Dahlia Lithwick Susan Matthews:

One afternoon late in her first year at Yale Law School, Linda sat down to create a contemporaneous record of a conversation she’d had the night before. She’d met with one of her professors, Jed Rubenfeld, in his office after hours at his suggestion, following repeated attempts to see him in the afternoon about a paper she was working on for him. Rubenfeld had made her uncomfortable throughout the year, commenting on her appearance and asking her about his. While friends had told her she had reason to feel creeped out by his behavior, Linda wondered whether she was being too sensitive and agreed to the 8 p.m. meeting. She really needed to make progress on the paper, after all. But given the queasy feeling she already had, she asked her partner to pick her up that night, and to come looking for her if he hadn’t heard from her after a reasonable amount of time.

Laurie Frost and Jeff Henriques:

Our analyses revealed that over the course of nine years of instruction, the percentage of minority students in the class of 2017 who were proficient in reading or math was very low and changed very little. At no point did more than 20 percent of black students or 30 percent of Hispanic students achieve grade-level proficiency in either content area. No limitation in the tests used or the data obtained — including any cultural bias that may exist in the tests — can explain away these painful results. Any way you slice it, we are failing to give the bulk of our minority students basic academic skills.

And yet 77 percent of Hispanic students and 72.6 percent of black students in the class of 2017 earned a high school diploma. Clearly most of them did so without having grade level skills. But a high school diploma without high school level reading and math skills is of limited value. What does the future hold for these students?

We have long been frustrated by the way the district selectively compiles, analyzes, and shares student data with the community. We see the situation as a decades-old cultural problem in the Doyle Building and do not hold any single individual responsible for it. For too many district administrators and school board members over the 20+ years we have been paying attention, making the district look good has been more important than thoroughgoing honesty about how our students are doing. In fact, we shared our analyses and concerns with the district administration and school board last month, but have received no response from the administration and only one from a board member.

See the Forest: Unpacking the Relationship between Madison (WI) school district graduation rates and student achievement.

Will Self:

In February, at an event at the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center in New York, while sharing the stage with my fellow British writer Martin Amis and discussing the impact of screen-based reading and bidirectional digital media on the Republic of Letters, I threw this query out to an audience that I estimate was about three hundred strong: “Have any of you been reading anything by Norman Mailer in the past year?” After a while, one hand went up, then another tentatively semi-elevated. Frankly I was surprised it was that many. Of course, there are good reasons why Mailer in particular should suffer posthumous obscurity with such alacrity: his brand of male essentialist braggadocio is arguably extraneous in the age of Trump, Weinstein, and fourth-wave feminism. Moreover, Mailer’s brilliance, such as it was, seemed, even at the time he wrote, to be sparks struck by a steely intellect against the tortuous rocks of a particular age, even though he labored tirelessly to the very end, principally as the booster of his own reputation.

Ron Charles:

If you tell anyone, I’ll deny it, but I’ve been irritated for a long time by Banned Books Week. Despite my unqualified support for the freedom to read, the annual celebration, which began Sunday, has always struck me as shrill and inaccurate. I know the American Booksellers Association, the American Library Association and other fine sponsors are doing important, necessary work. I just wish Banned Books Week didn’t appear to exaggerate a problem that’s largely confined to our repressive past.

All week in bookstores and libraries around the country, you’ll see displays, banners and special events like the Drag Queen Story Hour at the Brooklyn Public Library on Wednesday. Central to these celebrations is the annual list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books. This year, like most years, that list includes: Khaled Hosseini’s “The Kite Runner,” Harper Lee’s “To Kill a Mockingbird” and other fantastic, award-winning novels that only the most ignorant and backward people would object to.

Mark Bauerlein:

Harassment policies and speech codes these days affect every aspect of campus life, including the content of academic discourse. Everyone is on the alert for microaggressions and situations of discomfort. But what about the discomfort of people constantly suspicious of one another, never sure who will misunderstand a word or look, commit a sexual transgression, or file a complaint out of anger over quite other matters?

This hardly creates an atmosphere conducive to teaching and learning. It also suggests an absolute separation between a personal and professional life that does not correspond with reality, though we like to pretend otherwise these days. People tend to get involved with people they know – in schools and workplaces. Thus, to formally prohibit relationships between adults is to take a huge step toward allowing the state to dictate personal life.

Thus far, the situation on college campuses has only gotten worse, not better, as the advent of campus Bias Report Teams and multiplication of avenues for filing complaints reveal. The ensuing hypervigilance has been instituted without any discussion of the consequences on human relations on campus.

Karen Herzog:

But the stakes are especially high for UW-Stevens Point and UW-Platteville this fall because they are absorbing significant losses of enrollment at their new two-year satellite campuses, in addition to losses of their own.

