Whose Failing Grade Is It?

by Lisa Belkin

Since the subject today is schooling, let’s start with a quiz:

1. A third grader in Florida is often late for class. She tends to forget her homework and is unprepared for tests. The teacher would like to talk to her parents about this, but they fail to attend parent-teacher conferences. The teacher should:

a) fail the student.
b) fail the parents.

2. A middle-school student in Alaska is regularly absent, and his grades are suffering as a result. The district should:

a) fail the student.
b) fine the parents $500 a day for every day the student is not in school.

3. A California kindergartener has been absent, without a doctor’s note or other “verifiable reason,” 10 times in one semester. The district should:

a) call the parents.
b) call the district attorney and have charges brought against the parents.

The answer, under state laws that have been proposed (No. 1), or recently enacted (No. 2 and No. 3), is “b” on all counts: If a student is behaving badly, punish Mom and Dad.

Teachers are fed up with being blamed for the failures of American education, and legislators are starting to hear them. A spate of bills introduced in various states now takes aim squarely at the parents. If you think you can legislate teaching, the notion goes, why not try legislating parenting?

It is a complicated idea, taking on the controversial question of whether parents, teachers or children are most to blame when a child fails to learn.

But the thinking goes like this: If you look at schools that “work,” as measured by test scores and graduation rates, they all have involved (overinvolved?) parents, who are on top of their children’s homework, in contact with their children’s teachers, and invested in their children’s futures. So just require the same of parents in schools that don’t work, and the problem is solved (or, at least, dented), right?

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Saturday Night Mix

The Charms of Eleanor

by Russell Baker

In 1918, during the fourteenth year of their marriage, Eleanor Roosevelt, age thirty-three, discovered that Franklin, age thirty-six, was in love with her young social secretary, Lucy Mercer. Long afterward, Eleanor told her friend Joseph Lash that the discovery was devastating, that the bottom seemed to have dropped out of her life. Yet as her subsequent history persuasively testifies, it was also her liberating moment, a life-changing event that opened a world of glorious possibilities for a woman not too timid to explore them.

Until then she had been bound to a stifling marriage in which her life was spent in unobtrusively loyal service to Franklin’s gaudy ambition and in childbearing. There had been six pregnancies in the marriage’s first twelve years; sex, she later told her daughter Anna, was an ordeal to be borne.

It was a marriage under constant surveillance by Franklin’s mother, the omnipresent Sara Delano, a live-in mother-in-law out of a Gothic soap opera. Sara cast an authoritative shadow over household operations, child rearing, and, worst of all, over Franklin. He was her only son, and she adored him but seemed determined to keep him her boy forever. This desire to clasp him in unending maternal embrace may have accounted for her refusal to surrender her tight control of the family’s considerable wealth.

The discovery that he was having some sort of affair with another woman produced a family crisis fraught with great pain for Eleanor and great danger for Franklin. To those who now think of them as giants at ease on the world stage, their behavior in this moment of emotional turmoil may seem astonishingly youthful in its innocence. Yet they were certainly not young, and the year, after all, was 1918, a time when philandering husbands were a Washington commonplace that capital society shrugged off as part of the local culture.

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Low Voltage

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What Did Jesus Do?

by Adam Gopnik

When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee, meets John, an ascetic desert hermit who lives on locusts and wild honey, and is baptized by him in the River Jordan. If one thing seems nearly certain to the people who read and study the Gospels for a living, it’s that this really happened: John the Baptizer—as some like to call him, to give a better sense of the original Greek’s flat-footed active form—baptized Jesus. They believe it because it seems so unlikely, so at odds with the idea that Jesus always played the star in his own show: why would anyone have said it if it weren’t true? This curious criterion governs historical criticism of Gospel texts: the more improbable or “difficult” an episode or remark is, the likelier it is to be a true record, on the assumption that you would edit out all the weird stuff if you could, and keep it in only because the tradition is so strong that it can’t plausibly be excluded. If Jesus says something nice, then someone is probably saying it for him; if he says something nasty, then probably he really did.

So then, the scholars argue, the author of Mark, whoever he was—the familiar names conventionally attached to each Gospel come later*—added the famous statement of divine favor, descending directly from the heavens as they opened. But what does the voice say? In Mark, the voice says, “You are my Son, whom I love; with you I am well pleased,” seeming to inform a Jesus who doesn’t yet know that this is so. But some early versions of Luke have the voice quoting Psalm 2: “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.” Only in Matthew does it announce Jesus’ divinity to the world as though it were an ancient, fixed agreement, not a new act. In Mark, for that matter, the two miraculous engines that push the story forward at the start and pull it toward Heaven at the end—the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection—make no appearance at all. The story begins with Jesus’ adult baptism, with no hint of a special circumstance at his birth, and there is actually some grumbling by Jesus about his family (“Only in his home town, among his relatives and in his own house, is a prophet without honor,” he complains); it ends with a cry of desolation as he is executed—and then an enigmatic and empty tomb. (It’s left to the Roman centurion to recognize him as the Son of God after he is dead, while the verses in Mark that show him risen were apparently added later.)

