Dear Commons Community,

Jonathon Malesic,  who teaches writing at Southern Methodist University, and is the author of  The End of Burnout, had a guest essay in The New York Times yesterday entitled, “There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore”. His message is that college students no longer do reading assignments because

“it looks to them as if success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies. If this is the economy students believe they’re entering, then why should they make the effort to read?”

Having taught for decades,  I have not seen the same situation among my students, however, there may be a kernel of truth in what Malesic is saying  based on the interests and goals of the students he teaches.  Without a doubt, society has moved to multi-modal forms of information delivery (Internet, Google, Youtube, AI) and I have incorporated more video-based assignments in my lessons that have supplemented and in some cases, replaced reading assignments. I do not use textbooks and instead assign articles and other shorter reading pieces. However, in most classes, I continue to assign a standard “book report” based on current books related to education, culture, and biography.  I am fairly confident that students do the reading based on their written and oral reporting.  Over the past year, I have also encouraged my students to use AI in these assignments as long as they make proper citation and attribution.

Below is Malesic’s entire essay.  

I agree with his final statement that assigning nine books in one class is too many.

Tony

———————————————-

The New York Times

Guest Essay

There’s a Very Good Reason College Students Don’t Read Anymore

Oct. 25, 2024

By Jonathan Malesic

In 2011, I taught a college class on the meaning and value of work. It was a general-education class, the sort that students say they have to “get out of the way” before they move on to their major courses. Few of the students were avid readers, and many held jobs that constrained their study time.

I assigned them nine books. I knew I was asking a lot, but the students did great. Most of them aced their reading quizzes on Henry David Thoreau’s “Walden” and Plato’s “The Republic.” In class, our desks in a circle, we had lively discussions.

After 13 years that included a pandemic and the advent of generative A.I., that reading list seems not just ambitious but absurd. I haven’t assigned an entire book in four years.

Nationwide, college professors report steep declines in students’ willingness and ability to read on their own. To adapt, instructors are assigning less reading and giving students time in class to complete it.

It’s tempting to lament the death of a reliable pathway to learning and even pleasure. But I’m beginning to think students who don’t read are responding rationally to the vision of professional life our society sells them. In that vision, productivity does not depend on labor, and a paycheck has little to do with talent or effort. For decades, students have been told that college is about career readiness and little else. And the task of puzzling out an author’s argument will not prepare students to thrive in an economy that seems to run on vibes.

Recent ads for Apple Intelligence, an A.I. feature, make the vision plain. In one, the actor Bella Ramsey uses artificial intelligence to cover for the fact they haven’t read the pitch their agent emailed. It works, and the project seems like a go. Is the project actually any good? It doesn’t matter. The vibes will provide.

Even in the ostensibly true depictions of working life that students see, like the “day in my life” videos that were popular on TikTok a couple of years ago, intellectual labor seems optional and entry-level corporate positions seem like a series of rooftop hangouts, free lunches and team-building happy hours — less a job than a lifestyle. And of course the ultimate lifestyle job is being an influencer, a tantalizing prospect that seems always just one viral post away.

The most visible college students are big-time athletes, who these days can earn money — in some cases, millions of dollars — through sponsorship deals. But however hard these students push themselves, their earnings are officially not for their work on the field but for their marketability off it.

Once students graduate, the jobs they most ardently desire are in what they proudly call the “sellout” fields of finance, consulting and tech. To outsiders, these industries are abstract and opaque, trading on bluster and jargon. One thing is certain, though: That’s where the money is.

All in all, it looks as if success follows not from knowledge and skill but from luck, hype and access to the right companies. If this is the economy students believe they’re entering, then why should they make the effort to read? For that matter, how will any effort in school prepare them for careers in which, apparently, effort is not rewarded?

Given all this, it’s easy to lose faith in humanistic learning. Universities themselves offer little solace. They constantly promote the idea that a degree is about earning power above all else. They embrace influencer culture and probably benefit from viral phenomena like Bama Rush. They certainly aren’t shooing away corporate recruiters.

But teaching is an inherently hopeful profession, and as much as students worry me, they also give me hope. I often see my writing students push themselves past what’s easy or rational. They get excited about their research projects; sometimes they even ponder whether to use a period or a semicolon to separate two sentences.

