The Best Paragraph I've Read...

By Zac & Don

A podcast that discusses an interesting article or concept.... more

· Education

4.9

3232 ratings

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FAQs about The Best Paragraph I've Read...:

How many episodes does The Best Paragraph I've Read... have?

The podcast currently has 269 episodes available.

The Best Paragraph I've Read... episodes:

August 05, 2022 Milk! Why Does America Continue to Consume Less and Less of It? Should Athletes & Children Consume It For Health Benefits? Can Milk Make a Comeback? Or Is Soy, Almond, Rice, and Oat Milk the Future?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
Milk is still pasteurized and homogenized, as Chamberlain’s carton boasted, but it’s also been lionized and demonized, canonized and eulogized, weaponized and publicized. Got Milk? Milk has left society in general and sports in particular polarized. “It has been argued about for at least the past ten thousand years,” writes Mark Kurlansky in his 400-page history of milk called Milk! “It is the most argued-over food in human history.” Former Cardinals, Titans and Lions defensive end Kyle Vanden Bosch drank two gallons a day in high school. Vegan athletes like Cam Newton and Kyrie Irving won’t touch it with a 10-foot crazy straw.
Pasteurized, Homogenized, Modified—and Marginalized: Wilt’s greatest moment also marked the last great peak for milk, whose consumption in America, by 1962, had already been in decline for 10 straight years. Milk consumption in the U.S. has now been in decline for 70 consecutive years.
This paragraph comes from Sports Illustrated. The article is titled: "Who's Still Got Milk?" The author is Steve Rushin. You can read the full article here:
https://www.si.com/more-sports/2022/07/06/milk-the-strength-issue-daily-cover
Zac and Don talk about milk. They wonder if it actually has any health benefits. They wonder why it's consumption continues to decrease and if it can ever make a comeback.
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30min
July 28, 2022 What Should Schools and Educators Think? No College Degree Required to Teach in Arizona! A Wall Street Trader Is Responsible For A School's National Success in Math! Are these good ideas and examples?
The Best Paragraph I've Read
It was a sticky Thursday afternoon in the middle of summer break when dozens of teenagers walked through the doors of their high school. One of the world’s most dominant teams was about to start math practice.
There was probability in one classroom and pre-algebra next door, code-breaking down the hall and number theory around the corner. And there were few adults to be found anywhere. The students would spend the rest of the day teaching each other.
I had also come here to learn from them. I wanted to understand how this otherwise average public high school in Florida had managed to win 13 of the last 14 national math championships.
The Buchholz High School math team is a dynasty built by one teacher with a strategy for identifying talent, maximizing potential and optimizing the American system of education.
This paragraph comes from the Wall Street Journal. The article is titled: "How a Public School in Florida Built America's Greatest Math Team." The article is written by Ben Cohen. You can read the full article here:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-secrets-of-americas-greatest-high-school-math-team-11657791000
Another Best Paragraph I've Read:
The education requirement for teachers in Arizona has changed. Under legislation Gov. Doug Ducey signed earlier this week, a person only needs to be enrolled to get their college degree to begin teaching in public schools. It’s a big change, and it’s been met with mixed reactions.
This paragraph comes from azfamily.com. The article is titled: "Educators no longer need a college degree to begin teaching in Arizona Public Schools. the article is written by Amy Cutler. You can read the full article here:
https://www.azfamily.com/2022/07/09/educators-no-longer-need-college-degree-begin-teaching-arizona-public-schools/
Zac and Don are joined by middle school principal David McKay. The three discuss the job of being a teacher by talking about the pros and cons of Arizona's new teacher requirements. Then they discuss the merits of a Florida school letting a former Wall Street trader decide their math curriculum.
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41min
July 22, 2022 Train Wrecks! Literally!!! Are they America's REAL Pastime? How Should History Classes Teach About this Era of Popular Culture? Why Do People Enjoy Watching Real and Metaphorical Train Wrecks?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
One of the first staged train wrecks was done in 1895 by a railroad equipment salesman named A.L. Streeter in Ohio. The wreck used the same formula that nearly all other staged train wrecks would follow for the next 40 years. Organizers would lay a stretch of track, usually anywhere from 1,800 feet to a mile-long, and then get two old steam locomotives and put them at either end of the track facing each other. They would then hire two brave locomotive engineers to wait for a signal from the organizer. When they got the go-ahead, the engineers would pull the throttles back as far as they could to get the locomotives up to speed. They would then jump from the locomotive before the two trains crashed in front of a crowd who had paid a few dollars to see the spectacle.
This paragraph comes from Atlas Obscura. The article is titled: "For 40 Years, Crashing Trains Was One of America's Favorite Pastimes." The article is written by Justin Franz. You can read the full article here:
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/staged-train-wrecks
Zac and Don discuss America's fascination with watching train wrecks both real and otherwise. They talk about America's former cultural pastime of watching real train wrecks. They also wonder if this episode in American culture should be taught in schools. Finally, they discuss modern day "train wrecks" that people like to watch.
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31min
July 14, 2022 Prices!!! Uber, DoorDash and the Gig Economy Are Increasing Prices. Can Millennials Afford to Lose Their Subsidy? Will AriZona Iced Tea Win the War Against Inflation? Venice Is Charging Admission!
The Best Paragraph I've Read:

