From SanJoseInside.
“Reporting by student journalist Theo Baker, a Stanford University freshman, in the Stanford Daily student newspaper led to the stunning resignation last week by Stanford President Marc Tessier-Lavigne.”
Tessier-Lavigne is slinking back to the Biology Department.
Imagine a scenario where Tessier-Lavigne is scrolling through his Bio 101 class roster and right there near the top is the name of sophomore Theo Baker.
From The New York Times.
“A large new study, released Monday, shows that it has not been because these children had more impressive grades on average or took harder classes. They tended to have higher SAT scores and finely honed résumés, and applied at a higher rate — but they were overrepresented even after accounting for those things. For applicants with the same SAT or ACT score, children from families in the top 1 percent were 34 percent more likely to be admitted than the average applicant, and those from the top 0.1 percent were more than twice as likely to get in.
And “The new data shows that among students with the same test scores, the colleges gave preference to the children of alumni and to recruited athletes, and gave children from private schools higher nonacademic ratings. The result is the clearest picture yet of how America’s elite colleges perpetuate the intergenerational transfer of wealth and opportunity.”
After reviewing more than 500,000 internal admissions assessments at three elite institutions over fifteen years, this conclusion.
“In effect, the study shows, these policies amounted to affirmative action for the children of the 1 percent, whose parents earn more than $611,000 a year.”
Can we stop the “equal opportunity meritocracy” nonsense?
Just from today.
In the entertainment labor battle that’s just getting going, the Screen Actor Guild members and Hollywood writers are severe underdogs. They’re up against it. “It’ being a combination of C-Suite greed; artificial intelligence-based content; too many streaming services chasing a fixed number of people with finite disposable income; a decline in digital advertising dollars; and Peter Santenello.
I didn’t know Santenello until yesterday, when a YouTube algorithm correctly guessed I’d like his stuff. Long story short, he’s a do-it-yourself filmmaker. Tonight, after my dinner date with the GalPal, I’ll watch the bulk of this film I started last night.
It’s very good in a substantive, folksy, documentary kind of way. Not slick or sensational, in this case, an up close look at some of the poorest counties in the country. Lots of other people agree apparently. The film sits at 10 million views in 7 days.
There are Santellos everywhere you look on YouTube and TikTok and other similarly ungated, entirely democratic/meritocratic outlets.
There’s a parallel development in journalism of course, where thousands of substacks are blooming. And just as with visual media, a portion are truly outstanding.
The Santellos of the new digital landscape are saying, “We don’t need television or movie studios or newspaper companies to take our content directly to people, all we need are our cameras, laptops, editing software and open access formats.”
Santello and other insightful, creative, hardworking entrepreneurs like him have breeched Hollywood’s moat. They have no intention of sharing profits or creative control with middlemen in hierarchical organizations.
This grassroots content is as predictably constant as the waves rolling in on Santa Monica beach, down Sunset Boulevard from Hollywood. It will be very difficult for SAG members and Hollywood writers to win much at negotiations from such vulnerable gatekeepers of the past.
Right now the two sides are not talking. Some expect the strike to go into 2024.
I’ll be splitting the difference, watching Santello’s stuff while rooting for the underdogs to defy the odds and somehow pull off the upset by improving their compensation.
Team Biden for the win.
What’s the worst decision you’ve ever made? I’ll wait.
I have a long list of possibilities like hitting driver instead of 3-wood on #5 at Tumwater Valley G.C., but one especially bone-headed decision made during a high school chemistry lab takes the cake. Too ashamed to reveal more. Since then, I’ve learned my brain wasn’t fully formed.
However bad your’s and my worst decisions are, they pale in comparison to Pvt. 2nd Class Travis King’s.
From NPR:
“The 23-year-old had been stationed in South Korea, where he was recently imprisoned on assault charges, and was due to fly back to the U.S. to face military disciplinary action.
Instead, he ditched his escort at the airport and made his way to the Korean border village of Panmunjom, where he joined a tour — dressed in civilian clothes — and ran across the military demarcation line at the last stop.”
Let’s see, face a U.S. military disciplinary action or defect TO North Korea. Dude was stationed in South Korea and knew absolutely nothing about North Korea.
Most of us survive our worst decisions. Time will tell, but Pvt. 2nd Class Travis King may not.
Find your state here. Luckily, the Good Wife and I use electricity almost exclusively. Thanks to the Columbia River, only four states have less expensive electricity.
In the business world, “mergers and acquisitions” is a common phenomenon. Larger, better financed businesses regularly purchase and subsume more vulnerable ones. Now, according to this article, we’re entering a church “M&A” era where larger, younger churches are taking over much smaller, older ones.
The crux of the issue is that “The average Christian congregation in the U.S. is in precipitous decline, with just 65 members, about a third of whom are age 65 or older, according to a 2020 pre-pandemic survey.” Our local Lutheran congregation has approximately 150 members, about two-thirds of whom are age 65 or older.
Given the declining number of people attending church, should we assume collective spiritual longing has ebbed? Have we, for whatever reasons, become more materialistic, more secular, more Western European and Scandinavian?
The aforementioned National Public Radio article makes me think not. It suggests that young adults still find existential questions just as compelling as previous generations. It’s just that they want more vibrant spiritual experiences.
Here’s the conundrum. The 65+ crowd is holding tight to church traditions that are familiar and comforting to them. Like old hymns, and in the case of many Lutheran churches, Norwegian jokes. Traditions that unwittingly create distance between those on the “inside” of the tradition and those left “outside” them. Thus, leaving the older, smaller churches less diverse with respect to age, ethnicity, class, and life experience more generally. Which makes them even less welcoming to younger seekers.
I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that we’re in the process of having far fewer, albeit larger churches. Why should churches be any different than big box stores or airlines or mega-tech companies or any other sector of our economy where we’ve seen constant consolidation to the point where dated anti-trust laws are proving inept.
The challenge for the new, larger churches will be creating somewhat diverse, close-knit communities within their larger congregations. Communities within their community where people make friends, are known, and genuinely connect with a small group of people that are somewhat different than them.
When it comes to travel writing, Matt Lakeman is the man.
Among the better sentences, “Much of Jammeh’s government, reign, and conduct are pretty normal for a terrible African dictator, but at least his billowy white robe and trademark scepter is quite striking.”
And this tutorial took me back to my travels in East, West, and Southern Africa.
“As a poor country gets more tourism, the locals adapt. Many become more welcoming and friendly towards tourists since they represent an opportunity for personal and national enrichment. But other locals become more adept at exploiting tourists, whether through fraud, deception, or guilt.
One form of the latter treatment is to yell at random passerbys, usually to get attention to make some sort of sale or offer a service. This is by no means a unique element of West African travel. Any tourist who has been to Egypt, Morocco, India, Thailand, etc. knows exactly what I’m talking about.
The amateur tourist makes the mistake of defaulting to polite sensibilities and grants attention to the bystander who shouted “Hello, sir!”, “Excuse me, sir!”, “Nice to meet you, sir!” “Where are you from, sir?”, or whatever, and is soon sucked into a time-wasting and generally annoying sales pitch or preamble to a sales pitch. The experienced tourist keeps looking forward, not granting an iota of attention, in order to signal that they will not be suckered in and parted with cash.”
I also learned a new word, “sexpat”.
Pressing Pause 