Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
~ Rose Horowitch via The Atlantic
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In our zeal, we refuse to understand past generations as they understood themselves. We expect them to have organized their mental categories the way we organize ours—and we are greatly disappointed when we discover that they did not.
~ David Frum via The Atlantic
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Empires of the past were built upon the idea that conquest was the divine right of great powers. There was no legal distinction between the acquisition, occupation and takeover of foreign territory. The Portuguese did as they wished in Angola, and the British did as they wished in India.
~ Linda Kinstler via The New York Times
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Charles Q. Brown Jr. – the American four-star general who serves as the 21st Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and previously served as the 22nd Chief of Staff of the Air Force – was born on this day – August 27, 1962 – in San Antonio, Texas.
He is a graduate of Texas Tech University, Embry–Riddle Aeronautical University, and the Air Command and Staff College.
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Youth sentiment is a notoriously hard thing to track. Polling is a fraught enough enterprise without having to deal with flaky kids, occasionally impenetrable survey questions, and the real possibility that words such as “confidence” or “satisfied” might not mean the same thing from one generation to the next.
~ Jay Caspian Kang via The New Yorker
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“If I’m gonna have any looks at all, I’m gonna have to create them,” Dolly Parton once said. She was talking about makeup and plastic surgery, things she felt no shame in loving, but it’s hard to read that quote and not also think about what it means to be a visionary—to invent a whole world from nothing.
~ Amanda Petrusich via The New Yorker
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