Because it's Wednesday, and you need new ideas!

 

A really thought-provoking piece on concentration, distinguishing it from attention:

We ask too much of attention and not enough of concentration. The recent cultural emphasis on attention risks subsuming too many variables of human experience, as if they could ever be held constant. We have to pay attention with the body, the will, the place, the mood, the memory, the moment, the relationships, the affordances, not the least the smartphone. All these variables are implicated in our capacity to attend, but they have their own kinds of agency, too, and they play with each other in unpredictable ways. The emergent properties arising from the psyche at play with itself in the world include amusement, enchantment, dissonance and distraction: these are not mere hindrances but more like a kind of data to be understood and integrated before we can exercise agency that is truly our own. We need to coalesce in order to concentrate, and concentrate to coalesce.…Our problem today is not that we don’t or can’t pay attention, but that the systems and structures of society oblige us to pay attention so frequently and fleetingly that we cannot in fact concentrate. Lacking an ability to concentrate, it’s a struggle to construct and maintain a coherent and autonomous sense of self, which leaves us at the mercy of digital, commercial and political puppeteers. Without concentration, we are not free.

Seems to me to apply to social media, which is all about attention but not so much about concentration

 

This story asks about why colleges are failing lower-income students, then points out that there have been massive declines in public funding of public higher ed, and students from lower-income families often struggle in college because they're not prepared for college because their prior (public) K-12 education was insufficient, and yet despite all the evidence that we're facing a crisis of public support for education, this piece still manages to make you wonder if the colleges aren't really the crucial problem in this equation. Which is, you know, a bit frustrating.   

 

The great blessing of America is space.  The great curse of America is space.  This is why "Witchita Lineman" is such a fantastic song. It also is the focal complication for our transportation infrastructure. (By the way, the fact that cross-state mobility has declined in the past fifty years may be due to the fact that people's capacities for travel (within a hundred miles of their house, say) has rapidly expanded since the auto society really got going with the post-WWII boom and the Eisenhower interstate highway system.)  

 

Why Democrats in the United States are becoming more liberal.  Hint: It has a great deal to do with Donald Trump.  But it's not entirely that.  

 

A nice piece about an important theological influence i the latter half of the twentieth century, the made-up theologian Franz Bibfeldt.  

 

Interesting account of Vladimir Putin and his Russia.  One thing that I hadn't known is the degree to which he was shocked into a more active anti-Americanism by the 2008 financial crisis.

 

 

Yesterday here in Central Virginia was a mini-snowstorm.  There's still a bit of snow on the ground, but it has mostly gone away.  It was lovely, and it's great that it's mostly gone, too.  I hope you all enjoy the weather, wherever you are.