I recently had two separate conversations with academics who I have great respect for, where they asserted (in the most un-jerky way you can imagine) that a Harvard undergraduate education is really head and shoulders above, say, a Brown education or another Ivy. In other words, places where I assume the student body is indistinguishable from Harvard. Their explanations of why were examples like, "Your journalism class is taught by an actual former editor of the NYT" and "For example, I asked a student why he switched majors from X to Y, and he said it was after Harvard flew him to attend an Economic Summit in Europe." Both of them were asserting it was the quality of the actual education, although obviously the networking can't be beat either.

It left me with a funny feeling because I'm very vain, and yet I don't think a spot at Harvard should have been spent on me. You have to be a certain kind of ambitious to have the energy to properly milk an opportunity like this (and hopefully not the evil kind of ambitious).

It also irritates me because it's hard for me to think about education without immediately pivoting to a conversation about equality, and the Harvard model obviously can't scale. There just aren't enough former editors at the NYT.

That irritation is really about us not having a strong social safety net, though. If every person in the US had a safe bed to sleep in, and free food and medical care available, then most of the urgency about getting everyone educated deflates and you can have a conversation about how education should prepare citizens to vote sensibly.

So I guess my questions are:
1. is it true that the quality of the educational opportunities at Harvard is unmatched (in the US)?

2. if you have an inherently unequal educational system, what's the most ethical way to dole out spots to a place like Harvard? Obviously I'm not asking for you to critique the legacy system - I can do that on my own. But assuming a spherical cow, how would you best fill the slots at Harvard for the betterment of society?

This Slate reporter recently tried to hunt down all the runaway teens from the 1993 Soul Asylum "Runaway Train" video. The video gets credited with recovering 21 of the 36 kids featured, which appears to be wholesale crap.

Eleven kids from the U.S. videos are still missing. Four were ruled dead. That leaves 21 "found." But only that one case, from the 1993 AP story, was ever documented. She was also the only "Runaway Train" kid who appeared in an Access Hollywood segment on the 30th anniversary this summer.

Now the kids are in their 40s, and a handful of their stories are at the link. They're all interesting.

Humblebrag: even in 1993, I didn't think the song was that good. But I'm more sympathetic to the band members after reading the article, at least.

Mossy Character writes: Not the good LSD.

Heebie's take: 1. That's very worrisome.
2. Under 20 comments before comments turn to the good LSD

This is extremely atypical Unfogged content, but I ended up devoting a weirdly large amount time to it yesterday. Now I can't tell if it's actually interesting or if my brain is rationalizing why I stared at this for so long.

The backstory is that the black guy is a security guard for one of the river boats, and he's trying to these guys to move their boat so that the party barge can park where it's supposed to. There's a verbal altercation between him and the white guys who own the boat. At one point the security guard pushes the boat along a few feet.

At some point later, a group of white guys rush and jump the black security guard, which is the event that kicks off the fight. That part is the hardest to watch. I find fights very stressful.

But the storyline of how this one unfolds is really something to behold. Of the six different clips my devoted friend sent to me, this wrestlemania one below is the most palatable because the wrestling-style narration makes it less stressful to watch:

Riverboat Wrestlemania??? (Stay to the end and retweet it 😂) 🎙️ pic.twitter.com/ieSnB7n7Ws

— Mic Tyson (@bigcory00) August 6, 2023

Note: there are no guns involved. No one gets permanently hurt, either.

I still feel weird about posting this. But we really don't talk much about fights, so maybe this will be spark something interesting in the comments.

Analysis after the jump.

1. The guy swimming across the river is just amazing.

2. The chairs at the end!!

3. As Jammies pointed out, one thing about big adults who have been drinking all day is that you throw two or three punches and you're completely winded. So the fight doesn't have legs because everyone gets 15 seconds of bravado and then they're wilted. It only survives on adding new people in for so long.

4. To be a little earnest, the racial politics are what make it (debatably) worth posting. A group of rednecks jump a black guy, and then black people swarm in to his defense, and end up trouncing the growing crowd on the white guy's side.

5. There are so many camera angles and hot takes out there! There is more footage than the best directors ever dreamed of in the pre-digital age. That's not unique to this fight, of course.

I still feel a little queasy about posting this, but my age-old rule is to err on the side of posting impulsively, so here we go!

NickS writes: A change of tone from the last article I sent in, this is a cute history of the Russian astronaut dogs (with many photos):

The next dogs chosen to orbit were regarded as the most intelligent, quick-witted, and hardy of the dozen. These dogs went by Vilna and Kaplya, but just before launch, one of the scientists who worked with the dogs decided that they should have western-sounding names to appeal to a wider audience. The team changed their names to Belka (Белка, literally "squirrel" and also "whitey") and Strelka (Стрелка, "little arrow"). Belka was appointed as leader of the mission because she was more active and successful in tests.

I had no idea about this follow-up story (or that there is a Presidential Pet Museum)

During dinner, Khrushchev sat next to Jacqueline Kennedy. Caroline Kennedy later recalled to the BBC that her mom "ran out of things to talk about, so she asked about the dog, Strelka, that the Russians had shot into space. During the conversation, my mother asked about Strelka's puppies. A few months later, a puppy arrived and my father had no idea where the dog came from and couldn't believe my mother had done that." Khrushchev had sent one of Strelka's puppies--a member of the Soviet space dog royal family--to live at the White House. Her name was Pushinka (Пушинка or "Fluffy").

When she arrived, Pushinka was examined by the Central Intelligence Agency at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center over fears that she may be concealing an implanted listening device. She was x-rayed, screened with a magnetometer, and inspected with a sonogram. Pushinka was found free of any subversive devices and welcomed into the family of White House pets. In fact, Pushinka and Caroline Kennedy's Welsh terrier Charlie had four Russo-American puppies together, which President Kennedy referred to as the "pupniks." "I like to think of it as a Cold War romance," says Andrew Hager, historian in residence at the Presidential Pet Museum.

Heebie's take: I'm starting to think that maybe all dogs should have Russian names. We do have a cat named Fluffy and she is such a Pushinka at heart.