What'cha Reading?

[Kephalos]

Simple Rules for a Complex World -- Richard Epstein
The Economics of Justice -- Richard Posner
Law's Order -- David Friedman
The Common Law -- Oliver Wendell Holmes
Economic Analysis of Law -- Richard Posner
Analytics of Uncertainty and Information -- Jack Hirshleifer

 

[Tellenbach]

American Girls: Social Media and the Secret Lives of Teenagers. Scariest book I've read in the last decade. If you thought the millenials were terrible, the Gen Z'ers (the zombie generation) are even worse.

In her piece Rosin described the Instagram page as looking like "a porn site"; but in an interview on NPR, she maintained that the naked images of the girls were equivalent to "baseball cards or Pokemon cards" to the boys, a kind of "social currency" for them, "more than .... a springboard for fantasy."

Everybody wants to take a selfie as good as the Kardashians," Maggie said. "Some girls do their makeup just to take a selfie.They spend hours.

When researchers at the University of Michigan reviewed data from 72 studies conducted between 1979 and 2009, all focused on monitoring levels of empathy among Americn college students, they found that students today were scoring about 40% lower than their earlier counterparts.

Basically, social media is creating a generation of appearance-obsessed sociopaths who mistreat everyone, including themselves. It's a fascinating but frightening read.

 

[EJCC]

Living More With Less by Doris Janzen Longacre

All about minimalism and frugality, both of which are trendy... but written by Mennonites in 1980. Frugality from a very specific Christian perspective. It's super interesting so far.

 

[Hawthorne]

Stalled on the Bible. Finished Kafka's Metamorphosis yesterday. Started Atlas Shrugged today.

 

[ceecee]

Amazon.com: White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America eBook: Nancy Isenberg: Kindle Store

This is a rather uncomfortable read but, it's important and so revealing and well researched.

 

[Mal12345]

Stalled on the Bible. Finished Kafka's Metamorphosis yesterday. Started Atlas Shrugged today.

Good luck with Atlas Shrugged. If you have any questions please feel free to consult me.

 

[Tellenbach]

Stealing America by Dinesh D'Souza

Dinesh makes a strong case that Democrats/Progressives are crooks and use the government to steal from hard working Americans.

Cabinet and federal agencies routinely spend tens of thousands of dollars commissioning portraits of senior government officials who like seeing their own image on the wall when they come to work every day. Commerce Secretary Gary Locke paid $19,500 to have an artist paint his portrait; Energy Secretary Steven Chu had his official portrait made for $21,100, and EPA administrator Lisa Jackson had her portrait done for nearly $40,000.

NASA allocated $3 million to study How Congress works.

The National Institutes of Health currently has a $500,000 research project to figure out why obese girls are asked on fewer dates. The agency also spent $330,000 to study the sex and drug habits of gay and transgender men in Peru. Another $371,000 was given to study if mothers love their dogs as much as their kids by examining the way their brains respond to pictures of both.

We must be stinkin rich to be able to afford all these expenses.

 

[Noll]

Poems by Yang Mu

 

[Tellenbach]

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing our Kids for the Innovation Era

This is probably the best book on education reform I've read and it's written by a lefty.

There's an old saying about lectures. A lecture is an event where the notes of the professor pass to the notebooks of the students without going through the brains of either.

Recently, Ito recruited a student volunteer to spend a week with sensors monitoring her brain activity. Ito found peaks of activity and troughs of passivity. Most people assume that the near-comatose pattern comes at night when the student is sleeping. But, no. The student's brain is in its most dormant state....during lectures.

Lots of creative solutions. Basically the author contends that the educational system needs a complete overhaul. Lectures don't work. Teaching to the test is stupid and a waste of time. AP courses are a joke, etc.

 

[ceecee]

Most Likely to Succeed: Preparing our Kids for the Innovation Era

This is probably the best book on education reform I've read and it's written by a lefty.





Lots of creative solutions. Basically the author contends that the educational system needs a complete overhaul. Lectures don't work. Teaching to the test is stupid and a waste of time. AP courses are a joke, etc.

