Sunday, July 11, 2010
Janet Evanovich - Finger Lickin' Fifteen
I picked up this mass market book on an impulse from Publix, read it, found it laugh-out-loud funny, breezy, but finally boring. The author is a mass market machine having turned out 16 books in this series with the heroine Stephannie Plum, who chases bail bond jumpers. It's a good summer reading experience, but I think I'll stop with this one.
Friday, July 9, 2010
The Words of William Faulkner
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary."
- William Faulkner, commenting about Ernest Hemingway
- William Faulkner, commenting about Ernest Hemingway
Books vs. the Internet
If there is a war between the internet and books, I am on the side of books even though my mind is in both worlds.
The Medium Is the Medium
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 8, 2010
NY Times columnist
Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.
Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.
This study, along with many others, illustrates the tremendous power of books. We already knew, from research in 27 countries, that kids who grow up in a home with 500 books stay in school longer and do better. This new study suggests that introducing books into homes that may not have them also produces significant educational gains.
Recently, Internet mavens got some bad news. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy examined computer use among a half-million 5th through 8th graders in North Carolina. They found that the spread of home computers and high-speed Internet access was associated with significant declines in math and reading scores.
This study, following up on others, finds that broadband access is not necessarily good for kids and may be harmful to their academic performance. And this study used data from 2000 to 2005 before Twitter and Facebook took off.
These two studies feed into the debate that is now surrounding Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows.” Carr argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation.
Carr’s argument has been challenged. His critics point to evidence that suggests that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a person’s ability to process information and focus attention. The Internet, they say, is a boon to schooling, not a threat.
But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.
The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.
A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.
A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.
These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”
But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.
Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.
It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.
Perhaps that will change. Already, more “old-fashioned” outposts are opening up across the Web. It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to serious learning.
The Medium Is the Medium
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 8, 2010
NY Times columnist
Recently, book publishers got some good news. Researchers gave 852 disadvantaged students 12 books (of their own choosing) to take home at the end of the school year. They did this for three successive years.
Then the researchers, led by Richard Allington of the University of Tennessee, looked at those students’ test scores. They found that the students who brought the books home had significantly higher reading scores than other students. These students were less affected by the “summer slide” — the decline that especially afflicts lower-income students during the vacation months. In fact, just having those 12 books seemed to have as much positive effect as attending summer school.
This study, along with many others, illustrates the tremendous power of books. We already knew, from research in 27 countries, that kids who grow up in a home with 500 books stay in school longer and do better. This new study suggests that introducing books into homes that may not have them also produces significant educational gains.
Recently, Internet mavens got some bad news. Jacob Vigdor and Helen Ladd of Duke’s Sanford School of Public Policy examined computer use among a half-million 5th through 8th graders in North Carolina. They found that the spread of home computers and high-speed Internet access was associated with significant declines in math and reading scores.
This study, following up on others, finds that broadband access is not necessarily good for kids and may be harmful to their academic performance. And this study used data from 2000 to 2005 before Twitter and Facebook took off.
These two studies feed into the debate that is now surrounding Nicholas Carr’s book, “The Shallows.” Carr argues that the Internet is leading to a short-attention-span culture. He cites a pile of research showing that the multidistraction, hyperlink world degrades people’s abilities to engage in deep thought or serious contemplation.
Carr’s argument has been challenged. His critics point to evidence that suggests that playing computer games and performing Internet searches actually improves a person’s ability to process information and focus attention. The Internet, they say, is a boon to schooling, not a threat.
But there was one interesting observation made by a philanthropist who gives books to disadvantaged kids. It’s not the physical presence of the books that produces the biggest impact, she suggested. It’s the change in the way the students see themselves as they build a home library. They see themselves as readers, as members of a different group.
The Internet-versus-books debate is conducted on the supposition that the medium is the message. But sometimes the medium is just the medium. What matters is the way people think about themselves while engaged in the two activities. A person who becomes a citizen of the literary world enters a hierarchical universe. There are classic works of literature at the top and beach reading at the bottom.
