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 268 episodes available.

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

August 29, 2024 Pirates! Why Are We So Interested? Were they Originators of Democracy or the Last Holdouts of A Modernizing World? Does It Matter If the Facts Are Different From Reality? What About Modern Pirates?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
It’s as if Kidd and his fellow-marauders never stopped sailing. These days, pirates are everywhere. The five “Pirates of the Caribbean” films have collectively grossed billions. And then there are the shows, games, memes, bars, festivals, and rum bottles. Three major sports teams are named for them—the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Las Vegas Raiders, and the Tampa Bay Buccaneers: the first two from cities with no connection to piracy whatsoever.The pirates we typically have in mind are specific ones: the English-speaking sea robbers who sailed from the mid-seventeenth century to the first few decades of the eighteenth. And what makes these maritime lawbreakers of long ago so fascinating that, three centuries later, we’re still dressing up like them? The easy answer is that they were rebels. We delight in their lusty, wild lives because we, too, want to live freely. Pirates are especially fascinating because they sailed at the dawn of our era, just as the British Empire was rising and the portcullis of modernity was descending. Viewed in a certain light, pirates—the scourge of admirals and merchants—were the last holdouts against a world dominated by states and corporations.
This paragraph comes from the New Yorker. The article is titled: "Were Pirates Foes of the Modern Order - Or Its Secret Sharers?" The author is Daniel Immerwahr. You can read the full article here:
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/07/22/were-pirates-foes-of-the-modern-order-or-its-secret-sharers

Zac & Don discuss pirates. They wonder why pirates continue to be popular today despite the reality being so different that what we imagine.
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24min
August 22, 2024 What the World Needs Now: Axl Rose? Salad Bars? 3 Sport Athletes? Guitar Solos? Glass Bottles? Jumping Jacks? DVD Extras? No Travel Sports? Like A Rock TV Commercials? Less Distracted Drivers?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
Is a Spin Magazine cover from 25 years ago. You can view it here.

Zac & Don discuss the 25th anniversary of the Spin Magazine with Axl Rose on it. They also share their lists of other things that they think "The World Needs Now..." including Salad Bars, 3 Sport Athletes, Jumping Jacks, Glass Bottles, and more!
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37min
August 15, 2024 Don Went to the Olympics! What's It Like to Be in the Stadium Watching Track & Field? What Was Paris Like During the Major International Event? Will Los Angeles Be A Good Olympic Host?
Don went to the Olympics!

Zac & Discuss what it was like to be in Paris during the Olympics. They also discuss what it is like to attend a night of track and field events.
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37min
August 08, 2024 2 Summer Trends: Lifeguard Shortages & Males Doing Nothing On Planes. Why Isn't Lifeguarding A Glamorous Job Anymore? No Baywatch on TV? Why Reject Entertainment On Long flights? Online Brag Rights?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:

Once an emblem of summer — and the object of poolside fawning — the American lifeguard has somehow become an endangered species.

This paragraph comes from the Business Insider. The article is titled: "Lifeguard shortage: nationwide problem means closed pools, no swimming." The author is Kelli Maria Korducki. You can read the full article here:
https://www.businessinsider.com/lifeguard-shortages-jobs-american-pools-beaches-closed-swimming-lessons-baywatch-2024-7
Another Best Paragraph I've Read:
Everyone has their own tricks for staving off boredom on a long-haul flight. Some people load up on podcast episodes, others power through the available in-flight
entertainment. But no one simply sits, staring silently at the real-time flight map on the screen in front of them, for the entirety of a trip. Right? Wrong. A small group of hardy men—the gender that brought you frat hazing and Logan
Paul—are now doing exactly that, and for a variety of surprisingly solid reasons.

