Monday evening roundup and ramble and response to comment

The Taliban's war on girls and education is hardly limited to Malala.

Granderson balances arguments around affirmative action.

I still don't care for Junot Diaz's fiction--though a friend tells me that "The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao" was good once she got into it--but he's sort of redeemed himself with this:

You see, in my view a writer is a writer not because she writes well and easily, because she has amazing talent, because everything she does is golden. In my view a writer is a writer because even when there is no hope, even when nothing you do shows any sign of promise, you keep writing anyway.

All joking aside, the rethinking of homework for reasons of fairness is an interesting consideration, both from the perspective of learning and from the perspective of role-of-government: how far can/should government go in leveling the playing field? Kids with (constructively) involved parents will always have an advantage, that some other kids can overcome. Can you really neutralize the advantage without damaging the education system as a whole?

Carolyn on human nature and deliberate harm. I wrote recently about what a step it was to see that mom was deliberately saying destructive things to me (not out of an innocent cluelessness, not out of constructive criticism). And yet, as Carolyn points out, maybe we all do it at times, without even realizing it.

Stanford's organics study suffered some methodological issues:

So, for instance, [Kirsten Brandt, the scientist who led the Newcastle study,] decided that if a paper reported results for crops grown in separate years, each year should be regarded as a separate data point, because weather conditions vary so much from year to year. The Stanford group instead averaged the multiple years into a single data point.

The overall Stanford approach, Dr. Brandt said, was similar to what is used for analyzing human clinical drug studies, where the effects of a medicine should be consistent and variations indicate that a study may not have been done well. In agricultural studies, she said, the variations are expected because of differences in plant species, weather, soil and other conditions. “This difference is a genuine difference,” she said, and not an indication of shoddy experiments.

Farmed shrimp is even more disgusting than I'd previously known. Seriously, stay the f* away from it.

Supersizing and food waste.

Look at all that beautiful vegan food.

It is true that your outfit speaks for you.

***

On the way to my double-parked car on Saturday (such is most of the parking at the Birchmere, which now apparently charges for parking through its service fees), I heard my name out of a car backing out of its spot. I turned to see a friend, who had attended the same concert at the suggestion of her friend, who was in the driver’s seat. My friend and I said 'hello' and scurried away, so as not to exacerbate the traffic situation in the lot, but I caught up with the other friend at work this morning. She told me she hadn’t heard of either performer, but went because she trusted her friend’s judgment, and she enjoyed it, but didn’t care for Dar's performance. What was up with all that talking, she asked? Did the audience really need a primer on Greek mythology? She added that Dar came off as snooty, even a bit contemptuous of the audience.  

I, too, had detected a layer of contempt; Dar had chided the audience, twice, for requesting songs. “Oh, yeah, I’ll leave it up to you what I should play.” And, as I wrote the other day, I, too, was put off by the amount of talking. Last year, Dar talked a lot, but she also played a lot of songs.

But I told my friend, as I agreed that the performance was disappointing, that Dar was one of my favorite musicians of all time. My friend was surprised. I explained that, no, really, Dar has a lot of really great songs, even few of them made it into her set. It was so weird to have to say that. Mind you, not everyone likes her music, but I think this friend would. 

Now, I am not the concertgoer who needs to hear “As Cool as I Am” at every show, but I do need to hear more music than introductory explanation, and some representation of her more well-known music. It does seem like she’s almost disappointing on purpose, as an f* you to the audience. So to answer my own question, I doubt these last two years were anomalous; I guess she's come to see touring as an annoying duty. So I am done with seeing her live.

***

Response to comment: I just found out that one of my former managers (recently retired) was married to someone who sat around the corner from me. I worked for her on and off for three years without a clue that they were connected in any way. That is the way to work with one's spouse.