I'd like to invest in piracy Futures now.
If Halford were here, he could tell us of the need to leaven nerds with jocks.
Seriously, though, and I say this as a fan of college sports, it's long past time to call that whole culture out as a cancer.
3: I never thought of the people on the fencing team as jocks.
It was pointed out to me that the writer ranked her career a while back by being caught plagiarising repeatedly under her birth name, Ruth Shalit. Doesn't mean this story is all bullshit, but I wouldn't be surprised if the most jawdropping bits were.
As Opus The Penguin said*, "The rich should be ground up into hamburger and fed to the poor."
There have been a couple of interesting looking books on the failures of "meritocracy." I keep being interested, but haven't read any of them yet. Has anyone here read Twilight of the Elites (Hayes) or The Meritocracy Trap (Markovits)?
* I was considered a gaffe when he was the VP nominee on the meadow party ticket.
Feed them to the lions
In the Unfogged canon, they need to be fed to the hogs.
That should have been "tanked her career".
6: The Washington Post is all over this -https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/24/ruth-shalit-just-wrote-atlantic-would-readers-know-it-byline/
This sports article is simply hilarious. All this just so you can pay full tuition at Dartmouth instead of paying full tuition at Bucknell or Amherst.
Agreed that many of the quotes sounded too good to be true.
10: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/24/ruth-shalit-just-wrote-atlantic-would-readers-know-it-byline/
Some of us are making meatballs with parts of hogs and would like to avoid first derivative cannibalism.
11: The extra ironic twist is the kids that wind up going to less prestigious schools, because they want to play the sport that their parents pushed them into, so they could get into a prestigious school.
WHAT?!?!? UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA?!?!? YOU REALIZE WE COULD AFFORD BENNINGTON
Bennington Coat Factory used to be a big deal.
15:
Johns Hopkins is out of the question?
15 is a good joke, but having attended parents' orientation at Bennington, I can assure that there was not a single person there who would not have rather been in Charlottesville.
Fencing is interesting because its exclusive nature is entirely accidental - the cost of setting up a fencing salle is pretty tiny compared to the cost of setting up, say, a basketball team or a baseball team or a gridiron team. Any indoor space will do for a salle, and the kit - foils, jackets and masks - is pretty cheap compared to the cost of football pads and helmets. Even a boxing gym needs punch bags and a ring, which aren't cheap.
Ditch midnight basketball - introduce Midnight Duelling.
I love this so much:
In Columbus, Ohio, at the junior-fencing nationals with the couple's two younger girls and son, he reported that their middle daughter, a 12-year-old saber fencer, had been stabbed in the jugular during her first bout.
Look, let's be honest about this and just have them duel for the scholarship with live ammunition.
We seem to have had the same idea at the same moment.
The alternative is sanity inventing a succession of new prestige sports to create the required capacity. Brb installing a crane in the back yard for junior's bungee jumping (which did in fact start at Oxford, no?)
19 is correct. The author didn't point out that a lot of people representing the US in fencing have been from places where there literally isn't room to play sports that take more space than a basketball court. The Peter Westbrook Foundation has done an great job at finding fencers in the inner city, despite the article's cynicism of such efforts.
It does require weird equipment and no parent will be able to coach it because nobody in America does it, so those point toward being elite, but that's outweighed by not needing grass and only needing a few people per school, not a whole team. Seems like that would also apply to squash but... squash is just stupid.
Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, has his own island in Long Island Sound, if I understand correctly. It is high tech and carbon neutral, and has its own grid. Is anybody sympathetic towards North Dumpling Island as a proof of concept?
The college admission consultants aren't being creative enough. You need to find sports no one plays, or invent new ones, then convince colleges to start programs in them (with contributions from the striving wealthy families) so your advisees have an advantage.
In Spain we found this weird hybrid of squash and platform tennis that only a couple hundred Americans play.
Seems like wealthy Indian families should be setting up NCAA cricket programs nationwide for their children who don't happen to be good at mechanical engineering.
What do you have against medical school?