The fact is, not all students aim to sail on vibes. Some want to do work that makes more than money. Some finance majors do, too. And others, God bless them, just want to learn what they can and worry about work later.

It’s up to students to decide whether they’ll resist intellectual inertia. All I can do is demonstrate that it is worth it to read, to pause, to think, to revise, to reread, to discuss, to revise again. I can, in the time students are with me, offer them chances to defy their incentives and see what happens.

I need to get back to assigning books. Nine is too many. But one? They can read one. Next semester, they will.

Dear Commons Community,

MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough suggested yesterday (see video below) that new reporting on GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump’s alleged praise of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler isn’t the so-called October surprise of the 2024 election.

Instead, the surprise(s) are the controversial and often divisive comments that the former president is saying himself, with less than two weeks until Election Day.

The “Morning Joe” co-host cited Trump’s recent escalating authoritarian rhetoric such as his vow to purge political opponents, declaration he would use the military on U.S. citizens and description of high-profile Democrats as “enemies from within.”

“That’s the October surprise and that’s Donald Trump’s biggest problem right now,” Scarborough said.

I hope Scarborough is right!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell delivered a scathing assessment of the modern Republican Party in an upcoming biography, saying the “MAGA movement is completely wrong” and that Ronald Reagan “wouldn’t recognize” the party today. As reported by ABC News, The Associated Press, and CNN.

“I think Trump was the biggest factor in changing the Republican Party from what Ronald Reagan viewed and he wouldn’t recognize today,” McConnell told the Associated Press’ Michael Tackett for the upcoming biography “The Price of Power” obtained by CNN ahead of its release.

McConnell added that the former president has “done a lot of damage to our party’s image and our ability to compete.”

“Trump is appealing to people who haven’t been as successful as other people and providing an excuse for that…and you don’t deserve to think of yourself as less successful because things haven’t been fair,” he said.

Some of McConnell’s strongest comments were focused on Trump’s behavior after he lost the election in 2020, calling him “erratic.”

“Unfortunately, about half the Republicans in the country believe whatever he says,” McConnell said at the time, adding…”I think I’m pretty safe in saying it’s not just the Democrats who are counting the days until he leaves on January 20, but the Republicans as well.” McConnell gave Tackett access to his personal archive, including an oral history he has been recording since 1995, for the book.

The Republican leader eventually voted to acquit Trump during the second impeachment trial, focused on the former president’s involvement in the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol. However, Tackett reports that McConnell had leaned towards voting to convict at certain points.

“I’m not at all conflicted about whether what the president did is an impeachable offense. I think it is. Urging an insurrection and people attacking the Capitol as a direct result … is about as close to an impeachable offense as you can imagine, with the possible exception of maybe being an agent for another country,” said McConnell.

“I don’t know whether you can make a conclusive argument that he’s directly responsible for them storming the Capitol, but I think it’s not in dispute that those folks would not have been here in the first place if he had not asked them to come and to disrupt the actual acceptance of the outcome of the election,” the Senate GOP leader said.

The Kentucky Republican did not mince words, calling Trump a “sleazeball,” a “narcissist” and saying that the former president is “stupid as well as being ill-tempered.” He added that Trump is “not very smart, irascible, nasty, just about every quality you would not want somebody to have.”

While he dismissed Trump’s attacks against him, saying “every time he takes a shot at me, I think it’s good for my reputation,” he added that the former president’s attacks on his wife, Elaine Chao, Trump’s former Transportation Secretary, went too far.

In 2022, Trump referred to Chao as McConnell’s “China loving wife, Coco Chow” in a post on Truth Social. Tackett reports that Chao was “deeply disturbed” by the comments, and McConnell said that his wife is “not used to taking a punch.”

Tackett also reports that McConnell cried while addressing his staff in the hours after the attack on the Capitol. “You are my staff, and you are my responsibility,” he told them. “You are my family, and I hate the fact that you had to go through this.”

He called the rioters who entered the Senate chamber, “narcissistic, just like Donald Trump, sitting in the vice president’s chair taking pictures of themselves,” adding it was a “shocking occurrence and further evidence of Donald Trump’s complete unfitness for office.”

