Freedom House:

This image shows one of several signs that were hung up on Huashan Road in Shanghai by three unknown individuals on the evening of April 17, with slogans mocking the CCP’s COVID-19 lockdown of the city. The banner shows a hand-painted WeChat error message that is displayed when a post has been censored, and reads, “This content cannot be viewed due to violations.” Several other signs criticizing the city’s draconian lockdown measures were hung before police removed them, though photos were widely shared online. The three individuals who hung the signs were reportedly detained by police for several hours and had their phones confiscated. (Credit: Unknown)

Liah Greenfield

Since the 1990s, there has been talk of a mental-health epidemic in the U.S., particularly among young people. The mass shootings last month in Uvalde, Texas, and Buffalo, N.Y., carried out by 18-year-old gunmen, have heightened fears that something’s gone horribly wrong. But the problem isn’t new. American psychiatrists have been studying rates of functional mental illness, such as depressive disorders and schizophrenia, since the 1840s. These studies show that the ratio of those suffering from such diseases to the mentally healthy population has been consistently rising. 

Ten years ago, based on the annual Healthy Minds studyof college students, 1 in 5 college students was dealing with mental illness. Between 2013 and 2021, according to Healthy Minds, the share of U.S. college students affected by depression surged 135%. During the same period, the share of students afflicted by any psychiatric illness doubled to more than 40%. “America’s youth,” wrote journalist Neal Freyman in April, “are in the midst of a spiking mental health crisis, and public health experts are racing to identify the root causes before it gets even worse.”

Wall Street Journal:

“State leaders have lowered expectations for students and redefined success for both students and schools,” says the report, and that’s for sure. In 2017 the Virginia Board of Education reduced the importance of grade-level proficiency in school accreditation.

The education board also voted to lower proficiency standards on state exams. This has exacerbated Virginia’s “honesty gap,” which is the difference in student proficiency levels between state tests and the NAEP. While other states have closed these gaps, “Virginia is the only state to define proficiency on its fourth-grade reading test below the NAEP Basic level and also sets the lowest bars in the nation for fourth-grade math and eighth-grade reading,” says the report.

Perhaps the most shocking is Interlochen, a music camp for teenagers, where Epstein was touted as a key supporter. He had his own house on the campus. He groomed victims right there. (I’m not aware of anybody paying any price for this).

5/

— Adam Davidson (@adamdavidson) June 5, 2022

Allie Simon ’22 and Emily Fowler ’23:

All 30 universities have raised prices at least once since the 2019-2020 academic year, which coincided with the COVID-19 outbreak in America. 

That school year aligned with the spring 2020 COVID-19 outbreak. 

A Campus Reform analysis of 2019-2022 tuition figures from U.S. News & World Report found that Vanderbilt University increased its tuition the most in that timeframe. 

At the start of COVID-19, Vanderbilt charged $52,070. As of the 2022-2023 academic year, tuition at the Tennessee university is up approximately 11.64% from 2019-2020 to $58,130.

2022-2023 figures in the analysis come directly from the universities’ websites. 

Only Harvard University and Duke University have lowered tuition for the 2022-2023 academic year. The University of Michigan is keeping its same tuition rate.

The University of Virginia is decreasing its in-state tuition but is increasing its out-of-state tuition. 

The chart below tracks tuition and fee rates from the last four academic years. In-state and out-of-state tuition rates are both included for public universities.

Matthew Inglis:

Stereotype threat has been proposed as one cause of gender differences in post-compulsory mathematics participation. Danaher and Crandall argued, based on a study conducted by Stricker and Ward, that enquiring about a student’s gender after they had finished a test, rather than before, would reduce stereotype threat and therefore increase the attainment of women students. Making such a change, they argued, could lead to nearly 5000 more women receiving AP Calculus AB credit per year. We conducted a preregistered conceptual replication of Stricker and Ward’s study in the context of the UK Mathematics Trust’s Junior Mathematical Challenge, finding no evidence of this stereotype threat effect. We conclude that the ‘silver bullet’ intervention of relocating demographic questions on test answer sheets is unlikely to provide an effective solution to systemic gender inequalities in mathematics education.

Justin E H Smith:

Under the new regime, a significant portion of the decisions that, until recently, would have been considered subject to democratic procedure have instead been turned over to experts, or purported experts, who rely for the implementation of their decisions on private companies, particularly tech and pharmaceutical companies, which, in needing to turn profits for shareholders, have their own reasons for hoping that whatever crisis they have been given the task of managing does not end.

Once again, in an important sense, much of this is not new: it’s just capitalism doing its thing. What has seemed unprecedented is the eagerness with which self-styled progressives have rushed to the support of the new regime, and have sought to marginalize dissenting voices as belonging to fringe conspiracy theorists and unscrupulous reactionaries. Meanwhile, those pockets of resistance—places where we find at least some inchoate commitment to the principle of popular will as a counterbalance to elite expertise, and where unease about technological overreach may be honestly expressed—are often also, as progressives have rightly but superciliously noted, hot spots of bonkers conspiracism.

This may be as much a consequence of their marginalization as a reason for it. What “cannot” be said will still be said, but it will be said by the sort of person prepared to convey in speaking not just the content of an idea, but the disregard for the social costs of coming across as an outsider. And so the worry about elite hegemony gets expressed as a rumor of Anthony Fauci’s “reptilian” origins, and the concern about technological overreach comes through as a fantasy about Bill Gates’s insertion of microchips into each dose of the vaccine. Meanwhile we are being tracked, by chips in our phones if not in our shoulders, and Fauci’s long record of mistakes should invite any lucid thinker to question his suitability for the role of supreme authority in matters of health.

Dissenters risk being labeled not only conspiracy theorists, but eugenicists or even advocates of genocide, should they venture any reflection on the costs and benefits of public health policy other than what we might call “COVID maximalism”: the view that we must keep social-distancing restrictions in place wherever there is any risk of harm to the elderly or immunocompromised, no matter what other risks such restrictions cause, whack-a-mole-like, to pop up in turn. But as anyone who is familiar with the literature in medical ethics, or who served on hospital ethics boards before the pandemic, can tell you: there has always been prioritization and triage, and this is not necessarily a reflection of injustice, though of course it can be that.