25- You'll never get preference at a school in the Northeast if you're not familiar with that.
Platform tennis?
Platform tennis shoes, at least.
People only watch that to see somebody sprain an ankle.
My high school actually had platform tennis courts and we had a unit in gym where we learned it.
That seems like a lot of time just to learn one factoid.
I think that all Maryland colleges and universities should start varsity duckpin bowling teams.
What's wrong with terrapin bowling?
That reminds me that ALF had a running joke about bouillabaisseball. Unfortunately the show was canceled before ALF was old enough to apply to college so we never found out of it helped him get in to a UC.
I refuse to believe platform tennis is real. Ditto Bennington.
I refuse to believe platform tennis is real.
Wait till you hear about pickleball.
Also, it turns out that "Cornhole" isn't a sex thing.
11: I don't think Amherst is considered second-tier. Buckner might be. They were also proposing some colleges I had never heard of, which, truth be told, might not be worth the outsized tuition. I mean, they totally could be, but full tuition is so god damn expensive.
I was looking at private islands a while ago and if you're willing to accept middle-of-nowhere and a meh climate, they're cheaper than urban real estate in fancy US cities. Sure, you still have to build on them, but there's quite a few sub-$500k islands (and even more under $1 million) off the coast of Nova Scotia. Only one of which has a cursed money pit.
You can hardly buy a condo on the nicer island in the Allegheny for that.
For inhabitable islands in the Allegheny, I'm more partial to Twelve Mile because I like boats. Too bad that's a Trumpist identity thing now.
The site I was looking private islands up on had a ~$300k undeveloped island in the Allegheny, way up north. Clarion County or thereabouts. Not so exotic and hard to get to, but no need to worry about sea-level change.
I was looking at a plot on a Pine Creek, but they wanted $150k for twelve acres and the land is only accessible by canoe or trespassing.
I don't understand why people who get off on expecting the return of 14th century social conditions seem to think there's nothing to be learned from 14th century settlement patterns.
36- it's completely logical for the New England environment: If you want to play tennis when it snows you need to elevate the courts so you can push the snow off the sides of your elevated court, but it would be too expensive to make a full size court so you make it smaller but that means you need to increase the playable area so you enclose it and allow shots off the enclosure but if you do that you can't have normal racquets and balls because people would hit the walls too hard so you use harder balls and wooden paddles. QED.
What they should do is have each prep school provide two tributes who fight to the death in a massively complicated televised battle royale and the winner goes to Yale.
46: Why just tributes. You could have a entire seniors playoff series.
38: I think that's one of those weird regionalisms. I grew up calling that game "beanbags" and it still sounds dirty when I hear other people talking about it.
Ultimate Frisbee was invented at a New Jersey Ivy League feeder high school near mine in the mid-seventies. There were running jokes about kids inventing a sport just to get college scholarships. No one in our high school club listed it on college applications because frisbee had stoner implication. In fact, ultimate frisbee is completely unsuitable for playing while stoned.
It was only a couple of years ago that I learned ultimate frisbee wasn't the same as frisbee golf.
Which confusion is why I thought everybody was stoned when they played ultimate frisbee.
51: Frisbee golf remains solidly stoner friendly. Ultimate frisbee has at least one professional league now and is "proper" sport these days.
7: Brank Milanovic had a sorta-very-positive review of Meritocracy Trap recently:
Daniel Markovits has written in "The Meritocracy Trap" such a frontal assault on the meritocratic system that undergirds and sustains today's US society that, were the book on a similarly self-sustaining ideological rationale written in pre-revolutionary France, or Brezhnevite (let alone Stalinist) Russia, the book would have been burned and its author sent into exile or worse. ...
One will find many (at times, too many) such data in Markovits's book. But its main point lies elsewhere: to explain how such outcomes are not accidental but fully consistent with the pattern that enables the elite to reproduce itself and to fend off challenges from the lower parts of the distribution. "Meritocracy sustains dynasties [and the ruling class] by reconstructing the family on the model of a firm, the household on the model of a workplace, and the child on the model of a product." (p. 116). ...