Losing enrollment means losing valuable tuition revenue that, together with state funding, covers the cost of educating students.

Overall, the UW System’s 26 campuses collectively lost 2,598 students, compared with a year ago — dropping from a total 173,425 students to 170,827, or an enrollment decline of 1.5%.

BBC:

When the BBC launched the Loneliness Experiment on Valentine’s Day 2018 a staggering 55,000 people from around the world completed the survey, making it the largest study of loneliness yet. Claudia Hammond, who instigated the project, looks at the findings and spoke to three people about their experiences of loneliness.

“It’s like a void, a feeling of emptiness. If you have a good piece of news or a bad piece of news, it’s not having that person to tell about it. Lacking those people in your life can be really hard.”

Michelle Lloyd is 33 and lives in London. She is friendly and chatty and enjoys her job – she seems to have everything going for her, but she feels lonely. She has lived in a few different cities so her friends are spread around the country and tend to be busy with their children at weekends. She does go for drinks with colleagues after work, but tells me it’s the deeper relationships she misses.

“I’m very good at being chatty, I can talk to anyone, but that doesn’t mean I’m able to have those lasting relationships with people,” says Michelle. “You can be in a group and it can be intimidating because you’re conscious of not letting people get to know the ‘real you’.

“I would say I’ve always had an element of feeling lonely. Ever since I was a teenager, I’ve always felt a little bit different and separate from large groups of friends, but in the last five years it’s crept in more.”

Sam Biddle:

Omnipresent facial recognition has become a golden goose for law enforcement agencies around the world. In the United States, few are as eager as the Department of Homeland Security. American airports are currently being used as laboratories for a new tool that would automatically scan your face — and confirm your identity with U.S. Customs and Border Protection — as you prepare to board a flight, despite the near-unanimous objections from privacy advocates and civil libertarians, who call such scans invasive and pointless.

According to a new report on the Biometric Entry-Exit Program by DHS itself, we can add another objection: Your flight could be late.

Although the new report, published by Homeland Security’s Office of the Inspector General, is overwhelmingly supportive in its evaluation of airport-based biometric surveillance — the practice of a computer detecting your face and pairing it with everything else in the system — the agency notes some hurdles from a recent test code-named “Sprint 8.” Among them, the report notes with palpable frustration, was that airlines insist on letting their passengers depart on time, rather than subjecting them to a Homeland Security surveillance prototype plagued by technical issues and slowdowns:

Eve Houghton:

The history of the book does not always involve the study of either history or books. As James Raven shows in this slim, engaging volume, the question of what sort of object might count as a book remains very much up for debate. The history of the book in the Western world has traditionally made “book” synonymous with “codex” – gatherings of leaves folded or stitched together – but in Professor Raven’s geographically and chronologically wide-ranging account, it takes a variety of material forms: Chinese tortoise shells inscribed 3,000 years ago; Sumerian clay tablets impressed with cuneiform scripts; knotted string records, or khipus, used for record-keeping by South American Incan officials. The boundaries of the book seem even less clearly defined in the era of the blog post and Kindle.

Furthermore, the “history” of the book might not capture the full range and diversity of a scholarly endeavour that now encompasses work in literary studies, sociology, anthro­pology and computer science. Data-driven projects such as the Open University’s Reading Experience Database consider histories of book ­provenance and use on an aggregate scale. Advanced word and phrase search functions in databases such as Google Books and the HathiTrust Digital Library have allowed a ­computational approach to traditional literary-critical investigations concerning questions of style, authorship and literary influence. Online collections – among them Early English Books Online and Eighteenth Century Collections Online – have replaced reels of microfilm with digital images. The field Robert Darnton described in the early 1980s as “the social and cultural history of communication by print” now involves objects of inquiry and methodological approaches that would have been hard to imagine even a few decades ago, such as work on “born-digital” archives (such as emails and Word documents) or computer models that can superimpose historical records of book ownership over geographic data.

Matt Simon:

You’ve heard that social media is screwing with your brain. Maybe you even read about it on social media. (So meta; so messed up.) The neurochemical culprit, dopamine, spikes when you like and get liked, share and are shared. You’ve probably also heard scientists compare the affliction to drug or alcohol addiction. That’s fair. The same part of the brain lights up.

Scroll, scroll, scroll. It’s a phenomenon now so pervasive that it’s got a name: zombie scrolling syndrome. (The security company McAfee coined the phrase in 2016.) We are the undead of lore, shambling through the world, moaning and groaning with half-closed eyes. I’d like to be able to tell you this is a fantastical bit of exaggeration, that we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves. I can do no such thing.