Do no harm:

Why are so many medical schools violating civil rights? That’s the question Do No Harm is asking in five complaints filed on Wednesday with the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights. These schools offer scholarships that are eligible to people of certain races, which is incompatible with the Constitution and federal law.

The medical schools in question are affiliated with the University of Florida, the University of Oklahoma, the University of Utah, and the University of Minnesota, as well as the Medical College of Wisconsin. While more than 140 medical schools and institutions nationwide offer questionable scholarships, these five medical schools are particularly noteworthy.

Consider the scholarship at the University of Florida College of Medicine. It is available to members of certain “racial and ethnic populations.” They spell out what that means – people who are “African Americans and/or Black, American Indian, Alaska Native, Naive Hawaiian, Hispanic/Latinx, and Pacific Islander.” The application also asks for an applicant photograph!

Ryan Mac:

In his email to SpaceX employees, Mr. Musk told workers that they were required to “spend a minimum of 40 hours in the office per week.” Those who did not do so would be fired, he wrote in the memo, which was obtained by The New York Times.

“The more senior you are, the more visible must be your presence,” Mr. Musk said. “That is why I spent so much time in the factory — so that those on the line could see me working alongside them. If I had not done that, SpaceX would long ago have gone bankrupt.”

In his memo to Tesla’s executive staff, which was posted by two pro-Tesla Twitter accountsand which the billionaire appeared to confirm, Mr. Musk also wrote that “anyone who wishes to do remote work” must be in the office for a minimum of 40 hours a week. Those who decline should “depart Tesla,” he added.

Matthew Crawford:

Throughout history, there have been crises that could be resolved only by suspending the normal rule of law and constitutional principles. A “state of exception” is declared until the emergency passes — it could be a foreign invasion, an earthquake or a plague. During this period, the legislative function is typically relocated from a parliamentary body to the executive, suspending the basic charter of government, and in particular the separation of powers.

The Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben points out that, in fact, the “state of exception” has almost become the rule rather than the exception in the Western liberal democracies over the last century. The language of war is invoked to pursue ordinary domestic politics. Over the past 60 years in the United States, we have had the war on poverty, the war on drugs, the war on terror, the war on Covid, the war on disinformation, and the war on domestic extremism.

Maria Colombo:

A 2021 report by the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA) noted that Student Services costs “often also include diversity and inclusion initiatives.”

Corroborating Campus Reform’s findings in North Carolina, the ACTA report determined that, “Increases in per-student spending on instruction, administration, and student services were each correlated with an increase in tuition for the next academic year, even after controlling for levels of appropriations and institutional characteristics.”

At Duke, for example, the Office of Institutional Equity produces “Affirmative Action Plans,” DEI workshops, and trainings on anti-racism and microaggressions.

Duke also has a Center for Sexuality and Gender Diversity that, among other university-sponsored activities, hosts an annual “Coming Out Day”.

Wake Forest’s Intercultural Center hosts “Identity Development Initiatives” that include programs such as “Making Meaning of Men & Masculinities” and a “Women Encouraging Empowerment” group that “validate students’ value as members of the Wake Forest University community.”

UNC and NC State also dedicate substantial resources to such non-educational student services.

Wall Street Journal:

Obama Administration officials then complained the college wasn’t producing documents fast enough, and the Education Department cut off federal student aid. This drove Corinthian into bankruptcy and stranded tens of thousands of Corinthian students.

The Obama Administration then agreed to forgive $171 million in government loans for Corinthian students still in school. In 2016 a state judge handed Attorney General Harris a default judgment against Corinthian, which she flogged during her campaign for U.S. Senate. What a clever legal strategy: Bankrupt a company so it can’t defend itself.

But progressives, never satisfied, have demanded that the feds cancel the debt of every borrower who attended Corinthian since its founding in 1995. The Trump Administration refused this as a horrendous precedent that would let students off the hook for repaying loans if their college is accused of fraud.

The Biden Administration has no such qualms. On Wednesday the Education Department announced it would forgive $5.8 billion in debt for 560,000 former Corinthian students. “The action is the largest single loan discharge the Department has made in history,” the Department boasted, crediting Ms. Harris, who took a victory lap on Thursday at a press conference.

Eugene Volokh:

“[T]hese threats to due process and academic freedom are matters of life and death for our great universities. It is incumbent upon their leaders to reverse the disturbing trend of indifference to these threats, or simple immobilization due to fear of internal constituencies of the ‘virtuous’ determined to lunge for influence or settle scores against outspoken colleagues.”

[A]s alleged, this case describes deeply troubling aspects of contemporary university procedures to adjudicate complaints under Title IX and other closely related statutes. In many instances, these procedures signal a retreat from the foundational principle of due process, the erosion of which has been accompanied—to no one’s surprise—by a decline in modern universities’ protection of the open inquiry and academic freedom that has accounted for the vitality and success of American higher education.

This growing “law” of university disciplinary procedures, often promulgated in response to the regulatory diktats of government, is controversial and thus far largely beyond the reach of the courts because of, among other things, the presumed absence of “state action” by so-called private universities. Thus insulated from review, it is no wonder that, in some cases, these procedures have been compared unfavorably to those of the infamous English Star Chamber.

Natalie Wexler:

No single ready-made curriculum can do all of that, she said. Wit & Wisdom has provided a crucial “backbone” of curriculum materials that build knowledge in a thoughtful sequence—and ideally teachers help students connect their own lives to whatever they’re studying. But the district has also supplemented Wit & Wisdom with a social studies curriculum it created called “BMore Me,” which highlights the role of Black and brown communities in Baltimore’s history.

One of the most gratifying results of the new curriculum, Santelises said, is hearing from parents who are impressed by what their children are learning: “Parents love knowing their children know something they don’t know. Particularly in communities that have been underserved by the institution of school, that ability to see that your child is moving further than you is a very human need.”

