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"Community’s" Gillian Jacobs: TV’s Coolest Feminist?

by dig1iti43 Posted on December 31, 2013

Mother Jones

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Nowadays, Gillian Jacobs (pronounced with a hard G) is famous for her role on NBC’s acclaimed comedy Community, which returns for its fifth season on January 2. The series has brought her many fans and accolades, and she has since appeared in 2012’s Seeking a Friend for the End of the World and 2013’s Bad Milo! The Pittsburgh-born actress will also star in the 2014 comedy Walk of Shame (alongside one of her personal heroes, Elizabeth Banks), as well as the sequel to Hot Tub Time Machine, in which she plays the female lead.

But what if Jacobs had never gone into acting? What would she be doing instead? Well, if she had her way, she’d probably be sitting on the highest court in the land.

“I never pursued anything but acting,” Jacobs tells Mother Jones. “But as a kid, I was really interested in the Supreme Court. I wanted to to be a Supreme Court justice, but didn’t want to be a lawyer. I just wanted to go straight to being a justice.”

I ask her to name her all-time favorite justice—the one who might serve as the greatest influence on Associate Justice Gillian Jacobs.

“All the ladies,” she answers waggishly. “Like Ginsburg and Sotomayor. We need more of them, but I’m glad we have some.”

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"Community’s" Gillian Jacobs: TV’s Coolest Feminist?

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M. Night Shyamalan Steps Into the Education Wars

by Nomi Steen Posted on December 13, 2013

Mother Jones

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This is kind of weird. M. Night Shyamalan has apparently gotten a little bored with making movies, and has instead spent the past year or so writing a book. About education. And unlike other folks who parachute into the ed debates with the usual silver bullets (more charter schools! higher standards! fewer teachers unions!), he actually diagnoses the problem correctly:

You know how everyone says America is behind in education, compared to all the countries? Technically, right now, we’re a little bit behind Poland and a little bit ahead of Liechtenstein, right? So that’s where we land in the list, right? So that’s actually not the truth. The truth is actually bizarrely black and white, literally, which is, if you pulled out the inner-city schools — just pull out the inner-city, low-income schools, just pull that group out of the United States, put them to the side — and just took every other public school in the United States, we lead the world in public-school education by a lot.

And what’s interesting is, we always think about Finland, right? Well, Finland, obviously, is mainly white kids, right? They teach their white kids really well. But guess what, we teach our white kids even better. We beat everyone. Our white kids are getting taught the best public-school education on the planet. Those are the facts.

This is true. If you compare American white kids to, say, Finnish or Polish or German white kids, we do just as well. But we do an execrable job of teaching our black and Hispanic kids. In ed conversations, this usually gets referred to as the “achievement gap”—a deliberately watery term that Shyamalan has no use for. He calls it “education apartheid,” and what it means is that our schools qua schools are basically fine. It’s mostly our inner city schools with big low-income black and Hispanic populations that fail us:

So what are Shyamalan’s solutions? He’s got five:

Get rid of the bottom 2-3 percent of truly terrible teachers.
Make the principal the chief academic and head coach. Let another person handle school operations.
Constant feedback to teachers and students.
Small schools (not small classes).
Increased instructional time. Extend the school day and do away with summer vacation.

I don’t want to pretend that Shyamalan has all the answers here, or that his five interventions are themselves silver bullets. But I’ll say this: based on my sense of the literature and the endless number of n-point plans I’ve read over the years, Shyamalan’s sounds pretty reasonable. At the very least, his book is a welcome addition to the debate.

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M. Night Shyamalan Steps Into the Education Wars

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Biden drops by the Green Inaugural Ball to say thanks

by Myrna Posted on January 21, 2013

Biden drops by the Green Inaugural Ball to say thanks

By Philip Bump

kcpetersonBiden at a 2010 green jobs eventLast night’s Green Inaugural Ball had an unannounced speaker: Vice President Joe Biden.

He had a brief message for the activists and environmentalists in the room: “I came to say thank you.” Politico has more:

“I’ll tell you what my green dream is: that we finally face up to climate change,” Biden said during a surprise appearance at the “Green Ball,” an inaugural weekend event for environmental groups. …

Biden offered no details about what the administration’s approach will be but said, “I don’t intend on ending this four years without getting an awful lot more done.”

He added: “Keep the faith.”

And, in an apparent knock to Republicans who question climate science, he said, “There is science in the White House.”

Response online was positive.

The Green Ball wasn’t Biden’s only stop. He also dropped by the Latino Inaugural. From The Hill:

Biden, accompanied by his wife, Jill, and other family members, told the crowd during brief remarks, “I think you underestimate your power.” He continued, “I think you underestimate what you’ve done for America and what you’re about to do.”

He said to applause, “The fact that the Latino Hispanic community in this country was such a decisive voice in turning out in this election was noticed by the whole hemisphere.”

In other words, he came to say thank you.

Philip Bump writes about the news for Gristmill. He also uses Twitter a whole lot.

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Biden drops by the Green Inaugural Ball to say thanks

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