The analogy, it turns out, has legs. Consider parasites. An astonishing number of them exist in nature, from worms to wasps, and some have the power of mind control. Or, said another way, zombification. And these fiends are doing it in—gulp—ways that bring to mind social media.

Toni Airaksinen:

A newly released report reveals that Columbia University spent more than $185 million to increase “faculty diversity” but that it has effectively had no impact.

According to a September 13 report, Columbia University has spent $185 million since 2005 to increase the proportion of racial and ethnic minorities hired as faculty and tenured faculty professors. However, despite the $185 million spent, the proportion of black and Latinx faculty members have largely remained “stagnant” and, in some years, faculty diversity got worse, as 2017 saw a .05 percent drop in black faculty members.

“Social justice is not the purpose of a university.”

“We have to be able to make the scholarly case [for diversity] to our departments. But there is no stick. We are an office of carrots,” Dennis Mitchell, vice provost of faculty diversity and inclusion at Columbia University, told the Columbia Spectator.

Women faculty are the only demographic that has seen gains since the school started investing in faculty diversity, though the increase cannot necessarily be linked to the investment, as women are now the majority in higher education more broadly.

Brian Faler:

A nearly 100-year-old statute allows the chairmen of Congress’ tax committees to look at anyone’s returns.

The years-old mystery of what’s in President Donald Trump’s tax returns will likely quickly unravel if Democrats win control of at least one chamber of Congress.

Democrats, especially in the House, are quietly planning on using an obscure law that will enable them to examine the president’s tax filings without his permission.

Story Continued Below

The nearly 100-year-old statute allows the chairmen of Congress’ tax committees to look at anyone’s returns, and Democrats say they intend to use that power to help answer a long list of questions about Trump’s finances. Many also want to use it to make public confidential information about Trump’s taxes that he’s steadfastly refused to release.

“Probably the approach would be to get all of it, review it, and, depending on what that shows, release all or part of it,” said Rep. Lloyd Doggett of Texas, the No. 4 Democrat on the Ways and Means Committee.

That could bring a swift end to the long-running battle over Trump’s returns, while generating loads of fodder for what promises to be an array of investigations into the administration if Democrats win power.

Elizabeth Harrington:

Federal agencies spent millions on cars, scooters, fidget spinners, and shuffleboards in an attempt to exhaust their budgets before they run out at the end of the fiscal year.

An analysis of federal spending by OpenTheBooks.com and shared with the Washington Free Beacon reveals 67 agencies and departments spend nearly $50 billion closing out their fiscal year 2017 budgets.

The “spending frenzy” totaled nearly $50 billion in seven days.

“Federal agencies spend-out their budgets,” said Adam Andrzejewski, CEO and founder of OpenTheBooks.com. “If they don’t spend it this year, they lose it for next year. It’s a year-end spending spree whereby $1 of every $9 spent during the fiscal year is spent in the final week.”

“Last year, during the final week of the fiscal year, federal agencies literally ‘drove up taxpayer costs,'” he said. “They bought $170 million in ‘passenger motor vehicles.’ And that’s a lot more than the $1 million spent on motorcycles, scooters, and bikes. Health and Human Services bought a fleet of armored vehicles with Square One for $1.5 million.”

Mark Harris:

Commonly known as lie detectors, polygraphs are virtually unused in civilian life. They’re largely inadmissible in court and it’s illegal for most private companies to consult them. Over the past century, scientists have debunked the polygraph, proving again and again that the test can’t reliably distinguish truth from falsehood. At best, it is a roll of the dice; at worst, it’s a vessel for test administrators to project their own beliefs.

Yet Talbot’s test was no different from the millions of others conducted annually across the public sector, where the polygraph is commonly used as a last-ditch effort to weed out unsuitable candidates. Hiring managers will ask a range of questions about minor crimes, like marijuana use and vandalism, and major infractions, like kidnapping, child abuse, terrorism, and bestiality. Using a polygraph, these departments believe, increases the likelihood of obtaining facts that potential recruits might prefer not to reveal. And like hundreds of thousands of job candidates each year, Talbot was judged to have lied on the test. He failed.

New Haven allows failed applicants to plead their case in public before the Board of Police Commissioners. So in February 2014, Talbot sat down and recited his experiences with lie detectors. He had first applied to the Connecticut State Police and was failed for deception about occasional marijuana use as a minor. He then tried again with a police department in New Britain, where a polygraph test showed him lying about his criminal and sexual history.

This time he had failed the New Haven polygraph for something cryptically called “inconsistencies.” “[But] I’m not hiding anything,” he said at the hearing. “I was being straight and honest and I’ve never been in trouble with the law. I’m not lying about anything.”