It is not an easy book to read--at many levels. Its messages are harsh and brutal. It is not always best written. There are long and repetitive passages. Were it cut in half, it would have gained in power. But its main message is clear and loud: "Meritocracy has become the single greatest obstacle to equal opportunity in America today" (p. 27). ...
I am sorry to have to say that but I do not think that I have ever read a book the is so badly produced (Penguin's is the publisher). The book is chock-full of interesting statistics but there are no footnotes; there are not even end-notes. What exists are pseudo end-notes which are linked to the text by a few words written in the main text. When one reads the book, one has no idea whether there is an end-note or not. Such end-notes are quasi impossible to find and when one finds them, the font is the smallest possible on record, so they are illegible. For all intents and purposes, the book has no notes.
It's a bit of a curious review, because I'm not sure if he'd actually recommend that I read it or not. I mean, I already believe in the thesis. Should I really read a terribly-edited, twice-its-optimal-length book to be confirmed in my views?
The logical end state of 21 and 24 is some kid getting into an Ivy League university on a kosho scholarship. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORYNsVca608
Bounce fiercely, Harvard! Bounce, bounce, bounce!
Impress them with our prowess, do!
There are long and repetitive passages. Were it cut in half, it would have gained in power. But its main message is clear
This description also applies to The Age of Surveillance Capitalism which I'm currently reading. She makes good, insightful points, but tends to make each one five or six times.
This thread reminds me of a magnet school I was reading about. It's apparently long been a very strong science focused high school, and many graduates go on to Caltech/MIT/various Ivies. There's a move to change the admissions process, which had been determined by a very challenging entrance exam.
A person on their blog was lamenting that the exam based admissions created an opportunity for students who wouldn't otherwise have a chance at attending such a school because they lacked wealth, social connections & etc. Recent graduates from the school in question showed up in the comments section to point out that the last ~15 years had seen the growth of a ridiculous exam prep arms race, with families routinely spending tens of thousands of dollars on special courses to prepare kids just for this school's entrance exam.
Sounds like they should switch to platform tennis based admissions.
Platform tennis - is that the same as or similar to Real (royal) tennis? There's courts at Eton, Queen's Club and Lord's.
56: I know exactly what you're talking about! Having attended that high school and then gone on to MIT, and recently read that lament and the comments. The idea of exam prep specific to the school, and targeted and junior high school students, is foreign and terrifying to me.
58: Small world.
So, as an alumnus, what's your preferred new admissions system: platform tennis, or duckpin bowling?
Duckpin tennis.
Real tennis courts appear to be larger and different shape than platform tennis.
56: I think this may have been in the first few chapters of Chris Hayes's book? He went to Hunter College High School, and talked about how even its students recently started speaking out about how systemically inequitable the admissions process is.
(Actually, looks like that was 2010, not "recently".)
61: Oh, hey. I swear back in the dawn of time when I went there, people weren't spending tens of thousands on test prep. Back in the early eighties, admissions were inequitable because you had to be reasonably savvy to know to apply, which was entirely different. (Not really different.)
But I hadn't thought Nathan went there, which suggests that he was thinking of a different school.
I wonder how many people I went to high school with voted for Trump. I'm guessing 9 Trump, 6 Clinton. That may be optimism.
Has this been linked? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jk7LPpY8pXM
OT: I think I mentioned this guy at some point before. He just posted a really long thing on Nextdoor that, as near as I can tell, is a "he deserved it" defense of his actions.
69: Why isn't he in jail? Or can you post on Nextdoor from jail?
He's in jail, be says. My guess is that he is not listening to his lawyer very well.
It start with "Hi everyone, I'm sure that you heard I'm in jail but there are many false rumors as to why I hate this rabbi. Here is the truth."
Huh, I thought that was unusual-- guess not, easy to think of social media and popularity/profit when there's lots of free time.
https://www.stereogum.com/2103531/fyre-fest-billy-mcfarland-solitary-confinement-podcast/news/
Not to minimize the difference between Mobes' violent loon and the grifter in 73-- one's definitely much worse than the other.
