Reviews and News:
How to read fast and well: Ignore the speed-reading gurus, start early (with phonics), and read more. “Reading is a much more recent cultural invention, and it must be deliberately taught. Moreover, there is one way of teaching reading that works best: phonics, or showing children exactly how the words they hear connect to the letters they see on the page. Yet many teachers resist offering phonetic instruction to their young students, preferring to proceed on the basis of their experience, their observations and, yes, their intuition. As natural as these inclinations may feel, Seidenberg is unsparing about the harm they do: ‘A look at the science reveals that the methods commonly used to teach children are inconsistent with basic facts about human cognition and development and so make learning to read more difficult than it should be. They inadvertently place many children at risk for reading failure. They discriminate against poorer children. They discourage children who could have become more successful readers.'”
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How progressive was Jane Austen? Perhaps not as progressive as Helena Kelly thinks.
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Andrew Ferguson on the annual meeting of the American Association of Colleges and Universities: “If you told these educators they weren’t allowed to use the words engage, inclusive, diversity, equity, and sustainable anymore, they’d run out of things to say. They probably couldn’t even put on an annual meeting.”
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Joseph Bottum on the appeal of Heinlein’s juveniles: His sentences “are mostly in the category of ‘invisible prose,’ never rising high enough or falling low enough that the experience of reading is interrupted by notice of the writing.”
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Adam Kirsch reviews Sana Krasikov’s “boldly imagined” new novel, The Patriots: “Here is news we don’t already know, and that Krasikov seems able to bring us: What is it like to do a deal with a Russian oligarch, or to attend a Fourth of July party at the American embassy in Moscow? But even though Communism has vanished, life in Russia, Krasikov suggests, is still shot through with corruption and moral compromise. Julian and Lenny are compelled to commit their own betrayals—less consequential than Florence’s, because they involve business deals rather than prison terms, but still sullying. And still Russian—for in Krasikov’s imagination, Russia is a place where it is impossible to keep your hands clean.”
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Essay of the Day:
In Comment, Paul Sikkema looks at why so few millennials want to serve in the military:
“In November of 2015, shortly after the Paris attacks, a poll from the Harvard Institute of Politics revealed that 60 percent of millennials were in favour of the use of military force in Iraq and Syria to combat ISIL, yet only 15 percent were willing to serve in the military. Such an apparent double standard does not reflect well on our youngest adult generation. But rather than resorting to millennial-bashing, we might better understand these facts and more charitably understand this generation if we look at the context.
“That millennials advocate the use of the military but avoid serving denotes a deep tension at work in how they process the question of military intervention. They are clear that something needs to be done about the atrocities committed by adherents of extremist ideology, and that that something very likely involves the military in some facet. But it is by no means clear to millennials exactly what military intervention should entail, or where, or for how long. So military service is, for many, a dubious proposition.
“But it wasn’t always like this. So how did this come to be?”
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Image of the Day: London
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Poem: James Ellenberger, “Blue Collar”
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