Under the previous curriculum, students often never even learned to sound out words, because teachers hadn’t been trained in the systematic phonics instruction that many kids need. Some teachers still resist phonics, but Santelises says it’s important to let them know that historically, some Blacks in the South were prevented from learning phonics as a way of ensuring their continued oppression.

Matt Taibbi:

So as we’re getting ready to go on the air — MSNBC president Erik Sorenson had hired me earlier — we had gone to the Super Bowl and were driving up to LA and he said something really interesting to me. He said, “You know when I hired you, I got phone calls from two people, way up in the echelon of the Dems and Repubs. I won’t tell you who they were.” He wouldn’t reveal it to me. But he said, “They wanted to know why we were giving you a national forum.”

Virginia Gewin:

On 4 March, Christopher Jackson tweeted that he was leaving the University of Manchester, UK, to work at Jacobs, a scientific-consulting firm with headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Jackson, a prominent geoscientist, is part of a growing wave of researchers using the #leavingacademia hashtag when announcing their resignations from higher education. Like many, his discontent festered in part owing to increasing teaching demands and pressure to win grants amid lip-service-level support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He is one of many academics who say the pandemic sparked a widespread re-evaluation of scientists’ careers and lifestyles. “Universities, spun up to full speed, expected the same and more” from struggling staff members, he says, who are now reassessing where their values lie. The demands add to long-standing discontent among early-career researchers, who must work longer and harder to successfully compete for a declining number of tenure-track or permanent posts at universities. And Jackson had another reason. He received what was, in his opinion, a racially insensitive e-mail that constituted harassment and alluded to using social media to police staff opinions, which, he says, was the last straw. Jackson filed a formal complaint and the University of Manchester responded: “The investigation has now concluded. We have made Professor Jackson aware of its findings as well as the recommendations and actions we will be taking forward as an institution.”

Carey Goldberg:

Simone Collins knew she was pregnant the moment she answered the phone. She was on her sixth round of in vitro fertilization treatments and had grown used to staffers at Main Line Fertility starting this kind of call with the words “Oh, hi, Simone,” in a subdued tone, voices brimming with sympathy. This time, though, on Valentine’s Day, the woman on the other end belted out a cheery “Oh, hi, Simone!” Embryo 3, the fertilized egg that Collins and her husband, Malcolm, had picked, could soon be their daughter—a little girl with, according to their tests, an unusually good chance of avoiding heart disease, cancer, diabetes, and schizophrenia.

This isn’t a story about Gattaca-style designer babies. No genes were edited in the creation of Collins’s embryo. The promise, from dozens of fertility clinics around the world, is just that the new DNA tests they’re using can assess, in unprecedented detail, whether one embryo is more likely than the next to develop a range of illnesses long thought to be beyond DNA-based predictions. It’s a new twist on the industry-standard testing known as preimplantation genetic testing, which for decades has checked embryos for rare diseases, such as cystic fibrosis, that are caused by a single gene.

Chang Che:

Until 2022, Shanghai was called “the enchanted city.” It was a land of Gucci bags and French wine and weekend jogs along the Bund. It was a land of restless nights spent in the company of eclectic strangers. It was a land of coffee and convenience, of cloud-kissing skylines and flash-delivery bubble tea. There is an old cliché that the Shanghainese are an especially proud bunch, but it’s easy to see why: in a country with a xenophobic past and a revanchist nationalism, the cosmopolitan pleasures of the city bordered on the magical.

It was this pride that broke the magic spell. In March, when the Omicron variant penetrated China’s iron walls, other cities such as Shenzhen and Changchun locked down under a policy known as “dynamic zero-Covid,” which seeks to snuff out all virus transmissions. When cases began to rise in Shanghai, however, officials hesitated, believing China’s main financial hub too vital for a wholesale closure. They chose a retail approach, shuttering neighborhoods one by one as cases emerged. But by the end of March, it was clear the improvised plan had failed. As cases spilled into neighboring provinces, Beijing authorities took matters into their own hands. They ousted Shanghai’s more outspoken officials the way nature sent Icarus—wax-winged and recalcitrant—tumbling back to earth.

Twenty-five million residents—over twice the population of Greece—have paid the price ever since. For nearly two months, the city has been a ghost town. Shop front doors are bolted shut, and windows are strewn with black tarp. Sidewalks are hemmed by white tape, and neighborhood doors are patrolled by security guards. For an older generation who had witnessed the excesses of the Cultural Revolution, this was all too familiar. Food had to be rationed. Door-knocks became the stuff of nightmares. The Red Guards had returned—this time adorning white.

MD Kittle:

The Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction has long been a haven of leftist thought and policy. Increasingly, the agency has become politically weaponized in the pursuit of its woke diversity, equity and inclusion agenda.

Most recently, DPI launched an investigation into a Milwaukee Public Schools counselor whose alleged crime is that she spoke passionately in opposition to “gender identity ideology.” At a feminist rally in Madison.

DPI is investigating whether the counselor should lose her license for “immoral conduct.”

“The state is, quite simply, trying to punish a public-school counselor for her views on gender ideology. This is a classic, clear-cut, violation of the First Amendment and the state can expect a federal lawsuit if it proceeds,” said Luke Berg, attorney at the Milwaukee-based Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty. On Wednesday, the civil rights law firm sent a letter warning DPI of the legal perils it faces in attacking an educator’s First Amendment rights.

Marissa Darlingh, the MPS counselor, spoke at a feminist rally at the state Capitol on April 23, 2022.  She said she “oppose[s] gender ideology” in elementary schools and that young children should not be “exposed to the harms of gender identity ideology” or given “unfettered access to hormones—wrong-sex hormones—and surgery.”