The intractable complexities of fact produce the inevitable ambiguities of faith. The more one knows, the less one knows. Was Jesus a carpenter, or even a carpenter’s son? The Greek word tekto¯n, long taken to mean “carpenter,” could mean something closer to a stoneworker or a day laborer. (One thinks of the similar shadings of a word like “printer,” which could refer to Ben Franklin or to his dogsbody.) If a carpenter, then presumably he was an artisan. If a stoneworker, then presumably he spent his early years as a laborer, schlepping from Nazareth to the grand Greco-Roman city of Sepphoris, nearby, to help build its walls and perhaps visit its theatre and agora. And what of the term “Son of Man,” which he uses again and again in Mark, mysteriously: “The Son of Man is Lord even of the Sabbath.” As Diarmaid MacCulloch points out in his new, immensely ambitious and absorbing history, “Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years” (Viking; $45), the phrase, which occurs in the Gospels “virtually exclusively in the reported words of Jesus,” certainly isn’t at all the same as the later “Son of God,” and may merely be Aramaic for “folks like us.”

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Cruise Control

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Tale of Two Explosions

by Jesus Diaz

55 years ago today, the United States tested a hydrogen bomb over Namu island, in the Bikini Atoll, Pacific Ocean. The 15 megaton bomb exploded at 15,000 feet, causing a four-mile fireball, 500 times brighter than the Sun.

It was the first airborne test of the hydrogen bomb—created in 1951 by Edward Teller and Stanisław Ulam—and yet another nuclear test of the long Bikini Atoll series. By then, another kind of atomic weapon was already being tested in beaches all around the world, one of the most fascinating pieces of garment ever devised by humankind: The bikini.

The origin of the bikini

It was in May 1946 when Louis Réard—a French car engineer who at the time was running his mom's lingerie shop in Paris—introduced two small pieces of clothing, advertising them as "the smallest bathing suit in the world." Simultaneously and unknowingly, fashion designer Jacques Heim was working on a similar design.Réard named his invention the bikini because of the Bikini Atoll nuclear tests. He thought that everyone would be shocked by the risqué display of curves and belly buttons. He was right. During many years, the bikini caused more surprise than any of the nuclear tests conducted by the United States and the Soviet Union. The joke at the time was that that the "bikini" split the "atom", because it was introduced right after a tiny single-piece bathing suit called the Atome.

The bikini was so explosive that even American bathing suit queens disapproved, as the Los Angeles Times writes in 1949:

The bathing beauty queen-blond Bebe Shopp, 18, of Hopkins, Minn.-got an enthusiastic welcome in Paris, but she said she hasn't changed her mind about French swim suits. ... 'I don't approve of Bikini suits for American girls,' Bebe told her French interviewers. 'The French girls can wear them if they want to, but I still don't approve of them on American girls.

Little could she imagine the tiny g-strings to be used only a decade later.

The real origin of the bikini

But while we should all rejoice for the invention of the bikini, the car engineer and the fashion designer were only rediscovering it. In fact, the two piece bathing suit was already being used in the greco-roman world, back in the third century AD.

 

This mosaic—discovered in Villa Romana del Casale, Sicily—is good proof of that. Its thousands of colored tiles show women in bikini playing and exercising by the beach. Habemus Pamela Anderson.

This wasn't the only display of bikinis at the time. In Pompeii, archeologists discovered several statues of the goddess Venus wearing a bikini. And only six hundred years before this, the greek philosopher Democritus formulated his atomic theory of the cosmos, which explained that our world was made of tiny, invisible particles that were in constant motion.

Yet another confirmation that there's nothing new under the sun.

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Agreeing on Groupon

by Joshua Gains

Harry Truman famously begged for a one-handed economist. Why? He was sick of his economic advisers saying "on the other hand." Charles Schultz expressed similar frustration here. The idea that economists hedge their bets or disagree constantly with one another is a feature of the discipline. We see it today over issues such as the deficit and health care reform.

