Newmark's Door

'Tis the season. No surprise, DEET still seems to be the answer.

Interesting exposition by Paul Graham of one reason why high school and college English is taught so badly. Excerpt:

Defending a position may be a necessary evil in a legal dispute, but it's not the best way to get at the truth, as I think lawyers would be the first to admit. It's not just that you miss subtleties this way. The real problem is that you can't change the question.

And yet this principle is built into the very structure of the things they teach you to write in high school. The topic sentence is your thesis, chosen in advance, the supporting paragraphs the blows you strike in the conflict, and the conclusion-- uh, what is the conclusion? I was never sure about that in high school. It seemed as if we were just supposed to restate what we said in the first paragraph, but in different enough words that no one could tell. Why bother? But when you understand the origins of this sort of "essay," you can see where the conclusion comes from. It's the concluding remarks to the jury.

Link courtesy of reader JK.

Two more of Graham's essays on writing are quite worthwhile: "Write Simply" and "Writing, Briefly".

Professor Sowell has been right about a whole lot of things.

Well, "never" is a long time. But I can readily believe that they won't in the next five, maybe even ten years.

Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Abstract:

We study the health, behavioral, and economic effects of one of the most politically controversial policies in recent memory, shelter-in-place orders during the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous studies have claimed that shelter-in-place orders saved thousands of lives, but we reassess these analyses and show that they are not reliable. We find that shelter-in-place orders had no detectable health benefits, only modest effects on behavior, and small but adverse effects on the economy. To be clear, our study should not be interpreted as evidence that social distancing behaviors are not effective. Many people had already changed their behaviors before the introduction of shelter-in-place orders, and shelter-in-place orders appear to have been ineffective precisely because they did not meaningfully alter social distancing behavior.

Six-minute video on the crying need for more charter schools in NYC.

Related: "Black parents’ righteous fury at NYC public school failure" and "‘It’s frightening’: Troubled NYC school told mom to pull her smart son out". 

Despite the critics the number of charters in NC have, in the last ten years--after Republicans raised the cap on the number of charters--doubled to 200.

"How progressive reforms helped level a historic part of black Detroit".

"People have generally misunderstood wokeness as a purely cultural phenomenon. It does have a cultural component, of course, but it is important to also understand wokeness as something that has been law in the United States for the last half century.

"The triumph of this ideology over the last 10 years in public discourse is simply culture catching up to law."

John Cochrane reviews an essay that makes the interesting point that "The surest sign that a country will be economically successful is not the health of its democracy, as some liberals like to think, or the leanness of its government, as some free-marketers imagine, but its commitment to meritocracy."