Grade inflation:

By the end of the last decade, A’s and B’s represented 73 percent of all grades awarded at public schools, and 86 percent of all grades awarded at private schools.

Each semester I get a printout telling me what my grade distribution was (in case I didn't know...) and how it compares with other sections of the same course, other classes in the math department, other classes at LSU, and so on.

According to these printouts, stepping into my class (or any class in the math department, really) is like going back to 1988 or so, for good or for ill.

Bill James echoes the Solzhenitsyn quote that gives this blog its name:

It's reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone. We all have the capacity to commit evil acts.

Matt Yglesias is in awe of our amazing technology here in Louisiana:

Here in downtown DC, for example, the tallest office buildings are 110 feet tall. In Boise, Idaho by contrast, they have technology that’s allowed them to create a 267 foot building, and in Baton Rouge, they’ve somehow figured out that it’s possible to build a 450 foot building. If we could somehow import that kind of know-how to DC, then I bet people would be employed first building the structures and then working in the buildings. [...] But how on earth would we figure out how to build a 450 foot building? What magical technologies have they developed in Baton Rouge?

Our magical technology was developed by a wizard, but unfortunately the know-how died with him.