Lectures are a joke, they are at every level. You don't see them as much in college anymore with hybrid tools. Standardized testing is retarded. AP classes are a complete scam for money. They don't get any credits - they just allow kids to opt out of testing and that's a maybe. The classes are like totalitarian regimes. I hope parents considering it really look into it, it's not worth it and it took some talking to get our daughter to see how they weren't worth it. She graduated #2 in her class so, I think it turned out fine.

 

[Tellenbach]

[MENTION=4050]ceecee[/MENTION] The biggest problem with AP courses is the sheer volume of material covered in those classes. Because there is so much material to cover, there isn't room for much discussion and the subjects aren't discussed at any depth.

The book also exposes the fraud of the SAT as a tool to weed out potentially bad students. It doesn't.

Even studies performed by the College Board itself conclude that the main value of the SAT is a modest ability to help predict first-year college GPA. That's it.

The elite colleges still use the SAT because SAT scores are used in the ranking system by the US News and World Report when deciding college rankings. Higher SAT scores means more prestige and higher college rankings by the USNWR and this is why students are allowed to take the SAT multiple times. Colleges only report the highest SAT scores so they'll get a higher ranking. It's all nonsense.

 

[Mal12345]

The SAT was never meant to be a diagnostic tool for future success or anything like that. It is a tool used for deciding whether or not you can enroll at a particular school. Period. End of story. Any other use is fraudulent, but the problem is that this is being used as an excuse to eliminate the SAT. The SAT itself is not a fraud, only the way it's been used, as some kind of educational prognosticator, is fraudulent. In the long run the idea is to eliminate all testing in order to make it possible for any student to get a free ride to college on the government.

 

[Smilephantomhive]

[MENTION=20113]Tellenbach[/MENTION] Yes AP courses do have too much material, but I took them because regular classes are a literal joke and you don't learn anything. I did learn more taking AP classes compared to the regular counterparts, but it was mostly because I had to teach myself. I felt like some of my teachers in elective classes were more interactive and discussion based than AP classes. And yeah people teaching AP classes are forced to teach to the test. My AP lang teach literally gave us tips in case we didn't have time to read the passage and like if we're forced to rush through the passage then what's the point? So I'm not taking AP lit this year; I can learn more English on my own.

 

[cosmic royal]

Oblivion, by Kelly Creagh.

 

[Mvika]

Here's looking at Euclid by Alex Bellos

has anyone else here read it? Would love to discuss!

 

[Smilephantomhive]

The Final Decent by Rick Yancy.

 

[Frosty]

New harry potter. I gave in. Aunt said it was good, cousin did, vent did. So yeap.

 

[SearchingforPeace]

Recently finished Listen Liberal by Thomas Frank. Brilliant book.

Anyone who wants to know how the Democratic Party became the party for Wall Street and neocons to support and why it seems like the economic policies (instead of the rhetoric) of the Democrats help powerful interests and how the so-called Reagan Democrats were ditched by the Democratic Party years before they became Republicans should read it.....

 

[Tellenbach]

Cure: A Journey Into the Science of Mind Over Body.

This is a fascinating book about the placebo effect. I bet you didn't know that:

This revealed what the companies had been hiding: that in most cases (severely ill patients are an exception), antidepressant drugs such as Prozac have little effect over and above placebo. Meanwhile Benedetti has found that Valium, which is widely prescribed for anxiety disorders, has no effect unless patients know they are taking it. "The more we know about placebos," he says, "the more we learn that many positive outcomes of clinical trials are attributable to placebo effects."

 

[ceecee]

I've never really read many travel books before but I like Paul Theroux so I thought I would buy all of his books and I'm currently on this one. I would imagine some Brits don't care for this particular book.

Kingdom By the Sea: Paul Theroux: 9780241110867: Amazon.com: Books


Michael Totten also technically writes "travel" books but his are different. This is one of my favorites.

Where the West Ends: Stories from the Middle East, the Balkans, the Black Sea, and the Caucasus: Michael J. Totten: 9781475183641: Amazon.com: Books