In a statement to CNN about his comments on the former president in the book, McConnell said, “Whatever I may have said about President Trump pales in comparison to what JD Vance, Lindsey Graham, and others have said about him, but we are all on the same team now.”

The Senate GOP leader and the former president have long had a rocky relationship, which Tackett details in the book. However, McConnell has endorsed Trump, and met with him back in June of this year during Trump’s meeting with Senate Republicans off the Hill.

McConnell did not restrict his comments in the biography to the former president. He also criticized Sen. Rick Scott, who led the Senate Republicans’ campaign committee during the 2022 midterms and proposed a highly controversial policy plan that was criticized by both parties, before unsuccessfully challenging McConnell for Senate GOP leader. Scott has announced he is running for leader again this year, though this time he will not be challenging McConnell, who will be stepping down from his leadership post.

“I don’t think Rick makes a very good victim,” quipped McConnell. “I think he did a poor job of running the (Senate campaign) committee. His plan was used by the Democrats against our candidates as late as the last weekend (before the election). He promoted the fiction that we were in the middle of a big sweep when there was no tangible evidence of it. And I think his campaign against me was some kind of ill-fated effort to turn the attention away from him and on to somebody else.”

McConnell will remain in his role as Senate GOP leader through the end of the year until the start of the new Congress in early January.

The Kentucky Republican, who has previously said he is most proud of his legacy in shaping the Supreme Court and leading the efforts to confirm three new conservative justices during Trump’s presidency, acknowledged that Justice Clarence Thomas “exercised pretty questionable judgment,” when he chose to accept trips from a major GOP donor. “But then again, I’m not sure what the rules are,” he added.

In April 2023, when asked about reports on the trips, McConnell accused Democratic senators of launching political attacks on Thomas. “The Supreme Court and the court system is a whole separate part of our Constitution,” he said. “And the Democrats, it seems to me, spend a lot of time criticizing individual members of the court and going after the court as an institution.”

McConnell has previously praised Thomas’ judgment and his work on the Court. “I have total confidence in Justice Thomas’s impartiality in every aspect of the work of the Court,” he said on the Senate floor in 2022, before the reports of Thomas’s travel came to light.

McConnell also expressed support for special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s actions around the 2020 election and the insurrection. “I think it was the single most – in a category by itself – of how wrong all of it was and there’s no doubt who inspired it, and I just hope that he’ll have to pay a price for it,” said McConnell. “If he hasn’t committed indictable offenses, I don’t know what one is.”

Wow!

Tony

Click on to enlarge.

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education reported bad news and good news yesterday regarding  enrollment in our country’s colleges and universities.  First-time freshmen enrollment is down considerably while overall enrollment is up.  Here is an excerpt courtesy of The Chronicle.

“Freshman enrollment declined 5 percent this fall, the first drop since the start of the pandemic in 2020, according to preliminary enrollment data from the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center.

Four-year public and private nonprofit colleges saw the largest declines in first-year students (-8.5 percent and -6.5 percent, respectively) compared with the same time last fall. Meanwhile, freshman enrollment fell by 0.4 percent at community colleges.

The center’s data, released in a new report yesterday, provide a partial snapshot of an especially turbulent enrollment cycle defined by the disastrous rollout of the new Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA). For months, technical errors with the form and numerous delays in the transmission of FAFSA data to colleges disrupted the admissions and financial-aid process at institutions nationwide.

The 2023-24 enrollment cycle was also the first since the U.S. Supreme Court banned the consideration of race in admissions, which injected further uncertainty into this fall’s enrollment equation. Demographic shifts continue to alter the racial and socioeconomic diversity of high-school graduates. And concerns about the cost of college and student debt remain top of mind for many lower-income students.

“It’s very hard to pinpoint any single cause of the changes, particularly in freshmen, this fall,” Doug Shapiro, the center’s executive director, said during a news conference on Tuesday. “There have been so many different headwinds, and so I hesitate to single any of these out.”

Despite the substantial decline in freshmen, the center’s new report reveals that overall enrollment is up 3 percent over all — the second straight year that higher education saw an increase (last year’s was up 2.1 percent). This fall’s uptick, Shapiro said, was driven by gains in non-freshman undergraduates and high-school students participating in dual-enrollment programs (who are counted as undergraduates but not as freshmen).