Will Flanders:

Less discussed in Wisconsin is the tremendous impact that economic status has on student achievement. A school with a population of 100% students who are economically disadvantaged would be expected to have proficiency rates more than 40% lower than a school with wealthier students. Indeed, this economics achievement gap is far larger in terms of proficiency effects than the racial achievement gap, and has important implications for the rural areas of the state, where the percentage of low-income families is higher than most suburban and some rural areas.

While the initial data release by DPI did not include sufficient data for apples-to-apples comparisons among private schools in the choice program, the data was comprehensive enough for charter schools. Particularly in Milwaukee, these schools continue to outperform their peer schools. For this preliminary analysis, we pulled out independent and non-instrumentality charters from MPS, while leaving instrumentality charters—or charters in name-only—as part of the district’s performance. In both mathematics and English/language arts, charter schools continue to outperform their other public school peers.

In English/Language Arts, “free” charters had approximately 9% higher proficiency than traditional public schools. In mathematics, these schools had 6.9% higher proficiency. This is consistent with our past analyses which have found that independence from MPS is a key component of better student outcomes, whether through the chartering or the school choice program.

“We set a high bar for achievement,” DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy said.

Madison, despite spending far more than most, has tolerated long term, disastrous reading results.

Tony Evers, currently runnng for Governor, has lead the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction since 2009. I wonder if anyone has addressed Wisconsin achievement challenges vis a vis his DPI record?

The Wisconsin DPI has aborted our one attempt at teacher content knowledge requirements: “Foundations of Reading” for elementary teachers. Massachusetts’ MTEL substantially raised the teacher content knowledge bar, leading to their top public school rank.

An emphasis on adult employment, also Zimman.

Alan Borsuk:

“I didn’t have one phone call, I don’t have one email about this NAEP data. But my phone can ring all day if there’s a fight at a school or can ring all day because a video has gone out about a board meeting. That’s got to change, that’s just got to change. …

“My best day will be when we have an auditorium full of people who are upset because of our student performance and our student achievement and because of the achievement gaps that we have. My question is, where is our community around these issues?

Molly Beck and Erin Richards:

“We set a high bar for achievement,” DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy said. “To reach more than half (proficiency), we would need to raise the achievement of our lowest district and subgroup performers through policies like those recommended in our budget, targeted at the large, urban districts.”

The new scores reveal the state’s persistent gap in academic achievement between its black and white students remains large.

Twelve percent of black third-graders are considered proficient or advanced in English, compared to 48 percent of white students, for example.

In math, about 17 percent of black students in third grade scored proficient or advanced in the 2017-’18 school year, while 60 percent of white students scored at the same level.

Will Flanders:

Less discussed in Wisconsin is the tremendous impact that economic status has on student achievement. A school with a population of 100% students who are economically disadvantaged would be expected to have proficiency rates more than 40% lower than a school with wealthier students. Indeed, this economics achievement gap is far larger in terms of proficiency effects than the racial achievement gap, and has important implications for the rural areas of the state, where the percentage of low-income families is higher than most suburban and some rural areas.

While the initial data release by DPI did not include sufficient data for apples-to-apples comparisons among private schools in the choice program, the data was comprehensive enough for charter schools. Particularly in Milwaukee, these schools continue to outperform their peer schools. For this preliminary analysis, we pulled out independent and non-instrumentality charters from MPS, while leaving instrumentality charters—or charters in name-only—as part of the district’s performance. In both mathematics and English/language arts, charter schools continue to outperform their other public school peers.

In English/Language Arts, “free” charters had approximately 9% higher proficiency than traditional public schools. In mathematics, these schools had 6.9% higher proficiency. This is consistent with our past analyses which have found that independence from MPS is a key component of better student outcomes, whether through the chartering or the school choice program.

Madison, despite spending far more than most, has tolerated long term, disastrous reading results.

Tony Evers, currently runnng for Governor, has lead the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction since 2009. I wonder if anyone has addressed Wisconsin achievement challenges vis a vis his DPI record?

The Wisconsin DPI has aborted our one attempt at teacher content knowledge requirements: “Foundations of Reading” for elementary teachers. Massachusetts’ MTEL substantially raised the teacher content knowledge bar, leading to their top public school rank.

An emphasis on adult employment, also Zimman.

Alan Borsuk:

“I didn’t have one phone call, I don’t have one email about this NAEP data. But my phone can ring all day if there’s a fight at a school or can ring all day because a video has gone out about a board meeting. That’s got to change, that’s just got to change. …

“My best day will be when we have an auditorium full of people who are upset because of our student performance and our student achievement and because of the achievement gaps that we have. My question is, where is our community around these issues?

