1. Table to ponder: Brookings choice index
“In the process, it became both the nation’s largest source of new teachers and the largest single recipient of philanthropic funding for K-12 education. At the same time, Teach For America improved the quality of its corps member recruitment, selection, preparation, and support, as well as its approach to helping alumni build careers in education.”
“Stoicism is the philosophical root of a number of evidence-based psychological therapies, including Victor Frankl’s logotherapy and the increasingly diverse family of practices that go under the general rubric of cognitive behavioral therapy (C.B.T.).”
4. Building better secularists
•”Secular individuals have to build their own moral philosophies. Religious people inherit creeds that have evolved over centuries. Autonomous secular people are called upon to settle on their own individual sacred convictions.”
Note: this is something I struggle with – what to take from the ancients vs. what to take from modern experts vs. what to figure out myself?
5. On Lululemon’s outgoing CEO
“More than once, the way Wilson spoke reminded me of the airhead fashion model Ben Stiller plays in ‘Zoolander.’ But for all his off-putting and impolitic utterances (in a blog post about Lululemon’s origins, he infamously linked the use of birth control to rising divorce rates, and claimed this led to his future market), he has a kind of genius for forecasting trends and assessing the human impulses — vanity, insecurity, the yearning for perfection — that make people pay more for something they could buy much cheaper elsewhere.”
Note: but can he turn left?
6. Odd beliefs of some scientific geniuses
“Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) created his own model of the universe and, though he didn’t get things quite right, helped advance astronomy and catalogued more than 1,000 stars. He also convinced everyone he was a sorcerer.”