Both bachelor’s- and associate-degree programs saw enrollment growth (1.9 percent and 4.3 percent, respectively) this fall. There was a 2.1-percent uptick in enrollment in graduate programs. And more students are seeking shorter-term credentials: Enrollment in undergraduate certificate programs increased by 7.3 percent over last year.”

Bad news and good news indeed!

Tony

Click on to enlarge.

Dear Commons Community,

I have just finished reading Yuval Harari’s current bestseller, Nexus:  A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI.  As the title suggests, this is long (400 plus pages) and slow  book.  Actually as commented in a review published in The New York Times, it is actually two books. 

“Really, what we have is two separate books, neither brief. The first 200 pages are indeed historical in their way. Unfortunately, this is a dizzying, all-in version of history that swerves unsatisfyingly from Assyrian clay tablets to a 19th-century cholera outbreak to an adaptation of the “Ramayana” on Indian TV to the Peasants’ Revolt in medieval England to the Holocaust in Romania, and so on. It doesn’t feel controlled, or even particularly expert — and the effect is a little like a flight where the person sitting next to you is well-read, hyper-caffeinated and determined to tell you his Theory of Everything.

…the second half of the book is where the action is. The meat of “Nexus” is essentially an extended policy brief on A.I.: What are its risks, and what can be done? (We don’t hear much about the potential benefits because, as Harari points out, “the entrepreneurs leading the A.I. revolution already bombard the public with enough rosy predictions about them.”) It has taken too long to get here, but once we arrive Harari offers a useful, well-informed primer.”

I found the second half full of interesting and critical commentary.  See for instance my earlier posting entitled, “Insights from Yuval Harari’s “Nexus” – On Social Media Truth Loses!” His comments about the AI industry, the futility of trying to regulate it, and its inevitable dominance of our lives is sobering and probably true.

I recommend reading Nexus if you are interested in where AI is heading.  Feel free to go straight to Part II on page 191.

Below is the entire New York Times review.

Tony

——————————————————–

The New York Times

Pulling Back the Silicon Curtain

Yuval Noah Harari’s study of human communication may be anything but brief, but if you can make it to the second half, you’ll be both entertained and scared.

Yuval Noah Harari sounds the alarm on our A.I. future. “When the tech giants set their hearts on designing better algorithms, they can usually do it,” he writes. But will they?Credit…Philip Cheung for The New York Times

By Dennis Duncan

Dennis Duncan is the author of “Index, A History of the.”

Published Sept. 10, 2024. Updated Sept. 22, 2024

NEXUS: A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to AI, by Yuval Noah Harari

In the summer of 2022, a software engineer named Blake Lemoine was fired by Google after an interview with The Washington Post in which he claimed that LaMDA, the chatbot he had been working on, had achieved sentience.

A few months later, in March 2023, an open letter from the Future of Life Institute, signed by hundreds of technology leaders including Steve Wozniak and Elon Musk, called on A.I. labs to pause their research. Artificial intelligence, it claimed, posed “profound risks to society and humanity.”

The following month, Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of A.I.,” quit his post at Google, telling this newspaper that he regretted his life’s work. “It is hard to see how you can prevent the bad actors from using it for bad things,” he warned.

Over the last few years we have become accustomed to hare-eyed messengers returning from A.I.’s frontiers with apocalyptic warnings. And yet, real action in the form of hard regulation has been little in evidence. Last year’s executive order on A.I. was, as one commentator put it, “directional and aspirational” — a shrewdly damning piece of faint praise.

Meanwhile, stock prices for the tech sector continue to soar while the industry mutters familiar platitudes: The benefits outweigh the risks; the genie is already out of the bottle; if we don’t do it, our enemies will.

Yuval Noah Harari has no time for these excuses. In 2011, he published “Sapiens,” an elegant and sometimes profound history of our species. It was a phenomenon, selling over 25 million copies worldwide. Harari followed it up by turning his gaze forward with “Homo Deus,” in which he considered our future. At this point, Harari, an academic historian, became saddled with a new professional identity and a new circle of influence: A.I. expert, invited into the rarefied echelons of “scientists, entrepreneurs and world leaders.” “Nexus,” in essence, is Harari’s report from this world.