Oscar Schwartz:

I recently met a young woman named Wild Rose on an online chat forum. We struck up a conversation and within the first five minutes, Wild Rose – who is married, has a daughter, and lives in Texas with her in-laws – started telling me about her lover, a man called Saeran.

Saeran, she told me, is the illegitimate son of a politician who had grown up with an abusive mother. He is handsome, has white blond hair, golden eyes, a large tattoo on his shoulder. Wild Rose said that when she first met him, her “heart literally ached” and her cheeks “flooded with blood”.

She then paused and added: “But I don’t think Saeran loves me the way I love him. I love him genuinely. I’ll never know his true feelings.”

The reason: Saeran isn’t human. He is a character in a mobile phone game called Mystic Messenger, which was released two years ago by Cheritz, a South Korean game developer. It has since been downloaded by millions of people worldwide. The game is a mix between a romance novel and Spike Jonze’s 2013 movie Her, in which a man develops a relationship with a Siri-like character.

Rachel Aviv:

Seth Murrell, a four-year-old boy with dreadlocks to his chin, moved with his family to Atlanta in the fall of 2015. On his first day at his new preschool, he cried the whole morning. He wouldn’t sit still in his chair. He’d pop up and snatch the glasses off a classmate’s face, or spit at the teacher. When he was tired, he waved his arms in the air, begging his teacher to hold him. On the rare occasions that his teacher complimented him, he shouted “Yay!” too loudly.

His mother, Latoya Martin, a hair stylist, had moved with her husband and three children from Donalsonville, a rural town in Seminole County, in the southwest corner of Georgia, to be closer to psychiatrists and neurologists who would understand why her son was developmentally delayed. He couldn’t string words together into a sentence. His teachers called Latoya nearly every day and told her to pick him up early, because he was disrupting the class. When Latoya resisted—she was busy looking for a new job—her friends warned her that the school might call child-protective services if she couldn’t pick up Seth promptly. Latoya sensed that the teachers were accusing her of being a bad parent, so she informed the school’s principal that she had never done drugs and that in high school her G.P.A. had been 4.0. Latoya’s sister Anita said, “They kept saying we needed to work with him more at home. I’m, like, we work with him—that’s not the problem. This is part of his disability!”

Gordon Lubold:

U.S. forces operating in the region navigate through international waters regularly and always abide by international law, a U.S. official said, adding that such patrols demonstrate the U.S. will “fly, sail and operate wherever international law allows.”

“That is true in the South China Sea as in other places around the globe,” the official said. “FONOPs are not about any one country, nor are they about making political statements,” the official said.

There was no immediate response from the Chinese government. Beijing says it has “indisputable sovereignty” over all South China Sea islands and their adjacent waters.

Last week, China said the recent flight of American B-52 bombers over the South China Sea was “provocative.” The Pentagon called the flight routine.

The last time the U.S. conducted a freedom of navigation operation in the South China Sea was in May, when two warships—the USS Antietam and USS Higgins—navigated through the Paracel Islands.

Such maritime patrols are typically planned weeks in advance. Still, Sunday’s patrol comes amid rising tensions with China.

Patricia Laya and Fabiola Zerpa:

Lost amid the economic chaos in Venezuela, the bolivar has actually stabilized somewhat.

In the six weeks since the initial plunge after the government simultaneously carried out a massive devaluation and redenomination of the currency, it has slid just 19 percent in the black market. That may not constitute stabilization in most foreign-exchange markets, but in Venezuela, where hyperinflation has been ravaging the economy for months on end, it’s the closest thing to normality seen in a while.

While far from a major policy victory and possibly only ephemeral, the bolivar’s relative stability is a rare feat for Venezuela and could even help slow the breakneck pace of hyperinflation, which is forecast to reach 1 million percent this year. President Nicolas Maduro devalued the bolivar by 95 percent last month in what was perceived as a tacit acceptance of the ubiquitous black-market exchange, where most Venezuelans acquire dollars.

Related: US Debt Clock and local taxpayer K-12 school district spending.

Chaiel Schaffel:

Ferris will turn away customers if they’re not college students or faculty members. The cafe allows professors to pay, but students have something else the shop wants: their personal information.

To get the free coffee, university students must give away their names, phone numbers, email addresses and majors, or in Brown’s lingo, concentrations. Students also provide dates of birth and professional interests, entering all of the information in an online form. By doing so, the students also open themselves up to receiving information from corporate sponsors who pay the cafe to reach its clientele through logos, apps, digital advertisements on screens in stores and on mobile devices, signs, surveys and even baristas.

According to Shiru’s website: “We have specially trained staff members who give students additional information about our sponsors while they enjoy their coffee.”

