“Even as the SAT and its chief rival, the ACT, have become less important in admissions, they are becoming more universal for a different purpose: as a measure of high school achievement. More and more high schools have turned to the SATs and ACTs as their standard assessment tool for their students’ progress, entirely separate from the college admissions process. The result is a standardized testing landscape that has been shaken up, and whose future looks murky, at best.”
“Memo to the Media: You Are Not Obligated to Cover a Crackpot Like Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.”
“One key area the WGA is keen to bring attention to is the total lack of transparency from streaming services over viewership numbers, a process that has left many writers and showrunners unable to negotiate for fairer pay.”
“This isn’t a safe place to practice medicine anymore.”
RIP, Newton Minnow, former FCC Chair who in the early 1960s famously decried the state of American television as a “vast wasteland”.
RIP, Vida Blue, multi-time All Star and 1971 MVP pitcher for the A’s and Giants.
RIP, Chris Strachwitz, self-described “song catcher” whose label helped record and preserve an incredible quantity of music from the southern United States and Mexico.
“Netflix Users Are Trying To Game The System To Prevent Their Favorite Shows From Getting Canceled“. See that earlier story about lack of transparency from streaming services? This is where it takes us.
The mystery of the pink beret-wearing insurrectionist has been solved.
“A battery holds energy to be used later. Aquifers can be leveraged to do something similar: They can exploit the insulating properties of the Earth to conserve thermal energy and transfer it to and from buildings above ground. The temperature of water in an aquifer tends to stay fairly stable. This provides a way to heat and cool nearby structures with energy stored in water, instead of burning natural gas in furnaces or tapping into fossil-fuel-derived electricity to run air conditioners.”
“Here are a few of the wildest ways that Hollywood coped—for better or, mostly, for worse—with the 2007–2008 writers strike, producing some compelling, unexpected, and ultimately weird work along the way.”
RIP, Joe Kapp, former NFL and CFL quarterback, first Latino quarterback to lead a team to the Super Bowl.
“Clark is part of Archiving The Black Web, a group of digital archivists seeking to preserve the stories of Black people and extend existing archival practices to the digital sphere. This group and others hope to document not just the content created on the platform but how Black people use it for communication and community. They see an urgency to preserving Black Twitter in a world in which Black history and Black women’s cultural labor are undervalued or unacknowledged — and where the future of Twitter seems unknown.”
“This was a civil trial, not a criminal one, so Trump is not a convicted sexual assailant. But for the first time, a court of law has assessed the credibility of the former president against that of one of his accusers.”
“Sometimes the truth wins out.”
RIP, Deacon Jones, former MLB player, scout, and coach, first Black man recognized by the Hall of Fame, longtime executive/face of the franchise for the Sugar Land Space Cowboys.
Two headlines: George Santos Charged With Wire Fraud, Money Laundering, False Statements, George Santos Surrenders to Face Federal Criminal Charges. This really was quite a week, wasn’t it?
RIP, Denny Crum, Hall of Fame college basketball coach who led the Louisville men’s team to two NCAA championships.
“The point, as you can see, isn’t to remediate any specific set of concerns. It’s to get a news organization into the posture of a supplicant. That both defangs the news organization from playing its proper role.”
RIP, Jaclyn Zeman, actor best known for her long stint on General Hospital.
“Part of why so many men turn out to be like that — creepy and unsafe — is because the self-appointed and/or nominally God-ordained Moral Instructors spend more energy policing women for potential violations of their alleged ideal form of femininity than they spend teaching men forms of masculinity that don’t make them creepy and unsafe.”
“One thing last night made clear is that not only doesn’t “fact-checking in real time” work on Trump, it’s actually JUST WHAT HE WANTS. Allow me to explain…”
RIP, Hodding Carter III, journalist and civil rights activist who was the spokesperson for the State Department during the Iran hostage crisis.
““The list was endless when we began considering the conditions that could fall under that language,” said Rep. Julianne Young, a Republican from Blackfoot. “We want to make sure that health of the mother doesn’t become so broad that everything becomes an exception to take the life of a potential child.””
There is no reasonable, practical way to codify every possible medical complication into a law. Better to leave such decisions about saving the mothers’ life or health to the discretion of medical experts.
You missed RIP Don Denkinger of the 1985 WS fame.