is water."

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

This Is Water

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

The Invisible Committee:

The family is no longer so much the suffocation of maternal control or the patriarchy of beatings as it is this infantile abandon to a fuzzy dependency, where everything is familiar, this carefree moment in the face of a world that nobody can deny is breaking down, a world where "becoming self-sufficient" is a euphemism for "finding a boss." They want to use the "familiarity" of the biological family as an excuse to undermine anything that burns passionately within us and, under the pretext that they raised us, make us renounce the possibility of growing up, as well as everything that is serious in childhood. We need to guard against such corrosion.

Doris Lessing, from her 1985 Massey Lectures :

Imagine us saying to children:

"In the last fifty or so years, the human race has become aware of a great deal of information about its mechanisms; how it behaves, how it must behave under certain circumstances. If this is to be useful, you must learn to contemplate these roles calmly, dispassionately, disinterestedly, without emotion. It is information that will set people free from blind loyalties, obedience to slogans, rhetoric, leaders, group emotions."

Well, there it is.

What government, anywhere in the world, will happily envisage its subjects learning to free themselves from governmental and state rhetoric and pressures? Passionate loyalty and subjection to group pressure is what every state relies on.

No, I cannot imagine any nation -- or not for long -- teaching its citizens to become individuals able to resist group pressures.

We cannot expect a government to say to children:

"You are going to have to live in a world full of mass movements, both religious and political, mass ideas, mass cultures. Every hour of every day you will be deluged with ideas and opinions that are mass produced, and regurgitated, whose only real vitality comes from the power of the mob, slogans, pattern thinking. You are going to be pressured all through your life to join mass movements, and if you can resist this, you will be, every day, under pressure from various types of groups, often of your closest friends, to conform to them."

"It will seem to you many times in your life that there is no... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Prisons We Choose to Live Inside

Marge Simpson:

Bart, don't make fun of grad students! They just made a terrible life choice.

Louis Menand:

Students continue to check into the doctoral motel, and they don't seem terribly eager to check out.

There is a sense in which the system is now designed to produce ABDs -- graduate students who have completed all but their dissertations.

Between 1989 and 1996, the supply curve completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life.

From the archive, Louis Menand:

Getting a Ph.D. today means spending your 20's in graduate school, plunging into debt, writing a dissertation no one will read -- and becoming more narrow and more bitter each step of the way.

Winston Churchill:

Are we animals? Are we taking this too far?

Malcolm Gladwell:

Free is just another price ...

Decius:

Life is too short to spend 2300 hours a year working on someone else's idea of what the right problems are.

Matt Knox:

It's hard to get people to do something bad all in one big jump, but if you can cut it up into small enough pieces, you can get people to do almost anything.

Jonathan Pfeiffer:

Some of the most capable people in the post-graduate ranks feel uninspired or disempowered. They may enter graduate school full of creativity and find that after about a year, the light within them no longer burns as brightly as it once did.

Knowing exactly why this happens is difficult, but one cannot help but suspect that it has something to do with academic culture.

Richard Sennett:

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Christopher J. Ferguson:

Many people like to think that any child, with the proper nurturance, can blossom into some kind of academic oak tree, tall and proud. It's just not so.

Menand's new book asks:

Has American higher education become a dinosaur?

George Friedman:

That is what happened at the CIA: A culture of process destroyed a culture of excellence.

The Ph.D. Problem

Andrew Delbanco:

The more one ponders the statistics, the more murky their meaning becomes.

Whatever the merits of this or that testing regime or this or that curriculum, the only way to break up the impasse would be for governments and philanthropies to put in place real incentives and rewards for talented, well-educated, passionately committed teachers -- on whom, as everyone knows, everything finally depends.

Have you seen The Class?

Malcom Gladwell:

We should be lowering our standards, because there is no point in raising standards if standards don't track with what we care about.

Effective teachers have a gift for noticing -- what one researcher calls "withitness." It stands to reason that to be a great teacher you have to have withitness.

Tom Friedman:

The best way to learn how to learn is to love to learn, and the best way to love to learn is to have great teachers who inspire.

Charles McGrath:

In practically all the foxhole memoirs there is a common villain: standardized testing, which the authors agree has been so overemphasized that it is now an obstacle to the very education it was supposed to measure.

Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Dorothy Sayers (via Alan Jacobs):

However firmly a tradition is rooted, if it is never watered, though it dies hard, yet in the end it dies. And today a great number -- perhaps the majority -- of the men and women who handle our affairs, write our books and our newspapers, carry out our research, present our plays and our films, speak from our platforms and pulpits -- yes, and who educate our young people -- have never, even in a lingering traditional memory, undergone the Scholastic discipline. Less and less do the children who come to be educated bring any of that tradition with them. We have lost the tools of learning -- the axe and the wedge, the hammer and the saw, the chisel and the plane -- that were so adaptable to all tasks. Instead of them, we have merely a set of complicated jigs, each of which will do but one task and no more, and in using which eye and hand receive no training, so that no man ever sees the work as a whole or "looks to the end of the work."

What use is it to pile task on task and prolong the days of labor, if at the clos... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Dreams of Better Schools