But right now, there is one issue on which every economist I know of actually agrees (and in an unqualified way): that Groupon (a) should have accepted the purported $6 billion bid from Google when it had the chance; (b) that Google was insane to have offered it; and (c) that Groupon is pretty much doomed or, at least, will have fleeting glory. Put simply, the new coupon industry is following a path common to so many new markets, with a leader with initial success, a flurry of entrants (at last count some 400 competitors) and, finally, a big shakeout.

Of course, Groupon could be left standing after the shakeout, as Amazon and eBay were in days of old. But even if it makes the cut, the notion that it could earn persistently high profits seems far-fetched. Economists want to see what Groupon uniquely controls. The baseline idea — heavily discounted coupons delivered to inboxes — is easy to copy. The costs Groupon faces are not the low marginal costs of an Internet business but a business-by-business costly sales effort. Thus, there do not appear to be scale economies that could keep competitors at bay.

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Artificial People

How new advances in science rekindle old myths and fears.

by Michele Pridmore-Brown

Philip Ball
UNNATURAL
The heretical idea of making people

In the years leading up to the birth of the first baby produced by IVF, tinkering with life was routinely decried as Promethean hubris, Faustian ambition or sorcery. But once a real, squalling baby named Louise Brown arrived, on July 25, 1978, in Oldham Hospital, Manchester, courtesy of a great deal of tinkering, it became awfully hard to denounce her. Her “lusty yell” reverberated “round the brave new world”, announced Newsweek in a sentence that managed to sprinkle joy with a dash of unease by way of Huxley’s dystopia. One American comic famously quipped that perhaps one ought to send a card not to the parents but to the Dupont chemical company. The Vatican, faced with the reality of a life, perforce had to wish the family well, but frowned sonorously at the “unnatural” means that had brought this life about.

It took 4 million more babies like Louise Brown, and thirty-two years, for Patrick Steptoe, who had made Brown’s life possible, to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Medicine. His partner, Landrum Shettles, was long dead. Yet even then, a Vatican spokesman on bioethics declared the prize “out of order”. Philip Ball’s book can be read as an excavation of this complex debate.

Unnatural is not about assisted conception per se, but rather about our relationship to what Ball calls “anthropoeia”: the making of (artificial) people. In particular, it is about our fear of the unnatural, why tinkering with nature brings on thoughts of Prometheus’ eagle-pecked liver: of hubris punished, or, worse yet, of Frankenstein’s monster. IVF babies are of course very widely accepted now, but each time a fresh innovation – genetic engineering, cloning, synthetic biology – comes up the pipeline, an allied set of tropes is deployed. Prometheus, Frankenstein and Brave New World serve as a kind of unreflective shorthand. Ball’s book is a determinedly reflective account of how these myths are channelled through history: how they tell us about ourselves, about the human imagination, about our ever-evolving definitions of life, and about our fraught relationship to science and technology.

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Feel Good

Michael Franti & Spearhead:  Say Hey (I Love You)

United Steak of America

(..with a side order of Alaska and Hawaii)

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Wipeout

Big day at the Wedge, May 19, 2011 

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Pickmaster

[ed.  Ok, this is just too cool.  If you're a guitar player like I am you will immediately appreciate the utility of this idea.  It allows you to take any material, of any thickness, and craft it into a customized guitar pick.  You'll never have to buy (or search under the couch cushions)  for another pick again.  Rock on!]

I don’t know where my guitar picks disappear to. I’m pretty sure it’s the same place my socks and my abs went. Some days I spend at least as much time searching for plectra as I do playing guitar, and although for years I was strictly a one-pick dude (the Jim Dunlop Jazz III), I’ve trained myself to now use whatever pick I find, wherever I find it. It’s just better and more musicianly to remain adaptable than to be bound to any one type of pick.

The makers of Pickmaster must realise this quandry because they’ve created the ideal way to ensure you are never left pickless. The Pickmaster Plectrum Cutter is a very chunky and solidly built tool which lets you stamp out picks from whatever material you find around the house – old credit cards, the lid from the butter tub – you could even be super-ironic and use it to cut a guitar pick out of one of those large triangular bass picks.

I tested the Pickmaster out first on its own packaging (how very meta), then on a few cards laying around the house. The unit is reassuringly strong, and requires a bit of pressure to cut through some materials. When it does so it cuts a perfect pick shape every time, regardless of material. Some ‘victims’ might require you to smoothe out the edges a little, which can easily be performed by rubbing the sides of the pick on your tattered old Levis or even on the carpet. Then you’re good to go.