69+: has he been tried yet? I can't find any news on him since the events you link last year.
To be fair to Jewish people, the guy in 69 converted to Christianity.
To be even more fair, Christianity was started by Jewish people.
So it's the Jews' fault that Christianity lacks a proper trickster god?
The Peter Westbrook foundation and groups in that model were great for introducing fencing to underrepresented kids, who then went in some cases to win Olympic medals. The point was to get to college.
I feel like I should tell him to shut up and get a lawyer. I'm guessing that "Ultra-orthodox Judaism is really confining for women" isn't actually a defense when the charge is arson and attempted murder. (I'm not a lawyer, that was not legal advice.)
79: "Let me into this college or I'll prod you with this blunt, beeping, foil until you do."
Speaking of dumb criminals, I can't get over the fact that these guys put their names in the script of their illegal robocall.
I haven't seen a remotely adequate explanation of those guys, in general. It seems impossible that they could be that dumb -- "but I wore the juice!" every single time -- but I can't think of a strategic benefit to acting that dumb. I do not get it.
If it's Wohl it's dumb af, I can believe it
I think they make good money being that dumb.
"So it's the Jews' fault that Christianity lacks a proper trickster god?"
I'll tell you...let me give you a little inside information about God.
God likes to watch. He's a prankster!
Think about it.
He gives man instincts. He gives you this extraordinary gift, and then what does He do? I swear, for His own amusement, His own private cosmic gag reel...He sets the rules in opposition. It's the goof of all time.
"Look, but don't touch. Touch, but don't taste. Taste, but don't swallow."
And while you're jumping from one foot to the next, what is He doing? He's laughing his sick fucking ass off! He's a tightass! He's a sadist! He's an absentee landlord! Worship that? Never!
83: they want it to be known that they're willing to do anything for their funders, so they humiliate themselves like this as a costly signal.
Like people getting hypothermia at the Omaha airport because Trump can't plan a rally that is safe and it turns out that elderly Trump voters can't remember to bring a warm enough coat.
Or they could have brought some beautiful clean coal to burn to keep warm.
88: I am wildly overgeneralizing from a few people I know, but it does seem to me that the car-centric lifestyle of non-urban Americans has made a lot of people, even those who live in cold climates, bad at outerwear. Suburban people I know don't seem to wear warm coats even in winter, because they're going from a house to a car to an at most 90-second parking-lot walk to a store and so on.
Omaha is very urban. My grandmother didn't even learn how to drive until she left.
Which probably was not unrelated to why she once drove into the post office.
Anyway, she was a lifetime Democrat and had a very warm coat.
But, yes. People wear stupid clothing when they forget that it's possible to get stuck outside.
90: That will probably be me, now that I've got a car, even though I'm urban. (Not as urban as NYC, but urban by American standards.) The pandemic gave us the push. We get stir-crazy, and even though we haven't used it to get out of town so far, it's nice to have the option. As a more practical concern, we used to go grocery shopping several times a week on the way home from work. Ever since the pandemic, we're no longer commuting, and going into a store is a bad idea in general. With a car we can make bigger and therefore fewer trips. I tend to dress as lightly as I can and a car will probably help.
It's been a bit weird getting used to having the option. It's insidious how convenient it is, even with problems like parking. Like, to drop Atossa off one day, we hadn't planned to drive, it's only about five blocks, but when it came time to leave the house it was 50 degrees and raining lightly, so...
Omaha is basically the veldt anyway.
As my dad always reminded me before I drove across open county in the winter, keep warm stuff (coat, sleeping bag) in the car.
I was already thinking of the parking lot at the Omaha airport yesterday because that's where I was when I got the news about the terrorist attack in my neighborhood.
You'd think they'd dress better knowing they'd be outside for at least an hour even with everything going smoothly.
Sure, if they're women or Democrats.
This is genius https://twitter.com/relentlessbored/status/1321343424126242817?s=21
They didn't die. The Omaha police are very helpful to sober white people over the age of thirty.
