[snip] How the other half now eats. Tom Philpott writes in the online environmental magazine Grist: “Historically, people of limited means have tended to scrape by on what’s locally available, while the wealthy have used their resources to draw in fancy food from far away. Now, that situation has turned upside down. . . . Micro-farms dot the areas outside metropolises, producing hand-picked, highly nutritious, and pungent microgreens to be plopped on lawyers’, accountants’, and high-tech professionals’ plates for astronomical prices. Meanwhile, the people who staff the vast services economy get the dreck.”
[snip] More math courses may not be what Chicago public high schools need. In Catalyst Chicago Maureen Kelleher quotes Christine Franzen, math department chair at Senn High School: “I’ve had kids who had trouble with multiplication tables, even addition, who were in Algebra II.” No word on how they got there.
[snip] “Soft-headed spiritualism is its own form of fundamentalism,” argues Paul Powers of Lewis & Clark College, quoted in Martin Marty’s “Context.” “The suggestion that the ‘true essence’ of all religions is spirituality” denies the fact that “religions and religious people are mind-bogglingly different. Why American liberals who seem so happy to embrace difference in various contexts want, when it comes to religion, to sweep [all differences] under the rug of some invented, undefined, supposedly universal ‘spirituality’ remains one of the true religious mysteries of our times.”