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Language Log: More comments on comments (just between us)

No, what I discovered a year ago was that what displeased me the most was dopiness. Asininity, dim-wittedness, doltishness, dullness, dumbness, foolishness, idiocy, nescience, witlessness, pig-ignorance, senselessness, stupidity, — to capture it in a word, the kind of sheer knuckle-dragging moronic lack-wittedness that makes you think you would rather be listening to Vogon poetry.

What I discovered about myself was that the pain of seeing the dopey things posted by some commenters (not you) outweighed all the pleasure of doing the blogging.

New York Times: Big Study Links Good Teachers to Lasting Gain

But controlling for numerous factors, including students’ backgrounds, the researchers found that the value-added scores consistently identified some teachers as better than others, even if individual teachers’ value-added scores varied from year to year.

After identifying excellent, average and poor teachers, the economists then set out to look at their students over the long term, analyzing information on earnings, college matriculation rates, the age they had children, and where they ended up living.

The results were striking. Looking only at test scores, previous studies had shown, the effect of a good teacher mostly fades after three or four years. But the broader view showed that the students still benefit for years to come.

Publishers Weekly: Barnes & Noble May Spin Off Nook Business

Barnes & Noble could be a very different company one year from now. Following a report in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal that B&N is looking to sell Sterling Publishing (a process that a source told PW “is moving along”), the company disclosed Thursday morning that it is considering spinning off its Nook business into its own company. The disclosure came as part of B&N’s holiday sales report that showed large increases in sales of Nook devices, but also revealed that EBITDA, hurt by lower than expected sales of the Nook Simple Touch and increased investment in Nook products, will be less than forecast only a month ago.

Smithsonian: An Eye for Genius: The Collections of Gertrude and Leo Stein

If the picture startles even after a century has passed, imagine the reaction when Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat was first exhibited in 1905. One outraged critic ridiculed the room at the Grand Palais in Paris, where it reigned alongside the violently hued canvases of like-minded painters, as the lair of fauves, or wild animals. The insult, eventually losing its sting, stuck to the group, which also included André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck. The Fauves were the most controversial artists in Paris, and of all their paintings, Woman with a Hat was the most notorious.

Fox News: 'Dance Moms' Star Abby Lee Miller Says Most Parents Suck

I think parents today enable their children to fail. Years ago you had to actually work for something. When dance competitions first started, there was a first, second and third prize, everybody else went home with nothing. Nowadays kids get a trophy for being born. It’s ridiculous. Everybody gets gold or silver or a bronze and it goes on and on and on. It’s like they’re trying to pacify everybody instead of making the kids work to be the best. And you know what? You’re not going to always be the best. There’s somebody else out there, somebody who’s working harder or improves quicker, whatever, and they’re going to win. I don’t think it’s an asset to win all the time. I think it’s good to lose, it builds character. I mean, I want to win all the time because I have enough character!

Newsweek: Buff Your Brain

Yet that’s what we all want—to know more, to understand more deeply, to make greater creative leaps, to retain what we read, to see connections invisible to others—not merely to make the most of what we have between our ears now, but to be, in a word, smarter. By raising our mental game we would be able to pick out the most significant data in a company’s annual report, see immediately when a marketer or advertisement is conning us (“increase the molecular structure” of water to make it healthier for your Siamese fighting fish, as one bottler promises? Don’t think so), understand medical studies relevant to what ails us, grasp the significance of the euro meltdown to our retirement savings, and make smarter decisions in work, love, and life.

Newsweek: The Real Tragedy of Natalie Wood

The latest twist in Wood’s dramatic life and death came last month, when the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department decided to reopen the case based on new testimony from several witnesses, including the boat’s captain, Dennis Davern. In 2009, Davern published a book about Wood’s death, Goodbye Natalie, Goodbye Splendour, and it caught the eye of a Washington, D.C., patent lawyer named Vincent DeLuca, who describes himself as “a fan always bothered by how Natalie died.” DeLuca decided to start an online petition calling for the case to be reopened, and together with Davern’s coauthor, Marti Rulli, he gathered 800 signatures and sworn statements from Davern and other witnesses. “The book didn’t jump-start law enforcement because words are hearsay,” says DeLuca. “But ignore a sworn statement and they’re saying, ‘Davern lied to us, but we’re doing nothing about it.’ They had to act.”

