The alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at the Boston Marathon last week should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as children or teenagers.

In 1997, we started a large-scale study of newly arrived immigrants, ages 9 to 14, in 20 public middle and high schools in Boston, Cambridge, Mass., and the San Francisco Bay Area. Our participants came from Asia, Latin America and the Caribbean; many fled not only poverty but also strife, in countries like Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Haiti. Over five years, we interviewed more than 400 students, as well as their siblings, parents and teachers. We gathered academic records, test scores and measures of psychological well-being.

The two brothers accused in the Boston bombings — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was killed on Friday, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, who was captured later that day — were around 15 and 8, respectively, when they immigrated. Both attended Cambridge Rindge and Latin, that city’s only public high school. They were not part of our study, but they fit the demographic profile of the subjects of our research: birth to families displaced by war or strife, multiple-stage (including back-and-forth) migration, language difficulties and entry into harsh urban environments where gangs and crime are temptations.

When asked “what do you like most about being here?” an 11-year-old Haitian boy in Cambridge told us, “There is less killing here.” His response was notably succinct, but not unique.

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The image has been handed down throughout the long iconography of the West, most effectively transmitted in the image of Saint Jerome: the writer as a recluse, weaving spirited collocations of words in hushed seclusion. Jerome may have a lion at his feet, but he lacks other company — and, of course, he has no Wi-Fi. His condition is distinctly different from that of the modern writer; her room is not only well-lighted and likely lion-free, but also furnishes an Internet connection, through which the world’s tumult pours.

It has been argued that a chronic fever of distraction and fascination arrives on waves of Wi-Fi to stunt our attention spans, encouraging writers to paddle about, tweeting and liking, instead of striking out for deeper waters. As a writer who writes about writers, I struggle with this surfeit of ideas and impressions myself, but I also can see this so-called malady from a different point of view, through the prism of history. Authors, after all, have always sought the means to build bridges between the world and the page. Wi-Fi, Google Docs, social networks and even smartphones and other gadgets are just the most recent means of doing so. While they can distract us with their bells and whistles, they also provide powerful tools for gathering information, tracking renegade thoughts and inspirations and disciplining the flow of words and ideas.

The impulse to connect to the outside world is an ancient one. Martial, the wry and ribald Roman poet, relished bringing the prosaic textures of daily experience into his poems — and to bring the moment of their making into the world. Martial, in his epigrams, often caught himself composing in media res — as in Epigram 4.10, in which he sends a slave to deliver a gift of poems so newly composed, their ink is still wet.

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Curated by Phineas Upham

Paul Krugman has recently taken a keen interest in the rise of robots and automation — an issue that I have been focusing on since the publication of my book on this subject back in 2009.

In a recent post, Krugman says the following:

Smart machines may make higher GDP possible, but also reduce the demand for people — including smart people. So we could be looking at a society that grows ever richer, but in which all the gains in wealth accrue to whoever owns the robots.
I think there is a fundamental problem with this way of thinking: as jobs and incomes are relentlessly automated away, the bulk of consumers will lack the income necessary to drive the demand that is critical to economic growth.

Every product and service produced by the economy ultimately gets purchased (consumed) by someone. In economic terms, “demand” means a desire or need for something — backed by the ability and willingness to pay for it. There are only two entities that create final demand for products and services: individual people and governments. (And we know that government can’t be the demand solution in the long run). Individual consumer spending is typically around 70 percent of GDP in the United States.

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Austrian director Michael Haneke’s Amour has captured five Oscar nominations, including an unprecedented sweep of both Best Picture and Best Foreign Film. The majority of critical praise for the film focuses on its balance of compassion and brutality in presenting the final days of an elderly French couple as they endure the sordid demands of dying.

Anne and Georges Laurent are retired music instructors in their eighth decade of life who have shared a long, loving marriage. After a stroke Anne begins a trajectory of physical and cognitive decline and Georges is forced to shift exhaustively from the roles of lover, husband, father, and peer, to caretaker. Each new medical requirement marks the end to a piece of life they’ve shared.

If this sounds like a brutal examination of the perils of growing old, it is. However, Amour accomplishes vastly more than paint a picture of aging and dying, and to reduce its scope to such is to relegate the story of Anne and Georges — their memories and idiosyncratic behaviors, their achievements and contributions as wife and husband, parents, music teachers, and citizens, their singular love for each other — to a dusty place alongside the Arcadian landscapes that decorate their apartment walls.

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A slew of current projects — ranging from young adult novels to television to a rumored Anne Hathaway film — aim to make Shakespeare accessible to a contemporary audience.

Merit Press, a new Young Adult imprint headed by best-selling author, Jacquelyn Mitchard (The Deep End of the Ocean), is basing two of its first five debut releases on Shakespeare retellings.
Exposure, a modern retelling of Macbeth set in an Alaska high school, was published January 18th. It’s the second book of what will be at least three titles in co-authors Kim Askew and Amy Helmes’ Twisted Lit series.

Tempestuous, a humorous reimagining of The Tempest with a lead character named Miranda Prospero, was released in December.

