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Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom - Ars Technica:
So why did Sweden pivot? In an email to Undark, Linda Fälth, a researcher in teacher education at Linnaeus University, wrote that the “decision to reinvest in physical textbooks and reduce the emphasis on digital devices” was prompted by several factors, including questions around whether the digitalization of classrooms had been evidence-based. “There was also a broader cultural reassessment,” Fälth wrote. “Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting.”
Andre Malraux was a major French writer, a cultural icon, and also an arrogant, incompetent, and unrepentant thief of Khmer cultural antiquities.
The Milky Way over the Rio Grande at Big Bend National Park. Photo by Stephen Alvarez. This area is part of the world’s largest international dark sky reserve. It’s hard to describe, for the modern person who lives in brightly lit areas, the magnificence of the night sky in such dark places. I am blessed to live relatively near some of the darkest skies in the world.
Re: my recent post on how I use Claude: I have never used a chatbot to write even one word for me, and I never will. The reason is simple: I love making sentences, and paragraphs, and stories, and arguments. Love the act of writing more than I can say; wouldn’t outsource it for love or money. One unexpected revelation of the chatbot era — unexpected to me anyway — is how many writers, especially but not only journalists, dislike writing and are delighted to get someone or something else to do it for them.
Writers love to talk about how hard writing it, what a struggle, what misery, yadda yadda yadda. I have always thought this rhetoric a big smokescreen, a way to avoid admitting that they’re getting to do what they love. But maybe they don’t love it. Maybe they got into because they thought they would love it but it turns out that every job is a grind. And maybe they prefer just laying around on their ass totally watching television.
The gift which I am sending you is called a dog, and is in fact the most precious and valuable possession of mankind. For while other animals are each of them of use to us in virtue of one particular quality, and possess a special and distinguishing excellence, this one animal is responsible for greatest and highest points of excellence. A lion excels in courage, an ox in reliability and adaptability to agriculture, the horse in intelligence and speed, the ass and mule, as is stated by the poets, in patience and hard work; and other animals have other good points: this one animal combines the excellence of all others without one exception. He is naturally suitable for war work and the pursuits of peace, and equally fitted to be of use and to be a pleasant companion. It would not be easy, as you will believe, to enumerate all the excellences and all the services to ourselves of this animal.
— Theodorus Gaza, Laudatio Canis, via Futility Closet. (The date given there, 1482, is probably too late.) Further research turns up this article by Sophia Xenophontos on Byzantine dogs — from the dogs’ point of view. One important question pursued there: Can dogs actually sing?
Years ago, we bought a big box of new doorknobs for our old house. Once I had my technique down, I could replace a doorknob in a couple minutes, but every door was slightly different, warped with time, so there was enough thinking involved to keep each replacement interesting. I found the process enormously satisfying. So satisfying, in fact, that I didn’t replace all the doorknobs at once. I saved a handful of doorknobs for times when I was feeling really stressed out.
The Bills That Destroyed Urban America — The New Atlantis:
Americans are now three generations into a set of policies that, on the one hand, provide open-ended subsidies for sprawl and, on the other, do little to ameliorate the problems of the urban core — and maybe even aggravate them. Over time, this has come to seem like an unalterable fact of life and the work of the invisible hand of the market. But in this case, the hand is being nudged by Uncle Sam.
The sequel is here.
As we enter Holy Week and Lent draws to a close, I feel a certain relief; not just because I have given something up for Lent that I rather miss (in my case, beer), but because I find that Lent can quite easily become spiritually toxic – at least for me. It can turn into a purely human striving for perfection, of the kind that once became quite dangerous for me; it was, in fact, the scourge of performative spiritual perfection that was probably the single most dangerous thing I was exposed to at university. It was the one thing that nearly took me off the rails and risked turning me into something less than human, and I am thankful every day that I ultimately escaped it. Performative perfection is the besetting sin of people who define themselves, collectively or individually, as self-consciously devout; because once you make it part of your identity, you are socially locked into maintaining devout behaviour – or at least the appearance of devout behaviour, and that’s where the danger starts.