Attention Economy


Saturday, July 28, 2018

Long Reads for the Weekend

How to teach happiness
https://www.newstatesman.com/politics/education/2018/07/how-teach-happiness

Obama Presidency – Cautious to a Fault

Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner and the Trump Presidency
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/28/us/politics/jared-ivanka-trump.html

Global Dominance of the English Language
Jacob Mikanowski notes:
“From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent’s dream and a student’s misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.”