I mean it's funny, but the truth about Omaha is important.
The only thing I'll know about Omaha is Wild Kingdom
People worry about the wildlife, but the weather is what will get you.
non-urban Americans has made a lot of people, even those who live in cold climates, bad at outerwear. Suburban people I know don't seem to wear warm coats even in winter, because they're going from a house to a car to an at most 90-second parking-lot walk to a store and so on.
Jammies and I were trying to figure out something adjacent to this the other day - how the phrase "the cold weather is driving up Covid cases" plays out in reality. I was arguing that 50° is unpleasant to sit around and hang out. That 50° weather is wonderful if you're moving, but very cold if you're sitting still, and you'd want a heat source outside. Jammies was saying that people up north are used to bundling up, and 50° is fine for an outdoor event.
Granted, neither of us have lived anywhere cold since the other Clinton was president, so.
So for example: at what temperature would a restaurant shut down outdoor dining?
Depends on the food. Breakfast would be bad below 65 because the eggs would get cold too quick.
I'll eat lunch outdoors at a ski hill in the 30s. 20s if its sunny. But wouldn't eat dinner out downtown, or at my house, at 50. Sunshine is a bigger factor, since that's heat on your skin, even if not so much ambient.
If folks are having parties outside this time of year, there's a bonfire of some kind.
We just got new restrictions: bars close at 10pm, which is apparently thought to be enough to deter the worst behavior. Also back on with the tighter capacity and group size restrictions.
Am I supposed to have known who Miles Taylor was all along?
109 last: Here they aren't allowed to serve alcohol after 10 pm, but they can stay open until 11 pm.
My advice: take the W. Do the 'well actuallys' after Tuesday.
107: I just saw this Seattle Times article encouraging people to do more outdoors during this winter: https://www.seattletimes.com/life/outdoors/we-belong-out-there-how-the-nordic-concept-of-friluftsliv-outdoor-life-could-help-the-pacific-northwest-get-through-this-covid-winter/
Local restaurants are blowing through propane tanks. They have various kinds of heaters including those ones with the flame inside a tall glass tube. The restaurant we've gone to is using a large parking lot that they've filled with well spaced tables, requiring about 16 heaters to cover the space.
They should use those Japanese tables with built in heaters. I forget what they are called.
We went to Christmas markets when we were in Germany a few years ago and no one seemed to mind standing around eating and drinking in freezing weather.
Trump is campaigning with Nigel Farage, because I guess that's better than standing next to Boris?
Kotatsu. I think they're fire hazards though.
Restaurants burn down all the time anyway.
115: The caterer we used got our wedding in North Cambridge opened a pop up restaurant outside after the small high end restaurant closed that was connected to it. They set up something akin to little tents around picnic tables.
I'm still only doing take out but I got a nice birthday dinner to go from them.
I think it's probably because Farage's booker rang up and said he's available. It's not as if he has anything else to do.
WaPo notes that some of the fact claims in the article are bullshit: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/10/30/atlantics-troubled-niche-sports-story/
It may be true in spirit, but it's at least partially literary fiction.
The Atlantic has now prefaced the article with this amazing statement:
Editor's Note: After The Atlantic published this article, new information emerged that has raised serious concerns about its accuracy, and about the credibility of the author, Ruth Shalit Barrett.
We have established that Barrett deceived The Atlantic and its readers about a section of the story that concerns a person referred to as "Sloane." We are sharing with our readers what we have learned so far.
The original version of this article stated that Sloane has a son. Before publication, Sloane confirmed this detail to be true to The Atlantic's fact-checking department. After publication, when a Washington Post media critic asked us about the accuracy of portions of the article, our fact-checking department reached out to Sloane to recheck certain details. Through her attorney, Sloane informed us that she does not, in fact, have a son. We have independently corroborated that Sloane does not have a son, and we have corrected the story to remove the reference to her having a son.
