Totally Incredible
Greetings from Ohio. I'm out here with family in the path of totality because eclipses are an amazing thing to experience and I'll go out of my way to experience one. Totality and standing inside of Stonehenge one evening at sunset are the two experiences I've had where time does feel like it's moving differently. I hope you are somewhere you can experience it. (I also visited Neil Armstrong's childhood home, which was cool to see. I'm a nerd).
Alas, not everyone feels that way and some schools are doing the hide the kids thing again. I wrote about this back in 2017 for U.S. News & World Report. It's understandable why schools in the path of totality are going to make some changes given the time of day, there are traffic and other logistical concerns. But it's not understandable for some schools to just keep kids inside out of "an abundance of caution."
There is no world where we're not better off exposing young people to science and natural phenomena. It's how we get them engaged for the future. This still holds in 2024:
It's understandable that the ancients were terrified of eclipses. Professional educators in 2017? There is no excuse.
Lieberman
Joe Lieberman fell, and then passed away at the end of March. He was a controversial politician but you could see the respect many of his peers had for him in their tributes.
I had the privilege of working with him some, when I was in government and in the think tank world. He was decent, not a hater, and did what he thought was right (even if you didn't agree, and at times I certainly didn't). He was also funny. And he wasn't a partisan, which as it turns out presaged much of our polarization and negative polarization now.
You can't ask for more than that, and we need more people in government, whether you agree or disagree with them, who do what they think is right rather than just running in the worn grooves of a broken politics.
AI at ASU+GSV
Join us for this event in San Diego next week:
Or, we're hiring at Bellwether - so just join us.
Nota Bene
Jim Traub on books and phones:
A study by the American Psychological Association found that while in the late 1970s, 60 percent of twelfth-graders reported reading a book or a magazine every day, the figure had plummeted to 16 percent by 2016. It’s almost certainly fallen further since then.
Tyler Austin Harper on White Rural Rage:
Instead of reckoning with the ugly fact that a threat to our democracy is emerging from right-wing extremists in suburban and urban areas, the authors of White Rural Rage contorted studies and called unambiguously metro areas “rural” so that they could tell an all-too-familiar story about scary hillbillies. Perhaps this was easier than confronting the truth: that the call is coming from inside the house.
Alex Grodd, formerly of BetterLesson, has a smart new podcast on disagreeing better.
Outside on kids, schools, and BMI.