She told rally-goers that she “exist[s] in this world to serve children” and “to protect children,” and does not support social or medical transition of young children. Darlingh, apparently in a moment of passion, declared “f… transgenderism,” referring to the “gender identity ideology” that she believes harms children.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

.@newskag said she had an editor who didn’t like education coverage. Thought it was too soft. I think that’s a misguided belief. School districts are largest employer in most communities with the largest budgets & often the most corrupt govt bodies. #RowanJournalismConference

— Scott Travis (@smtravis) June 4, 2022

Alexander Shur:

The company insured the vast majority of school districts before former Gov. Scott Walker’s Act 10 in 2011 blocked unions from negotiating over benefits, which led school districts to shop for cheaper alternatives, resulting in a stark revenue loss for the company. Conservatives heralded the change, saying it saved school districts tens of millions of dollars around the state.

“For years taxpayers across the state were getting a raw deal,” Walker said in a 2012 press release. “Collective bargaining stymied competition for benefits in the health insurance market, and instead directed property tax revenue to those affiliated with big government union bosses,” adding taxpayers were saving millions with the changes he enacted.

WEA Trust has since expanded to cover state, county and municipal workers.

WEA Trust spokesperson Steve Lyons said Act 10 had nothing to do with the company’s decision to pull out of the health insurance market in Wisconsin.

2014: 25.62% of Madison’s budget to be spent on benefits.

Chris Rickert:

LeMonds said the base rate for summer school staff is $28 per hour, or 12% higher than in previous years. But the relief money last year allowed the district to pay $40 an hour. The district’s teachers’ union, Madison Teachers Inc., had not responded to requests for comment.

Wednesday’s district email said “chronic staff shortages in education continue to impact the (district) community and school districts across the country.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Go read the lengthy, multi-pronged Washington Post “corrections” of the Taylor Lorenz story. They don’t describe reckless errors the way she’s displayed on so many other occasions. They describe outright fraud: deliberate, self-interested lying.https://t.co/lSWor7cnCO pic.twitter.com/DnQUFApCje

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 3, 2022

Ann Althouse: The Washington Post and the ACLU really did behave awfully.

Ted Dabrowski and John Klingner

The Sunshine State attracted over $41.1 billion in Adjusted Gross Income (AGI) from 624,000 new residents (tax filers and their dependents) that moved into Florida in 2020. On the flip side, Florida lost $17.4 billion in AGI from 457,000 people who left. Overall, Florida came out ahead with 167,000 net new people and $23.7 billion in net new taxable income.

That’s a total gain of about 3.3 percent of the state’s total 2019 AGI ($711 billion).

Texas was the runner up with a net income gain of $6.3 billion, followed by Arizona with $4.8 billion. North and South Carolina rounded out the top five with net gains of $3.8 billion and $3.6 billion, respectively.

Alex Tabarrok

Nevertheless, the lesson I take is that information revelation is rarely pure. Information revelation is strategic–what is revealed and when it is revealed are choices in a game that may have complex and counter-intuitive equilibria.

Robert Pondisco:

Every teacher of struggling readers hasexperienced the moment when a student says, “I read it, but I didn’t get it.” It can be a bewildering experience. Why don’t they get it?

For several decades, elementary schools in New York City and across the country have turned to Columbia University education professor and acclaimed reading guru Lucy Calkins to answer that question. But in recent years, her influential and best-selling “Units of Study” curriculum has faced an intense barrage of criticism from experts who complain its “balanced literacy” approach is ineffective and gives short shrift to phonics — teaching children to look at pictures and guess words, for example, instead of sounding them out.

Schools Chancellor David Banks has announced plans to move literacy instruction in New York City away from Calkins’ curriculum in favor of approaches based on the “science of reading,” including phonics. Perhaps as a result, Calkins now appears to have conceded the argument, promising in a lengthy New York Times article to include “daily structured phonics lessons” in her program. That’s welcome news, but it’s not enough.

The South Bronx elementary school where I taught 5th grade for several years was a proponent of Calkins’ approach. We adopted her teaching methods and employed her literacy coaches for years, to very little effect. Her greatest sin against literacy comes after kids learn to “decode” the written word, whether or not they are taught with phonics, which is just the starting line for reading.

Pierre Baldi

Today there exists no public, freely downloadable, comprehensive database of all known chemical reactions and associated information. Such a database not only would serve chemical sciences and technologies around the world but also would enable the power of modern AI and machine learning
methods to be unleashed on a host of fundamental problems. In time, this could lead to important scientific discoveries and
economic developments for the benefit of humanity. While ideally such a repository ought to be created and maintained by an
international consortium, in the near future, it may be easier to begin the process through governmental agencies such as the National Science Foundation or the National Institutes of Health. Working together, we could use a multipronged approach that
could combine negotiations with commercial stakeholders, crowd-sourcing efforts, automated extraction methods, and legislative actions.

T. Keung Hui:

A Wake County teacher has resigned amid the controversy over the use of LGBTQ themed flash cards in her preschool classroom.

The preschool teacher, who was not immediately identified by the Wake County school system, resigned from Ballentine Elementary School in Fuquay-Varina on Friday, according to Lisa Luten, a district spokeswoman.

Some critics on social media had demanded that the teacher be fired, but a parent in that special-needs preschool class praised the teacher as being a caring educator.

“She is an amazing teacher who has worked tirelessly in an unpredictable school year to provide a safe, loving and inclusive classroom for our children to grow,” Jackie Milazzo, whose child is in the preschool class, said in an interview Tuesday.

The issue came to light on Friday, when N.C. House Speaker Tim Moore issued a press release saying Rep. Erin Paré was contacted by a constituent that the flash cards were being used to teach colors to children in a preschool class at Ballentine.

Laura Spinney:

When the great library at Alexandria went up in flames, it is said that the books took six months to burn. We can’t know if this is true. Exactly how the library met its end, and whether it even existed, have been subjects of speculation for more than 2,000 years. For two millennia, we’ve been haunted by the idea that what has been passed down to us might not be representative of the vast corpus of literature and knowledge that humans have created. It’s a fear that has only been confirmed by new methods for estimating the extent of the losses.

