LIFE IN 2021:

"What radicalized you?"

Me: pic.twitter.com/oFMzkpFd1L

— Caesar (@Caesar63BC) December 23, 2021

#JOURNALISM:

OPEN THREAD: The day is my enemy, the night my friend.

THE NEW SPACE RACE: Chinese astronaut pair complete six-hour spacewalk.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Harvard and others nixing standardized tests reinforce privilege and harm minorities.

RIP: Desmond Tutu, Archbishop Who Helped End Apartheid, Dies at 90.

STEVE HAYWARD:  Liberals are miserable.

COLLECTION: Commander Cody on David Letterman.

Related: (I Ain’t Never Had) Too Much Fun.

RETURN OF THE PRIMITIVE: Burdened By Books.

Though I had read about our new age of orality, my students made it existential. The absence of punctuation and attrition of meaning, the spinning of word salads and splintering of sentences in their papers read like transcripts from their online lives. . . .

It was not just, say, the weirdness of Jean-Paul Sartre’s Nausea, the thickness of Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, or the otherness of Camus’s The Stranger. Instead, their difficulty seems to reside in the act of spending time alone with an open book in their hands.

Faced by this difficulty, students told me that they listen to audio recordings of the book as they read. The sound of the words, it seems, helps them grasp the sense of the words.

Well, that’s how it works when you can’t really read. I have some discussion of how this has happened in my The Social Media Upheaval.

Related: The beginning of silent reading changed Westerners’ interior life.

GETTING TO BE THAT TIME OF YEAR: TurboTax Deluxe 2021 Tax Software, Federal and State Tax Return with Federal E-file [Amazon Exclusive] [PC/Mac Disc]. #CommissionEarned

FLASHBACK: Joan Didion on Self-Respect. “In brief, people with self-respect exhibit a certain toughness, a kind of moral nerve; they display what was once called character, a quality which, although approved in the abstract, sometimes loses ground to other, more instantly negotiable virtues. . . . Self-respect is something that our grandparents, whether or not they had it, knew all about.”

CARS ARE BETTER: Crashing Through the Snow: The Grim Sarcasm Behind ‘Jingle Bells.’

WELL, THIS IS THE 21ST CENTURY, YOU KNOW: The US Navy is testing out drone-zapping laser weapons.

THE LAST DAYS OF CNN.

BE PREPARED: MTP-6 Tactical Pen – Military-Inspired Multitool Pen. #CommissionEarned

GOOD: Ketamine therapy swiftly reduces depression and suicidal thoughts.

REMINDER: It’s time to abolish ‘emergency’ COVID-19 powers.

USE YOUR SLOW COOKER: Easy Low Carb Slow Cooking: A Prep-and-Go Low Carb Cookbook for Ketogenic, Paleo, & High-Fat Diets. #CommissionEarned

LIFE IN THE BLUE ZONES: Angry crowds, arguments across NYC as demand for COVID tests rises.

NOBODY THERE CARES ABOUT FREE SPEECH: After one year, U.S. Department of Education stays mum on ‘Free Speech Hotline’.

MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE: 10 times universities said no to the woke mob in 2021.

HEROES AMONG US:  I didn’t know about the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission until very recently when I ran across its web site.  But it’s the sort of thing I can’t help but love.  Andrew Carnegie established it in 1904 to honor “individuals in the United States and Canada who risk their lives to an extraordinary degree saving or attempting to save the lives of others.”

“We live in a heroic age,” Carnegie wrote in the Commission’s founding document.  “Not seldom are we thrilled by deeds of heroism where men or women are injured or lose their lives in attempting to preserve or rescue their fellows.”

There is a “Search Heroes” function on the web site that allows visitors to search for past Carnegie Hero Fund honorees.  Hoping to find a relative, I searched “Heriot.”  Alas, no dice.  So I searched my mother’s maiden name, which is also uncommon–Vannah.  Bingo!  In 1913, someone named Bessie Vannah tried valiantly–though futilely–to try to save a boy who’d fallen through the ice.  She was 16 at the time.

I don’t recall my mother ever mentioning an Aunt Bessie, but the attempted rescue happened in the same rural county where my mother was born and raised.  I don’t think there are any unrelated Vannahs in Lincoln County, Maine–current population 35,237.  Or at least that’s what I’ve convinced myself.  But whether or not she was my lost long relative, Bessie was a heck of a girl. We have that on the authority of the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission, and they ought to know.

MY NEW YORK POST COLUMN: Abandoning Standardized Tests Part of Harvard’s War on Asians. “In short, they’re getting rid of objective tests so as to give more power to admissions bureaucrats.”

THE AMERICAN MEDICAL ASSOCIATION HAS GONE FULL WOKE:  And the result is truly astonishing. Here is how it recommends that doctors speak:

 Table 5: Contrasting Conventional (Well-intentioned) Phrasing with Equity-focused Language that Acknowledges Root Causes of Inequities

Check out the full report:  Advancing Health Equity:  A Guide to Language, Narrative and Concepts.

While you’re at it, check this one out too:  Organizational Strategic Plan to Embed Racial Justice and Advance Health Equity.

These folks have seriously lost their minds.

BURIED LEDE: NBC NEWS SHOCKED THAT AN NBC PRODUCT HAS GONE VIRAL. NBC News Calls ‘Let’s Go, Brandon’ A ‘Right-Wing Slur.’  “On October 2, an NBC sports reporter interviewing NASCAR driver Brandon Brown at Talladega Superspeedway in Alabama after Brown scored his first career NASCAR Xfinity Series win stated in a video that the crowd was chanting ‘Let’s go, Brandon!’ when in reality they were chanting ‘F*** Joe Biden,’ The Daily Wire reported.”

Oh, how NBC sports reporter Kelli Stavast must be hated at the office these days.