Keeping up with the spate of education coverage fostered by the release of Waiting for Superman is an impossible task. But the story is not a new one…. This from Timothy Noah’s 10 part series on The United States of Inequality: Throughout the first three-quarters of the 20th century a growing supply of better-educated workers met the demand created by new technologies. The 1944 G.I. Bill, which paid tuition for returning servicemen, played an important role; so did the Sputnik-inspired...

The thrust of Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales’ comments at a business conference in Kuala Lumpur was that Wikileaks may have good intentions but it is a reckless enterprise that could “get people killed.” And it’s not a wiki: Wales also expressed irritation over the website’s use of the term “Wiki” in its name, which refers to a site that allows different users to collaborate and make contributions. “I would distance myself from WikiLeaks, I wish...

Will the truth hurt? Alkalized cocoa, corn syrup and artificial vanilla. They’re safe to eat, but are they natural? On Monday, Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, the Vermont ice cream brand that is synonymous with funky flavors and environmentally and socially responsible behavior, agreed to phase out its use of the term “All Natural” for ice creams and frozen yogurts that contain processed or artificial ingredients. The move comes a month after a Washington-based public health...

Muslims have been worshiping in the abandoned building that is now the center of debate — two blocks from the edge of Ground Zero — for more than a year. The only question left is whether the community center will get built. Most of us don’t know that. I learned it from an excellent report aired tonight on 60 Minutes tonight. They also traveled to DC: It occurred to us that there is, of course, another Ground Zero: 184 people were killed at the Pentagon on 9/11. One face of the...

On the SNL premiere last night* and Sunday Morning this morning, she was booted from Sesame Street because she’s too hot for some parents. She’s got the cut scene — “Come on Elmo don’t you want to play?” — on her YouTube channel. Three million views and counting. Said Sesame Street: “Sesame Street has always been written on two levels, for the child and adult. We use parodies and celebrity segments to interest adults in the show because we know that a...

The 4 min version of Steven Johnson’s new book… Johnson says of the video: I have to admit when the good folks at Riverhead mentioned that they were working on an animated video promoting Where Good Ideas Come From, I wasn’t fully convinced it was going to be worth the effort. But the absolutely brilliant video they produced with Cognitive Media in the UK shows how wrong I was. It’s genuinely worth watching multiple times, which is something I’ve certainly never said...

Cash’s cover of the song, considered by many to be his epitaph, showed up at #96 on the German singles chart this month… I’ve always been moved by the video, shot in his Hendersonville, TN, home and featuring footage from the closed House of Cash Museum. Archival footage includes Cash riding a steam train in Zebulon, Georgia (not too far from where I now live), as Abe Cross in the 1971 movie, Gunfight saying, “You stay the hell away from me, you hear,” performing at Folsom...

So says Bloomberg Business Week in this week’s cover story. Facebook is changing the way advertising is done: The company has developed a potentially powerful kind of advertising that’s more personal—more “social,” in Facebook’s parlance—than anything that’s come before. Ads on the site sit on the far right of the page and are such a visual afterthought that most users never click them. These ads can evolve, though, from useless little billboards into content,...

From the director of An Inconvenient Truth… The NYTimes: Consider the following statistics cited in the film: the annual cost of prison for an inmate is more than double what is spent on an individual public school student. Eight years after Congress passed the No Child Left Behind act, with the goal of 100 percent proficiency in math and reading, most states hovered between 20 and 30 percent proficiency, and 70 percent of eighth graders could not read at grade level. By 2020, only an estimated...

Blockbuster is expected to shutter at least 1,000 of its 3,000 stores in a “Pre-Arranged” Chapter 11 Proceeding. The plan to turn the company around, led by billionaire investor Carl C. Icahn, is to move to on-demand movies delivered through cable services and the Internet. The single advantage the company hopes to cash in on is that it can deliver some movie titles on the day they are released. Competitors like Netflix and Redbox have to wait 28 days. But Apple and Amazon also offer...