The website for the Japanese-owned cafe also explains Shiru’s mission and philosophy: “Through a free drink we try to give students some information which sponsor company would like to inform exclusively for university students to diverse the choices of their future career.”

Bella d’Abrerea:

Earlier this year, the Dean of Arts at Newcastle University wrote a piece for The Conversation in which she stated that Western Civilisation is past its used by date and that it’s too ‘white’ to teach in multi-cultural classrooms. The University of Sydney academics leading the charge, claim that the BA will “pedal racism disguised as appreciation for ‘Western Culture.’” At a National Tertiary Education Union forum, former University of Sydney chair, sociologist and gender theorist Raewyn Connell, told her audience that the curriculum “has racism embedded in its agenda.”

When I articulated to my fellow alumnus that I had not been surprised at the response from Australian universities—given the antipathy displayed towards Western Civilisation by many academics—he did not think this hostility to be a bad thing. When I added that I thought all students studying an undergraduate degree in history, or any humanities degree for that matter, should be required to do a foundation course in Western Civilisation, he was shocked and horrified. From his point of view, knowing about what happened during the Scientific Revolution or the Enlightenment is an irrelevancy and a waste of students’ time. For him, history is about ‘issues,’ not knowledge.

It was at this point that I realised that just how far universities, especially the humanities departments, have strayed from their original purpose. From the Renaissance until the 1960s, the humanities, derived from the expression ‘studia humanitatis’ or the study of humanity, made it their purpose to make sense of and understand the world through the great traditions of art, culture and philosophy. There appeared in the 1970s and 1980s however, a range of ‘new humanities’ subjects which rejected this tradition. The new humanities were underpinned by a range of radical post-structuralism and post-modernist theories which had been conjured up in the previous decade by a predominantly French group of philosophers such as Jacques Derrida, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, as well as the psychiatrist, Jacques Lacan.

Ray Bendici:

Students accepted by Winston-Salem State University in North Carolina receive an introductory text message from Winston, the institution’s AI chatbot. Winston first congratulates them and then supports them through the onboarding process, says Joel Lee, assistant vice chancellor for enrollment management.

“We wanted a better way to meet students and communicate in the ways they are communicating. Unlike email or traditional mail, texts have basically a 100 percent open rate.”

Introduced a little more than a year ago, Winston can now answer 75 percent of inquiries—or 3,000 to 4,000 questions—from incoming students. This past June, the peak period for incoming student questions, Winston engaged with 2,000 students, sending more than 42,000 texts.

Javier Hernandez:

They were exactly what China’s best universities were supposed to produce: young men and women steeped in the ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.

They read Marx, Lenin and Mao and formed student groups to discuss the progress of socialism. They investigated the treatment of the campus proletariat, including janitors, cooks and construction workers. They volunteered to help struggling rural families and dutifully recited the slogans of President Xi Jinping.

Then, after graduation, they attempted to put the party’s stated ideals into action, converging from across China last month on Huizhou, a city in the south, to organize labor unions at nearby factories and stage protests demanding greater protections for workers.

Richard Sandomir:

Mel Elfin, a longtime Washington bureau chief for Newsweek who moved to the rival U.S. News & World Report in 1986 and helped build its college rankings feature into a major educational franchise, died on Saturday in Washington. He was 89. …

For Mr. Elfin, overseeing U.S. News’s college rankings posed a challenge that differed from working at Newsweek, where he covered President Richard M. Nixon’s groundbreaking trip to China and developed a strong stable of reporters during the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal.

Now, at U.S. News, he was dealing with college presidents, educational data and algorithms.

“He was a pivotal figure,” said Bob Morse, the chief data strategist of U.S. News, who worked closely with Mr. Elfin to hone the methodologies behind the rankings. “He embraced the fact that the rankings were needed and that serving consumers was our primary mission.”

Above The Law:

I remember a poignant conversation with an associate dean. The associate dean called me into his office because one of my courses had lower than average student evaluations. More specifically, one evaluation had something along the lines of “I HATE YOU! I HATE YOUR BOOK! I HATE YOUR FACE! I JUST HATE EVERYTHING ABOUT YOU!” You know, the important feedback we are supposed to get from evaluations.

The associate dean then proceeded to talk to me as if I were a terrible teacher. I called him out: “Can we stop talking like I’m a terrible teacher?” My evaluations were, apart from this outlier, completely fine. He replied, “We’d be having this discussion even if you were a great teacher!” Yes, he said that. I then looked up his student evaluations. Let’s just say he wasn’t “a great teacher,” either.

I now instruct my students not to cause drama on student evaluations. I’m fine with comments about pedagogy, about the curriculum, and statements that will help me improve as a teacher. But that isn’t usually what I get. I get numbers and either “You rock!” or “I hate you!”