First, it must be said that the subtitle — “A Brief History of Information Networks From the Stone Age to A.I.” — is misleading. Really, what we have is two separate books, neither brief. The first 200 pages are indeed historical in their way. Unfortunately, this is a dizzying, all-in version of history that swerves unsatisfyingly from Assyrian clay tablets to a 19th-century cholera outbreak to an adaptation of the “Ramayana” on Indian TV to the Peasants’ Revolt in medieval England to the Holocaust in Romania, and so on. It doesn’t feel controlled, or even particularly expert — and the effect is a little like a flight where the person sitting next to you is well-read, hyper-caffeinated and determined to tell you his Theory of Everything.

In a nutshell, Harari’s thesis is that the difference between democracies and dictatorships lies in how they handle information. Dictatorships are more concerned with controlling data than with testing its truth value; democracies, by contrast, are transparent information networks in which citizens are able to evaluate and, if necessary, correct bad data.

All of this is sort of obvious-interesting, while also being too vague — too open to objection and counterexample — to constitute a useful theory of information. After a lot of time, we have arrived at a loose proof of what we hopefully felt already: Systems that are self-correcting — because they promote conversation and mutuality — are preferable to those that offer only blind, disenfranchised subservience.

In the end, however, this doesn’t really matter, because the second half of the book is where the action is. The meat of “Nexus” is essentially an extended policy brief on A.I.: What are its risks, and what can be done? (We don’t hear much about the potential benefits because, as Harari points out, “the entrepreneurs leading the A.I. revolution already bombard the public with enough rosy predictions about them.”) It has taken too long to get here, but once we arrive Harari offers a useful, well-informed primer.

The threats A.I. poses are not the ones that filmmakers visualize: Kubrick’s HAL trapping us in the airlock; a fascist RoboCop marching down the sidewalk. They are more insidious, harder to see coming, but potentially existential. They include the catastrophic polarizing of discourse when social media algorithms designed to monopolize our attention feed us extreme, hateful material. Or the outsourcing of human judgment — legal, financial or military decision-making — to an A.I. whose complexity becomes impenetrable to our own understanding.

Echoing Churchill, Harari warns of a “Silicon Curtain” descending between us and the algorithms we have created, shutting us out of our own conversations — how we want to act, or interact, or govern ourselves.

None of these scenarios, however, is a given. Harari points to the problem of email spam, which used to clog up our inboxes and waste millions of hours of productivity every day. And then, suddenly, it didn’t. In 2015, Google was able to claim that its Gmail algorithm had a 99.9 percent success rate in blocking genuine spam. “When the tech giants set their hearts on designing better algorithms,” writes Harari, “they can usually do it.”

Even in its second half, not all of “Nexus” feels original. If you pay attention to the news, you will recognize some of the stories Harari tells. But, at its best, his book summarizes the current state of affairs with a memorable clarity.

Parts of “Nexus” are wise and bold. They remind us that democratic societies still have the facilities to prevent A.I.’s most dangerous excesses, and that it must not be left to tech companies and their billionaire owners to regulate themselves.

That may just sound like common sense, but it is valuable when said by a global intellectual with Harari’s reach. It is only frustrating that he could not have done so more concisely.

Dear Commons Community,

The Georgia Supreme Court yesterday rejected an attempt by national and state Republicans to immediately reinstate recently passed election rules that a judge had ruled were invalid.

Fulton County Superior Court Judge Thomas Cox last week ruled that the State Election Board didn’t have the authority to adopt the new rules, and declared them “illegal, unconstitutional and void.” The Republican National Committee and the Georgia Republican Party had appealed that ruling to Georgia’s highest court. They asked that it be handled in an expedited manner and for the rules to be reinstated while the appeal was pending.

The Supreme Court unanimously declined the request for expedited handling and declined to put Cox’s order on hold. The court’s order says that once the appeal is docketed it will “proceed in the ordinary course,” which means it will likely take months before there’s a ruling.

The three-person Republican majority on the State Election Board, which was praised by former President Donald Trump during a rally in Atlanta in August, voted to adopt multiple rules in August and September over the objections of the board’s lone Democrat and the nonpartisan chair. The controversial new rules met resistance from the start, not least from local election officials who worried about changes so close to the general election. But yesterday’s order may mark the end of the legal fight over election rules in this critical battleground state — at least until after the election.

