What the Dog Saw

Any patent you received would protect your intellectual property for twenty years, but after that anyone could take your invention. You get an initial monopoly on your creation because we want to provide economic incentives for people to invent things like cancer drugs. But everyone gets to steal your breast-cancer cure—after a decent interval—because it is also in society’s interest to let as many people as possible copy your invention; only then can others learn from it, and build on it, and come up with better and cheaper alternatives.

teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.

High-quality feedback is where there is a back-and-forth exchange to get a deeper understanding.”

Eric Hanushek, an economist at Stanford, estimates that the students of a very bad teacher will learn, on average, half a year’s worth of material in one school year. The students in the class of a very good teacher will learn a year and a half’s worth of material. That difference amounts to a year’s worth of learning in a single year. Teacher effects dwarf school effects: you

Teacher effects dwarf school effects: your child is actually better off in a bad school with an excellent teacher than in an excellent school with a bad teacher.

We have to learn that sometimes a poor performance reflects not the innate ability of the performer but the complexion of the audience; and that sometimes a poor test score is the sign not of a poor student but of a good one.

Old words in the service of a new idea aren’t the problem. What inhibits creativity is new words in the service of an old idea.
And this

for commercials come with products attached, and products offer something that songs and poems and political movements and radical ideologies do not, which is an immediate and affordable means of transformation.

a revolution is not accessible, tangible, and replicable, how on earth can it be a revolution?

hen we give an account of how we got to where we are, we’re inclined to credit the philosophical over the physical, and the products of art over the products of commerce.