NewsTrust - Lifelong Learning - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Mainstream)

Public libraries: enablers of Americans' dreams

Sat, 21 Aug 2010 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Times - By Neal Peirce - Aug. 21 (Opinion) - America's public libraries, fast turning themselves into "one-stop shops" for digital job searches, appear to be staging one of their great historic transformations. Responding to a rush of recession-time visitors, 88 percent of our libraries now offer access to job databases. And at least two-thirds of library staffs are helping applicants complete online job applications, according to a national survey by the American Library Association and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

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What Is a Philosopher?

Mon, 17 May 2010 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By Simon Critchley - May. 17 (Opinion) - There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more. After three millennia of philosophical activity and disagreement, it is unlikely that we’ll reach consensus, and I certainly don’t want to add more hot air to the volcanic cloud of unknowing. What I’d like to do in the opening column in this new venture — The Stone — is to kick things off by asking a slightly different question: what is a philosopher?

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Making It

Sun, 14 Jun 2009 00:00:00 -0700

Washington Post - By Elizabeth Chang - Jun. 14 (Interview) - A creator of artistic walking canes offers her customers a little support

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Travel guru assesses Iran

Sat, 21 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By D. Parvaz - Jun. 21 (Editorial) - "My job is not to say we're right and they're wrong or that they're right and we're wrong. ... It's that, as a travel writer, to help America better understand Iran, because it's clear that we don't know anything about Iran," said Steves, 53, sitting behind his desk at his Edmonds office, his demeanor more intense than what we see on his shows. "And as an electorate, we're being asked to make decisions of war and peace and life and death for a country of 70 million people."

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Training the Mind for Resiliency - Shifting Careers - Small Business - New York Times Blog

Wed, 04 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0700

New York Times - By karen salmansohn - Jun. 04 (Interview) - Karen Salmansohn has written 29 books and, in the process, created her own mini genre that she calls "self-help for people who wouldn't be caught dead reading self-help." The ingredients for a Salmansohn book include bold graphics, advice distilled to digestible nuggets and lots of humor. The levity does not preclude her from tackling weighty subjects, and her latest, "The Bounceback Book," looks at the psychology behind resiliency and offers 75 tips on how to bounce back after both minor setbacks or major trauma.

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Cookie-cutter schools don't improve student achievement

Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:00 -0700

Seattle Post Intelligencer - By Richard W. Clark - Mar. 24 (Opinion) - None of these explanations of why children learn requires that programs adopted in one school be the same as those in another. Districts spend heavily when they seek uniformity by training teachers in the "one-right-way" and then monitor compliance. They do so ignoring the reality that there is no one way that will work with all students in the varied circumstances of their lives. Because it doesn't work, districts that seek such uniformity invariably run out of resources and community support after a few years and new leaders are installed who pour their own magic potion on the district from their perch at the top.

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The Dumbing Of America

Sun, 17 Feb 2008 00:00:00 -0800

Washington Post - By Susan Jacoby - Feb. 17 (Comment) - "The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects, eats upon itself." Ralph Waldo Emerson offered that observation in 1837, but his words echo with painful prescience in today's very different United States. Americans are in serious intellectual trouble -- in danger of losing our hard-won cultural capital to a virulent mixture of anti-intellectualism, anti-rationalism and low expectations.

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Philosophy for kids

Tue, 01 Jan 2008 00:00:00 -0800

BPS Research Digest - Jan. 01 (Opinion) - Teaching children the art of collaborative philosophical inquiry brings them persistent, long-term cognitive benefits, according to psychologists in Scotland.

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Language: For politicians and poets, the suspension of disbelief

Sun, 07 Oct 2007 09:18:14 -0700

International Herald Tribune - By William Safire - Oct. 07 (Opinion) - After years of blinking at news of the celebrated glitterati and suffering the certitude of the illuminati, finally the old-fashioned literati had their moment in the political sun. It came in a Senate hearing room on Sept. 11, when General David Petraeus, commander of United States forces in Iraq, gave his promised report on progress in the war. Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton reached back 190 years in literary history for the exact phrase and told him, "I think that the reports that you provide to us really require the willing suspension of disbelief."

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Language: Redact this, and the meme 9/11

Sun, 09 Sep 2007 09:16:50 -0700

International Herald Tribune - By William Safire - Sep. 09 (Entertainment) - When with-it users of language need a word to describe a suddenly increasing activity, we either create a new one - a neologism like blog, a borrowing like au courant - or we dust off a somewhat-related old word and give it a new meaning. How do we handle the demands of government secrecy or the need for judicial discretion to conceal passages of text that ordinary mortals are not allowed to read? Cross out doesn't do it because you can often hold up crossed-out copy to the light and make out what it says; besides, pencils and typewriters are going the way of sharpened quills. Blacken is more descriptive but has an active primary meaning of "destroying reputation." Censor condemns itself. Obliterate is nicely expressive but excessive in this case because the forbidden words must remain accessible to those blessed with security clearances or to our guardians of privacy.

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Author sees stark choice: Serve society, or sell out

Mon, 03 Sep 2007 22:01:57 -0700

Philadelphia Inquirer - By Matt Blanchard - Sep. 03 (Interview) - In his new book, The Trap: Selling Out to Stay Afloat in Winner-Take-All-America (Times Books), Brook argues that while small luxuries from sangria to Ikea may come cheap these days, the ballooning costs of education, housing and health care are likely to drive talented twentysomethings into a Faustian bargain with corporate America....Simply accepting that the rich will always get richer, and that they will dominate our educational and political systems, Brook argues, "is basically giving up on the whole point of America."

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