Iserotope Extras - Issue #47

Welcome to Iserotope Extras! This week, I'm featuring articles and podcasts that help deepen topics that have emerged in previous issues. If you’ve been following the debate on the teaching of grit as a character skill, you’ll love the first piece. If you’re still reeling, as I am, from the horror of the attack in Orlando, you’ll find some solace in the second piece. If you care about race and education, and if you’re interested in the role that journalism can play to challenge inequity, you’ll appreciate the third piece. And finally, if your life is totally great right now, but you might be yearning for a change, you’ll be grateful for the last piece. Please enjoy!

The Limits of “Grit”

Grit is hot. In Issue #43, I highlighted Paul Tough’s article, “How Kids Learn Resilience,” which challenged Angela Duckworth’s research on grit and its consequences in schools. Now David Denby, author of Lit Up, goes further, excoriating Prof. Duckworth’s “bootstraps” philosophy as “corporate” and lacking in ethics and morality. (Meanwhile, we also learn that Denby, an old-time public schools kind of guy, does not like KIPP.)

A White Horse, The Memory Palace Podcast

Last week, Extras subscriber Kester sent me this excellent episode of The Memory Palace, which focuses on the history of the White Horse Bar in Berkeley. Established in 1933, the White Horse is the oldest gay bar in the United States. Poetically, this nine-minute ode reminds us how far the LGBT community has come, and how far we still need to go.

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Friends & family updated 208+ Kindles this weekend! Thank you! (Also, Extras subscriber Abby suggested this "Update-o-Meter."[/caption]

An Interview with Nikole Hannah-Jones

Part of the mission of Extras is making sure that you know about my favorite people. Nikole Hannah-Jones, whose latest article on school resegregation, “Choosing a School for My Daughter in a Segregated School,” appeared in last week’s Extras, is my favorite education reporter. To learn more about her, please listen to this interview on the Longform Podcast. A journalist through and through, Ms. Hannah-Jones talks about reporting, race, her award-winning story on This American Life, and how to ask the right questions.

Screw Mastery

Accomplished writer and reporter Hanna Rosin, who wrote “The Silicon Valley Suicides” last December, writes this piece to explain her decision, in her 40s, to switch from print to podcast. Now a co-host on Invisibilia, Ms. Rosin explains why she left the Malcolm Gladwell definition of mastery to try something totally outside her comfort zone. Spoiler: It’s to feel “goofily, absurdly proud for figuring something out.”

That’s it for this issue! Your homework this week is to take an article or podcast you’ve seen in Extras and work it naturally into conversation with a friend or family member, at which point you let that person know about Iserotope Extras, and then you encourage them to subscribe. Great!