Tough Love

Yes, I like this picture. Wanna make something of it?

I should have mentioned yesterday that that hilarious David Brooks column was drivel, but not pure drivel— actually about something, namely a new book by the education-beat journalist Paul Tough, which Brooks gets to in paragraph 8:

The good news is that attention is finally turning to the love lives of our students — to the psychic and emotional qualities they bring to the classroom. No one is better at chronicling this shift than Paul Tough, the author of “How Children Succeed” and now “Helping Children Succeed.” In his latest book, he asks how, concretely, can we improve students’ noncognitive skills. 

Psych!

From The Lovable Misanthrope.

Dr. Google and I may have caught David Brooks with his pants down, or something like that—I'm not saying plagiarism, but an ethical breach in the plagiarism family, and I'm not kidding—in reference to his Friday column, on its surface a relatively dull specimen of his social science dishing mode, where he attempts to show you how hot new research proves that poverty has nothing to do with our social problems (and therefore, implicitly, government ought to leave it alone and focus on more effective measures like eliminating the budget deficit, because everybody knows the budget deficit is responsible for teenage pregnancy, segregated neighborhoods, and hunger).