A person enters this world as a novice, and slowly studies the works of great writers and scholars. Readers immerse themselves in deep, alternative worlds and hope to gain some lasting wisdom. Respect is paid to the writers who transmit that wisdom.
A citizen of the Internet has a very different experience. The Internet smashes hierarchy and is not marked by deference. Maybe it would be different if it had been invented in Victorian England, but Internet culture is set in contemporary America. Internet culture is egalitarian. The young are more accomplished than the old. The new media is supposedly savvier than the old media. The dominant activity is free-wheeling, disrespectful, antiauthority disputation.
These different cultures foster different types of learning. The great essayist Joseph Epstein once distinguished between being well informed, being hip and being cultivated. The Internet helps you become well informed — knowledgeable about current events, the latest controversies and important trends. The Internet also helps you become hip — to learn about what’s going on, as Epstein writes, “in those lively waters outside the boring mainstream.”
But the literary world is still better at helping you become cultivated, mastering significant things of lasting import. To learn these sorts of things, you have to defer to greater minds than your own. You have to take the time to immerse yourself in a great writer’s world. You have to respect the authority of the teacher.
Right now, the literary world is better at encouraging this kind of identity. The Internet culture may produce better conversationalists, but the literary culture still produces better students.
It’s better at distinguishing the important from the unimportant, and making the important more prestigious.
Perhaps that will change. Already, more “old-fashioned” outposts are opening up across the Web. It could be that the real debate will not be books versus the Internet but how to build an Internet counterculture that will better attract people to serious learning.
Monday, July 5, 2010
The Perils of Progress
The Perils of Progress
What about all the beautiful things that new technologies will take away from us?
by Rochelle Gurstein
The Great American Brain Rot (Or, Why We Need the Humanities) We had just heard a lecture by an exquisitely sensitive, painfully alert poet friend of ours about how we live today. She ranged widely and brilliantly and did not shy away from hazarding, ever so gently, a few doubts about what the Internet was doing to the feel of our daily life. These days, even a few well-considered, measured reservations about digital gadgetry apparently cannot be tolerated, and our poet friend was informed by forward-looking members of the audience that she was fearful of change, nostalgic, in short, reactionary with all its nasty political connotations. How, I whispered to my husband, is being pro- or anti-technology a political stance? It says nothing, I thought to myself, about where one stands on justice, equality, or freedom, except in the rather debased form of "access" to information. I was abruptly brought back to the lecture hall, however, when I heard an ardent champion of blogs speak the word "dinosaur" with equal parts conviction and contempt. How tiresome, I again whispered to my husband. How many times have I seen skeptics of progress (myself included) turned into dinosaurs? Was there really no way of responding to one's opponents except to doom them to extinction?
The other morning, I felt the same unfair stacking of the deck against my sensibility when I read an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Steven Pinker, a popularizer of evolutionary psychology, where he defended Twitter, e-mail, PowerPoint, and Google from the charge that they are "making us stupid." (Whether they are or not, typing that sentence, I couldn't help thinking that their silly names and broken punctuation have a decidedly stupid adolescent feel about them.) It is a tried-and-true strategy of boosters of progress, even if they don't know they are following in a well-established tradition, to offer a catalogue of what now appears to be irrational fears about earlier versions of whatever they are promoting, the better to discredit present-day naysayers. Pinker, true to type, opens his piece: "New forms of media have always caused moral panics. The printing press, newspapers, paperbacks, and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber."
Just as these, in Pinker's estimation, proved to be false alarms, so, too, he confidently predicts, will be the case with the current moral panic over new electronic technologies. When I read his list of "reality checks" that are supposed to mollify critics—for example, "the decades of television, transistor radios, and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continually"—I can't say that I felt reassured. Instead, I was struck, as I often am at such moments, by the thought that if intelligent, sensitive people have long and consistently been alarmed by a particular class of thing, instead of automatically assuming our superiority to them, we might better assume they were aware of something to which we have since become oblivious and that it is worth our while to attend carefully to their warnings.