In explaining Sloane's reasoning for telling our fact-checker she had a son, Sloane's attorney told The Atlantic that she wanted to make herself less readily identifiable. Her attorney also said that according to Sloane, Barrett had first proposed the invention of a son, and encouraged Sloane to deceive The Atlantic as a way to protect her anonymity.
When we asked Barrett about these allegations, she initially denied them, saying that Sloane had told her she had a son, and that she had believed Sloane. The next day, when we questioned her again, she admitted that she was "complicit" in "compounding the deception" and that "it would not be fair to Sloane" to blame her alone for deceiving The Atlantic. Barrett denies that the invention of a son was her idea, and denies advising Sloane to mislead The Atlantic's fact-checkers, but told us that "on some level I did know that it was BS" and "I do take responsibility."
Sloane's attorney claimed that there are several other errors about Sloane in the article but declined to provide The Atlantic with examples. Barrett says that the fabricated son is the only detail about which she deceived our fact-checkers and editors. Our fact-checking department is continuing to thoroughly recheck the article.
We have already corrected and clarified other details in the story. During the initial fact-checking process, we corroborated many details of Sloane's story with sources other than Sloane. But the checking of some details of Sloane's story relied solely on interviews and other communications with Sloane or her husband or both of them.
We have clarified a detail about a neck injury sustained by Sloane's middle daughter, to be more precise about its severity. We have corrected a detail about a thigh injury, originally described as a deep gash but more accurately described as a skin rupture that bled through a fencing uniform. And we've corrected the location of a lacrosse family mentioned in the article: They do not live in Greenwich, Connecticut, but in another town in Fairfield County.
On October 22, we noted and corrected another error in the story: The article originally referenced Olympic-size backyard hockey rinks, but although the private rinks are large and equipped with floodlights and generators, they are not Olympic-size.
We are also updating Barrett's byline. Originally, we referred to her as Ruth S. Barrett. When writing recently for other magazines, Barrett was identified by her full name, Ruth Shalit Barrett. (Barrett is her married name.) In 1999, when she was known by Ruth Shalit, she left The New Republic, where she was an associate editor, after plagiarism and inaccurate reporting were discovered in her work. We typically defer to authors on how their byline appears--some authors use middle initials, for example, or shorter versions of their given name. We referred to Barrett as Ruth S. Barrett at her request, but in the interest of transparency, we should have included the name that she used as her byline in the 1990s, when the plagiarism incidents occurred. We have changed the byline on this article to Ruth Shalit Barrett.
We decided to assign Barrett this freelance story in part because more than two decades separated her from her journalistic malpractice at The New Republic and because in recent years her work has appeared in reputable magazines. We took into consideration the argument that Barrett deserved a second chance to write feature stories such as this one. We were wrong to make this assignment, however. It reflects poor judgment on our part, and we regret our decision.
We are continuing to review this article. We will correct any errors we find, and we will communicate our findings to our readers as speedily as possible.
Updated at 11:06 p.m. ET on October 30, 2020.
Holy shit that's amazing. They should retract the whole story.
"although the private rinks are large and equipped with floodlights and generators, they are not Olympic-size"
Messing that up is a fucking travesty- Olympic ice is a totally different game because the passing is much more wide open.
125: Ooh, thanks for posting that! Wow. You'd think with such a high profile story and a chance at redemption, the author would have been extremely careful. I don't get people.
128:. It's possible Stephen Glass wasn't the best choice for a role model.
You'd think with such a high profile story and a chance at redemption, the author would have been extremely careful.
Yes! I too don't get people like this.
I guess there were probably lots of people from TNR at that time who didn't turn out badly, probably including people I read now but don't know what they were doing twenty-five years ago. But there's her, Glass, Sullivan.
To be clear, I'm including Sullivan because I don't agree with him, not because he was faking articles.
132:In that case you should include Kaus.
I would have, but I didn't know he was ever at TNR.
The correction section (chapter?) of The Atlantic's article is more engrossing than the article itself.
I just talked to a registered Republican who is very strongly for Biden. I'm canvassing near my house today.
I wasn't actually trying to talk to him and didn't persuade him.