The Dish

J.D. Tuccille considers the effects of having too much work outside the classroom:

A study, published last year in the Journal of Experimental Education, takes a dim view of the heavy workloads under which high school kids in “10 high-performing high schools in upper-middle-class communities” stagger. Results indicated that students in these schools average more than three hours of homework per night. Students who did more hours of homework experienced greater behavioral engagement in school but also more academic stress, physical health problems, and lack of balance in their lives. Which is to say, even if you think that homework can be a good thing, there’s a limit. More is not better, say researchers from Stanford University, Lewis and Clark College, and Villanova University.

Granted, those “upper-middle-class communities” may not be the most broadly representative; the average American high schooler spends about an hour and a half on homework per day. But as Misty Adoniou points out, even modest amounts of homework may widen achievement gaps:

Research finds that homework doesn’t improve learning outcomes in primary school, and has a weak link to improved outcomes in junior high school. Those improvements are connected to parental involvement – but parents who are keen supporters of homework may be disappointed to hear that their positive contribution is largely just ensuring their children hand in their homework. …

There are many parents, dedicated and desperately interested in their children’s education, who cannot involve themselves in their children’s homework. They may not have had schooling opportunities themselves, they may speak English as an additional language, they may work long hours or shifts, or they may just be like most of us, and simply can’t remember what a quadratic equation is. Those with spare cash buy the homework support, in the form of after hours tutoring. In high school, where homework tasks contribute substantially to the course grade, homework is the great unequalizer.

What an amazing portrait of San Francisco! http://t.co/oSK0Iz6R

— Zach Klein (@zachklein) July 25, 2012

In New York magazine, Kevin Roose suggests that “in many ways, San Francisco is the nation’s new success theater”:

It’s no secret that New York is having a bit of an identity crisis these days. Wall Street lost its swagger during the crash and hasn’t gotten it back despite the market’s broader recovery. Big banks are adding employees in Bangalore and Salt Lake City while cutting them in Manhattan. New York City’s budget wonks expect the city to add only 67,000 jobs this year, a sluggish number that faster-growing cities like Denver and Austin will look upon with pity. The city’s culture seems to be changing, too: Greenpoint and “normcore” are in, stilettos and pinstripes are out; junior bankers now get Saturdays off; “work-life balance” is no longer a euphemism for sloth.

Meanwhile, certain pockets of San Francisco have become the sort of gilded playground that New York once was. Brand-new Teslas with vanity plates like DISRUPTD drift down the streets of the Mission District, where pawnshops and porn stores used to be. Paper millionaires spend their nights at the Battery, a members-­only club with a tech-heavy roster and a $10,000-per-night penthouse suite. … It’s the city where dreamers go to prove themselves – the place where just being able to afford a normal life serves as an indicator of pluck and ability.

In SFist, Jay Barmann retorts:

I’m still not clear on the part about how we “don’t quite know what to do with [our] wealth,” apart from the digs about how SF men don’t dress up very much. We clearly spend all of our money on rent, food, and booze, and many of us do buy nice clothes and cars and things, and those with lots of money go buy houses in Napa or in Tahoe. But it’s true, we are less inclined to embrace asshole behavior, unapologetic displays, and the giddy capitalist fervor that has made Manhattan a bohemia-free retail Disneyland where no one ever thought twice about bulldozing a building to build something newer and bigger.

It’s hard if you’ve lived in both cities not to compare them, but I would argue that while most San Franciscans might long for the nightlife of certain eras of New York’s past, they’ve never wanted the city to become New York. And while many a trapped New Yorker who has visited or lived here dreams of an easier life in the west, they usually resign themselves to the fact that economically, and career-wise, there isn’t enough happening here. If that changes permanently, and there are more and more opportunities here, what excuses will they have left for staying in New York?

Russia says intercepted US drone over Crimea… http://t.co/FHRRybAX6q

— Drudge Siren (@Drudge_Siren) March 14, 2014

Norm Ornstein explains why getting tough with Putin is tricky for Obama:

Putin saved the president from a huge embarrassment with the intervention to resolve Syria’s chemical-weapons stockpile, just before the Senate would have voted down his request for authorization to use force to punish Assad for using the weapons repeatedly against Syrians. Russia is a key player in the delicate negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program. Moscow can make the U.S. transition out of Afghanistan more painful and disruptive, and can be a positive or negative player in negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians.

