Smartphones get blamed for a lot of what may be wrong with social interactions these days, including a decline in “soft skills” that some say is the reason why young people are poorly prepared for the labor market. It’s refreshing to read someone who has other ideas about this lack of career readiness and ways …
Continue reading Not so soft a skill: Matt Reed on career navigation
Prestige universities across the globe share many of the features that account for their excellence—“celebrated faculty, groundbreaking research,” and comfortable, well-maintained facilities. There is a huge difference, however, in the source of funding for these institutions; those in the US are overwhelmingly private schools, while prestige universities in the rest of the world tend to …
Continue reading Who pays the bill: Alia Wong on prestige universities around the world
Do you love the ads that pepper your TV shows, online content, walks through your neighborhood, and almost everything else? We didn’t think so. But sometimes ads are clever, interesting, and engaging, right? How can you filter out the annoying ones and keep the entertaining ones? There’s no simple answer, but innovator and technology writer …
Continue reading Better blocking: Laura Desmond on the future of advertising
Parents all over the world want good lives for their children. That’s not a controversial statement, nothing to write home about. But what does it mean to have a “good life”? Is it only about economic prosperity? And is prosperity only measured across generations? Washington Post economics columnist Robert J. Samuelson observes what may be …
Continue reading At the top, heading down: Robert Samuelson on economic mobility
“Vegan hot dog” isn’t an oxymoron, and it doesn't attempt to replicate the taste of an all-beef frank. What it does, according to Wired staff writer Emily Dreyfuss, is offer a “comprehensible” product that can participate in protein-centered social events such as backyard barbeques. Dreyfuss explains her ideas in this July 2018 essay. Dreyfuss, "In defense …
Continue reading A place at the grill: Emily Dreyfuss on fake meat
Experts, authorities, and ordinary people in all walks of life have observed (and complained) that our gadgets have taken over our lives and attention spans. And, as always, there’s an app for that (dozens of them, actually), and many people offer those tech-based solutions. Others say quitting cold turkey is the only remedy. Arielle Pardes, …
Continue reading A focused, relaxing ride: Arielle Pardes on the “slow web”
Who doesn’t love a good story? Nobody, probably. But in addition to their entertainment value, stories serve an important social function. In this April 2012 Boston Globe essay, literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall presents evidence from the emerging science of the story to argue that “most fiction, even the trashy stuff, appears to be in the public …
Continue reading In the public interest: Jonathan Gottschall on the social benefits of fiction
“It doesn’t grow on trees, you know!” Many complaints about the use of valuable resources begin with that statement. Some fruits and edible resources, however, do grow on trees. Environmental justice worker and UCLA doctoral student Comfort Azubuko would like to see more fruit trees in public spaces, and she outlines her proposal in this …
Continue reading It does grow on trees: Comfort Azubuko on food forests in public space
We want our doctors to be competent scientists, of course; our bodies are complicated instruments, and doctors need to learn a lot. Since medical training can’t cover everything, should it focus only on the hard sciences—the anatomy, the chemistry, the bioengineering? Dr. Angira Patel, professor of pediatrics and medical education in Chicago, argues that medical …
Continue reading The doctor’s empathy: Angira Patel on the humanities in medical training
Men’s major league sports coaches are proven leaders, role models, iconic authority figures, sometimes even larger than life. And, up to now in the US, they’ve always been men, but that may be about to change. San Antonio Spurs (NBA) player Pau Gasol talks about that possibility in this May 2018 essay in the Players’ …
Continue reading Coach wears high heels: Pau Gasol on gender and the NBA
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