This paragraph comes from GQ. The article is titled: "Why Men Are 'Raw-dogging Flights." The article is written by Kate Lindsay. You can read the full article here:
https://www.gq.com/story/why-men-are-rawdogging-flights

Zac & Don discuss two trends that have emerged in America this summer: The shortage of Lifeguards and the males who chose to do nothing on planes.
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29min
July 25, 2024 Presidential Election Update! Who's Winning After Biden Steps Aside, Republicans Are Unified, Harris Enters, The Assassination Attempt, Why Did Dems Let Biden Debate? What Else? Kevin Kopec Joins!
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
"It has been the greatest honor of my life to serve as your President. And while it has been my intention to seek reelection, I believe it is in the best interest of my party and the country for me to stand down and to focus solely on fulfilling my duties as President for the remainder of my term."

This paragraph comes from President Joe Biden. You can read his full announcement here:
https://apnews.com/article/biden-letter-election-harris-step-down-3fb79a6ecf2a62410aec9288554e8bd6

Government Teacher Kevin Kopec joins Zac & Don to discuss the Presidential Election. The three discuss the major events over the past couple weeks and discuss the future as Vice President Harris begins her campaign.

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1h 8min
July 11, 2024 The Unwritten Rules of Pickup Basketball! Why Do Most People Follow Them? Can Basketball Bring A Group of Strangers to Transcendence? What about the Guy Who Shoots Bad 3s & Calls Too Many Fouls?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:

In 2015, Nick Rogers, now a sociologist at the University
of Pittsburgh, conducted an ethnography of a pickup-basketball game. Like an anthropologist who heads into the bush to live with tribe members, Rogers became one of the game’s regulars. During breaks, he took hurried notes on his iPhone. (Nice work, if you can get it.) Rogers wanted to understand the paradox of pickup basketball. Its culture is aggressively masculine. Its players tend to be diverse in age, race, and class. They jostle one another, elbow to elbow. They collide with full force. They get loud. And yet, fights are relatively rare. Rogers believes that this carefully pitched intensity is enabled by a special set of norms. These aren’t etched into stone like the Ten Commandments, he told me, but the players he interviewed on the sidelines were all fluent in them, and even reverent toward them. This unspoken code keeps the game from tipping over into violence. It allows a small group of perfect strangers with little in common besides basketball to experience a flow state—a brief, but intense, form of group transcendence.
This paragraph comes from The Atlantic. The essay is titled: "The Secret Code of Pickup Basketball." The author is Ross Andersen. You can read the full story here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2024/06/pickup-basketball-sociology/678677/
Zac & Don discuss pickup basketball and some of the unwritten rules that almost everyone seems to follow. They reflect on their experience with the game and how it relates with organized basketball.
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29min
June 27, 2024 America's Hot New Sport: Slap Fighting? Made for Streaming & Safer than Boxing, MMA? Joey Chestnut's NOT Competing on July 4th? Is It Easier to Match Chestnut's or an Olympian's Best Performance?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:
It’s the replay, caught with super-slo-mo cameras, that makes it exactly the kind of weird I like: We see the hand approaching the face and then the impact. BAM! Phillips’s face is briefly displaced off his skull, his neck skin stretching, his face in this moment deformed like a rubber mask—that’s how unlike a face it looks!—and then suddenly it snaps back on. And in that extended instant we see the light going out. His face is almost peaceful as he falls in the aftermath of such a sudden blast of pain. The clip ends and we don’t see what happens after.
This is the money shot that Power Slap—the newer of the two American slap-fighting leagues, the one with the vastly higher budget and bigger footprint—has perfected. It’s shocking. It’s dumb. It’s fun. It’s nuts. It’s barbaric. And
it’s brief, so it’s extremely shareable online, which is part of the point. In an age of the unreal and the fake, the AI-doctored and the dubiously sourced, slap fighting—a sport in which two men stand over a pedestal or a barrel and take turns slapping each other and being slapped—is indisputably really freaking real. It’s so real, in fact, and seems so simple that it almost feels like it can’t be. No way, you think. They’re not actually just doing this. Shouldn’t somebody stop them? This is awesome!
This paragraph comes from Esquire. The article is titled: "Inside the Savage, Surreal, Booming World of Professional Slap Fighting," The article is written by Ander Monson. You can read the full article here:
https://www.esquire.com/sports/a60828501/professional-slap-fighting/
Zac & Don discuss the sport of Slap Fighting. They discuss why the sport is gaining in popularity and how the sport technically work. They also discuss the sport of competitive eating and the recent news that Joey Chestnut will not compete in the 4th of July Hot Dog Eating Contest. They wonder whether it is harder for an average person to match Mr. Chestnut's performance or the feat of a real Olympian.

