Milestones

… of gallons of oil into the Gulf, and devastated local economies. There was no reenactment or stamp, but wall-to-wall coverage in newspapers, television, and Twitter feeds, much of which debated lasting damage and lessons learned.
This summer the city is gearing up for the 10th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, in late August. This …

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Kill the Creature

… exactly backwards.
It’s a matter of days, they said, as his organs began to shut down. It can’t be long now, as they removed the feeding tube and discontinued all treatments that were not palliative in nature. I was there for a 24-hour period, and he never moved a muscle, never opened …

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Corruption

… rice, too, pressed together: a moist, solid entity. If you lower your head to within a foot or two of an infested corpse (and this I truly don’t recommend), you can hear them feeding. Arpad pinpoints the sound: “Rice Krispies.” Ron frowns. Ron used to like Rice Krispies.
—Mary Roach, Stiff: The Curious …

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Throws Away

… beads, that sort of thing. Over the decades, throws evolved in nature and swelled in volume. Now, whole fleets of cargo ships steam in from China to feed the Mardi Gras maw. I’ve never ridden on a large float in a large parade, but I imagine that riders essentially see what a mother bird …

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Learning to Drive

… nadir of my experience learning to drive with my mother was the time I zoomed right through a yellow light at an intersection that had eight lanes feeding into it, and my mother gasped and said something sharply in this other language, and I realized that I had done wrong, so before I got all …

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Misbehaving Baldly

… that’s the real death of an original American city. I’m telling ya, GoCups are next.”
Behind all the rar-rar-rar on my social media feeds, this is essentially a continuation of the same argument that’s been running here for centuries—neatly summed up by several observers, including Tulane geographer Richard Campanella …

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School Reform Fails the Test

… past decade. Effective techniques are an important part of the complex activity that is teaching, and good mentorship includes analyzing a teacher’s work and providing corrective feedback. Teachers of teachers have been doing this for a long time. What is new is the nearly exclusive focus on techniques, the increased role of digital technology …

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Feast Your Eyes on This

… gastronomic tableaux? Charlie Chaplin boiled and carved a shoe in The Gold Rush, and in Modern Times he was the subject of a tormenting experiment with a feeding machine. Sid Caesar gagged on a basket of plants billed as “health food” in a skit on Your Show of Shows. Jessie Royce Landis infamously stubbed out …

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Traveling Corpse

… events, or even the demands of the growing story, but with my inner life and internal demands: who I am, what I need, what torments me, what feeds me. Among the people associated with that little house in Gabach (or Gabatch: even the spelling depends on whom you read)—Young, who killed himself; Macalla, who …

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Storybook Stereotypes

… that “teachers call on boys more often than girls, ask boys more higher-order questions, give boys more extensive feedback, and use longer wait-time with boys than girls [….] Girls are rarely chosen to give a demonstration or help with an experiment.” In Richard Scarry’s Great Big Schoolhouse of 1969, girls’ silence is …

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