"The AP classroom is where intellectual curiosity goes to die."

John Tierney, a former college professor and high-school teacher, explains why AP classes are a scam. (via theatlantic)

(via theatlantic)

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theatlantic:

Happy Birthday Occupy! Income Inequality Is Still Getting Worse.

Occupy Wall Street may well have been the first global protest movement to rally around a statistic cribbed from an economics paper. So to mark its one year anniversary today, I thought I’d break out some of the latest numbers tracking U.S. inequality, courtesy of this month’s Census Bureau recent report on income, poverty, and health insurance coverage. 

From 2010 to 2011, the top 5 percent of U.S. households upped their share of the country’s income by 5.3 percent. The top 20 percent got a 1.6 percent bump. And while the country’s poorest saw their piece of the pie grow by a smidgen, the middle classes lost ground.

Read more. [Image: Jordan Weissmann]

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theatlantic:

monkfishjowls:

Hell yeah, The Atlantic. 

“Introverts are persistent—give them a difficult puzzle to solve, and they’ll analyze it before diving in, then work at it diligently. (“It’s not that I’m so smart,” said Einstein. “It’s that I stay with problems longer.”) And they’re careful risk-takers: less likely to get into car accidents, participate in extreme sports—or place outsize financial bets. (Warren Buffett is a self-described introvert who attributes his success to his temperament.)”

Read more.

YES!

"Brandon is utterly uninteresting. Not unlike a porn star, except that the money shots are tears."

Noah Berlatsky writing about Shame for The Atlantic

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theatlantic:

Why I Am Proudly, Strongly, and Happily in Favor of Adverbs

Writing isn’t math. It has no Pythagorean theorem, but it’s simple to ban adverbs. In many cases, doing so can improve the work in question, as it encourages writers—children, adults, newbies, veterans—to think about structure and diction. The no-adverbs rule only becomes problematic when students don’t learn—just like how there are many words where “e” comes before “i”—that there are times when the rule is meant to be broken.

Even those most famous rulebooks couch their points in qualifiers. Dig past the section headings, and Strunk and White aren’t always against an adverb. It’s in the rush to get it right that those who rely on those rules replace Zinsser’s “most” with “all.” We forget that there are exceptions, that an adverb can go a long way.

Lily Rothman comes to the defense of a much-maligned part of speech. Read more.

“The only way to learn the difference is from the supreme writing teacher: reading. Reading great books, great magazines, great blogs—and reading a lot—allows you to internalize what works and what doesn’t. Read great sentences until you can tell when one isn’t. Read great paragraphs until their rhythms get stuck in your head.”

"Oops."

Is it all over for Rick Perry? (via theatlantic)

Bye bye, Rick Perry. Next up? Herman Cain. Heh heh heh…