Piles and Piles of Excellence

Lots of great reading this week:

Fear of a Black President by Ta-Nehisi Coates of The Atlantic. (Coates will be on Up with Chris Hayes, MSNBC, this Saturday to discuss the article.)

Stats on U.S. nationwide school tests over the past 40 years. The trend is up, and mostly way up. But you'd never know that from the national discussion on education.

Excellent graphs from NPR on the number of immigrants in the U.S. in 1910, 1960 and 2010, showing that the percentage of foreign-born people in the U.S. is lower now than it was in 1910. It's just the ethnicities that have changed. A good companion for this story on how everything thing we think is true about Mexican immigration is wrong.

A report on the Gates Foundation's Inventing the Toilet of the 21st Century. (Yes, I've written about the toilet competition before.)

A brilliant essay on The Problem of Men Explaining Things.

Super fun article on the great vowel shift that's happening in the northern U.S. I never knew I was a part of a vowel movement until now.