For the past decade, people like me—youngish, urbanish, professionalish—got a sweetheart deal from Uber, the Uber-for-X clones, and that whole mosaic of urban amenities in travel, delivery, food, and retail that vaguely pretended to be tech companies. Almost each time you or I ordered a pizza or hailed a taxi, the company behind that app lost money. In effect, these start-ups, backed by venture capital, were paying us, the consumers, to buy their products.
It was as if Silicon Valley had made a secret pact to subsidize the lifestyles of urban Millennials. As I pointed out three years ago, if you woke up on a Casper mattress, worked out with a Peloton, Ubered to a WeWork, ordered on DoorDash for lunch, took a Lyft home, and ordered dinner through Postmates only to realize your partner had already started on a Blue Apron meal, your household had, in one day, interacted with eight unprofitable companies that collectively lost about $15 billion in one year.

This paragraph comes from The Atlantic. The article is titled: "The End of the Millennial Lifestyle Subsidy." The article is written by Derek Thompson. You can read the full article here:

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/06/uber-ride-share-prices-high-inflation/661250/

Zac and Don discuss the issue of prices and how they are impacting people this summer. They discuss the price increases in the gig economy. They also discuss Arizona Ice Tea fighting to keep their product at ninety-nine cents. They also talk about Venice Italy using prices to try and reduce the number of people visiting the city.

You can read the other two articles here:

LA Times: "As inflation soars, how is AriZona iced tea still 99 cents?" Written by Sam Dean
https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2022-04-12/az-iced-tea-inflation-99-cents