The Pickmaster Plectrum Cutter will easily stash into your guitar case or gig bag for those little emergencies, and aside from being extraordinarily practical, it’s also a lot of fun. I can see myself making little pick-shaped pasta out of lasagne sheets, or maybe pick-shaped confetti out of shiny paper for some kind of special guitar-related occasion (I’m not sure what occasion that might be yet – I’ll invent one).

LINK: Pickmaster at Prezzybox

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Friday Book Club - Zeitoun

by Timothy Egan

In “Zeitoun,” what Dave Eggers has found in the Katrina mud is the full-fleshed story of a single family, and in telling that story he hits larger targets with more punch than those who have already attacked the thematic and historic giants of this disaster. It’s the stuff of great narrative nonfiction.

Eggers, the boy wonder of good intentions, has given us 21st-­century Dickensian storytelling — which is to say, a character­-driven potboiler with a point. But here’s the real trick: He does it without any writerly triple-lutzes or winks of post­modern irony. There are no rants against President Bush, no cheap shots at the authorities who let this city drown. He does it the old-fashioned way: with show-not-tell prose, in the most restrained of voices.

In that sense, “Zeitoun” has less in common with Eggers’s breakthrough memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (which met with mostly deserved trumpet-blaring in 2000), than it does with his 2006 novel “What Is the What,” the so-called fictionalized memoir of a real-life refugee of the Sudanese civil war. In that book, Eggers’s voice took a back seat to his protagonist’s outsize story. But it was an odd hybrid.

“Zeitoun” is named for the family at the center of the storm. Abdulrahman Zeitoun is a middle-aged Syrian-­American father of four, owner of a successful painting and contracting firm. He works hard and takes good care of his loved ones, in America and in Syria. He is also the kind of neighbor you wish you could find at Home Depot.

His wife, Kathy, has Southern Baptist big-family roots, but drifts after a failed early marriage until she finds a home in Islam and a doting husband in Abdul. Her hijab is a problem for her family, and for many citizens in post-9/11 America. Yet her charms and his smarts make for a good pairing at home and at the office — which is often the same place, an old house in the Uptown neighborhood of New Orleans.

Eggers starts things out at a slow simmer, two days before the storm arrives, with tension in the air, people fleeing, anxiety as heavy as the humidity. It’s Hitchcock before the birds attack. Once he starts to turn up the gas, he never lets up. Kathy flees with the children, first to a crowded, anxious house of relatives in Baton Rouge and then west to Phoenix. She begs Zeitoun to join them. But he’s been through storms before, he says, and besides, somebody needs to stay behind and watch the fort.

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MIT

by Ed Pilkington

Yo-Yo Ma's cello may not be the obvious starting point for a journey into one of the world's great universities. But, as you quickly realise when you step inside the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), there's precious little about the place that is obvious.

The cello is resting in a corner of MIT's celebrated media lab, a hub of techy creativity. There's a British red telephone kiosk standing in the middle of one of its laboratories, while another room is signposted: "Lego learning lab - Lifelong kindergarten."

The cello is part of the Opera of the Future lab run by the infectiously energetic Tod Machover. A renaissance man for the 21st – or perhaps 22nd – century, Machover is a composer, inventor and teacher rolled into one. He sweeps into the office 10 minutes late, which is odd because his watch is permanently set 20 minutes ahead in a patently vain effort to be punctual. Then, with the urgency of the White Rabbit, he rushes me across the room to show me the cello. It looks like any other electric classical instrument, with a solid wood body and jack socket. But it is much more. Machover calls it a "hyperinstrument", a sort of thinking machine that allows Ma and his cello to interact with one another and make music together.

"The aim is to build an instrument worthy of a great musician like Yo-Yo Ma that can understand what he is trying to do and respond to it," Machover says. The cello has numerous sensors across its body, fret and along the bow. By measuring the pressure, speed and angle of the virtuoso's performance it can interpret his mood and engage with it, producing extraordinary new sounds. The virtuoso cellist frequently performs on the instrument as he tours around the world.

When Machover was developing the instrument, he found that the sound it made was distorted by Ma's hand as it absorbed electric current flowing from the bow. Machover had a eureka moment. What if you reversed that? What if you channelled the electricity flowing from the performer's body and turned it into music?

Armed with that new idea, Machover designed an interactive system for Prince that the rock star deployed on stage at Wembley Stadium a few years ago, conjuring up haunting sounds through touch and gesture. Later, two of Machover's students at the media lab had the idea of devising an interactive game out of the technology. They went on to set up a company called Harmonix, based just down the road from MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts, from which they developed Rock Band and Guitar Hero.

