Search Results for: education

Back to the Future with Peter Thiel

Back to the Future with Peter Thiel

Back to the Future with Peter Thiel

Longreads Pick

“Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced and there must be an intense belief in it. Housing was a classic bubble, as were tech stocks in the ’90s, because they were both very overvalued, but there was an incredibly widespread belief that almost could not be questioned — you had to own a house in 2005, and you had to be in an equity-market index fund in 1999. Probably the only candidate left for a bubble — at least in the developed world (maybe emerging markets are a bubble) — is education. It’s basically extremely overpriced. People are not getting their money’s worth, objectively, when you do the math.”

Source: National Review
Published: Jan 21, 2011
Length: 16 minutes (4,053 words)

The Gleeful Contrarian

The Gleeful Contrarian

Amy K. Nelson's Top 6 Longreads of 2010: Murder mysteries, baseball, The Price Is Right

Amy K. Nelson is a writer for ESPN.com. (She and Elizabeth Merrill also wrote this great longread about sports and infidelity.)

***

Longreads asked me to compile my Top 5 of 2010. An impossible task, and I know a few of mine are on other people’s lists. Here’s what I drew up:

The Case of the Vanishing Blonde
By Mark Bowden
Vanity Fair

Can’t get enough of murder-esque mysteries; this is one that stayed with me.

Dodgers Tap into ‘V energy’
By Bill Shaikin
Los Angeles Times

The most amazing baseball story of 2010. Hands down. One of those you wish you had written.

TV’s Crowning Moment of Awesome
By Chris Jones
Esquire

I’m biased because this is my all-time favorite game show (Bob Barker only). Even without my bias, it’s just a kickass story.

Last Drop
By Brad Melekian
Outside

This was an amazing quick-turn of a difficult story with reluctant sources.

Art of the Steal
By Joshuah Bearman
Wired

Murder mysteries and thieving stories battle it out for closest to my heart.

*EXTRA CREDIT

The Shadow Scholar
By Ed Dante
The Chronicle of Higher Education

Michelle Legro: My Top 5 Longreads of 2010

Michelle Legro is an editor for Lapham’s Quarterly (who you should be following on Tumblr!)

michellelegro:

If you aren’t one of the more than 10,000 people who follow @longreads on Twitter, or get the Longreads Instapaper feed on your iPhone or iPad, then do so immediately. Every day there are perfectly curated features of long-form journalism, new and old, to discover and send along to others.

1. Garry Kasparov, “The Chess Master and the Computer” (NYRB) + Clive Thompson, “What is IBM’s Watson?” (NYT Magazine)

Did you know that 2010 is the year grandmaster Garry Kasparov declared man’s battle for chess supremacy over machines at an end? Instead, the machine must take on a new game, and the subtle questions of Jeopardy are the next ambitious goal for IBM programmers. 

2. Veronica Mittnacht, “An Advice Columnist Asks for Advice” (The Rumpus)

Of the many, many essays about navigating life after college, this one really takes to heart the essential contradiction of youth: “How did we become so ambitious and afraid?”

3. Ed Dante, “The Shadow Scholar” (Chronicle of Higher Education)

Speaking of fear, be afraid. Not of the skills of this professional paper writer—who can charm a twenty-five page essay about any topic you like from mid-air. Be afraid of everyone out there who has ever used him. Doctors, nurses, businessmen, teachers, seminary students, everyone

4. Zadie Smith, “Generation Why?” (NYRB) + Jose Antonio Vargas, “The Face of Facebook Opens Up” (The New Yorker)

It’s really worth getting to the dark heart of the Zuckerberg in this NYer profile before reading Smith’s screed about Facebook and the Social Network, if just to get some perspective. 

5. And the best Longread of 2010 is, without a doubt, the very insightful, funny, and of course frustrating look into the Senate by George Packer, “The Empty Chamber” (The New Yorker) Please, just give him all the National Magazine Awards right now. 

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health.

Can Technology End Poverty?

Longreads Pick

The myth of scale is seductive because it is easier to spread technology than to effect extensive change in social attitudes and human capacity. In other words, it is much less painful to purchase a hundred thousand PCs than to provide a real education for a hundred thousand children; it is easier to run a text-messaging health hotline than to convince people to boil water before ingesting it; it is easier to write an app that helps people find out where they can buy medicine than it is to persuade them that medicine is good for their health.

Source: Boston Review
Published: Nov 20, 2010
Length: 17 minutes (4,340 words)

The Web Means the End of Forgetting

Longreads Pick

Four years ago, Stacy Snyder, then a 25-year-old teacher in training at Conestoga Valley High School in Lancaster, Pa., posted a photo on her MySpace page that showed her at a party wearing a pirate hat and drinking from a plastic cup, with the caption “Drunken Pirate.” After discovering the page, her supervisor at the high school told her the photo was “unprofessional,” and the dean of Millersville University School of Education, where Snyder was enrolled, said she was promoting drinking in virtual view of her under-age students. As a result, days before Snyder’s scheduled graduation, the university denied her a teaching degree.

Published: Jul 21, 2010
Length: 27 minutes (6,787 words)

The Teachers’ Unions’ Last Stand

Longreads Pick

Race to the Top has turned a relatively modest federal program (the $4.3 billion budget represents less than 1 percent of all federal, state and local education spending) into high-yield leverage that could end up overshadowing health care reform in its impact and that is already upending traditional Democratic Party politics.

Published: May 17, 2010
Length: 32 minutes (8,095 words)

The Patron Saint (and Scourge) of Lost Schools

Longreads Pick

[Not single-page] Eva Moskowitz, the controversial leader of the fastest-growing charter network in the city, wants to save New York public education by, in a sense, destroying it.

Published: Apr 25, 2010
Length: 19 minutes (4,843 words)