NPR: "A day trip to Venice will require a reservation - and a fee." Written by the Associated Press
https://www.npr.org/2022/07/03/1109615164/italy-venice-travel-new-rules#:~:text=Tourists%20who%20choose%20not%20to,the%20city%20is%20very%20crowded.
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42min
July 07, 2022 Regulations! Are there Too Many? Why Are They So Hard to Repeal? Do they Benefit Society or the Status Quo? Should All Laws & Regulations Have Sunset Provisions? What Current Regulations Need to Go?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
The regulatory state exists because of the practical necessity for a traffic cop to oversee common resources and enforce minimum norms of safety and fairness. This is a dynamic role, requiring government to be an active umpire in a crowded world, adapting to new challenges while keeping its own house in order.
But America's massive, convoluted, rigid legal structure makes it almost impossible for government to do this job sensibly and within budget. Laws are piled upon laws, making adaptation essentially illegal. Congress doesn't clean out the stables in part because of a constitutional flaw -- our founders didn't anticipate that it would be much harder to repeal a law than passing it in the first place. Bureaucracies don't clean out regulations for the additional reason that the agencies become inbred, and are run by people who do things this way because that's how it's always been done.
This paragraph comes from The Atlantic. The article is titled: "Obsolete Law - The Solutions." the article is written by Philip K. Howard. You can read the rest of the article here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/03/obsolete-law-0151-the-solutions/255141/
Zac and Don discuss why it's so hard to repeal laws and regulations. They also wonder about regulations they would like to see repealed.
The following article from National Affairs is also frequently discussed in the conversation:
The Next Phase of Regulatory Reform (Author: James Broughel)
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45min
June 29, 2022 Private Youth Sports! Why Are Parents Spending So Much Time and Money on It? Are Kids Sports Careers Over If They're Not Playing? Is the Income Inequality Any Different than Other Youth Activities?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
“I need you to take him.”
The father on the phone was upset. If his 10-year-old son did not make the team at the $2,500-per-season private baseball club where I coached, the boy would lose friends and the family’s routines would be upended, he argued. They would have to drive to another suburb for ball games.
Looking for a deeper, more forceful argument, the dad added: “This team is our community.”
The privatization of American youth sports over the past 40 years is one of those revolutions of late-stage capitalism that should shock us more than it does. We have commodified the play of millions of children into a $19.2 billion business, weakening volunteer-based programs that promise affordable sports for all children. It is a trend mirrored by our schools, hospitals and military. Once-proud public institutions are being privatized, with many unintended consequences.
For millions of American families, paying private for-profit clubs—euphemistically termed “travel teams”—thousands of dollars a year to organize athletic games for their children is now an unquestioned way of life that shapes family routines, work schedules and commutes. That is why I was sympathetic to the angry dad’s argument and, in the end, took his son for the team.
This paragraph comes from www.americamagazine.org. The article is titled: "How America Sold Out Little League Baseball." The article is written by John W. Miller. You can read the rest of the article here:
https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/2022/05/19/catholic-youth-sports-little-league-club-baseball-243016
Zac and Don talk about the rise of youth sports culture. They wonder if its good for parents and kids to take sports so seriously at a young age. They talk about why parents are willing to spend so much time and money on club sports. They also talk about the future of baseball in America.
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48min
June 16, 2022 What Is Camping? Is It Different than Being Homeless? Is It A Protest Protected By the 1st Amendment? Are You Camping If You Need Electricity and Running Water? Should More or Less People Be Camping?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
The historian Phoebe S. K. Young finds that Americans have long struggled to decide what camping is, and who is allowed to do it. Over the decades, the act of sleeping outside has served wildly varying ends: as a return to agrarian ideals, a means of survival, a rite of passage for the nuclear family, a route to self-improvement, and a form of First Amendment expression. In Young’s account, it becomes a proxy for disputes about race, class, and rootlessness—all the schisms in the American experiment.
This paragraph comes from The New Yorker. The article is titled: "The Confounding Politics of Camping in America." The article is written by Dan Piepenbring. You can read the full article here:
https://www.newyorker.com/books/under-review/the-confounding-politics-of-camping-in-america
Zac and Don discuss the question: What is camping? How do you define it? They also talk about America's complicated view of those who camp and their reasons for it.
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33min
June 10, 2022 Is Tom Cruise Good at Running? Can We Use His Movies To Determine If He's Fast? How Can We Tell If Someone's Good at Running? Could Tom Beat Don In A Race? What If They Had to Carry A Briefcase?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