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39min
June 20, 2024 Steroids! PEDS! Get on the "Gear"? Everyone's On A "Cycle"? Has It Become Socially Acceptable to Use These Drugs? Any Ramifications? Do We Need Solutions? Or Just Keeping Working Out Until You Can't?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:

The use of performance-enhancing drugs, a.k.a. PEDs, remains something of a shadow world—but it may not remain so for long. Consider the shifting landscape of
what’s now edging toward the mainstream in health care. Cannabis as a cancer therapy. Psychiatrists testing out psychedelics. MDMA being studied for use in treating PTSD. The gap between our society’s embrace of once-taboo ideas and its faith in institutional medicine is widening—and personally, I laugh anytime I catch a drug commercial telling me to consult my doctor, because who the hell has a doctor anymore? For many, medicine is no longer a visit to the physician’s office but a dip into YouTube, a scroll through TikTok, maybe a quick Zoom with a tele-med nurse practitioner, or a visit to the nearest urgent care.

This paragraph comes from GQ. The article is titled: "Why Is Everyone on Steroids Now?" The author is Rosecrans Baldwin. You can read the full article here:
https://www.gq.com/story/why-is-everyone-on-steroids-now

Zac & Don discuss the rise in Steroid & PED use. They also discuss why it has become more socially acceptable to use these drugs.
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29min
June 13, 2024 200th Episode! What Has America Built During the Last 4 Years? Will America Dominate the Globe for the Next Century? Why the Pessimism With So Many Positive Data Points & Billionaires?
The Best Paragraph I've read:

Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building? If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building. There are always outstanding people in even the most broken systems — we need to get all the talent we can on the biggest problems we have, and on building the answers to those problems.

This paragraph comes from Marc Andreessen's essay⁠ (⁠https://a16z.com/2020/04/18/its-time-to-build/⁠) on what America should do now. His answer - Build!

Zac & Don celebrate their 200th episode by looking back at the essay and discussing what America has built over the past 4 years.

Zac & Don also reference the following Politico essay by Matthew Kaminski: "Welcome to Another 'American Century' Also: We Suck" You can read the full essay here:
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/24/american-century-confidence-crisis-00153961
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42min
June 06, 2024 ACT Scores Are Down!!! But GPA Is Up? Why Are Students Getting "Smarter" Yet Unable to Demonstrate their Knowledge? Is Standards Based Grading to Blame? Increased Cheating? Phones in Schools?
The Best Paragraph I've Read:

Dating back to 2020, when the pandemic upended American education overnight, many schools have adopted a more lenient approach to grading. Some eliminated zeros or removed penalties for late work. Many
teachers report “giving grace” to struggling students. Others say they have felt pressure from administrators to limit failure rates. Higher grades have come even as students’ test scores and attendance rates have dropped. A study in Washington state found that in the 2021-22 school year, high-school grades were at or above levels seen before the pandemic. A national analysis of the class of 2022 found that among students who took the ACT, high-school grades had risen, even as ACT scores had dipped.

This paragraph comes from the Wall Street Journal. The article is titled: "Test Scores Down, GPAs Up: The New Angst Over Grade Inflation." The article is written by Matt Barnum. You can read the full article here:
https://www.wsj.com/us-news/education/grade-inflation-education-test-scores-40196419

Zac & Don discuss grade inflation. They wonder how it happened. They discuss the theory behind Standards Based Grading. They also wonder how big of an issue is grade inflation compared to lower ACT Scores.
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37min

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

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

The podcast currently has 268 episodes available.

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