But I’m tenured. If the associate dean doesn’t like how I teach, the punishment is to put me in smaller classes with fewer students, with fewer exams to grade. That’s right: That’s the punishment. But it’s only punishment for those of us who enjoy and care about what we do, and the untenured for whom this might count as a death knell.

Kelsey Gee:

Applications to American M.B.A. programs dropped for a fourth straight year, with even elite universities starting to show signs of struggling to lure young professionals out of the strong job market.

For the first time in nearly a decade, waning interest in the traditional master of business administration degree hit business schools that draw the most applications, including Harvard and Stanford universities, according to a survey of 360 schools by the Graduate Management Admission Council, a nonprofit that administers the…

Paul Hitlin:

In addition, certain groups of Americans – most notably, older adults – face their own unique challenges when it comes to using and adopting new technologies. In a 2015 survey, 34% of internet users ages 65 and older said they had little to no confidence in their ability to use electronic devices to perform online tasks, while 48% of older adults said the statement, “When I get a new electronic device, I usually need someone else to set it up or show me how to use it” describes them very well. And a substantial share of seniors reports they have chronic health condition, disability or other type of physical limitation that might prevent them from fully utilizing a variety of devices.

While many long-standing measures of technology adoption have steadied the past two years, the ways that people get connected and use digital platforms are constantly shifting and evolving. For instance, Pew Research Center surveys have shown that the number of people who are “smartphone-only” internet users – meaning they own a smartphone but do not have traditional home broadband service – has grown from 12% in 2016 to 20% this year.

And although the shares of Americans who use certain social media platforms have changed little in recent years, that has not been true with every site. The percent of adults using Instagram, for example, has grown from 28% in 2016 to 35% this year. And looking beyond the adult population, the social media environment of today’s teenagers looks remarkably different than it did just a few years prior.

Meanwhile, new connected devices continue to emerge. Consumer surveys show that the use of smart TVs and wearable devices has grown in recent years. Nearly half of Americans (46%) use digital voice assistants on smartphones or devices like Amazon Echo, according to a 2017 Pew Research Center survey. A host of items collectively called “the Internet of Things” – ranging from household thermostats and security systems to “smart city” transportation systems – are also coming on the market.

Jessica Davies:

The biggest ad buyer in the world has some serious issues with Facebook, and it wants action.

“We’re increasingly holding Facebook to account to justify the levels of investment we are putting in them,” said Robin O’Neill, managing director of digital trading for GroupM. “We continue to press them to allow us to independently verify our metrics and operate in the real world. Facebook doesn’t operate with real-world metrics. I would urge every agency to hold Facebook to account and interrogate the data that comes out from them.”

Facebook and YouTube have been plagued by negative headlines over the last year or so, either related to brand-safety issues or lack of transparency around metrics. Both companies have attempted to offer improvements: Facebook introduced new brand-safety measures as recently as this week, though advertisers weren’t wholly impressed by its efforts. Google launched Google Measurement Partners in July, which allows advertisers to verify ad delivery through a set of third parties including comScore, DoubleVerify, IAS, MOAT, Nielsen, and Kantar.

Tom Steele:

But unfortunately, the couple didn’t have much water and, despite their late start, were not prepared for the cold or to camp for the night, according to the sheriff’s office. When it got dark, they became disoriented because of the lack of marked trail.

Another hiker happened upon the pair, who showed signs of dehydration and altitude sickness, and led them back to where a group of his friends were camping. Mason and Davis were given food, water and a tent while one of the campers hiked down to her vehicle and called 911.

Terence P. Jeffrey:

Americans on average spent more on taxes than on food and clothing combined in 2017, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s new data on consumer expenditures, which was released this month.

“Consumer units” (which include families, financially independent individuals, and people living in a single household who share expenses) spent an average of $9,562 on food and clothing in 2017, according to BLS.

But they spent $16,749 on federal, state and local taxes.

Madhvi Ramani:

On the facade of the Ministry of Justice in Paris, just below a ground-floor window, is a marble shelf engraved with a horizontal line and the word ‘MÈTRE’. It is hardly noticeable in the grand Place Vendôme: in fact, out of all the tourists in the square, I was the only person to stop and consider it. But this shelf is one of the last remaining ‘mètre étalons’ (standard metre bars) that were placed all over the city more than 200 years ago in an attempt to introduce a new, universal system of measurement. And it is just one of many sites in Paris that point to the long and fascinating history of the metric system.

“Measurement is one of the most banal and ordinary things, but it’s actually the things we take for granted that are the most interesting and have such contentious histories,” said Dr Ken Alder, history professor at Northwestern University and author of The Measure of All Things, a book about the creation of the metre.