For those who immediately began calling for the harshest sanctions we can apply against Russia after its outrageous behavior in Crimea, those considerations were nowhere evident. Of course, one can make the case—and it is a powerful one—that Putin’s Russia will act in its cold, hard self-interest no matter what we do to try to appease it or cushion any reaction. But it is also likely that the harder we push, the more Russia will respond in a hard and negative way in every other area of our interest, at least in the short run. And when it comes to Russia and Syria, the short run is absolutely crucial.

In addition, Jamila Trindle warns the US not to underestimate how badly Russia can mess up our efforts to crack down on international criminal finance:

[Russia] could stop helping the U.S.-led effort to ferret out financial transactions of drug kingpins, weapons traffickers, and terrorist organizations like al Qaeda.

Russia has signed on with international efforts to combat money laundering, bribery, and nuclear weapons proliferators by stepping up oversight of the financial system, isolating bad actors, and freezing their assets. If Russia becomes a target of those same efforts, it will likely be less enthusiastic about enforcing them against others. …

If the United States tries to isolate Russia financially, Juan Zarate, formerly a senior Treasury Department official charged with overseeing the Bush administration’s sanctions program, said the effort could backfire. If Russian banks are cut off from the financial system by sanctions, they could react by slacking off on enforcement of those rules or creating financial havens for sanctions-breakers and criminals.

Rogin highlights another way Russia might retaliate:

One administration official told The Daily Beast that the White House’s National Security Council is leading an interagency process to examine all of the possible retaliatory steps Moscow might take if U.S. and European sanctions move forward. The potential counterstrikes include what this official called “asymmetric” actions by Moscow — Russian actions against the U.S. that have nothing to do with Ukraine. The NSC is preparing for potential Russian actions on all issues in its multi-faceted relationship with the United Stated: American military access to Afghanistan through Russia; Moscow’s cooperation on the destruction of Syria’s chemical weapons stockpiles; Russian pressure on Iran to strike a deal over its nuclear program; and much, much more.

Juan Cole points out that the Ukraine crisis is pushing Moscow and Tehran closer together:

Since Iran is under financial blockade by the United States, increases in bilateral trade with Russia would be very welcome. … [One] area of cooperation between the two is that Russia built three nuclear reactors for Iran at Bushehr, and is rumored to be considering constructing two more. Putin also referred to Iran’s observer status in the Shanghai Cooperation Council (which links Russia, China, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan) and spoke of the need to implement the decisions taken recently at Bishkek by the SCC. Iran wants to become a full member of this trading and political bloc, in a bid to escape the isolation imposed on it by the United States.

Novelist and playwright Hanif Kureishi recently savaged creative writing MFA programs as “a waste of time,” having done one himself:

It’s probably 99.9 percent who are not talented and the little bit that is left is talent … A lot of my students just can’t tell a story. They can write sentences but they don’t know how to make a story go from there all the way through to the end without people dying of boredom in between. It’s a difficult thing to do and it’s a great skill to have. Can you teach that? I don’t think you can.

Scott Esposito offers constructive criticism:

I agree with this in spirit. But I would very quickly add that learning how to write is not the point of the MFA. They’re more about having time off to write and making connections than actually being taught how to write.

I think in the best case you have a group of talented, motivated people who want to learn things from truly great writers, and the program ends up being partly getting a master’s “spin” on writing/editing, partly two years of uninterrupted time to do your thing. (Or fuck around on Facebook, if that’s what you prefer.) Yes, programs admit people who have no clue, and those people probably won’t get much out of their MFA and will end up in some completely different line of work in a year or two, but I don’t know that there’s any kind of professional degree where this isn’t the case.

