Can't read books
It's Free for All Friday!
It’s Free for ALL Friday! Each week I keep track of some of the off-the-path things I've found, and work extra-hard to make sure you never hit a paywall, using my own subscriptions, gift links, and other (legal) hocus-pocus.
The Elite College Students Who Can't Read Books
To read a book in college, it helps to have read a book in high school.
Nicholas Dames has taught Literature Humanities, Columbia University’s required great-books course, since 1998. He loves the job, but it has changed. Over the past decade, students have become overwhelmed by the reading. College kids have never read everything they’re assigned, of course, but this feels different. Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.
This development puzzled Dames until one day during the fall 2022 semester, when a first-year student came to his office hours to share how challenging she had found the early assignments. Lit Hum often requires students to read a book, sometimes a very long and dense one, in just a week or two. But the student told Dames that, at her public high school, she had never been required to read an entire book. She had been assigned excerpts, poetry, and news articles, but not a single book cover to cover.
“My jaw dropped,” Dames told me. The anecdote helped explain the change he was seeing in his students: It’s not that they don’t want to do the reading. It’s that they don’t know how. Middle and high schools have stopped asking them to.
How Russians Serve the State: In Battle, and in Childbirth
President Vladimir Putin is throwing ever more resources at two interlocked priorities: recruiting more soldiers and encouraging bigger families.
What the Kremlin wants from Russians now boils down to two things.
Men should join the army.
Women should have more children.
In recent months, the Russian government has doubled sign-up bonuses for contract soldiers and blanketed the airwaves, social media and city streets with recruitment ads. And a new law allows criminal suspects to avoid trial if they sign up to fight.
At the same time, President Vladimir V. Putin has decreed that increasing births is a national priority, an effort that entered a newly repressive phase last week with a bill that would outlaw any advocacy for a child-free lifestyle.
The two campaigns are separate, but in wartime Russia, they are also two sides of the same coin: the Kremlin’s increasingly aggressive attempt to enlist regular Russians in reshaping their country to prevail over the West.
The Making of an Alleged School Shooters: Missed Sarnings and Years of Neglect
Interviews with family members, along with a review of private texts and public documents, open a window on a 14-year-old’s path to alleged gunman at Georgia’s Apalachee High School.
Three weeks before Colt Gray became the youngest alleged mass school shooter in a quarter century, his grandmother told him to hide in his bedroom and shut the door.
He had called his grandmother because, he told her, his mother was angry and “acting weird again.” His mom had struck him in the past, the grandmother said, recounting the episode to The Washington Post. This time, she said, the 14-year-old decided to confront his mother when she stepped through the doorway.
He reached for the AR-style rifle his dad had bought him for Christmas, family members said, using the gun to shove her out of the bedroom and into a wall in the hallway.
He made a plea to his grandmother that day.
“I really need you to get my mother out of this house,” he said, according to the grandmother. Later, she would identify that as the moment Colt stopped believing his life would get better.
By then, family members said, Colt was adrift in a childhood ravaged by violence and addiction and overlooked by a system that failed to pull him out of it. His grandmother, Debbie Polhamus, had for years prodded schools, counselors and caseworkers to help him. None of it had been enough.
On Sept. 4, according to authorities, the teen used his rifle to kill two students and two teachers at Apalachee High School here in Winder, exposing yet another community to America’s epidemic of campus gun violence. The next day, in this small city just beyond the Atlanta suburbs, his father became the first parent of an alleged school shooter to be charged with murder.
Secrets of the Ultimate Celebrity Photographer
In a declining business, Kevin Mazur has thrived by gaining the trust of Beyoncé, Madonna and Taylor Swift. His motto: “Why wouldn’t you want to make people look good?”
When Taylor Swift opened her Eras Tour in Glendale, Ariz., in March 2023, Kevin Mazur was granted full access to photograph the show.
When Beyoncé opened her Renaissance Tour in Stockholm, Sweden, two months later, Mr. Mazur captured the performance from directly in front of the stage.
That fall, when Madonna opened her Celebration Tour in London, Mr. Mazur was once again in position for the best shots.
At the Met Gala and Vanity Fair’s Oscar party, Mr. Mazur, 63, roams freely while photographers from major news outlets are given a short amount of time to shoot the goings-on away from the red carpet.
His motto — “Why wouldn’t you want to make people look good?” — helps explain how he became the John Singer Sargent of live-action digital photography, a go-to chronicler of rock gods and movie stars.
“He’s our preferred photographer for every show,” said Bruce Gillmer, the executive producer of the MTV Video Music Awards. “He gets the access he gets because he’s artistically the best in the business and the person the artists most trust.”