Matthew DeFour:

Not all districts have the same revenue level. DPI spokesman Tom McCarthy highlighted some differences:

The Beloit School District, with higher poverty and lower property values, can receive $9,626 per student, about 83 percent of which comes from state aid. So when revenue limits increase, the district typically uses all of the extra funding without having to raise property taxes much.

The more rural Plum City School District in northern Wisconsin can collect $10,271 per student, about half of which comes from aid and half from property taxes, so when limits increase the district has to engage with its community about whether to raise property taxes.

The Nicolet Union High School District in a higher property value district Milwaukee suburb receives $15,344 per student, only 5 percent of which comes from state aid, so in order to raise funding levels the district must raise property taxes.

McCarthy added, “per pupil aid subverts all of these considerations.”

In the last budget Walker proposed more money for schools than Evers, even with the high price tag of the Evers funding formula change, but most of the increase went to per-pupil aid and property tax credits. Kitchens said the Legislature didn’t use the funding increase to back Evers’ plan because “politically there wasn’t a will to come back and change it.”

He also acknowledged that continuing to pump money into per-pupil aid is problematic.

“If we keep doing that, we’re defeating the purpose of the formula,” Kitchens said. “I know politically there may be advantages to giving everybody something so everybody’s happy, but that does defeat the purpose.”

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction, long lead by Mr. Evers, has aborted our one attempt to improve teacher content knowledge requirements, as Massachusetts has done (via MTEL), in an effort to address our disastrous reading results.

Madison spends far more than most taxpayer funded K-12 school districts, nearly 20,000 per student.

Yet, Madison has long tolerated disastrous reading results, and recently promoted improved graduation rates despite declining academic results.

JD Tuccille:

Tech giants get a lot of well-deserved flack for playing at partisan politics, picking sides in policy disputes, and suppressing speech and ideas that don’t fit well with their dominant political ideology—or promoting those that do. Even some of the companies’ employees’ find the internal culture stifling, such as the Facebook workers who recently derided the social media behemoth for “a political monoculture that’s intolerant of different views.” But for a glimpse of real danger, consider what happens when Google, the dominant search-engine company, teams up with a regime it apparently finds agreeable, and lends its considerable clout to reinforcing authoritarian rulers’ control over their suffering subjects.

Google left China in 2010 after realizing that there was no end to the demands and intrusions the government would make, no matter how the tech firm tried to comply. But now the company appears willing to do almost anything asked to win access to the vast market. And what’s being asked of the company is that it help the government control its people.

A “memo, authored by a Google engineer who was asked to work on the project, disclosed that the search system, codenamed Dragonfly, would require users to log in to perform searches, track their location—and share the resulting history with a Chinese partner who would have ‘unilateral access’ to the data,” The Intercept reports about a new search engine Google is developing for China.

John Ross:

Although this insight may seem self-evident today, it was revolutionary in Powell’s time; his maps were arguably as stunning to behold in the 19th century as nasa’s photographs of Earth from space were in the 20th.

One year later, he released his seminal Report on the Lands of the Arid Region of the United States, which put forward the first scientific and detailed understanding of the climate system of the American West. The important book, noted the writer Wallace Stegner, was “loaded with dynamite.” Here was clear-cut information and data that could rationally direct federal land-management policy.

The map and the report amounted to a full-frontal assault on the federal land-grant system, still rooted in the 1862 Homestead Act’s stipulation that any American adult could receive 160 acres, contingent upon demonstrating an ability not just to live on the parcel but also to improve it. However well that system worked in Wisconsin or Illinois, Powell’s research suggested, the arid West could not support such relatively small homesteads.

Mild conditions had given recent immigrants to the West good crops and false expectations of a rosy future. But Powell’s experience studying western geology had taught him that the climate was variable and cyclical, bad decades following good ones. Pioneers flocking into the lands beyond the 100th meridian, Powell believed, would soon see their dreams wither into spindly crops and foreclosure. The lucky few who owned access to water were likely to establish dangerous monopolies that would roll over small farmers.

Powell’s warnings were anathema to politicians and business interests. No one wanted to hear from a man who thought “rain follows the plow” was hogwash—who seemed to look back to the days of the Great American Desert and would impede America’s natural progress. The land agent for the Northern Pacific Railroad, itself the beneficiary of nearly 4 million acres in government grants (an area bigger than Connecticut), hammered back at Powell’s “grave errors.” Opponents claimed that Powell was blind to nationally crucial economic realities. Several powerful western senators took Powell’s position as a personal affront; they feared that, if his warnings gained currency, they would lose out on the tax revenue generated by settlers.