http://maagblog.ysu.edu/readings And maybe you will read it too Fri, 04 Sep 2009 19:43:45 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en For some strange reason the distribution of great articles to read (and recommend) tend not to occur uniformly. They often come in bunches. I just finished reading two recent articles that I thought were exceptional. The first is an article on Healthcare in the current issue of The Atlantic. It is ... http://maagblog.ysu.edu/readings/2009/09/04/economics-and-healthcare/ This piece in the current issue of the New Yorker is Malcolm Gladwell (Blink, The Tipping Point) at his very best. In a nutshell, Gladwell discusses the many cases of winning by not playing by the rules ... and he doesn't mean cheating. Gladwell points out that contests, be they ... http://maagblog.ysu.edu/readings/2009/05/11/how-david-beats-goliath/ Phillip Mayer's new book, American Rust, shows us the lives of two young men who grew up in a small southwestern Pennsylvania town after the steel mills closed.  It's a pretty good book, with some perspectives on how deindustrialization has affected people.  But I also think that Mayer's novel is ... http://maagblog.ysu.edu/readings/2009/04/17/deindustrialization-lit/ Judith Warner has an excellent piece in the (online) New York Times about the grave outcomes of a resurgence of bullying in schools that focuses on singling out those who are different in any way with accusations of "gay" or "fag". It has ever been thus, even while we strongly believe ... http://maagblog.ysu.edu/readings/2009/04/17/schools-bullies-and-homophobia/ Last night I read an article from the current issue of the Atlantic Monthly that is getting a TON of mentions in the print and on-line news and opinion communities. It is entitled The Quiet Coup and is written by Simon Johnson. One reason that the article is getting so ... http://maagblog.ysu.edu/readings/2009/03/31/a-populist-imf/ David Pogue, the New York Times technology writer seems to have just discovered what librarians and archivists have known for a long time. In a recent interview with Dag Spicer, the Curator of the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley, he finds out that digital storage devices have a remarkably ... http://maagblog.ysu.edu/readings/2009/03/29/old-news-if-you-can-access-it/ A recent essay by noted environmentalist Bill McKibben points out that global warming is such a serious and immediate problem that we have to stop quibbling about whether any single alternative energy project is perfect or perfectly ready for implementation  and start to implement as many as we can now. Even ... http://maagblog.ysu.edu/readings/2009/03/26/not-how-but-now/ Two recent articles about student expectations in higher education seem to fit together and are highly recommended. The first appeared in the NY Times on February 17, 2009 and was entitled: "Student Expectations Seen as Causing Grade Disputes." In essence, it reports that over the course of their pre-higher education lives, ... http://maagblog.ysu.edu/readings/2009/03/24/what-happened-to-learning/