Newsweek: How the Higgs Boson Could Change the Universe

“Hadron,” in fact, refers to particles that interact through one of the four forces of nature known as the strong nuclear force. The Higgs-boson experiments are taking place at the Large Hadron Collider, an enormous particle accelerator crossing the French-Swiss border. In the LHC’s underground labyrinth, scientists can observe the collision of protons—a type of hadron—that have been accelerated to nearly the speed of light. These protons collide a billion times a second in a tiny region smaller than a human hair. When they do, they can turn into energy, as predicted by Einstein’s theory, and that energy can then create new types of matter, never before seen.

National Geographic: Twins

To these scientists, and to biomedical researchers all over the world, twins offer a precious opportunity to untangle the influence of genes and the environment—of nature and nurture. Because identical twins come from a single fertilized egg that splits in two, they share virtually the same genetic code. Any differences between them—one twin having younger looking skin, for example—must be due to environmental factors such as less time spent in the sun.

The Atlantic: I Was Wrong, and So Are You

Buturovic was exploring the possibility that ideological differences stem more from differences in people’s beliefs about how the world works than from differences in their basic values. It was in pursuit of that thesis that she undertook the survey, and designed the questions for it. But when I got my hands on it, I saw its potential for assessing economic enlightenment.

NPR: A Self-Published Author's $2 Million Cinderella Story

Finally, last fall, Hocking joined an elite literary club that includes only 11 other authors, including James Patterson, Stieg Larsson and Nora Roberts: She sold her 1 millionth book for the Amazon Kindle.

And she has made $2 million doing it. Movie rights for her work have been optioned, and the publishing companies that once rejected her came back around. She signed a multimillion-dollar deal with St. Martin's Press, and her first print book, Switched, is out now.

NPR: Louis C.K. On Life, Loss, Love, And 'Louie'

"I get a lot of email from people saying, 'I saw something you did on TV that was clean.' Like I did this clip on Conan that went viral that everything is amazing and no one is happy, and it just was about appreciating what the world is like and not grousing about it. And it got really popular with Christian groups. And I heard that a lot of pastors would play it before their services and stuff. So a lot of people that saw it would go to my website and be horrified by everything else that I say.

So I got a lot of emails from people saying, 'Why can't you just keep it clean? Because I am now shut off from your act by the horrible things you said, and that's such a shame.' And I would not usually respond to them because I don't return emails, but in my head and to a few of them I said, 'Well, you're the one putting the limit. Not me. I'm saying a bunch of stuff, and you're the one saying I should only say one facet of it.' That's a limit. But at the same time, when these people would write to me I'd kind of like them. Whenever I've encountered a Christian saying, 'Why don't you stop talking like that so I can hear you?' I think, 'Well you're the one putting the earmuffs on, but I wish you could hear me because I like you.'

Lapham's Quarterly: The Meaning of Home

What vexed Miller were the stories Americans have told themselves about the power of positive thinking, the instant money and spiritual purity that are sure to follow from unfettered entrepreneurship, the decency of the profit motive, the goodness of the national past, and, when all else fails, the possibility of escape and reinvention in the West. This land is your land: Henry David Thoreau crosses uneasily with Norman Rockwell; the tenets of Ayn Rand crash into the gospel of Jesus Christ; the Book of Mormon reads strangely in parallel with the Bill of Rights; Huckleberry Finn lights out for the territory but never becomes the Marlboro Man, exactly. Above all, Miller responded to a culture that cherished a sanctimonious and noxiously sentimental vision of family life as a beacon of health and wealth.

The American Scholar: How to Pay for What We Need

Conservatives and liberals alike should step back from conventional thinking in the face of our current conditions. None of the prevailing economic orthodoxies—neither the liberal ones of Keynes nor the conservative counterorthodoxies of Milton Friedman or Arthur Laffer—touch sufficiently on the central point that we ought to be considering now: the nature of money as an economic thing-in-itself, because modern money is a fluid—an evolving—construction.

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