Recommended reads #94
And their eyes glazed over – how much is tech-related distraction harming learning?
Why time management is ruining our lives
This proclamation of the Bears Ears National Monument is some exceptional prose that reveals the beauty, history, and natural history of the area. Whoever wrote this for the White House press office deserves a medal or something.
The animals that went extinct in 2016 – well, the ones we have documented.
Teaching with your mouth shut – the more the professor talks, the less learning.
A year-in-review for the public sexual harassment cases in science.
Here’s a good argument for why we should abandon the phrase “achievement gap” in education.
Imperial College London produced a stinging report about the toxic and bullying environment generated by the monomaniacal pursuit of “excellence.”
The queen does not rule. This is from Deborah Gordon, one of my favorite ant-omologists, on the distributed organization of ant societies that is quite different from our own. And how the claims of task specialization and the division of labor in ants have been historically overstated.
Some garbage I used to believe about equality. This is the story of a white guy who saw through the widespread haze of self-deception. It just takes a genuine effort to understand the world through someone else’s eyes.
Here’s an old story from Robert Krulwich’s blog (heavily derived from its source material by Sam Kean) about how Niels Bohr saved his Nobel Prize from the Nazis by putting it into a solution.
Donald Trump and the triumph of climate denial
The Empire’s data management plan is rather bizarre.
How the Smithsonian is preparing for the Trump administration
Those of us who enjoy the privileges of tenure have a special obligation to speak out and resist, and to defend our work environments as places where all kinds of thinkers and thoughts are welcome. We’ll need to document hostile attempts to mess with our workplaces, our students, our intellectual liberty, and our curriculum, and we’ll need to collaborate in this resistance.
In short, we’re going to have to roll up our sleeves and plunge into the muck.
This is what the resistance sounds like: my Governor, Jerry Brown.
This is a shorter-than-usual list because I’ve mostly spent the last two weeks having a restful break and sharing time with with loved ones. I hope you’ve taken some time off over the holidays as well. I’ll soon be spending a chunk of my sabbatical more on the road than at home, and things will be a bit slower here.