The latest attempt was led by scholars Mike Kestemont and Folgert Karsdorp. The Ptolemies who created the library at Alexandria had a suitably pharaonic vision: to bring every book that had ever been written under one roof. Kestemont and Karsdorp had a more modest goal – to estimate the survival rate of manuscripts created in different parts of Europe during the middle ages.

Using a statistical method borrowed from ecology, called “unseen species” modelling, they extrapolated from what has survived to gauge how much hasn’t – working backwards from the distribution of manuscripts we have today in order to estimate what must have existed in the past.

The numbers they published in Science magazine earlier this year don’t make for happy reading, but they corroborate figures arrived at by other methods. The researchers concluded that a humbling 90% of medieval manuscripts preserving chivalric and heroic narratives – those relating to King Arthur, for example, or Sigurd (also known as Siegfried) – have gone. Of the stories themselves, about a third have been lost completely, meaning that no manuscript preserving them remains.

Harini Logan was eliminated from the #SpellingBee, reinstated on appeal, and made it all the way to the first ever 90 second spell-off, basically a tiebreak. Spelled 26 words in 90 seconds, got 21 correct.

A must-watch clutch performance: pic.twitter.com/bJI1fl63ew

— Andrew Eccles (@AJEccles) June 3, 2022

John Pfeiffer:

7 habits of highly effective people

1. be proactive
2. “begin with the end in mind” (envision the goal)
3. “put first things first” (order and prioritize)
4. “think win-win” (good outcomes for everyone)
5. “Seek First to Understand, Then to be Understood” (listen, then persuade)
6. “synergize” (teamwork)
7. “sharpen the saw” (sustainable balance)

Tom Moran

There is a lot that we don’t know about William Shakespeare, but there is one fact concerning him about which nearly everyone appears to be in full agreement. They agree with Shakespeare’s great contemporary Ben Jonson in his poem about his fellow playwright included at the beginning of the 1623 First Folio that Shakespeare had “small Latin and less Greek”:

For if I thought my judgment were of years
I should commit thee surely with thy peers,
And tell how far thou didst our Lyly outshine,
Or sporting Kyd, or Marlowe’s mighty line.
And though thou hadst small Latin and less Greek,
From thence to honor thee I would not seek
For names, but call forth thund’ring Aeschylus,
Euripides, and Sophocles to us…

It is one of the few statements about Shakespeare that is almost universally considered to be uncontroversial and accepted as fact. The editors of The Norton Shakespeare footnote the line, claiming that “The underrating of Shakespeare’s Latin was likely influenced by Jonson’s pride in his own impressive classical learning.” Even Jonson’s most recent biographer, Ian Donaldson, accepts the line at face value, claiming that Jonson was utilizing a rhetorical strategy that he had gleaned from the Roman rhetorician Quintilian: namely, that you should point out a person’s shortcomings (such as Shakespeare’s having “small Latin and less Greek”) before building up his virtues.

Pupaweb:

The leavers classifier detects messages that explicitly express intent to leave the organization, which is an early signal that may put the organization at risk of malicious or inadvertent data exfiltration upon departure. Microsoft Purview Communication Compliance helps organizations detect explicit code of conduct and regulatory compliance violations, such as harassing or threatening language, sharing of adult content, and inappropriate sharing of sensitive information. Built with privacy by design, usernames are pseudonymized by default, role-based access controls are built in, investigators are explicitly opted in by an admin, and audit logs are in place to help ensure user-level privacy. More info

Mine Bloomberg:

The message to educators and elected officials could hardly be clearer: Too many public schools are failing, parents are voting with their feet, and urgent and bold action is needed. Until now, however, the only governmental response has been to spend more money — too much of which has gone to everyone but our children.

Since 2020, Congress has sent an additional $190 billion to schools, in part to help them reopen safely and stave off layoffs. But in many districts, union leaders resisted a return to in-classroom instruction long after it was clear that classrooms were safe. And by and large, remote instruction was a disaster. By one analysis, the first year of the pandemic left students an average of five months behind in math and four months behind in reading, with much larger gaps for low-income schools.

It’s abundantly clear that money was far from the biggest challenge facing public schools. The U.S. spends more per pupil on public education than virtually any other country, and many districts have struggled to spend all the federal funds they’ve received. Others have splurged on sports.

Alex Gutentag:

The collapse of educational pathways and structures has had a particularly brutal effect on the poorest students, who can least afford to have their schooling disrupted. High-poverty schools had the lowest levels of in-person instruction, causing low-income students to fall even further behind their more affluent peers. The entirely foreseeable ways in which bad COVID-19 policy choices exacerbated inequality perversely led many public school systems to try to hide their mistakes by dismantling programs for gifted and talented students along with entrance tests and other standardized testing regimens—piling on more bad policy choices that deprive economically disadvantaged students of opportunity.

The available numbers tell a worrying story of educational slippage that is likely to keep large numbers of kids from acquiring the basic skills, both intellectual and social, that they will need to hold decent jobs. Recent test scores have dramatically declined, with one report finding that in districts offering distance learning, the decline in passing rates for math was 10.1 percentage points greater than in districts that offered in-person instruction. In Maryland, 85% of students now are not proficient in math, and in Baltimore the figure is 93%. Michigan, Washington, and other states have found dramatic declines in their test scores. In Los Angeles, the decline has been worse for younger students, with 60% of third and fourth graders not meeting English standards compared to 40% of 11th graders. Overall, the youngest children were most profoundly impacted by lockdowns and school disruptions, and some of them now lack basic life skills.

As the severity of these repercussions comes to light, some outlets—notably those that most aggressively advocated for lockdowns and masking—have been eager to suggest that we are now aware of the overwhelmingly negative consequences of these policies thanks to “new research” that has only just become available to fair-minded people, who can therefore be forgiven for having adopted the course they did. But to many doctors and scientists, the damage to kids caused by COVID-19 panic was neither inevitable nor surprising. Rather, it was the result of the public health establishment’s conscious choice to eschew rational cost-benefit analysis in favor of pet cultural theories and political gamesmanship. For those who applied the scientific method to the available evidence, the consequences were already clear just a few weeks into the pandemic. “It was not at all true that people in healthcare and public health were unaware of what was going on with children,” Dr. Noble told me. “They were not ignorant.”

