Five Best Monday Columns

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Jackson Diehl in The Washington Post on Obama's delay tactics "Wherever war rages, crisis looms, or a truculent strongman glowers, the message from the White House has been the same: 'Give me space,'" writes Diehl. Obama said those words to President Medvedev of Russia, explaining that his ability to negotiate in an election year is hampered. And Diehl says the sentiment is similar elsewhere, describing Obama's stalling tactics in a range of conflicts, from Syria to Israel to North Korea. But Diehl says events in North Korea have already shown delay can be "disastrous" because it hands power over to leaders like Kim Jong Un. "That's the problem with asking for 'space': It tends to get filled by others."

Mohamed Keita in The New York Times on journalism in Africa Recent years have seen a rise in persecution for independent journalists operating across the African continent. "In the West, cynicism about African democracy has led governments to narrow their development priorities to poverty reduction and stability; individual liberties like press freedom have dropped off the agenda, making it easier for authoritarian rulers to go after journalists more aggressively," writes Keita. The rising influence of China as a trading partner also gives African governments a model of the press that doesn't prize freedom. Keita uses Ethiopia as an example where investigative reporting has changed the country for the better but new policies have clamped down on it. "[S]upport for the press ... must be integrated into a wider strategy of political and media reforms."

Juliette Kayyem in The Boston Globe on Indonesia's disaster preparation "Most scholars in disaster management acknowledge that the truest evaluation of any response system is one that gets as close to a catastrophe as real life allows, but falls short of real damage," writes Kayyem. And so the fear that a tsunami might follow last week's earthquake near Indonesia provided valuable insight into their disaster response after a 2004 tsunami killed hundreds of thousands. The performance wasn't perfect, but populations did begin to evaluate dangerous areas. The most important lesson is that historical memory is the best way to have populations protect themselves. When people remember how to behave from a previous crisis, they can teach future generations. "Governments can warn and support, but the public may be its own best protector."

L. Gordon Crovitz in The Wall Street Journal on reporting in the internet age The responses from a class of Yale journalism students when asked how the internet would have changed the reporting of the Watergate story revealed to Bob Woodward an overconfidence in the power of the internet. When he reported his surprise reading their answers, last week, it led to a wider discussion of journalism in the internet era. "Mr. Woodward concludes that the Internet is 'not that magic and it doesn't always shine that bright,'" writes Crovitz. "It's a great tool for research, including for linking data that before might have been public but was hard to put together ... But at a time when the federal government is only getting bigger and state and local governments are so badly mismanaged, the Web is still no substitute for old-fashioned reporting."

Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker on Mad Men nostalgia The return of Mad Men has rekindled debate about whether the show engages only in 1960s nostalgia, or whether it speaks to a more forward-looking truth. "So it seems time to pronounce a rule about American popular culture: the Golden Forty-Year Rule. The prime site of nostalgia is always whatever happened, or is thought to have happened, in the decade between forty and fifty years past," writes Gopnik. He proceeds through the 20th century, giving examples of ways each decade's pop culture spoke to the decade 40 years previous. He suggests it's because the 40-somethings who make movies and produce music are pondering the era just before their birth. This means, he writes, we will only fully understand how the Obama years have solidifed in our memory during the 2050s. "Forty years from now, we'll know, at last, how we looked and sounded and made love, and who we really were."

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.

About the Author

Eric Randall is an associate digital editor at Boston Magazine and a former staff writer for The Atlantic Wire.

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A new study shows that families act on insufficient information when it comes to figuring out where to enroll their children.

A person trying to choose their next set of wheels might see that car A made it farther than car B in a road test and assume it gets better gas mileage. But that’s only true if the two tanks are filled with the same substance. Putting high-octane gas in one and water in the other, for example, provides little useful information about which car makes the most of its fuel. A new working paper titled “Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?” suggests that parents similarly opt for schools with the most impressive graduates rather than figuring out which ones actually teach best. The study joins a body of research looking critically at what it means for a school to be successful.

Take the work of Erin Pahlke, for example. The assistant professor of psychology at Whitman College saw research showing that girls who attend school only with other girls tend to do better in math and science. The trick, she said, is that those studies didn’t analyze “differences in the students coming into the schools.” As it turns out, those who end up in same-sex schools tend to be wealthier, start out with more skills, and have parents who are more proactive than students who attend co-ed institutions. In a 2014 meta-analysis, Pahlke and her colleagues reviewed the studies and found when examining schools with the same type of students and same level of resources—rather than “comparing [those at] the public co-ed school to [their counterparts at] the fancy private school that’s single-sex down the road”—there isn’t any difference in how the students perform academically. Single-sex schooling also hasn’t been shown to offer a bump in girls’ attitudes toward math and science or change how they think about themselves. In other words, it often looks like single-sex schools are doing a better job educating kids, but they aren't. It's just that their graduates are people who were going to do well at any school. They’re running on high-octane gas.