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Akala
@akalamusic
, 5 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
Something strange happened to me writing this book that I am finding hard to explain but i’ll try, in case any1 is interested and other writers have has similar experiences...
On the one hand the sheer gargantuan effort required to write a readable book made me redefine what I thought hard work actually was...
But when they say ‘the more you know the more you know you don’t know’ that is some of the realest shit ever... I found that...
Doing sooo much research about things I already knew a fair amount about and learning new stuff really made me think about how much I don’t know about virtually everything else..
So I have left the process with this paradoxical feeling: I am much more confident about the few things about which I know a lot and much less sure about the many things about which I know only a little... ‘a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous things as they say’...
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Akala
@akalamusic
It is, of course, compelling that the relative and general academic overachievement of working class British-Nigerian/Ghanaian boys has not led to a general positive stereotyping of them....
Even as the most famous British West African in the country literally got the best exam grades in his entire school and has recently set up a publishing company...
Even as the youngest children to ever take maths GCSE’s in the country also come from this group... it’s *almost* as if stereotypes don’t care that much about facts.
Read 3 tweets
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Akala
@akalamusic
This is not *entirely* true though I get the general point. I like perhaps thousands of other British-Caribbean’s of my generation went to a *private* community/volunteer run saturday school, albeit in a few portacabins...
I personally know plenty of lower middle class black parents that choose co-home school their children for all of the reasons I outline in Natives... needless to say NONE of those children seem to have had an issue attaining 5GCSE’s that most fail to get.
In an even more spectacular example: within one generation of 1865 about half of the black people in the United states were literate. This is one of the greatest campaigns of self directed (ie non-state actors) mass literacy in world history...
Read 3 tweets
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Akala
@akalamusic
Yes and no, Zimbabwe is not in west Africa and the huge gap between academic outcomes of ‘Caribbean’s’ (black English working class really) and 1gen British west africans is more likely due to chronology than culture see below...
The vast majority of Caribbean’s came to Britain before their nations received independence and thus before there were Universities in their respective nations, whereas British West Africans came later and mostly were Uni educated ‘back home’...
I would stake good money on it that academic outcomes at the University of the West Indies compare well with any in Ghana or Nigeria so a more complicated and historically grounded explanation will have to be sought..
Read 6 tweets

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Will Bunch
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1. So @RonanFarrow and co-author Adam Entous dropped a story in the New Yorker today that I can't believe isn't getting more attention. It's largely about the Israeli intelligence firm Psy-Group and role of 'psy-ops' in our politics newyorker.com/magazine/2019/…
2. Maybe some of the lack of attention is because the story is framed around a fascinating but not consequential example: The use of psy-ops like fake websites and personas, or avatars, in a California hospital board election. The story is also a warning about...
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Tommy Collison
@tommycollison
Something strange happened on the plane. As we boarded, an older woman asked me to put her suitcase up in the overhead bin. I did, no problem.

For most of my life, I couldn’t do this. (I have moderate cerebral palsy, and lifting heavy things was never something easy.)
In fact, as recently as when I was in college, I would have to people for help putting my own suitcase up in the bin.

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Craig Silverman
@CraigSilverman
Sometimes you find stories in the strangest ways.

Today I published an investigation into a DC think tank and its cofounder. It’s one insane turn after another.

But all started when I was added on a reply to an innocuous tweet. Thread...
buzzfeed.com/craigsilverman…
Back in early March a guy I don’t know and don’t follow shared one of my stories. He complimented it, while also making a humorous drag of BuzzFeed. I jokingly replied. He replied. Cool.

But then this other account chimed in to laugh. Something strange happened after that.
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Heather Urry
@HeatherUrry
Thread on making a difference.

When I was a kid, I went on many camping trips with my mom and stepdad. One one such trip, we camped near sand dunes because my mom was writing a book called Seasons of the Wind. It's about plant life on sand dunes in the southwest United States.
I remember hiking in the sand, putting one foot in front of the other. Forward progress was surprisingly difficult. Step, sink, pull, repeat. And standing at the top of a dune was dizzying; they seemed to move, almost breathe.
Since 2011, I've felt a bit like I'm back on that dune, the sand shifting under my academic feet. Am I doing this right? What findings can we trust? What the hell is evidence anyway? Maybe I never really knew anything to begin with. Maybe this sand will pull me under.
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Bri LeRose
@BriLeRose
I'm sad that we don't get to make anymore episodes of Lady Dynamite. If you enjoyed watching it, it's probably because we enjoyed making it so much it's hard to explain, but I will try.
Some things that happened in the writers' room: We brought in a crate of puppies to play with on a break. We watched as two Canadian writers held a surprise Christmas Gift-Off involving possibly hundreds of personalized gifts that had been hiding in the office all day.
We sent one writer to Atlanta to meet a panda after she beat breast cancer. We placed bets on one writer's platelet count and sent him New England chunky clam chowder and several Criterion collection DVDs to cheer him up. We did karaoke and watched close-up magic.
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