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Sahaj Sharda:

Politicians sometimes talk about breaking up companies, but it rarely happens. There are lots of reasons for this. Firstly, a lot of companies are really hard to break up. Sometimes this is just a natural fact about companies. But other times, break ups are made artificially harder. For example, Facebook (now Meta) deliberately made itself hard to break up as a defensive business strategy. Essentially, when political discourse about breaking up Big Tech started heating up, Facebook worked on integrating Messenger into Instagram and its other products. It tried to tie all the code together in a hard to untangle web so that regulators would get scared by the challenge and give up on untangling the company’s previously separate product lines. 

Beyond business challenges inherent to breaking up firms, there are also legal challenges. Essentially, breaking up companies on antitrust grounds is nearly impossible because the courts have adopted a radically narrow standard of consumer harm. Further, courts hate to drastically intervene in markets. As a result, few antitrust cases ever result in breakups anymore. Because of the challenges inherent in breaking up firms, natural, artificial, and legal, breakups rarely happen. This is why when politicians talk about breakups, few voters really believe them. 

But elite colleges are different. They’re quite easy to break up, and you don’t need to go through the courts. Essentially, the key component of elite colleges isn’t their campuses, nor is it their professors, nor is it even their qualified student bodies. There are plenty of campuses, professors, and qualified students to go around. The key component of elite colleges is their resources, also known as endowments. These resources enable elite colleges to maintain strong brands by being ranked higher than other schools. The endowments allow elite colleges to afford things that other schools can’t. Furthermore, the large endowments operate through flywheel effects, because the more resources a school has, the higher its ranking, and therefore the more resources it is likely to attract from donors and others.

Peter Sullivan

“Right before the election, people would get notices of big premium increases, and that will certainly not reflect well on Democrats,” said Larry Levitt, a health policy expert at the Kaiser Family Foundation. 

Vulnerable Democratic lawmakers are trying to sound the alarm. A group of 26 House Democrats from swing districts, led by Rep. Lauren Underwood (D-Ill.), sent a letter to leadership last week urging the extra subsidies to be extended.  

“I’m worried that we’re running up on a cliff,” said Rep. Susan Wild (D-Pa.), one of the signers of the letter, who compared it to the expanded child tax credit that was allowed to expire at the start of this year. “We’re suddenly going to lose that ability. It’s similar to the child tax credit, which, you know, just kind of came and went, the expiration of it. I just don’t want to see that happen. I think it is absolutely game-changing.”

Given Republican opposition to any increased spending on ObamaCare, an extension of the subsidies would have to be included in a party-line package using the reconciliation process to bypass a GOP filibuster in the Senate.  

The problem for Democrats is that negotiations over that broader package with Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), the key swing vote, have shown few signs of progress for months.   

But the health care cliff is adding increased urgency for Democrats to find a way forward on the package.

AnnMarie Hilton and Sophia Voight:

As Kim Konen was driving to pick up her daughter at the designated safe spot, she felt a flurry of emotions. She was scared. She was furious. She was happy, and relieved, to know her daughter was OK.

Since the first bomb threat was made against the Kiel school system last week, five others have followed targeting the Kiel Public Library, city hall, the homes of school district employees, roads and utility companies throughout the city.

So far, no bombs have been found, but school has been canceled for the remainder of the year, the Memorial Day parade that usually has residents lining the street and stopping by the local VFW for a brat didn’t happen and graduation for the class of 2022 is postponed.

Ambarish Chandra and Tracy Beth Høeg

Our study replicates a highly cited CDC study showing a negative association between school mask mandates and pediatric SARS-CoV-2 cases. We then extend the study using a larger sample of districts and a longer time interval, employing almost six times as much data as the original study. We examine the relationship between mask mandates and per-capita pediatric cases, using multiple regression to control for differences across school districts. 

Findings: Replicating the CDC study shows similar results; however, incorporating a larger sample and longer period showed no significant relationship between mask mandates and case rates. These results persisted when using regression methods to control for differences across districts. Interpretation: School districts that choose to mandate masks are likely to be systematically different from those that do not in multiple, often unobserved, ways. We failed to establish a relationship between school masking and pediatric cases using the same methods but a larger, more nationally diverse population over a longer interval. Our study demonstrates that observational studies of interventions with small to moderate effect sizes are prone to bias caused by selection and omitted variables. Randomized studies can more reliably inform public health policy.

Mandates, closed schools and Dane County Madison Public Health.

The data clearly indicate that being able to read is not a requirement for graduation at (Madison) East, especially if you are black or Hispanic”

2017: West High Reading Interventionist Teacher’s Remarks to the School Board on Madison’s Disastrous Reading Results 

Madison’s taxpayer supported K-12 school district, despite spending far more than most, has long tolerated disastrous reading results.

My Question to Wisconsin Governor Tony Evers on Teacher Mulligans and our Disastrous Reading Results

“An emphasis on adult employment”

Wisconsin Public Policy Forum Madison School District Report[PDF]

WEAC: $1.57 million for Four Wisconsin Senators

Friday Afternoon Veto: Governor Evers Rejects AB446/SB454; an effort to address our long term, disastrous reading results

Booked, but can’t read (Madison): functional literacy, National citizenship and the new face of Dred Scott in the age of mass incarceration.

No When A Stands for Average: Students at the UW-Madison School of Education Receive Sky-High Grades. How Smart is That?

Charlottesville:

As of May, only 67 students were enrolled in CCS Virtual, Katina Otey, the district’s chief academic officer, said. Almost a third of those students are currently in fifth grade. The number of students interested in continuing online next year is lower still — only 15.

“We know so much more about COVID and about how it spreads and how we can take care of ourselves,” said Paula Culver-Dickinson, the district’s digital knowledge and professional learning coordinator. “We believe we can bring everyone back safely.”