The rules that Cox declared invalid included three that have gotten a lot of attention. One would require three poll workers to count ballots — not votes — by hand once polls close. The other two had to do with the process to certify county election results.

Democrats and some voting rights groups had raised concerns that the rules could be used by allies of Trump to slow or deny certification or election results, or to cast doubt on results if the former president loses the presidential election to Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris.

While some prominent Republicans in Georgia, including Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, have criticized the flurry of last-minute rules the State Election Board introduced, the state and national Republican parties have been supportive. They have said the rules promote transparency and accountability in the state’s elections.

Cox’s ruling came in a lawsuit filed by Eternal Vigilance Action, an organization founded and led by former state Rep. Scot Turner, a Republican. The suit argued that the State Election Board overstepped its authority in adopting the seven rules. In addition to invalidating the rules, he ordered the State Election Board to immediately inform all state and local election officials that the rules are void and not to be followed.

Reached by phone Tuesday, Turner said he was glad for the election workers, who will not have to be trained on new election rules with just two weeks to go before Election Day. Many county election officials had expressed concern over the tight timeline for implementing the rules, saying they risked causing confusion for poll workers and undermining public confidence in the election results.

“I hate fighting my friends,” Turner said. “It’s unfortunate that the Republican Party has apparently lost their affection for defending constitutional principles like separation of powers. But I’m undeterred and we will continue to fight.”Georgia Republican Party Chairman Josh McKoon called objections to the new rules “unimaginably stupid and damaging to public confidence in what is expected to be a closely contested election.”

“It is supremely disappointing to observe yet another failure of our judicial system to expeditiously resolve critical questions about our elections process,” he wrote in a statement.

The CEO of Fair Fight, an organization founded by former Democratic gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams, called Tuesday’s order “a huge win for Georgia voters and the rule of law.”

“These rules are part of a larger election denier plot to undermine confidence in our elections, but once again, the courts have affirmed that the rule of law will prevail,” Lauren Groh-Wargo said in a statement. “This is a critical victory in the ongoing fight to protect independent elections.”

Good decision and a win for fair elections!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times reported yesterday that Bill Gates has donated  $50 million to help elect Vice President Kamala Harris.

The donation was made privately to a nonprofit group called Future Forward, which is supporting Harris’ Democratic bid for president and was not meant to be made public, people familiar with Gates’ support told the Times. The mammoth figure would be a shift for the Microsoft co-founder, who has generally avoided throwing his financial might behind candidates on either side.

“I support candidates who demonstrate a clear commitment to improving health care, reducing poverty and fighting climate change in the U.S. and around the world,” he told The New York Times in a statement. “I have a long history of working with leaders across the political spectrum, but this election is different, with unprecedented significance for Americans and the most vulnerable people around the world.”

Gates has not formally endorsed Harris, but the Times added that he has told friends he is concerned about what could happen in a second Donald Trump presidency.

Future Forward is the largest super PAC in America and has raised more than $700 million, much of it through its nonprofit “dark money” arm that does not disclose its donors. Other major benefactors include former New York Mayor Mike Bloomberg, who has given millions of dollars to the group.

Gates’ ex-wife, Melinda French Gates, has also given large donations to groups supporting Harris’ bid and described her own shift from the political sidelines in an interview with the Times earlier this month.

“Now I do get to make whatever decision I want to make about endorsing or not endorsing on my own,” she said, referring to her 2021 divorce from Gates and her decision to step down from her family foundation.

Tony

Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge

Dear Commons Community,

It’s hard to envision a more star-studded and magnetic World Series matchup than this one — both a throwback to when baseball reigned supreme in the U.S. while also showcasing the greatest talents in the game.

The New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers represent the two largest markets in Major League Baseball. They entered the season with the second-largest payroll in the sport (Yankees) and the fifth largest (Dodgers). They will now meet for a twelfth time in the World Series, the most by any two teams.   As reported by NBC News.

Decades ago, the key players were luminaries like Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Roy Campanella and Jackie Robinson.

Legends of the game, for sure, and now that star power has returned in 2024.

Shohei Ohtani — who just rewrote the history books with baseball’s first season of 50 home runs and 50 stolen bases — certainly appears to have a flair for the dramatic, crushing a three-run homer in his postseason debut.

