Here, public school begins today. Our son starts seventh grade! Of course, it's all remote. What a year it will be. 

Meanwhile I have links for your own continued education: 

Using some advanced mathematics to talk about cryptology; most of this is just beyond me. But it seems pretty cool.

Here, Brookings's Isabel Sawhill "explains what Social capital is, argues that it is declining, and that these declines contribute to political extremism, worsens health, and depresses economic growth." She has policy suggestions for doing better, too.

This is an interesting piece; it sounds to me a lot like applying to US-China relations the lessons of George Kennan’s argument for a policy of containment rather than rollback at the beginning of the Cold War.

Good conversation on what we can learn from Camus’s novel The Plague.  The key word, I think, is solidarity: we can learn a fundamental solidarity that is ordinarily obscured.

Amazing story about a large research project relating millions of people’s DNA to the transatlantic slave trade.

An interesting brief piece on Edith Wharton’s library.

Five Japanese authors on their favorite Haruki Murakami short stories.  Cool.   And what looks also interesting: a book about the making of the “Murakami Industry.”   

Good reporting on one basic problem with our economy:

In 1960, cutting-edge research from economists at the University of Chicago and Stanford University has documented, more than half of Black men in America worked as janitors, freight handlers or something similar. Only 2 percent of women and Black men worked in what economists call “high-skill” jobs that pay high wages, like engineering or law. Ninety-four percent of doctors in the United States were white men.

…The Chicago and Stanford economists calculated that the simple, radical act of reducing discrimination against those groups was responsible for more than 40 percent of the country’s per-worker economic growth after 1960. It’s the reason the country could sustain rapid growth with low unemployment, yielding rising wages for everyone, including white men without college degrees. 

America’s ruling elites did not learn from that success.…

The statistics show tragedy. They also show opportunity. If America can once again tear down barriers to advancement, it can tap a geyser of entrepreneurship, productivity and talent, which could by itself produce the strong growth and low unemployment that historically drive up wages for the working class, including working-class white men.

Maybe it's not too late to learn now? 

Such a terrific little memoir of Joseph Brodsky as a teacher, among other things.  (What a list of poets to read!)  This little tidbit of Brodsky speaking after talking about Frost for three hours straight: “Some of you will go on to become poets, though many of you will not, for that’s just what comes to pass and what statistics tell us. But there is one thing that all of you must do and that is be grateful for this language!”  Oh, and be grateful for Brodsky, too. 

Be grateful for the chance to read things like these pieces.  I'm grateful I found them, and I'm grateful I can share them with you.  I suppose that's the teacher gene in me.  Or the bossy gene.  Is there a difference?

Wash those hands, wear a mask, yadda yadda yadda--be well.