IN 2018, TOM CRUISE finally joined Instagram, and fans sure felt the need for speed: He picked up 550,000 followers in less than an hour. Now he's up to 6.5 million followers, and they're greeted by the actor's self-assessment of his own career in his bio. He could have gone with "Three-time Oscar nominee," or "Sold $10 billion worth of movie tickets."
But instead, he picked: "Actor, producer, running in movies since 1981." It's a winking, self-aware nod to this much-memed chapter of his Hollywood career. He always gets the rogue bad guy with the rogue nuclear codes from the rogue country, and he does it in a sprint. By one running blog's count, he's run in 44 of his 52 movies, and that includes two running scenes in his newest movie, "Top Gun: Maverick," which opens this week nationwide... ... ... But that raises the question... Is Tom Cruise actually a good runner?
This article comes from ESPN.com. The article is titled: "Tom Cruise runs. But is he any good at it?" The article is written by Ryan Hockensmith. You can read the full article here:
https://www.espn.com/olympics/story/_/id/33966556/tom-cruise-running-top-gun-maverick
Zac and Don discuss whether Tom Cruise is good at running. Don breaks down his form and shares his knowledge about high level running. Some of Tom Cruise's best movie runs are also discussed.
Zac and Don reference this video that shows every Tom Cruise movie run.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U8Q2MgdMskQ&t=38s
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38min
June 02, 2022 Is Deciding Where You Live the ONLY Important Parenting Decision? How Should Parents Feel If They Have Little Influence On How Their Children Turn Out? Is there Anyway Nurture Can Defeat Nature?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
As Bryan Caplan notes in his 2011 book, Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids, parents have only small effects on their children’s health, life expectancy, education, and religiosity (though studies have found that they have moderate effects on drug and alcohol use and sexual behavior, particularly during the teenage years, as well as how kids feel about their parents).
Some examples: One of the largest randomized controlled trials on breastfeeding found that it had no significant long-term effect on a variety of outcomes. A careful study of television use among preschoolers found that TV had no long-term effects on child test scores. A randomized trial suggests that teaching kids cognitively demanding games, such as chess, doesn’t make them smarter in the long term. A meta-analysis of bilingualism found that it has only small effects on a child’s cognitive performance, and that even these may be due to a bias in favor of publishing positive study results.
This paragraph comes from an article in the Atlantic. The article is titled: "The One Parenting Decision That Really Matters." The article is written by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz. You can read the full article here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/05/parenting-decisions-dont-trust-your-gut-book-excerpt/629734/
Zac and Don discuss the article's conclusions about parenting and location. Should parents accept that on average they will have little influence on how their children turn out as adults? Is there anyway nurture can fight back against nature? How should we think about the data that suggests where you raise your child is the most important parenting decision?
Zac and Don reference the location data from The Opportunity Atlas. You can visit the interactive map and data here:
https://www.opportunityatlas.org/
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39min
May 26, 2022 Top Gun!!! Is the Movie A Giant Commercial to Sell America? Is Maverick the Perfect Piece of American Symbolism? Does the Movie Still Hold Up Today? Is It A "War" Movie? What Will the Sequel Be Like?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
Are you looking to consider the grim realities of war, or to acknowledge the humanity of “the enemy”? Top Gun elides those inconvenient complications. If you are in search of some full-throttle patriotism, however, this film has you covered. Top Gun indulges in its metaphors. A hero who is young and arrogant and attempting to come to terms with his legacy might remind you of a country you know. And again and again, that hero is absolved. Maverick disobeys orders; he gets sent to Top Gun anyway. His antics get Goose in trouble with their superior; Goose forgives him. A series of scenes with Charlie goes roughly like this: She criticizes one of Mav’s flight maneuvers; unable to tolerate the negative review, he throws a tantrum and drives away on his motorcycle; she chases after him in her car, almost causing a pileup on a busy street; she catches up to him; he braces for her outrage; instead, she tells him she’s falling in love with him. There are many versions of this exchange in Top Gun. Maverick is someone who fails not just upward, but skyward.
This paragraph comes from an essay in The Atlantic titled: "Top Gun Is an Infomercial for America." The essay is written by Megan Garber. You can read the full essay here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/07/top-gun-infomercial-for-america/619013/
Zac and Don discuss the movie Top Gun. They wonder if the movie and its main character Maverick serve as a symbol of America. They wonder if the movie is serious enough. They wonder how the rest of the world views the movie.
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33min

FAQs about The Best Paragraph I've Read...:

How many episodes does The Best Paragraph I've Read... have?

The podcast currently has 269 episodes available.

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