What’s more, ending the program will ease the district’s severe substitute teacher shortage, Culver-Dickinson said. Ending the program means the existing subs will have fewer classes to cover.

Jiang Xueqin joins us in this episode to discuss ideology in schools, the effort to turn Chinese universities into “world-class” institutions, and cross-national educational projects and international schools in an era of Covid-19 and US-China decoupling.https://t.co/sIxBnYrrAW

— Jeremiah Jenne (@JeremiahJenne) June 1, 2022

Virginia Gewin

On 4 March, Christopher Jackson tweeted that he was leaving the University of Manchester, UK, to work at Jacobs, a scientific-consulting firm with headquarters in Dallas, Texas. Jackson, a prominent geoscientist, is part of a growing wave of researchers using the #leavingacademia hashtag when announcing their resignations from higher education. Like many, his discontent festered in part owing to increasing teaching demands and pressure to win grants amid lip-service-level support during the COVID-19 pandemic.

He is one of many academics who say the pandemic sparked a widespread re-evaluation of scientists’ careers and lifestyles. “Universities, spun up to full speed, expected the same and more” from struggling staff members, he says, who are now reassessing where their values lie. The demands add to long-standing discontent among early-career researchers, who must work longer and harder to successfully compete for a declining number of tenure-track or permanent posts at universities. And Jackson had another reason. He received what was, in his opinion, a racially insensitive e-mail that constituted harassment and alluded to using social media to police staff opinions, which, he says, was the last straw. Jackson filed a formal complaint and the University of Manchester responded: “The investigation has now concluded. We have made Professor Jackson aware of its findings as well as the recommendations and actions we will be taking forward as an institution.”

West Cook News:

Oak Park and River Forest High School administrators will require teachers next school year to adjust their classroom grading scales to account for the skin color or ethnicity of its students.

School board members discussed the plan called “Transformative Education Professional Development & Grading” at a meeting on May 26, presented by Assistant Superintendent for Student Learning Laurie Fiorenza.

In an effort to equalize test scores among racial groups, OPRF will order its teachers to exclude from their grading assessments variables it says disproportionally hurt the grades of black students. They can no longer be docked for missing class, misbehaving in school or failing to turn in their assignments, according to the plan.

“Traditional grading practices perpetuate inequities and intensify the opportunity gap,” reads a slide in the PowerPoint deck outlining its rationale and goals.

It calls for what OPRF leaders describe as “competency-based grading, eliminating zeros from the grade book…encouraging and rewarding growth over time.”

Hillary Leung:

Hong Kong’s Foreign Correspondents’ Club (FCC) has overwhelmingly polled in favour of a motion relating to press freedom. More than half of the board members abstained from the vote.

The non-binding motion was raised at the club’s annual general meeting on Monday, just weeks after the FCC made the decision to scrap the Human Rights Press Awards over legal concerns. The move was widely criticised and sparked questions about the club’s commitment to upholding press freedom in the city.

Claire Cain Miller and Bianca Pallaro

American schoolchildren’s learning loss in the pandemic isn’t just in reading and math. It’s also in social and emotional skills — those needed to make and keep friends; participate in group projects; and cope with frustration and other emotions.

In a survey of 362 school counselors nationwide by The New York Times in April, the counselors — licensed educators who teach these skills — described many students as frozen, socially and emotionally, at the age they were when the pandemic started.

“Something that we continuously come back to is that our ninth graders were sixth graders the last time they had a normative, uninterrupted school year,” said Jennifer Fine, a high school counselor in Chicago. “Developmentally, our students have skipped over crucial years of social and emotional development.”

Nearly all the counselors, 94 percent, said their students were showing more signs of anxiety and depression than before the pandemic. Eighty-eight percent said students were having more trouble regulating their emotions. And almost three-quarters said they were having more difficulty solving conflicts with friends.

Share of school counselors who said they noticed these student behaviors more often, compared with before the pandemic

One fact that clearly emerged from the trial: the Amber Heard op-ed in the @washingtonpost that the jury just found defamed Johnny Depp was ghost-written by @ACLU, after Heard promised to pay them $7 million (a promise she never fulfilled).

They have a lot to answer for.

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 1, 2022

The real loser in the Heard-Depp trial is @aclu, which ghostwrote Heard's @washingtonpost op-ed–without which none of this would have happened–after Heard pledged to pay @aclu $3.5M. Just so gross. https://t.co/eN0qG6xP8D

— Lara Bazelon (@larabazelon) June 1, 2022

Deflation at work
Aspiring @TheEconomist interns used to have to submit a sample article of 1000 words in 2002, now just 500 words. pic.twitter.com/vwpTMfhVUB

— Stanley Pignal (@spignal) June 1, 2022

Tdarb.org

By shifting towards a purely "open" software stack, schools then have the ability to purchase older, cheaper hardware. Instead of running bloated spyware (Windows) IT departments could opt to use any one of the lightweight Linux distros available.

This would reduce e-waste, save school districts significant amounts of money (no need to purchase Windows licenses or beefy hardware to be able to even _run_ the operating system) all while still maintaining a high level of user/network security.

Heck, you could even have a fleet of Raspberry Pi devices as your main student "computers". The cost of replacement also becomes less significant (these are children using these devices remember).

Andrew:

The acceleration in tuition costs in the past 30 years has a surprisingly simple origin, mostly stemming from Title IV of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993:

Title IV: Student Loan ERISA Provisions — Subtitle A: Direct Student Loan Provisions — Student Loan Reform Act of 1993 — Amends the Higher Education Act of 1965 (HEA) to replace the Federal Family Education Loan Program, under which loans made by private lenders are guaranteed by the Government with a Federal Direct Student Loan Program, to be partially phased in over a five-year transition period.

Up until 1993, the federal government merely guaranteed/backed student loans that private lenders gave. This meant that only in the case of someone defaulting on their loan would the government be on the hook, stepping in and paying the college what’s owed.

This amendment completely overhauled that system, making it so that for the vast majority of student loans, the federal government directly made the loans to students. More specifically, the federal government pays the universities/colleges up front, and the student then owes the government that money.