Matt Haig objects to Kureishi’s hypothesis on innate talent:

Creative writing lessons can be very useful, just like music lessons can be useful. To say, as Hanif Kureishi did, that 99.9 percent of students are talentless is cruel and wrong. I believe that certain writers like to believe they arrived into the world with special, unteachable powers because it is good for the ego. …. Of course, it is always important to know your limitations. For instance, I could have 7,000 guitar lessons but I wouldn’t be Hendrix, though I would be a lot better than I am now. Like most art forms, writing is part instinct and part craft. The craft part is the part that can be taught, and that can make a crucial difference to lots of writers.

Jane Messer suggests Kureishi could learn a thing or two about teaching:

Kureishi, it would appear, is from the school of teachers whose focus is not on the learner, but on themself. This approach focuses on the transmission of knowledge from the expert to the receptive learner. Ideally, the student is an elite talent: preternaturally bright, both an autodidact and a willing disciple. Students for whom sentences and narrative are not easy, whose best work comes with much rethinking and rewriting, who are sometimes inarticulate on the page; these students are hard work in Kureishi’s world. In the learner-teacher model in which the learner is a reflection of the teacher, such students offer the teacher a spotty mirror image.

Previous Dish on MFAs in the visual arts here.

Alex Rogers summarizes a bipartisan Senate proposal to restore the emergency unemployment benefits that expired in December:

The proposal from senators representing some of the most economically distraught states would be paid for through changes to single-employer pension plans and extending fees on U.S. customs users through 2024. The extension would not be restored for the tiny fraction of millionaires who receive unemployment insurance. Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I), who led the negotiations with Sen. Dean Heller (R-Nev.), called it a “bipartisan breakthrough.”

But the reaction from influential House conservatives who had yet to hear of the plan ranged from skeptical to outright opposition, suggesting the bill will struggle to get beyond the Senate.

Danny Vinik explains what the proposal would do:

It means people who have been out of work more than 26 weeks and less than 73 would receive a big check from the government for unemployment benefits they would’ve been collecting over the past 10 weeks.

If you were out of work 70 weeks as of December 28, you’d receive three weeks of unemployment insurance. If you were unemployed 50 weeks as of then, you’d receive 10 weeks of benefits now and continue receiving them until the five month extension expires. Oh, that’s assuming you didn’t make more than a million dollars last year. If you did, then you wouldn’t get anything.

As for the amount, unemployment benefits generally make up half a person’s previous wages by average, although the exact amount varies by state. In 2012, average benefits ranged from $133 in Puerto Rico to $653 in Massachusetts.

Sargent thinks bringing up the subject again benefits the Democrats:

This is really good news, and let’s hope it passes. It probably won’t; it will probably die in the House.

But in raw political terms, that means UI as a key issue is back. Now the Senate will vote on it, and Senate Republicans will be challenged to vote against it. Senate candidates on both sides will be asked by the press to take a position on it. Presuming it passes the Senate, which it should (any Dem defections are unlikely), the House GOP will have to decide whether to kill it — by not allowing a vote on it or by voting it down. House Republicans will now have to confront the issue.

Chad Stone supports extending UI, considering the still-weak job market:

It’s still hard to find a job, especially for the “long-term unemployed” — those who’ve been looking for a job for 27 weeks or more. In the early stages of the recovery, when unemployment insurance spending was at its highest, there were about six or seven unemployed workers for every job opening. That ratio has declined substantially, but it is still closer to the highest level it reached in the 2001 recession and its aftermath than to the more normal levels just before the Great Recession.

Most tellingly, long-term unemployment remains much higher than at any previous time when policymakers allowed emergency unemployment insurance to expire

Noting that there’s no ironclad argument against extending UI, Jennifer Rubin suggests the GOP support it and try to get something in return:

Let me suggest that Republicans have leverage here and should apply it precisely to the issue at hand: jobs. The House has already passed the SKILLS Act, which reforms job-training programs. That trade would signal that Republicans are willing to work with Democrats but insist on meaningful measures that help job readiness. It’s hard for Senate Democrats to say no to job-training reform, especially with UI, a big issue with their depressed base, in play. Alternatively, the House could attach a pro-growth, pro-jobs energy bill.