Pinker's description of earlier fears about the dangers of newspapers, paperbacks, and television as "threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber," like his belief that a rise in "I.Q. scores" somehow offset or discredited earlier anxieties about what television, transistor radios, and rock videos were doing to people's sensibility and consciousness sounded tone-deaf to me.
The Great American Brain Rot (Or, Why We Need the Humanities) When it came to new mass-circulation newspapers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, leading critics like E.L. Godkin, editor of The Nation, thought its worst offense was "that its pervading spirit is one of vulgarity, indecency, and reckless sensationalism; that it steadily violates the canons alike of good taste and sound morals; that it cultivates false standards of life and demoralizes its readers." In the 1940s and '50s, critics on the Left perceived similar destructive forces in new forms of mass-produced entertainment. Dwight Macdonald spoke for writers associated with The Partisan Review and his own magazine Politics when he warned that "the deadening and warping effect of long exposure to movies, pulp magazines, and radio can hardly be overestimated."
Pinker closes his piece by praising Twitter and e-books and online encyclopedias for "helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales." ("Manage, search and retrieve"—when, I asked myself, had thinking taken on the character of an army reconnaissance mission?) "Far from making us stupid," Pinker triumphantly concludes, "these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart." In disputes about the consequences of innovation, those on the side of progress habitually see only gains. They have no awareness that there are also losses—equally as real as the gains (even if the gain is as paltry as "keeping us smart")—and that no form of bookkeeping can ever reconcile the two. I had recently been reading some stirring essays in defense of the humanities and reading Pinker made me think of the kinds of losses that worried the great literary scholar Harry Levin back in 1954, the supposed golden age of the humanities: "This is the heyday of reprints and anthologies, not to speak of digests and abridgments. ... It may be that a commendable zeal for widespread literacy has somehow ended by spreading it too thin, with a resulting cultural inflation." I was interested to find that Levin was also troubled by mass culture. He pointed to the ever-increasing popularity of picture magazines like Life, of television and the phonograph, and worried aloud that "we are moving so quickly into the audio-visual epoch that the reading habit itself is seriously jeopardized."
In her lecture, our poet-friend expressed similar reservations about the fate of what remains of the reading habit in our digital era. She was also alert to another kind of loss, more elusive, having to do with a sense that the world we have on our computer screens lacks physical, tangible materiality and that it is changing the feel of our lives in unpredictable ways. Her observation has been much on my mind as I read in newspapers and magazines almost daily about the end of the book as we know it, how convenient it will be to download and read "content" on inert, blank screens with names like Amazon Kindle or Apple iPad. I recoil at this consumerist approach to books as immaterial content to be consumed. For me, books, like paintings, are tangible manifestations of a mind, of a person—
Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man,
(Is it night? are we here together alone?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me
forth. (Whitman, Leaves of Grass)
Their physical being matters to us who pour our very being into writing and reading, we want the fruits of our labor to exist between hard or even soft covers in our own time and after us (and accept that the pages containing our being will turn brown and become brittle), it means something to us to see and speak of a book as a weighty tome or a slender volume, we like to be able to locate a passage we've already read spatially on a page, we are interested, even as we are dismayed, to discover that we are the first person in 61 years, eight months, and three days (according to the "due date" slip) to check a book out of the library, it pleases us to think of Whitman's leaves of grass as pages of a book, we are in awe of the perfection of the ending of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude where the reader's act of reading coincides with Aureliano's act of deciphering the pages of a mysterious set of parchments, and that as Aureliano comes to the end of his book—"he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror"—so the reader comes to the last page and end of Marquez's novel.