This represented a large shift in the alignment of incentives. When the loans come from the federal gov, there’s much less pressure on schools to compete on price. This is especially true since “increasing max student loan size => making college more accessible to everyone” is a political argument that both major parties benefit from in terms of optics.

Cecilia Kang:

Ahead of the 2020 elections, Connecticut confronted a bevy of falsehoods about voting that swirled around online. One, widely viewed on Facebook, wrongly said absentee ballots had been sent to dead people. On Twitter, users spread a false post that a tractor-trailer carrying ballots had crashed on Interstate 95, sending thousands of voter slips into the air and across the highway.

Concerned about a similar deluge of unfounded rumors and lies around this year’s midterm elections, the state plans to spend nearly $2 million on marketing to share factual information about voting, and to create its first-ever position for an expert in combating misinformation. With a salary of $150,000, the person is expected to comb fringe sites like 4chan, far-right social networks like Gettr and Rumble, and mainstream social media sites to root out early misinformation narratives about voting before they go viral, and then urge the companies to remove or flag the posts that contain false information.

“We have to have situational awareness by looking into all the incoming threats to the integrity of elections,” said Scott Bates, Connecticut’s deputy secretary of the state. “Misinformation can erode people’s confidence in elections, and we view that as a critical threat to the democratic process.”

Scott Williams:

The new policy in Burlington was developed in consultation with the Racine County District Attorney’s Office. Other police departments in the county say they, too, have been advised by the DA to withhold public disclosures on any case headed to court.

That means that the public will not be allowed any information about criminal cases until trial, unless law enforcement officials choose to release information.

Kate Brumbach:

CISA Executive Director Brandon Wales said in a statement that “states’ standard election security procedures would detect exploitation of these vulnerabilities and in many cases would prevent attempts entirely.” Yet the advisory seems to suggest states aren’t doing enough. It urges prompt mitigation measures, including both continued and enhanced “defensive measures to reduce the risk of exploitation of these vulnerabilities.” Those measures need to be applied ahead of every election, the advisory says, and it’s clear that’s not happening in all of the states that use the machines.

2022 MIDTERM ELECTIONSSupreme Court order could affect Pennsylvania Senate countElection returns show state senator losing by single voteNearly one third of Idaho voters cast ballots in May primaryOregon county complete counting blurred primary ballots

University of Michigan computer scientist J. Alex Halderman, who wrote the report on which the advisory is based, has long argued that using digital technology to record votes is dangerous because computers are inherently vulnerable to hacking and thus require multiple safeguards that aren’t uniformly followed. He and many other election security experts have insisted that using hand-marked paper ballots is the most secure method of voting and the only option that allows for meaningful post-election audits.

“These vulnerabilities, for the most part, are not ones that could be easily exploited by someone who walks in off the street, but they are things that we should worry could be exploited by sophisticated attackers, such as hostile nation states, or by election insiders, and they would carry very serious consequences,” Halderman told the AP.

Kashmir Hill:

What happened, however, was more complicated than a simple algorithmic mistake. It involved several humans, academic bureaucracy and an automated facial detection tool from Amazon called Rekognition. Despite extensive data collection, including a recording of the girl, 17, and her screen while she took the test, the accusation of cheating was ultimately a human judgment call: Did looking away from the screen mean she was cheating?

The pandemic was a boom time for companies that remotely monitor test takers, as it became a public health hazard to gather a large group in a room. Suddenly, millions of people were forced to take bar exams, tests and quizzes alone at home on their laptops. To prevent the temptation to cheat, and catch those who did, remote proctoring companies offered web browser extensions that detect keystrokes and cursor movements, collect audio from a computer’s microphone, and record the screen and the feed from a computer’s camera, bringing surveillance methods used by law enforcement, employers and domestic abusers into an academic setting.

Honorlock, based in Boca Raton, Fla., was founded by a couple of business school graduates who were frustrated by classmates they believed were gaming tests. The start-up administered nine million exams in 2021, charging about $5 per test or $10 per student to cover all the tests in the course. Honorlock has raised $40 million from investors, the vast majority of it since the pandemic began.

Oliver Traldi:

A few weeks before Donald Trump’s inauguration as President, the New Yorker published a cartoon depicting a mustached, mostly bald man, hand raised high, mouth open in a sort of improbable rhombus, tongue flapping wildly within, saying: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” The tableau surely elicited many a self-satisfied chuckle from readers disgusted by the populist energy and establishment distrust that they perceived in Trump’s supporters.

But what exactly is the joke here? Citizens in a democracy are not akin to airline passengers, buckled quietly into their seats and powerless to affect change, their destinations and very lives placed in the hands of professionals guarded by a reinforced door up front. Even brief reflection reveals the cartoonist’s analogy to be comparing like to unlike.

That none of us thinks we know better than a plane’s captain, yet we often think we know better than experts in matters of politics, suggests differences between those domains. And it highlights a vexing problem for modern political discourse and deliberation: We need and value expertise, yet we have no foolproof means for qualifying it. To the contrary, our public square tends to amplify precisely those least worthy of our trust. How should we decide who counts an expert, what topics their expertise properly addresses, and which claims deserve deference?

Avram Alpert:

In the 18th century, the University of Basel faced a nepotism-driven crisis. Of its 80 professorships, about 50 were controlled by just 15 families. The university’s enrollment and reputation were in decline. In response, they implemented a new method for choosing appointments: a structured lottery system. There was a rigorous, standardized procedure to arrive at the final three candidates. Then, one of the three was chosen randomly.

Not everyone was happy with the system. One scholar, for example, was a finalist 10 times without being chosen, while others lucked into positions on their first try — including one at just 23 years old. But there were also marked benefits. Most obviously, the nepotistic chain was largely broken. There were also reports of decreased envy and jealousy, and greater satisfaction with the final decisions, even among those who did not win the job. And among those who did win, the knowledge that they had been chosen by lottery increased their humility and modesty.