Nothingness not being nothing, nothingness being emptiness.
Cities that tend of have better schools for middle-income families, they tend to have much better prospects for kids moving up in the income distribution.
The data show we can do something about upward mobility. Every extra year of childhood spent in a better neighborhood seems to matter.
Every extra year you spend in a better environment makes you more likely to go to college, less likely to have a teenage pregnancy, makes you earn more as an adult, makes you more likely to have a stable family situation, be married, for instance, when you're an adult.
The latest research on social mobility showed that there's a large aggregate decline in the U. S. in your chances of earning more than your parents. But I think where the story becomes more optimistic one is that there are pockets of America, where children from low-income families have significant chances of rising up in the income distribution. This finding of big geographic variation is an encouraging one because it shows that there are places where we see the American Dream thriving and we simply need to understand how can we replicate those successes elsewhere throughout the country.
Atlanta's a good example of a city that's quite sprawling, where there's a sharp division between where blacks and whites live, between where low-income and high-income families live.
We don’t really care about test scores. We care about adult outcomes.
. . . Enduring comprises a strong activity of the soul, namely, a vigorous grasping of and clinging to the good; and only from this stout-hearted activity can the strength to support the physical and spiritual suffering of injury and death be nourished.
I cant see any great evidence that humans have any ability to access anything other than the material world. Beyond that, who knows, but theres no good evidence that would take me to any particular belief.
Nelson Mandela once remarked that he befriended his jailers, those grim, khaki-clad overseers of his decades of hard labor in a limestone quarry, by "exploiting their good qualities. " Asked if he believed all people were kind at their core, he responded, "There is no doubt whatsoever, provided you are able to arouse their inherent goodness. " If that sounds like wishful thinking, well, he actually did it.
By the end, you should be inside your character, actually operating from within somebody else, and knowing him pretty well, as that person knows himself or herself. You're sort of a predator, an invader of people.