It actually took Casey quite a while to settle on where she wanted to go, because she'd had her heart set on another program (which she also got into), and wasn't expecting at all to get into MIT.
But she's done a bunch of digging in the last few weeks, and she's completely fallen in love.
It's all tremendously exciting, and we're all just ridiculously proud of her.
My college has one lecture hall. On the entire campus. Most classrooms seat about 30 comfortably in non-covid times, 40 if you push it. No way to do social distancing for in-class instruction without folding in Zoom for the majority of students.
And we're a commuter campus, which means no dorms. At all. So everyone's going back to families, kids, parents, housemates, etc. And most students AND faculty are arriving on public transportation.
One thing to note about Andrew Sullivan's ongoing race-realism rant, now dozens if not hundreds of tweets long: He hasn't used the word "Black" once in it yet.
There are some quiet parts he's still unwilling to say out loud.
And just to make this really explicit, Blackness is central to Andrew Sullivan's interest in race. Search his timeline for "African," and you'll see him going on and on about Black violence just a few days ago.
Yep. As a vaccinated person I'm doing basically the same thing. Double-masking when indoors, particularly in crowded or constricted spaces or for extended periods, a light cloth or surgical mask outside.
I pretty much assume I'd be pretty much safe outdoors without a mask at this point, but other people don't know I'm vaxed, and some have a different risk tolerance than me, so I haven't devoted much thought to the question. Because being considerate is a sufficient justification.
If there's nobody anywhere near me and I've got good lines of sight so I know nobody's going to stumble across me suddenly, I'll take my mask out when I'm outside, too.
Andrew Sullivan's tweets from today are really quite breathtaking—he spent the evening both attacking people for claiming he believes in innate racial differences in intelligence and mocking people for suggesting that innate racial differences in intelligence don't exist.
I may do a detailed exegesis of this stuff later, but just go look. I defy anyone to construct a coherent narrative of the affirmative case Sullivan is making about race and intelligence out of the stuff he said on here today.
None of this is new with him, but usually he lets a bit of time elapse between the "I'm not a racist" rants and "if you don't believe in innate racial difference you don't believe in science" rants. Tonight he did both at the same time, and it's really something to see.
Her job wasn't to get the colleges to like her. Her job was to let the colleges know who she was, so they could make an informed decision as to whether to admit her or not.
There were several times in the process where she was struggling with what to write in (or for, or as) an essay, and where she landed every time was "write something real."
Tommy Lasorda once said managers are juggling eight or ten considerations when they debate a pitching change. Smart fans will be aware of about three, and they'll actually usually get the cost-benefit analysis of those three right. Where they fail is missing the others.
Which is not to say experts are always right, or that MLB managers never make bonehead calls based on weird whims. But I found the quote really useful and try to remember it.
An interesting side note: If you're an armchair critic, you're screwing up if you're not properly assessing all eight factors. But if you're an activist trying to influence policy, that's not actually your job—your job is to become the ninth factor.