Ohtani, the marquee name in the sport, was part of the Dodgers’ $1 billion offseason overhaul that saw them pad a star-studded roster with two pitching aces — fellow Japanese countryman Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Tyler Glasnow, acquired from the Tampa Bay Rays.

On the Yankees side, general manager and senior vice president Brian Cashman made a major offseason splash of his own — acquiring 25-year-old phenom Juan Soto, whom many consider the most complete hitter in baseball, adding to a lineup that already features American League home run king Aaron Judge and the fearsome Giancarlo Stanton.

Soto not only delivered with a career season of 41 home runs and 109 runs batted in, but he also just unleashed one of the most epic at bats you will see in postseason play — daring Cleveland Guardians pitcher Hunter Gaddis to throw him a fastball in extra innings Saturday, only to belt it over the centerfield fence and send the Yankees past upstart Cleveland and into their first World Series since 2009.

Judge and Ohtani, meanwhile, are both making their first appearance in the Fall Classic, a fact that might seem hard to fathom given their already robust resumes. Judge and Ohtani are both MVP winners and are the favorites to win it again this season. Judge flirted with the Triple Crown by batting .322 with 58 home runs and 144 RBIs. Ohtani nearly matched those numbers, with a .310 average, 54 home runs and 130 RBIs.

“This is sweeter — it’s even sweeter,” Judge said on Fox Sports about reaching the World Series and whether the reality matched expectations.

“This group we have is something special,” he said. “You know, all the work they put in the offseason, the ups and downs during the regular season, there’s no better group. … That’s what you grind all season for — moments like this.”

Dodgers manager Dave Roberts echoed those sentiments after his team ousted the magical New York Mets to reach their fourth World Series in the last seven years, though with only one ring to show for it, in the Covid-shortened 2020 season.

“I’ve never believed in a group of guys more than I believe in these guys,” Roberts said, ahead of the impending clash of the titans. “Most importantly, they believe in each other.”

The playoffs this season have been a hit with fans as TV viewership is at its highest levels in years.

The last time the two teams faced off in the World Series was in 1981 (the Dodgers won), and Tyler Kepner, the longtime baseball writer now with The Athletic, reflected on the rarity of what we’re seeing.

“There was a 40- or 41-year span, from 1941 to 1981, where we saw that matchup [in the World Series] 11 times … but in the last 41 years, we haven’t had one.”

And with Judge and Ohtani headlining the two juggernauts, another feat is now happening that’s taken more than four decades, too.

“To have two Hall of Fame-type players in MVP seasons making their World Series debuts against each other, that’s only happened once,” Kepner said. “That was George Brett and Mike Schmidt in 1980 — so it is kind of a perfect storm of fun stuff that would happen if it’s Yankees and Dodgers.”

Let the games begin!

Tony

A miner walks in a shaft of the CSM coal mine in Stonava, Czech Republic, Monday, Oct. 14, 2024. (AP Photo/Petr David Josek). Click on to enlarge.

Dear Commons Community,

This photo appeared in The Associated Press. Below is the text that accompanied it.

What an image!

Tony

—————————————–

AP photographer Petr David Josek started working with The Associated Press in 2002 and became a full-time staffer in 2011, when he got the Prague bureau job.

Since then, he has covered the Iraq War, eight Olympics and four World Cups among numerous sports and news assignments.

Here’s what he had to say about this extraordinary photo.

Why this photo?

When walking through the dark shafts of the mine in northeastern Czech Republic you come across quite a few miners, but this guy’s unique physique obviously struck me. I figured it would be nice to get some portraits of the man.

Luckily, he walked past me more than once, so I had few chances to shoot a couple of frames as he was doing his work.

How I made this photo

I shot this picture on 24mm 1.4 lens at 1000/sec. Going to the mine is somehow specific. It’s a very dusty and dark environment, so I figured less equipment is better for that. I took two cameras that I covered with foil for protection from the dust and two fixed lenses, 24 mm and 85 mm. I was equipped with a flashlight that you use to navigate through the mine – it also helped for the pictures, as you can light up your subject.

Why it works

I had several pictures of this man, but I think in this one, the combination of his strong posture, his facial expression and the dirt on his body reflects the best, just how hard this job really is.

Also, the fact that his eyes aren’t seen makes it a bit more mysterious.