All this to be lost for the sake of consumers who like the ease and efficiency of immaterial electronic "books"... But that is not all. The concrete, material presence of books on our bookshelves transports us back to the time and place where we first read them, we sometimes are pleased and other times shudder when we think of what a book meant to us then, what it has come to mean to us now, we are sometimes comforted to see the continuity of ourselves when we read our earlier marginalia, sometimes disconcerted by its now-alien quality, and occasionally we have dreams about books, like the one I had after my mentor died. When I was in graduate school, he used to lend me his books, their margins overflowing with neat, handwritten questions, objections, notes to himself (I can still picture the fine purple line quality of his felt-tip pen), teaching me how to read in conversation with the author, that is, when I paid attention to the author and not, as I was inclined to do, to the always more interesting thoughts of my mentor. When he died, I dreamt that he had left me a book that he had annotated especially for me and how grateful I was to have it ("who touches this touches a man") and how sorry I was to wake up.
What about all the beautiful things that new technologies will take away from us?
by Rochelle Gurstein
The Great American Brain Rot (Or, Why We Need the Humanities) We had just heard a lecture by an exquisitely sensitive, painfully alert poet friend of ours about how we live today. She ranged widely and brilliantly and did not shy away from hazarding, ever so gently, a few doubts about what the Internet was doing to the feel of our daily life. These days, even a few well-considered, measured reservations about digital gadgetry apparently cannot be tolerated, and our poet friend was informed by forward-looking members of the audience that she was fearful of change, nostalgic, in short, reactionary with all its nasty political connotations. How, I whispered to my husband, is being pro- or anti-technology a political stance? It says nothing, I thought to myself, about where one stands on justice, equality, or freedom, except in the rather debased form of "access" to information. I was abruptly brought back to the lecture hall, however, when I heard an ardent champion of blogs speak the word "dinosaur" with equal parts conviction and contempt. How tiresome, I again whispered to my husband. How many times have I seen skeptics of progress (myself included) turned into dinosaurs? Was there really no way of responding to one's opponents except to doom them to extinction?
The other morning, I felt the same unfair stacking of the deck against my sensibility when I read an op-ed piece in The New York Times by Steven Pinker, a popularizer of evolutionary psychology, where he defended Twitter, e-mail, PowerPoint, and Google from the charge that they are "making us stupid." (Whether they are or not, typing that sentence, I couldn't help thinking that their silly names and broken punctuation have a decidedly stupid adolescent feel about them.) It is a tried-and-true strategy of boosters of progress, even if they don't know they are following in a well-established tradition, to offer a catalogue of what now appears to be irrational fears about earlier versions of whatever they are promoting, the better to discredit present-day naysayers. Pinker, true to type, opens his piece: "New forms of media have always caused moral panics. The printing press, newspapers, paperbacks, and television were all once denounced as threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber."
Just as these, in Pinker's estimation, proved to be false alarms, so, too, he confidently predicts, will be the case with the current moral panic over new electronic technologies. When I read his list of "reality checks" that are supposed to mollify critics—for example, "the decades of television, transistor radios, and rock videos were also decades in which I.Q. scores rose continually"—I can't say that I felt reassured. Instead, I was struck, as I often am at such moments, by the thought that if intelligent, sensitive people have long and consistently been alarmed by a particular class of thing, instead of automatically assuming our superiority to them, we might better assume they were aware of something to which we have since become oblivious and that it is worth our while to attend carefully to their warnings.
Pinker's description of earlier fears about the dangers of newspapers, paperbacks, and television as "threats to their consumers' brainpower and moral fiber," like his belief that a rise in "I.Q. scores" somehow offset or discredited earlier anxieties about what television, transistor radios, and rock videos were doing to people's sensibility and consciousness sounded tone-deaf to me.
The Great American Brain Rot (Or, Why We Need the Humanities) When it came to new mass-circulation newspapers of the last quarter of the nineteenth century, leading critics like E.L. Godkin, editor of The Nation, thought its worst offense was "that its pervading spirit is one of vulgarity, indecency, and reckless sensationalism; that it steadily violates the canons alike of good taste and sound morals; that it cultivates false standards of life and demoralizes its readers." In the 1940s and '50s, critics on the Left perceived similar destructive forces in new forms of mass-produced entertainment. Dwight Macdonald spoke for writers associated with The Partisan Review and his own magazine Politics when he warned that "the deadening and warping effect of long exposure to movies, pulp magazines, and radio can hardly be overestimated."
