A quick digest on what I’ve been reading now that I’m back in Duluth after two weeks on the road:

Sometimes I think I could just spend my entire blogging life commenting on George Packer’s work, and he shows off his characteristic range of observation in his account of raising children within the New York school system. He captures the absurdity of the tracking system that tests two-year-olds for admission to preschools, the anxiety suffused through the American meritocracy, and the Trump era over-politicizing of everything by well-meaning progressives and its ensuing effect on children. The opening paragraph is as brilliant a summation of the conscientious parent’s paradox as I’ve ever encountered.

Sticking with the education system, you’ve probably heard about STEM education and how it is supposed to prepare students for the jobs of the future. In American Affairs, Jared Woodward marshals the best data and literature available to show that injecting technology into classrooms has a detrimental effect on actual learning and is a colossal waste of money. One could argue this conflates STEM with a more general influence of technology on learning, but the results are clear enough: the emerging system serves technology, instead of technology serving students.

As an undergrad I frequently took Amtrak back and forth between Minnesota and Washington DC, a wonderfully leisurely way to start or end a semester and move large amounts of personal goods. One of the great highlights of these journeys was a meal in the dining car, where I got to meet random people and share a reasonably good meal. To this, I bring you the deplorable news that Amtrak is beginning to eliminate its dining cars. Most disgustingly, Amtrak is justifying the death of the dining car on the backs of millennials because its officials think we enjoy leading harried, cheap lives devoid of human contact. (Or maybe they know this lifestyle is more a product of being overworked and enduring stagnant incomes, but they also know lazy tropes can help them justify cost-cutting.) This millennial is incensed, and so is Rainesford Stauffer in the New York Times.

On a lighter but still millennial-focused note, Jia Tolentino, the New Yorker’s Official Scribe of the Millennial Zeitgeist, starts a review on the film “Hustlers” but ends up discoursing on her nostalgia for 2008 pop music and its ability to capture that pre-recession moment. If your memories of 2008 also involve slurping on jungle juice while “Love in this Club” pulses away at an underage party, this article is for you. And yes, other generations, you now must endure millennials finding nostalgia for the stupid pop culture moments that defined our quickly fading youth, just as you subjected us to these reminders as we grew up. How fleeting it all seems now. And does anyone else think M.I.A’s “Paper Planes” is a glaring omission from Tolentino’s list?

Let’s close with a quote from Wendell Berry in a semi-recent New Yorker interview:

The thing that worries me very much is how much language we’re using now that is so abstract as to require no thought at all. I mean very important words. Justice, for instance. I had a list, I think, of eleven kinds of justice. Restorative justice, climate justice, economic justice, social justice, and so on. The historian John Lukacs, whose work I greatly respect, said that “the indiscriminate pursuit of justice . . .  may lay the world to waste.” And he invoked modern war, which kills indiscriminately for the sake of some “justice.” He thought the pursuit of truth, small “t,” much safer. I want to remember—and this comes to me from my dad, to some extent—that our system of justice requires a finding of truth, and it labors to see that justice is never done by one person. There’s a jury of twelve. There are two lawyers, at least, and a judge. It doesn’t always work perfectly. Sometimes the result is injustice. But, the effort to discover the truth that goes ahead of judgment is extremely important. It requires us to think about the process and what’s involved.

It’s a very humbling thing, finally. People speak of “the environment.” They don’t know what they’re talking about. “The environment” refers to no place in particular. We’re alive only in some place in particulars.