Ryan Walters

Dear Commons Community,

Opponents of an Oklahoma law for schools to teach the Bible are suing the state’s superintendent of public instruction, calling the mandate unlawful and asking the state’s highest court to halt the purchase of materials intended to be taught this academic year.  As reported by Education Week.

The lawsuit—brought on behalf of more than 30 community members which include parents, teachers, and religious leaders—was filed with Oklahoma’s state Supreme Court Oct. 17. It argues that the mandate should be ruled invalid, and that political firebrand Ryan Walters, a Republican who serves as the state’s elected superintendent of public instruction, is illegally appropriating funds for the $3 million purchase of approximately 55,000 Bibles.

The complaint states the directive violates the Oklahoma’s constitution by using state funds to purchase religious materials as the mandate “represents a governmental preference for one religion over another.”

Legal experts say this is a case other states will likely be watching, as it comes at a time when conservative state officials are testing the church-state divide. For instance, Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry, a Republican, recently signed a bill requiring all public schools to display a copy of the Ten Commandments in every classroom. That law is also being challenged in court.

Walters, who announced the Bible mandate in June and issued subsequent teaching guidance a month later, has garnered national attention for his handling of LGBTQ+ student rights and position on teaching about race and racism. He’s been active in former President Donald Trump’s 2024 reelection effort and has said he supports dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. His name has been surfaced as a possibility for education secretary in a Trump administration.

Walters recently drew scrutiny from his own party, with a number of state GOP lawmakers calling for an investigation into his stewardship of the department’s budget, spending priorities, and transparency.

In a statement, Walters said Oklahoma would not be “bullied by out-of-state, radical leftists who hate the principles our nation was founded upon.”

“It is not possible for our students to understand American history and culture without understanding the Biblical principles from which they came, so I am proud to bring back the Bible to every classroom in Oklahoma,” he said. “I will never back down to the woke mob, no matter what tactic they use to try to intimidate Oklahomans.”

The lawsuit argues Bible mandate violates the separation of church and state

The 32 plaintiffs—which include 14 public school parents, four public school teachers, and three faith leaders—argue that Walters is pushing his religious beliefs, violating the separation of church and state.

In the complaint, parents—both those who are Christians, and those who are not—argue that he is overstepping, and that the mandate interferes with the upbringing of their children. One longtime educator believes “the Bible contains confusing concepts, many of which are not age-appropriate for elementary- and middle school students,” according to the complaint. One religious leader’s “conscience is violated by a sacred Christian religious text being used for what he considers to be political grandstanding,” the filing states.

The complaint alleges that the $3 million to purchase the Bibles also is illegally reallocated from education department staff salaries. It also alleges that the specifications limit acceptable Bibles. Earlier this month, the state officials amended the original request to broaden eligible Bibles after backlash that the original request favored an edition endorsed by Trump.

The complaint alleges that school districts have the authority to select academic materials, and that Walters and the state’s education department do not.

Lawyers representing the community members said the mandate is an erosion of church-state separation, and a political stunt. The plaintiffs are represented by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, the American Civil Liberties Union, the ACLU of Oklahoma Foundation, the Freedom From Religion Foundation, and Oklahoma Appleseed Center for Law & Justice.

Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United, one of the firms representing the plaintiffs, said in a statement that Walters was “abusing the power of his office” through the mandate.

“Not on our watch,” she said. “We’re proud to defend the religious freedom of all Oklahomans, from Christians to the nonreligious.”

Broadly, religion in schools has been litigated since the mid-20th century, said Whittney Barth, executive director for the Center for the Study of Law and Religion at Emory University. Courts have found devotional reading of the Bible and the offering of the Lord’s Prayer to be unconstitutional, as is religious instruction in classrooms.

The Bible has historically been taught as literature, and has been seen to have academic merit as a historical document, she said. The American Academy of Religion has guidance on teaching the Bible.

“What’s interesting about this case is the integration of the Bible into the curriculum in ways that, I think, many people would say have both devotional aspects as well as potentially academic aspects,” Barth said. “I do think this raises those kinds of concerns.”

Teaching the Bible is religious instruction. Even if this case should ever reach the conservative U.S. Supreme Court, the Oklahoma law will be overturned.

Tony