Reviews and News:
Why kids can’t write: “Three-quarters of both 12th and 8th graders lack proficiency in writing, according to the most recent National Assessment of Educational Progress. And 40 percent of those who took the ACT writing exam in the high school class of 2016 lacked the reading and writing skills necessary to successfully complete a college-level English composition class…The root of the problem, educators agree, is that teachers have little training in how to teach writing and are often weak or unconfident writers themselves.”
Neutrinos observed bouncing off nuclei for the first time. In a study published in Science, “researchers working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) detected never-before-seen neutrino interactions using a detector the size of a fire extinguisher. Their feat paves the way for new supernova research, dark matter searches and even nuclear nonproliferation monitoring.”
How did the war against poaching elephants become a war on ivory?
“Gathering around the living room television to watch the latest hit show has been a family pastime for decades.” No more.
David Devoss attends summer camp for aspiring online celebrities: “It’s a beautiful day, and I’m standing in a courtyard of a private university east of L.A. surrounded by 40 teenagers, most of them desiring to become the next Internet sensation. The youngest are here for SocialStar Creator Camp, which is designed to turn them into social media superstars able to produce content that will attract adoring followers and corporate sponsors willing to pay top dollar for Internet ‘influencers’ to promote their products…There’s a 13-year-old singer from San Francisco and a 13-year-old boy from Sonora, Mexico, here to learn about vlogging (video-blogging), a 17-year-old South African who needs help with video editing, and a Puerto Rican, back for a second summer, who believes Internet fame will help him become a DJ and party planner. In the shade of a dormitory breezeway, two teens from Idaho are flirting with a 12-year-old from Sweden who likes shoes and plans to start a YouTube channel that reviews footwear.”
Editor Judith Jones has died. She discovered Julia Child, edited John Updike for half a century, and, in 1950, “rescued the diary of Anne Frank from a pile of rejects and persuaded her superiors to publish it in the United States.”
Essay of the Day:
Hate capitalism? Are you young, educated, and middle class? Do you have a smart phone and a Twitter account? Have you “occupied” something? Maybe even kicked in a Benetton window with your Toms sneakers? Congratulations. You may be riot chic. Cosmo Landesman on the trend in The Spectator:
“Riot chic isn’t interested in facts or justice, or what we used to call the truth. It’s the way things look immediately, the pose, how a certain image of police brutality or capitalist cruelty becomes an excuse to rage, riot and come out with absurd rants.
“Like the proclamations from Jason Osamede Okundaye, the current king of riot chic. Okundaye, who runs Cambridge University’s Black and Minority Ethnic Society, took to Twitter after the protests over Rashan Charles to declare his full support for the rioters, advising them to ‘smash every-thing’, and claiming that ‘all white people are racist’. ‘Watching these middle-class white people despair over black people protesting in their colonised Dalston is absolutely delicious,’ said this 20-year-old ex-public schoolboy whose mother works in the civil service. Absolutely delicious? He sounds like a literary snob enjoying a particularly bitchy book launch. Only a middle-class person would use ‘delicious’ in that context.
“But then riot chic is all about the middle classes expressing their own self-hatred. It is prevalent among the white people who offered Okundaye this ‘delicious’ spectacle. They loathe belonging to what they see as the bland bourgeoisie. They hate the urban gentrification that they are part of, which partly explains why so many middle-class voters in west London voted for Labour’s Emma Dent Coad, Kensington’s new MP, who promises to fight ‘gentrification one cupcake at a time’.
“Riot chic is, like cupcakes, an import of American culture — the Black Lives Matter and Occupy movements both began in the post-crash US. Studies have shown that almost all those arrested in the Occupy Wall Street protests came from areas where the value of houses was more than double the national average. No doubt that has something to do with the fact that travelling to take part in protests can be time-consuming and expensive, and only people with money can afford to do it. In some parts of America, protesting has actually become quite an effective high-status signifier; radicals wear T-shirts declaring that ‘Protest is the new brunch’, and try not to choke on the irony. In Britain, the trend hasn’t quite reached that stage, but raging against the machine is undeniably an activity for the affluent young, as well as for useful lower-class gang members who just want to smash things up. The more edgy or dangerous a protest is, the more authentic it feels.”
Photo: Night and day
Poem: Scott Cairns, “Tempest”
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