Browsing PBH By Articles

How Evangelicals Won A Culture War And Lost A Generation

The Article: How evangelicals won a culture war and lost a generation by Rachel Held Evans in CNN Online.

The Text: On March 24, World Vision announced that the U.S. branch of the popular humanitarian organization would no longer discriminate against employees in same-sex marriages.

It was a decision that surprised many but one that made sense, given the organization’s ecumenical nature.

But on March 26, World Vision President Richard Stearns reversed the decision, stating, “our board acknowledged that the policy change we made was a mistake.”

Supporters helped the aid group “see that with more clarity,” Stearns added, “and we’re asking you to forgive us for that mistake.”

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GOP Rhetoric Vs. Global Warming Reality

The Article: GOP Rhetoric vs. Global Warming Reality by Eleanor Clift in The Daily Beast.

The Text: Reading the summary of findings from a worldwide panel of scientists about the impact of climate change and the looming threat that manmade greenhouse gases pose to the planet is pretty disturbing. Oceans rising, coral reefs dying, ice caps melting, heavy rains and Biblical floods, the world’s food supply threatened. The existential danger posed by climate change is so overwhelming that most people shake their head in dismay and then go back to what they were doing.

It scares people to understand the scope of the problem, and they fear that any solution would be so draconian and out of reach that it is best not to think about it. The inability of the environmental and scientific community to rally the country toward action by warning of all the dire consequences of inaction is implicit in the report issued Monday by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of international scientists under the auspices of the United Nations.

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Want To Rule The World? Talk To Millennials Like They’re Human

The Article: The First Person To Talk To Millennials Like Human Beings Will Rule The World by in Esquire.

The Text: The results are in: Millennials are going to change the false two-party dichotomy that is currently destroying America.

But it’s not because they’ve seen the waste and corruption that a two-party system brought with it, ruining an economy that Millennials now have to inherit. According to The USA Today and the Third Way think tank, it’s because they love Netflix.

“Millennials have come of age in a period of expansive customization of goods and services,” the report concludes. “Their experiences have led them to an á la carte worldview, including in politics.”

This is not what’s happening.

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Obamacare Didn’t Fail. Let’s Move On Now.

The Article: Obamacare fails to collapse. Time to move on, folks. by Paul Waldman in The Washington Post.

The Text: If you pick up any newspaper today, you’re likely to find a story about the fact that today is the (somewhat loose) deadline to sign up for insurance under the Affordable Care Act. The deadline will also be a major topic on cable news, and will probably lead all three network newscasts this evening. There will be some uncertainty and some arguments over what the numbers mean.

But we should mark this day, because barring some kind of unforeseen catastrophe, it’s the last time the ACA will be the lead story everywhere in the media.
Of course, there will be another open enrollment deadline every year, and new insurance policies taking effect every January 1. But today is the last of the law’s key dates, when everyone’s attention turns to it. We had the dreadful opening of healthcare.gov (and the state exchanges) on October 1st, then on January 1st the last round of key provisions took effect, and today open enrollment concludes. And that’s the end of major ACA news events.

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Want An A On Your Next Awful, 143-Word Paper? Be An Athlete

The Article: Here’s the Awful 146-Word “Essay” That Earned an A- for a UNC Jock by Jordan Weissmann in Slate.

The Text: The University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill has already been embroiled in a scandal for allowing its athletes to enroll in fake courses for easy credit. Now, the whole controversy has a rather potent visual symbol to go along with it: a 146-word, ungrammatical essay on Rosa Parks that earned an A-.

Mary Willingham, who spent a decade tutoring and advising UNC’s jocks before turning into a whistleblower, unveiled the paper during an interview with ESPN. As the segment explains, academically troubled UNC athletes were encouraged to sign up for so-called “paper classes”—which were essentially no-work independent studies involving a single paper that allowed functionally illiterate football players to prop up their GPAs, thus satisfying the NCAA’s eligibility requirements. Here’s the sort of work that was involved:

And here’s the text.

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