Pinker closes his piece by praising Twitter and e-books and online encyclopedias for "helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales." ("Manage, search and retrieve"—when, I asked myself, had thinking taken on the character of an army reconnaissance mission?) "Far from making us stupid," Pinker triumphantly concludes, "these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart." In disputes about the consequences of innovation, those on the side of progress habitually see only gains. They have no awareness that there are also losses—equally as real as the gains (even if the gain is as paltry as "keeping us smart")—and that no form of bookkeeping can ever reconcile the two. I had recently been reading some stirring essays in defense of the humanities and reading Pinker made me think of the kinds of losses that worried the great literary scholar Harry Levin back in 1954, the supposed golden age of the humanities: "This is the heyday of reprints and anthologies, not to speak of digests and abridgments. ... It may be that a commendable zeal for widespread literacy has somehow ended by spreading it too thin, with a resulting cultural inflation." I was interested to find that Levin was also troubled by mass culture. He pointed to the ever-increasing popularity of picture magazines like Life, of television and the phonograph, and worried aloud that "we are moving so quickly into the audio-visual epoch that the reading habit itself is seriously jeopardized."
In her lecture, our poet-friend expressed similar reservations about the fate of what remains of the reading habit in our digital era. She was also alert to another kind of loss, more elusive, having to do with a sense that the world we have on our computer screens lacks physical, tangible materiality and that it is changing the feel of our lives in unpredictable ways. Her observation has been much on my mind as I read in newspapers and magazines almost daily about the end of the book as we know it, how convenient it will be to download and read "content" on inert, blank screens with names like Amazon Kindle or Apple iPad. I recoil at this consumerist approach to books as immaterial content to be consumed. For me, books, like paintings, are tangible manifestations of a mind, of a person—
Camerado, this is no book,
Who touches this touches a man,
(Is it night? are we here together alone?)
It is I you hold and who holds you,
I spring from the pages into your arms—decease calls me
forth. (Whitman, Leaves of Grass)
Their physical being matters to us who pour our very being into writing and reading, we want the fruits of our labor to exist between hard or even soft covers in our own time and after us (and accept that the pages containing our being will turn brown and become brittle), it means something to us to see and speak of a book as a weighty tome or a slender volume, we like to be able to locate a passage we've already read spatially on a page, we are interested, even as we are dismayed, to discover that we are the first person in 61 years, eight months, and three days (according to the "due date" slip) to check a book out of the library, it pleases us to think of Whitman's leaves of grass as pages of a book, we are in awe of the perfection of the ending of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude where the reader's act of reading coincides with Aureliano's act of deciphering the pages of a mysterious set of parchments, and that as Aureliano comes to the end of his book—"he began to decipher the instant that he was living, deciphering it as he lived it, prophesying himself in the act of deciphering the last page of the parchments, as if he were looking into a speaking mirror"—so the reader comes to the last page and end of Marquez's novel.
All this to be lost for the sake of consumers who like the ease and efficiency of immaterial electronic "books"... But that is not all. The concrete, material presence of books on our bookshelves transports us back to the time and place where we first read them, we sometimes are pleased and other times shudder when we think of what a book meant to us then, what it has come to mean to us now, we are sometimes comforted to see the continuity of ourselves when we read our earlier marginalia, sometimes disconcerted by its now-alien quality, and occasionally we have dreams about books, like the one I had after my mentor died. When I was in graduate school, he used to lend me his books, their margins overflowing with neat, handwritten questions, objections, notes to himself (I can still picture the fine purple line quality of his felt-tip pen), teaching me how to read in conversation with the author, that is, when I paid attention to the author and not, as I was inclined to do, to the always more interesting thoughts of my mentor. When he died, I dreamt that he had left me a book that he had annotated especially for me and how grateful I was to have it ("who touches this touches a man") and how sorry I was to wake up.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
The Memory Theatre
My library is where I go to find my books. It is also the place where I go to remember for the memories of my life are tied to my books.