The Hurricane That Threatens to Sink Asheville’s Feel-Good Success
The North Carolina mountain mecca’s economy was thriving until Helene hit. Residents are left wondering how they can rebuild.
ASHEVILLE, N.C.—This city has been booming for a decade, drawing new residents with its beautiful views, artsy vibe and mild weather. The pandemic brought new possibilities for remote work and supercharged population growth. Craft breweries, vintage stores and other small businesses flourished, adding to Asheville’s appeal.
Now another unexpected phenomenon has thrown off its status as one of America’s most desirable mountain meccas. Floodwaters and heavy wind from Hurricane Helene destroyed the arts district, decimated historic Biltmore Village and trapped some people, including retirees, in their own homes. After nearly a week, there is still no running water, scant power and spotty cell service.
Residents are left wondering whether the local economy can rebuild and continue to thrive. Almost half of small businesses never reopen after a disaster, according to the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
“What do you try to save? Nothing is left,” said Erin Stefanacci, 37, cofounder of Flow at Foundy yoga studio. She and her partner, Megan Parker, had invested $120,000 in the studio and completed the three months’ worth of renovations themselves. They opted against flood insurance after receiving a quote for $6,000 a year, figuring the worst-case scenario would be the annoyance of replacing drywall from a few feet of water.
“We made what we thought was a data-driven decision,” said Parker, 32. “We thought we’d be able to afford to replace the damage. That didn’t turn out to be the case.”
For How Much Longer Can Life Continue on This Troubled Planet?
New data on the end times.
Wikipedia’s “Timeline of the Far Future” is one of my favorite webpages from the internet’s pre-slop era. A Londoner named Nick Webb created it on the morning of December 22, 2010. “Certain events in the future of the universe can be predicted with a comfortable level of accuracy,” he wrote at the top of the page. He then proposed a chronological list of 33 such events, beginning with the joining of Asia and Australia 40 million years from now. He noted that around this same time, Mars’s moon Phobos would complete its slow death spiral into the red planet’s surface. A community of 1,533 editors have since expanded the timeline to 160 events, including the heat death of the universe. I like to imagine these people on laptops in living rooms and cafés across the world, compiling obscure bits of speculative science into a secular Book of Revelation.
Like the best sci-fi world building, the Timeline of the Far Future can give you a key bump of the sublime. It reminds you that even the sturdiest-seeming features of our world are ephemeral, that in 1,100 years, Earth’s axis will point to a new North Star. In 250,000 years, an undersea volcano will pop up in the Pacific, adding an extra island to Hawaii. In the 1 million years that the Great Pyramid will take to erode, the sun will travel only about 1/200th of its orbit around the Milky Way, but in doing so, it will move into a new field of stars. Our current constellations will go all wobbly in the sky and then vanish.
Gmail Inbox Full? Transfer All Your Messages and Score 15GB of Free Storage
If you can't decide which of your thousands of old messages are worth keeping, this hack will let you keep everything without paying for more storage.
Have you used up the 15GB of free storage that comes with your Gmail account? Have you tried to delete a few spammy emails or unsubscribe to those newsletters you stopped reading, but still found yourself with thousands of unread messages? Does the idea of cleaning out your Gmail inbox sound impossible? Before you start paying for extra storage, read on: there's an easy way to get your account back to inbox zero while keeping all your old email.
All you need to do is create a second Gmail account to store all of your current messages. There's no restriction on the number of free Google accounts you can own, which means you can set one up as a dedicated archive account, and then transfer all your old emails to it.
Completing the whole process of transferring your Gmail messages to a new account doesn't take too long, but it will be dependent on just how many messages you have. We'll walk you through the simple process of transferring your emails from your old account to a new one (including the important step of backing everything up first).
Wow! An abundance of terrific information today. Thanks, Bill, for today’s reads!
As a native mountain woman having grown up in Asheville in the ‘50 s and ‘60s then living back there, after separating, in 1978 until November last, I can tell you that right now, that is where most of my attention is right now. I wrote somewhere else that in 1916 when there was another devastating flood there the population in Buncombe County where Asheville is was about 2.3 million people. When the flood happened last week, a population of 278,012 found themselves having to deal with all the headaches that an exploded population in an ecologically fragile drainage system for the French Broad River system had created. I’ll get around to the NYT piece that I’m sure is well written but can’t know personally what has led up to this tragedy.
As for not being able to read a complete book, how degraded has our educational system really become? Above said before, I’m old. I’ve read books almost all my life; and not small ones either. No wonder these kid’s brains break when asked to read something like a complete book. Blows my mind 🤯. How sad.
That’s it for now. Have a good weekend Bill.