There seems like a bumper crop of good stuff to see and read today, so in the spirit of Marginal Revolution, here’s a bunch of stuff in no particular order:
Huge roundup of recent studies on student well-being in the age of Covid-19. Everything I’ve seen as a teacher in the last two years tracks here.
“The pandemic has amounted to a comprehensive assault on the American public school. It strained the ties—not just physical but also social and even psychological—that connect American families and children to the schools that are essential for delivering almost every support our welfare state provides. Kids missed out on all of it while schools were closed: not just academic learning but also nutrition, and exercise, and friendship networks, and stable relationships with caring adults, and health care, and access to social workers, and even the attention, at home, of parents unburdened by the need to provide child care during school hours.”
You can also find NPR coverage on the same reports here.
Also from the Atlantic, I love this 1905 photo of Japanese soldiers after the Battle of Port Arthur in the Russo-Japanese War.
Speaking of Russia, Dostoevsky’s first publication was apparently a Russian translation of Balzac’s Eugênie Grandet with enough changes in vocabulary, pacing, tone to be more like an adaptation than a strict translation. I doubt it’s as severe as Icelandic Dracula, though.
From Politico, the most recent crop of Trump administration memoirs seem to be bombing. I’m probably too keyed-in to literary fiction sales, because it’s hard to imagine 20,000+ copies sold in twelve months being a bomb. There are big, buzzy, award-winning novels that get half that number and are still considered winners! Anyway, the early Trump staffer blockbusters seem to have been a one-time thing: nobody actually cared that much about Michael Bolton or James Comey, they just wanted the inside scoop on Donald Trump back when he could still start WWIII with a tweet. Or maybe the GOP’s book-buying machine, one of the worst-kept secrets in publishing, is finally flagging.