Tabs to Start the New Year, 2022

I accumulated a pile of tabs while I was away. A warning: I finally coughed up for a digital subscription to the Washington Post, so I'll be linking to more stories there.

Discovering Dr. Wu. "The world reveres Chien-Shiung Wu as a groundbreaking nuclear physicist who made a startling find 65 years ago. But to me, she was Grandma — and I long to know more about her private universe."

Big Trouble in Little Rock. Radley Balko's grim, lengthy look at the racism and corruption of the Little Rock police department. Ugh. 

The Great Escape. Why workers are quitting their jobs, after (during!) the trauma of the pandemic. 

A Thousand Rivers. What the modern world has forgotten about children and learning. By Carol Black. "Talk to gifted scientists, writers, artists, entrepreneurs. You will find they learned like a Yanomami child learns, through keen observation, experimentation, immersion, freedom, participation, through real play and real work, through the kind of free activity where the distinction between work and play disappears. Talk to a really good auto mechanic, carpenter, farmer, fiddle player, web designer, film editor, songwriter, photographer, chef, and you will find they learned the same way."

The Great Shoplifting Freakout by Amanda Mull. Why is it so hard to figure out if the "surge in theft" is real?

Five Myths about Highways. By David Zipper, who studies transportation policy and technology at Harvard's Kennedy School.

Two posts written about a month apart, two years ago, by a Sri Lankan writer, now living in the U.S. I Lived Through Collapse. America Is Already There. And Collapse Takes A Lifetime. America Is Just Getting Started. (Talk about having a perspective.) Oh, I guess he wrote a third one soon after: The Sadness of American Collapse. I have to read all three of these and process them. I have not done this.

And just in time for the anniversary of January 6, the Atlantic brought together its journalists to look at the implications of the insurrection, its ongoing fallout, and growing threat. It's a video conversation that I also have not been able to bring myself to watch.