Here are some articles I have selected which may be of interest to my students. Tell me which ones interest you and we can chat about them in our sessions.
Links may be to original website, or gift article, or a Google document in the case of something behind a paywall or in a newsletter. Google documents may have a student and teacher version, and may include comprehension questions or other tasks and activities.
If there is not Google document please read, take notes and be prepared for a discussion.
SOCIETY
Title: “As Many South Koreans Shun Marriage, Two Women Try to Redefine Family“
Topics / Concepts: marriage, being single, society, social expectations and obligations, culture, discrimination, sex, roles of women, Korea
Link: https://archive.ph/hP98S
Title: “When most of Canada switches from daylight saving time, I won’t participate”
Topics / Concepts: society, obligation, time change, daylight savings time, seasons, winter, SAD
Source: CBC
Link: https://www.cbc.ca/amp/1.7371398
CULTURE
57 Sandwiches that Define New York City
Food Culture New York United States Sandwiches Bagels Wraps
https://archive.ph/keN5T
Excerpt: “You can tell a lot about a city by the sandwiches it keeps. Not just its tastes or its vices — cured meats — but also its fascination with myriad cultures, its appreciation for stellar ingredients and its desire for delicious convenience. Over the last three months, the New York Times Food staff has crisscrossed all five boroughs in search of heroes, bodega icons, inspired crossovers, meatless wonders and more. This list isn’t a ranking — though every one of these sandwiches is marvelous to eat, with one hand or two — but a way of surveying New York as the culinary destination it is. Why sandwiches? Well, what other food item could be as dynamic, diverse and entertaining as New York City itself?
— Nikita Richardson“
Title: ” Carolyn Hax: Losing patience with all these ‘overly nice’ people”
Topic / Content – opinion, editorial, society, culture, being nice, –
https://archive.ph/bONLo
LANGUAGE
Title: “Social Greetings in the English Language”
Source: Thought Co.
Link: https://www.thoughtco.com/greetings-social-language-1210042
Title: “How this Anishinaabe elder uses online videos to pass along love of language to children”
Source: Toronto Star
Link: https://www.thestar.com/news/watch-how-this-anishinaabe-elder-uses-online-videos-to-pass-along-love-of-language-to/article_02c0c975-7622-5146-8e6f-fc66ba6ec86b.html
Excerpt: “Indigenous languages, he added, can hold answers to pressing modern questions. The world’s last biodiversity-rich lands are owned and managed by Indigenous people, he said, whose languages are encoded with the techniques to manage the territory. The world may lose important knowledge about climate change and sustainable development when those languages are lost.”
SCIENCE
Title: “Scientists Identify a Speech Trait That Foreshadows Cognitive Decline”
Topics / Concepts: Speech, speaking speed, Cognitive decline, Mental health , Aging, Science and technology, Health and wellness, Medicine and health
Source: Science Alert
Link: https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-identify-a-speech-trait-that-foreshadows-cognitive-decline
Is Fake Meat Better for You Than Real Meat?
Topics: food, meat, science
Source: New York Times
https://archive.ph/j7tGJ
TECH
Title: “The Tech Friend: Affordable phones are dying”
Topics / Concepts: tech, technology, business, affordability, cost of living, luxury, products
Source: Washington Post
Link: Google doc
The Barcode Engineered Its Own Downfall
Topics / concepts: Inventions, bar code, product design, distribution, industrial design, technology, business, retail, stores, shopping
Source: The Atlantic
https://archive.ph/w9LNX
The barcode is deceptively simple by design. The black-and-white stripes of varying thickness represent the numbers in a UPC code. Point a laser at the barcode, and light will reflect back from the white lines, but not the black ones, turning into 0s and 1s on a computer. In that split-second beep, a machine knows that the first chunk of those 12 digits is the manufacturer’s code, whereas the second half points to the specific product—sulfite-free dijon, not the plain dijon or the dijon laced with Mike’s Hot Honey. From the beginning, the design was basically perfect. “We got very, very few errors,” Paul McEnroe, an engineer on the IBM barcode team and the author of The Barcode (which is a different book from Barcode), told me. At the company’s barcode lab in North Carolina, an IBM vice president picked up a pack of cigarettes with a barcode, McEnroe said, “and threw it across the checkout stand. It bounced as it passed across the top of the table, over the scanner window, spinning. And the damn thing—it read it.”
BUSINESS
Title: “Poor Nations Are Writing a New Handbook for Getting Rich”
Topics / Concepts: Developing countries, trade, imports and exports, economics, economy, supply chains, technology
economic models, economic growth, Jobs employment, International trade, Service industry
Economies focused on exports have lifted millions out of poverty, but epochal changes in trade, supply chains and technology are making it a lot harder.
https://archive.ph/gakSn
There’s a future in service jobs.
One alternative might be found in Bengaluru, a high-tech center in the Indian state of Karnataka.
Multinationals like Goldman Sachs, Victoria’s Secret and the Economist magazine have flocked to the city and set up hundreds of operational hubs — known as global capability centers — to handle accounting, design products, develop cybersecurity systems and artificial intelligence, and more.
Such centers are expected to generate 500,000 jobs nationwide in the next two to three years, according to the consulting firm Deloitte.
They are joining hundreds of biotech, engineering and information technology companies including homegrown giants like Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro and Infosys Limited. Four months ago, the American chip company AMD unveiled its largest global design center there.
“We have to move away from the idea of classic development stages, that you go from the farm to the factory and then from the factory to offices
factory and then from the factory to offices,” said Richard Baldwin, an economist at the International Institute for Management Development in Geneva. “That whole development model is wrong.”
Two-thirds of the world’s output now comes from the service sector — a mishmash that includes dog walkers, manicurists, food preparers, cleaners and drivers, as well as highly trained chip designers, graphic artists, nurses, engineers and accountants.
It is possible to leapfrog to the service sector and grow by selling to businesses around the world, Mr. Baldwin argued. That is what helped India become the world’s fifth-largest economy.
Title: “A millennial who’s been applying to jobs for a year says he’s encountered ghost jobs and scammers in his struggle to find a remote role”
Topics / Concepts: Job search / work search, employment, career, work, telecommuting, hybrid work
Source: business Insider
Link: https://www.businessinsider.com/millennial-cant-get-hired-remote-jobs-tech-sales-layoffs-health-2024-5
Excerpt: Martins also said he thought some job postings he was seeing were created by “scammers.”
For example, he said he recently got an email from a company with a website domain name that was the name of a real company, followed by the word “jobs.” The real company’s website, however, had a different domain name, and the quality of the site made Martins suspicious.
Using the Whois lookup tool, he discovered that the suspicious website had been created on April 18th.
“I got an email from the scammer on April 19th, so they certainly didn’t waste time going after people,” he said.
Martins said the “company plus jobs” domain-name format was common in his experience with scammers. He added that recruiters who couldn’t answer basic questions about a role and pay that seemed too good to be true were red flags.
“They hook you in, throw out a huge pay rate, and hope people are too blown away imagining themselves making bank to ask questions,” he said.
BI has spoken with several people who said they were nearly duped into sending scammers money. The Federal Trade Commission has more information about job scams and how to avoid them