From Ma's cello, via Prince, to one of the most popular video games ever invented. And all stemming from Machover's passion for pushing at the boundaries of the existing world to extend and unleash human potential. That's not a bad description of MIT as a whole. This maverick community, on the other side of the Charles River from Boston, brings highly gifted, highly motivated individuals together from a vast range of disciplines but united by a common desire: to leap into the dark and reach for the unknown.

The result of that single unifying ambition is visible all around us. For the past 150 years, MIT has been leading us into the future. The discoveries of its teachers and students have become the warp and weft of modernity, the stuff of daily life that we now all take for granted. The telephone, electromagnets, radars, high-speed photography, office photocopiers, cancer treatments, pocket calculators, computers, the internet, the decoding of the human genome, lasers, space travel . . . the list of innovations that involved essential contributions from MIT and its faculty goes on and on.

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Eyescape

 

Photo:  John Rankin

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Roast Chicken For Two, A Recipe

Step 1: Preheat your oven. Step 2: Wash chicken. Step 3: Have sex with your partner.

by Michael Ruhlman

In my prekid days, I lived with my wife in a shaded little bungalow in Palm Beach, Fla. The evenings were balmy, and I thought nothing of getting dinner rolling, then coaxing my wife into a little preprandial fling. What better way could there have been to pass the time while the charcoal turned to burger-searing embers? There was no better appetizer, and the meal afterward was remarkably satisfying. The conversation that followed had an uncommon ease.

Now that I'm a parent, the evenings are filled with something more than warm breezes. Family life can feel like a gale-force event. Forget creatively trying to pass the time. Just sitting down to dinner seems to eat up the clock. But not long ago, on a tear on my blog about the way food companies try to convince us that cooking is too hard to do on our own and that we're too stupid to succeed, I dashed off a recipe that included a hard-earned suggestion. I had learned by now that to recapture and maintain the excitement of my relationship takes plan­ning. In this case, though, not much. With a little invention, a simple roast chicken—one of the great staples of cooking life—becomes something entirely new.

Roast Chicken for Two

• Step 1: Preheat your oven to 425˚F or, if you have ventilation, 450˚F, and use convection heat if it's available.
• Step 2: Wash and pat dry a 3- to 4-pound chicken. Truss it if you know how, or stuff 2 lemon halves in its cavity. Season it aggressively with kosher or sea salt (it should have a nice crust of salt). Put it in a skillet and slide it into the hot oven.
• Step 3: Have sex with your partner. (This can require planning, occasionally some conniving. But as cooks tend to be resourceful and seductive by nature, most find that it's not the most difficult part of the recipe.)
• Step 4: Remove the chicken from the oven after it's cooked for 1 hour, allow it to rest for 15 minutes, and serve.

Properly executed, such a dish is extraordinary—economical, satisfying, not overly caloric, fun to prepare (in fact, worth making sim­ply to pursue Step 3), and potentially a valuable recipe in your weekly cooking routine.

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Mississippi Floodwaters Roll South

Very slowly, the high waters of the swollen Mississippi River are making their way south to Louisiana. Weeks of heavy rains and runoff from an unusually snowy winter have flooded thousands of homes and over 3 million acres of farmland in Mississippi, Tennessee, and Arkansas. The river is expected to crest at a record height of 58.5 feet sometime today in Vicksburg, Mississippi, 200 miles north of New Orleans. In order to spare larger cities and industrial areas downstream, the U.S, Army Corps of Engineers has opened floodgates in the Morganza Spillway, north of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, allowing an estimated 100,000 cubic feet of river water to flow into the Atchafalaya Basin every second. Collected here are images of the Mississippi and those caught in its path over the past few days -- coping, watching and waiting.

 

A levee protects a home surrounded by floodwater from the Yazoo River on May 18, 2011 near Vicksburg, Mississippi. The flooded Mississippi River is forcing the Yazoo River to top its banks where the two meet near Vicksburg causing towns and farms upstream on the Yazoo to flood. 

Submerged buildings are seen near Lake Providence, Louisiana, on May 18, 2011.

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Be a Tree

by Theodora Zareva

You don't find many designers working in the funeral business thinking about more creative ways for you to leave this world (and maybe they should be). However, Spanish designer Martin Azua has combined the romantic notion of life after death with an eco solution to the dirty business of the actual, you know, transition.

His Bios Urn is a biodegradable urn made from coconut shell, compacted peat and cellulose and inside it contains the seed of a tree. Once your remains have been placed into the urn, it can be planted and then the seed germinates and begins to grow. You even have the choice to pick the type of plant you would like to become, depending on what kind of planting space you prefer.





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