In Defense of the Memory Theater
By Nathan Schneider What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.
In Defense of the Memory Theater
By Nathan Schneider What concerns me about the literary apocalypse that everybody now expects—the at least partial elimination of paper books in favor of digital alternatives—is not chiefly the books themselves, but the bookshelf. My fear is for the eclectic, personal collections that we bookish people assemble over the course of our lives, as well as for their grander, public step-siblings. I fear for our memory theaters.
Thursday, July 1, 2010
The Best Presidents
FDR Rated Best President In Survey Of 238 Scholars
| 07/ 1/10 09:54 AM |
Read More: Best Presidents, Fdr, Fdr Best President Survey, FDR Rated Best President, Fdr Rated Best President In Survey Of 238 Scholars, FDR Siena College Survey, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Siena College Best Presidents Survey, Siena College President Survey, Siena College Presidential Survey, Siena College
LOUDONVILLE, N.Y. — Franklin Delano Roosevelt is being ranked the top president in U.S. history by 238 scholars surveyed by Siena College.
Roosevelt has topped each of the five presidential scholar surveys conducted by the Albany, N.Y.-area college since 1982. Theodore Roosevelt came in at No. 2 in the survey released Thursday, followed by Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Scholars ranked the 43 presidents on attributes such as integrity, intelligence, leadership and communication, as well as their accomplishments.
Lincoln's beleaguered successor, Andrew Johnson, was rated the worst president.
| 07/ 1/10 09:54 AM |
Read More: Best Presidents, Fdr, Fdr Best President Survey, FDR Rated Best President, Fdr Rated Best President In Survey Of 238 Scholars, FDR Siena College Survey, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Siena College Best Presidents Survey, Siena College President Survey, Siena College Presidential Survey, Siena College
LOUDONVILLE, N.Y. — Franklin Delano Roosevelt is being ranked the top president in U.S. history by 238 scholars surveyed by Siena College.
Roosevelt has topped each of the five presidential scholar surveys conducted by the Albany, N.Y.-area college since 1982. Theodore Roosevelt came in at No. 2 in the survey released Thursday, followed by Abraham Lincoln, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson.
Scholars ranked the 43 presidents on attributes such as integrity, intelligence, leadership and communication, as well as their accomplishments.
Lincoln's beleaguered successor, Andrew Johnson, was rated the worst president.
Multitasking: One of the perils of technology
I will be reading Nicholas Carr's new book.
Nicholas Carr On Colbert: Multitasking Makes Us Worse At Multitasking
Nicholas Carr, author of the new book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains," talked to Stephen Colbert last night about how the Internet is making us more superficial. He said that we have begun to multitask more and more, and have a harder time focusing and thinking deeply because of it. In fact, Carr said, the more we multitask, the worse we get at multitasking itself, in addition to other cognitive tasks. Colbert offered up the website Reddit as an example, admitting his love for the site: "I could burn my entire life on that site," he said.
Carr said that what we need is a return to attentive thinking, that introspection and reflection have been the sources of most of the advances and knowledge that we have today, and that they should not be lost.
Nicholas Carr On Colbert: Multitasking Makes Us Worse At Multitasking
Nicholas Carr, author of the new book "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to our Brains," talked to Stephen Colbert last night about how the Internet is making us more superficial. He said that we have begun to multitask more and more, and have a harder time focusing and thinking deeply because of it. In fact, Carr said, the more we multitask, the worse we get at multitasking itself, in addition to other cognitive tasks. Colbert offered up the website Reddit as an example, admitting his love for the site: "I could burn my entire life on that site," he said.
Carr said that what we need is a return to attentive thinking, that introspection and reflection have been the sources of most of the advances and knowledge that we have today, and that they should not be lost.
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