Holiday reading list
For your holiday reading pleasure, find the following links to some award-winning magazine essays and articles:
1) Steven Brill’s essay, “The Rubber Room,” focuses on the New York City teachers who don’t teach but can’t be fired.
2) Bethany Vaccaro’s piece, “Shock Waves,” concerns a family dealing with their brother’s brain injury, caused by an I.E.D. explosion in Iraq.
3) “The Goldstone Illusion” by Moshe Halbertal details the ridiculousness of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
4) William M. Chace’s “The Decline of the English Department” ponders why fewer and fewer college students major in the humanities.
5) “Is Food the New Sex?” by Mary Eberstadt examines the flip-flop of food and sexual mores.
6) Malcolm Gladwell’s “Offensive Play” looks at the lingering effects of football violence.
(I culled the list from David Brooks’ column in the New York Times.)
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I particularly liked that "Seven of the fifteen Rubber Room teachers with whom I spoke compared their plight to that of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay or political dissidents in China or Iran."Methinks the lady protests too much.
Here's another great quote:"The walls of the large, rectangular room were covered with photographs of Barack Obama and various news clippings. Just to the right of a poster that proclaimed 'Bloomberg’s 3 Rs: Rubber Room Racism,' a smiling young woman sat in a lounge chair that she had brought from home. She declined to say what the charges against her were or to allow her name to be used, but told me that she was there 'because I’m a smart black woman.' I asked the woman for her reaction to the following statement: 'If a teacher is given a chance or two chances or three chances to improve but still does not improve, there’s no excuse for that person to continue teaching. I reject a system that rewards failure and protects a person from its consequences.' 'That sounds like Klein and his accountability bullshit,' she responded. 'We can tell if we’re doing our jobs. We love these children.' After I told her that this was taken from a speech that President Obama made last March, she replied, 'Obama wouldn’t say that if he knew the real story.' "Accountability = bullshit. *That's* what I call The New Math. Heh.
Regarding “The Decline of the English Department,” Gore Vidal–years ago–put it down to “literary theory.” Maybe that’s what the author of the article alludes to when he writes that “the focus would or should be on the books, not on the theories they can be made to support.” Good reading, thanks!