Sunday Tabs
The Hill, “Schiff’s swearing-in sets record in U.S. Senate.” tl;dr: He took the oath of office three separate times in less than a month.
Kathleen DuVal, NYT, “Enough With the Land Acknowledgments.” tl;dr: While well-intentioned, pro forma recitations of which Native tribes used to own the land actually marginalize those who are still with us.
WSJ, “Long the Star Pupils, Girls Are Losing Ground to Boys.” tl;dr: COVID shutdowns harmed girls far more than boys and they still haven’t recovered.
John Scalzi, Whatever, “20 Years of Old Man’s War” The author looks back on his groundbreaking first novel.
Ellen Cushing, The Atlantic, “Americans Need to Party More.” tl;dr: We extend fewer social events than we used to.
I would have trouble describing the tone of Scalzi’s work. “Humorous” comes to mind, but “Old Man’s War” and a number of his other works aren’t humorous. “Light” may have a little accuracy, but on the other hand, he deals with some fairly serious themes. “Straightforward” is about the only thing that feels accurate to me, but I don’t think that would convey anything to someone who hadn’t read him.
On the girls in school issue I think girls have benefitted more from schooling so its not surprising that not having school available would affect them more. I would expect them to catch up. It is interesting that the people who claim that schools are useless and teachers are awful are also complaining a lot about losses during covid. Turns out teachers and schools are valuable. Also of note, test scores dropped everywhere and there wasn’t much difference between states that had long lockdowns and those that had short ones.
Steve
Thanks for the Kathleen Duval piece. Acknowledgement of First Nations presence in the Americas, prior to European colonization, seems a lot like “Thank you for your service”: a nice thing to do, but not as helpful as concrete help.
Old Man’s War to me is still a seminal sci-fi novel, at least on par with anything written since. That being said, Scalzi’s newest stuff has been “meh” to me. He has a good political bite to his personal blogging still.