Hi, I'm david (b) hayes.

Lightning Sunset

Sam Javanrouh captured a few moments of a great one.

New Orleans Education

Making time to do things that I usually “don’t have time for” was a good idea. For example, Paul Tough’s (rather long) story for the New York Times Magazine about the challenge and hope for New Orleans schools is good. The most striking paragraph in a primarily optimistic article:

Pastorek’s optimism and determination can be inspiring, but he admits that for now, at least, there’s no proof that a portfolio model will do a significantly better job educating poor children than a command-and-control model. When I spoke last month to Diane Ravitch, a historian of education who has spent decades studying and writing about the often dispiriting process of school reform, she said that she was skeptical that a change in the governance model would solve the problems plaguing New Orleans’s schools. “The fundamental issue in American education — I say this after 40 years of having read and studied and written about the problems — is one that is demographic,” she told me. Poor children, Ravitch said, simply face too many problems outside the classroom. “If you don’t buttress whatever happens in school with social and economic changes that give kids a better chance in life and put their families on a more stable footing, then schools alone are not going to solve the problems of poor student performance. There has to be a range of social and economic strategies to support and enhance whatever happens in school.”

India’s Olympic Medals

Specifically: Why does India have so few Olympic medals? Tyler Cowen and others speculate. I do believe that cricket remains my favorite explanation.

Famous Trips in History

GOOD has a pretty interesting map of history’s greatest journeys. Worth a look.

(via Snarkmarket)

A Brief History of Humanitarian Intervention

Not quite sure why — perhaps because the topics been on my mind recently — but I feel compelled to link to Gary Bass’s passable summary of the concept of humanitarian intervention.

An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube

This has been going around for some time, and I never found an hour with which to watch it. Today I finally did, and I’m glad for that. It’s well done, and brings new weight to Robin’s question: “How is YouTube not the greatest art project ever?”

The 38 US States

Hidden in a rather good mental_floss post called “3 Controversial Maps” is an interesting idea:

If George Etzel Pearcy had his way, Lynyrd Skynyrd’s famous song would have been called “Sweet Home Talladego.” In 1973, the California State University geography professor suggested that the U.S. should redraw its antiquated state boundaries and narrow the overall number of states to a mere thirty-eight.

Pearcy’s proposed state lines were drawn in less-populated areas, isolating large cities and reducing their number within each state. He argued that if there were fewer cities vying for a state’s tax dollars, more money would be available for projects that would benefit all citizens.

Though there are a substantial number of reasons to immediately reject this proposal, I think I could get used to this new map.

Magic and Science

New research is looking into the way magicians are able to trick us to discover what insights that can give us into the nature of cognition. Cool.

The End of Globalization

It’s worth considering the fact that Paul Krugman is wrong. But it’s also worth considering his point that the Georgia-Russia conflict may be the dawn of a new era:

But as I was reading the latest bad news, I found myself wondering whether this war is an omen — a sign that the second great age of globalization may share the fate of the first.

The False Nobility of Victimhood

I’ve had mixed opinions about Ta-Nehisi Coates’s work in the past, but I really — really really — like this blog post.

Here is the thing — believing that you have fallen because of actions outside of your control, or the collective control of your tribe, rewards you with an unearned sense of the cosmic. It allows you to fashion yourself as heroic — a Hercules robbed by the smallness of Gods. It fills you with an anger which is, at its root, a sort of false power, a weak righteousness that turns your enemies into demons. It was thrilling to believe we’d been kidnapped by white interlopers, as opposed to knowing that, in the words of the great Robert Hayden, we’d been sold off for “tin crowns that shone with paste” for “red calico and German-silver trinkets.”