At the New York Times, Nicholas Kristof highlights a study finding that a classroom of students of a strong fourth-grade teacher will collectively earn $700,000 more over their lifetimes than those taught by a weak teacher.
Kristof on the Value of Teachers
Thursday Links
The Rake is at it again, taking The Believer down a peg.Adventures in niche publishing: A new Paris Review?Simon at Bloggasm considers Harriet Klausner, the widely reviled #1 reviewer at Amazon.And, finally, some spot-on humor at the New Yorker this week.
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Natural Opposition
Recommended Reading: Michele Filgate’s interview with Leslie Jamison, who participated in Year in Reading this year.
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Surrealist and Sweet
I’ve written before about Haruki Murakami‘s advice column, but at that point it was still a work-in-progress with few details or samples available. A month later, the submission period for questions is over and Murakami’s responses are being published. The Washington Post calls the column “surrealist and sweet,” and NPR has reported on the ongoing Mr.Murakami’s Place project as well, with an emphasis on semi-magical stories involving cats.
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Jenny Zhang on the Importance of Funny Writers
Jenny Zhang on "the hardest and most worthwhile thing to achieve in writing:" making people laugh.
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You Faking Fakers
This quick-and-dirty Times article about a crackdown on fake reviews includes one of the best sentences to appear in the Gray Lady of late: “Faking reviews often begins with faked reviews of the company faking the reviews.”
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Sick
What drives the Year in Reading alum and Boy, Snow, Bird author Helen Oyeyemi? If we can believe her interview with The Globe and Mail, it isn’t just the enjoyment she derives from writing fiction. When asked why she wrote her new book, she said: “A few reasons, but mainly to see if I could…at this point, it’s perversity that keeps me writing.”
Janie Crawford and Tea Cake on Air
To commemorate the book’s 75th anniversary, WNYC and WQXR Radio will present a live radio play of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. New Yorkers will be able to catch the broadcast on February 29th and March 1st, and then the rest of the nation can hear it in September.
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What do Liza Minnelli, Michael Jackson, and Abu Ghraib have in common?
Picador’s digital marketing team put together a playful web series for Wayne Koestenbaum‘s Humiliation. John Waters has called the book “the funniest, smartest, most heartbreaking yet powerful book I’ve read in a long time.”
A rebuttal: http://www.theawl.com/2012/01/the-evil-economics-of-judging-teachers