A recent study out of the UK revealed that almost a third of schoolchildren under the age of 13 had never heard of their country’s most famous writer. The statistics for adults 18-34 were equally dismal. Five percent believed Shakespeare’s most famous play was Cinderella, and nearly half (49 percent) were unable to complete the line “Romeo, Romeo…” with the correct response “wherefore art thou Romeo” from Shakespeare’s best known play, Romeo and Juliet.

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The Girl Scouts organization has been criticized in recent years by some parents, bloggers and activists over the organization’s annual — and quite profitable — cookie sale fundraiser. The complaints range from the cookies’ artificial and/or unhealthful ingredients, the general promotion of cookie consumption in an era of childhood obesity, and the company’s use of environment-depleting palm oil.

In what looks like a lame PR move to counter some of this criticism, this year the organization is including in its cookie line-up a new variety called “Mango Cremes with Nutrifusion,” a nutrient-boosting additive. The ABC Bakers website (ABC is the manufacturer of all Girl Scout cookies) touts the benefits of this “delicious & nutritious” product this way:
We all want to eat with health in mind. Now, you can in a delicious new way with our Mango Cremes with NutriFusion™ Girl Scout Cookies. . . . These tangy, refreshing tropical treats are packed with great taste AND vitamins!

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If you’re into fitness, you’ve heard of CrossFit. Celebrities, athletes, moms and military vets are all stepping into the box (CrossFit lingo for gym). Some are doing it to lose weight, some enjoy the thrill of the competition and some probably don’t know why they keep coming back day after day to participate in this fitness phenomenon. The “sport of fitness,” as CrossFit dubs itself, has steadily grown to hold a powerful presence, proving it is more than just another passing fitness trend. CrossFit is booming so fiercely that it is difficult to find an accurate count on how many boxes are affiliated worldwide, but it is somewhere around 5,000 and increasing by 50 a week according to the most recent Wikipedia findings.

Inside boxes, groups of athletes push through grueling workouts together, against the clock and their own personal best. If one were to poke their head into a box towards the end of a WOD ( workout of the day), the sight would be difficult to forget. Sweat and blood may drip off the pull-up bar, bodies may be strewn about the floor like rag dolls straining to catch their breath, and the quaking sound of a loaded barbell slamming against the floor would affirm the last group member had completed their final squat snatch of the day. Members would write their scores on the board, high five and walk out the door — back to their more complicated and stressful lives outside the box.

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On Friday, Jan. 18, the thick pall of pollution that blanketed Beijing earlier in the week returned, raising readings to hazardous levels.

Why is Beijing susceptible to these episodes? First, and uncontrollable by the authorities, are the peculiarities of Beijing’s geography. In particular, the capital is surrounded by mountain ranges that lead to the unfortunate phenomenon of an inversion layer—cold air settles on top of a warmer air mass, trapping the pollutants inside. This is the same problem that bedevils Los Angeles.

Beyond the misfortune of geography, though, lie a number of factors that have everything to do with China’s policies. Even as Beijing has moved much heavy industry out of the city limits, there has been a surge of industrialization in neighboring provinces like Hebei, home to major steel and cement industries. Beijing’s steel giant Shougang, for example, has relocated to the port city of Caofeidian, Hebei, some 200 kilometers away. And pollution no doubt has been exacerbated by years of investment-led growth that led to a huge jump in industrial production, with China producing vast quantities of steel, aluminum, and cement, even when underlying demand hasn’t kept up.

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We’ve been arguing for some time that Twitter is becoming a media entity in its own right, and some of the company’s moves around the Summer Olympics and other events have helped flesh out that theory. John Battelle of Federated Media argues much the same thing in a new blog post. He says Twitter wants to become a media company and that doing so means curating and even creating or “co-creating” content for its users. While this is undoubtedly true, Twitter is going to need to become a lot better at relevance and discovery if it really wants to be a new-media player.

In his post, Battelle describes how his thinking has been influenced by some of the recent offerings Twitter has come up with around broadcast events such as the “Oscars Index,” (a partnership with Topsy), which tracks sentiment around Oscar-nominated movies and personalities leading up to the Academy Awards by analyzing tweets about them. Although Battelle doesn’t mention it, Twitter recently announced an even more ambitious effort to create a verified “Twitter TV Rating” for TV shows as part of a partnership with media-metrics company Nielsen (NLSN).

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Just one week after a Texas state senator filed legislation to allow concealed handguns on the state’s college campuses, a scuffle between two men at Lone Star College, 20 miles north of Houston, left three people injured and the two shooters in custody.

The incident, which occurred around 1 p.m. on Tuesday, sent the campus into lockdown and students into evacuation mode. A 22-year-old man identified as Carlton Berry has been charged in the shootings, according to a statement from the Harris County Sheriff’s Office. Berry was among those injured, the office said.

“Our thoughts and prayers go out to those impacted by the terrible event at Lone Star College today,” read a statement issued by State Sen. Brian Birdwell, the man behind the proposed bill. “Though few facts or details have been confirmed as of late afternoon, the basis for filing the Campus Personal Protection Act remains the same. This legislation is about ensuring that law-abiding citizens are able to defend themselves. It’s about trusting citizens with their rights.”

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