“Can you think of a country that starts with the letter U?”

You’ve seen those “Are you smarter than a 5 year old” videos on Youtube (it’s an actual TV show) or marveled at the intelligence of Miss Teen South Carolina, now here’s the kids from a suburban high school in Washington State. We learn that “Somebody Bin Laden” is the Vice-President of the United States, that the US gained its independence in the Civil War, that Canada is actually a state in the US, that “South America is a country that borders the US.” Oh, and one student suggested Europe and Utopia are countries that start with a U.

Further Reading

Goodbye, Piassa

The demolition of an historic district in Addis Ababa shows a central contradiction of modernization: the desire to improve the country while devaluing its people and culture.

And do not hinder them

We hardly think of children as agents of change. At the height of 1980s apartheid repression in South Africa, a group of activists did and gave them the tool of print.

The new antisemitism?

Stripped of its veneer of nuance, Noah Feldman’s essay in ‘Time’ is another attempt to silence opponents of the Israeli state by smearing them as anti-Jewish racists.