So far three young men are claiming anti-gay Bishop Eddie Long used cash, cars and expensive trips to pressure them into sexual relationships. On Inside Edition last night, Ted Haggard said he can empathize: “I think he’s heartbroken, I think he’s confused,” Haggard said on the program Wednesday. “I’ll tell you how I felt. I felt like I’d ruined my life.” Haggard’s wife, Gayle, who stood by her husband during the scandal that forced his 2006 resignation,...

Following up on last night’s post… Saxby’s office says it was the source of yesterday’s hateful slur. AJC: But in a statement, Chambliss’ office said it has not discovered exactly who was behind the slur, and has turned the matter over to the Senate sergeant at arms. The office employs 42 people. “The [sergeant at arms] has worked side by side with our personnel to determine whether the comment in question emanated from our office. That appears to be the case,”...

The hateful comment was left today by “Jimmy” on a Joe.My.God post about the DADT cloture vote. Joe gave his geek readers the commenter’s IP address and told them to get busy! The geeks complied quickly. The AJC’s Jim Galloway takes it from there: U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss confirmed Tuesday that he investigating whether one of his staffers left a threatening slur on an Internet discussion of the right of gays and lesbians to serve openly in the U.S. military. “We have...

At the conclusion of a substantial essay examining the question of whether the controlled extinction of carnivorous species would be a good thing, philosophy professor Jeff McMahan cautiously concludes: It would be good to prevent the vast suffering and countless violent deaths caused by predation. There is therefore one reason to think that it would be instrumentally good if predatory animal species were to become extinct and be replaced by new herbivorous species, provided that this could occur...

The movie, that is, not the mesh of personal ties facilitated by a website on the Internet… Next week’s NYMagazine cover story serves up 6,000 words on The Social Network, the movie about Mark Zuckerberg and the founding of Facebook. For the piece Mark Harris spoke with its director David Fincher, writer Aaron Sorkin, star Jesse Eisenberg (he plays Zuck), and Justin Timberlake (he plays Napster co-founder Sean Parker, who went on to be Facebook’s first president), among others,...

Nick Kristof celebrates its ability to get more kids in school in Zimbabwe: When I asked Abel what he dreamed of, he said “a bicycle” — so that he could cut the six hours he spent walking to and from school and, thus, take better care of the younger orphans. Last week, Abel got his wish. A Chicago-based aid organization, World Bicycle Relief, distributed 200 bicycles to students in Abel’s area who need them to get to school. One went to Abel. That’s the first of a planned 20,000 bicycles...

This ought to make one group of TMV regulars happy. A Jake Tapper exclusive: President Obama will announce this week that Elizabeth Warren, the Harvard Law School professor who first proposed the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, will be named to a special position reporting to both him and to the Treasury Department and tasked with heading the effort to get the new federal agency standing, a knowledgeable Democrat told ABC News. Warren’s title will be Assistant to the President &...

The NYTimes reports on the latest research: Experts have long known that some kinds of people — including the mentally impaired, the mentally ill, the young and the easily led — are the likeliest to be induced to confess. There are also people like Mr. Lowery, who says he was just pressed beyond endurance by persistent interrogators. New research shows how people who were apparently uninvolved in a crime could provide such a detailed account of what occurred, allowing prosecutors to claim that...

That’s Mark Zuckerberg’s personal philosophy from his Facebook profile as reported by Jose Antonio Vargas in his 6,000 word New Yorker piece, The Face of Facebook — Mark Zuckerberg Opens Up. A snippet: He walked into the house, which is painted in various shades of blue and beige, except for the kitchen, which is a vibrant yellow. Colors don’t matter much to Zuckerberg; a few years ago, he took an online test and realized that he was red-green color-blind. Blue is Facebook’s...

Alexia Tsotsis says that if you were an Internet hipster you’d have seen this three days ago: French designer Evan Roth has made a ten minute music video consisting of popular gifs vs. the typical fragmented Girl Talk tomfoolery (from the 2006 album Night Ripper). While Roth’s cleverly titled “Cache Rules Everything Around Me” is absolutely not the first time someone has combined Internet culture imagery and music (see: Paper Rad) it is perhaps the longest and most monumental...