A series of federal surveys of selective colleges found virtually no change from the 1990s to 2012 in enrollment of students who are less well off — less than 15 percent by some measures — even though there was a huge increase over that time in the number of such students going to college. Similar studies looking at a narrower range of top wealthy universities back those findings. With race-based affirmative action losing both judicial and public support, many have urged selective colleges to shift more focus to economic diversity.

People have long suspected that there’s a cost to all this digital data all the time, right at our fingertips. Now there’sa study out of UCLA that might prove those digital skeptics right. In the study, kids who were deprived of screens for five days got much better at reading people’s emotions than kids who continued their normal screen-filled lives.
The California research team’s findings, published in the journal Computers in Human Behaviorthis month tries to analyze the impact digital media has on humans’ ability to communicate face-to-face.

Research in the last couple of decades suggests that the problem is not so much overt racists. Rather, the larger problem is a broad swath of people who consider themselves enlightened, who intellectually believe in racial equality, who deplore discrimination, yet who harbor unconscious attitudes that result in discriminatory policies and behavior.

Trong lịch sử tân nhạc Việt, dường như không có một nhạc sĩ nào nổi tiếng ngay với sáng tác đầu tay, ở tuổi niên thiếu, khi chỉ mới 14, 15 tuổi, như trường hợp Cung Tiến. Có dễ chính vì thế mà, có người không ngần ngại gọi hiện tượng Cung Tiến là thiên tài của bộ môn nghệ thuật này.<br>Nói vậy, không có nghĩa chúng ta không có nhiều nhạc sĩ (cũng như thi sĩ), bước vào sân chơi VHNT rất sớm. Thậm chí có người chỉ ở độ tuổi lên 9, lên 10... Nhưng để được đám đông biết đến hay, được những người cùng giới công nhận thì, chí ít cũng phải nhiều năm sau. Ở đây, chúng ta cũng không nên loại trừ trường hợp, nếu có những nhạc sĩ (hay thi sĩ) thành danh chỉ với một bài duy nhất thì, cũng có những người viết nhạc (làm thơ) trọn đời vẫn không được dư luận biết tới!

Tác giả Lan Cao là một trong những người Mỹ gốc Việt viết sách tiếng Anh hiếm hoi được những nhà xuất bản có tiếng của Hoa Kỳ chọn in. Bà tên thật là Cao thị Phương Lan, và là ái nữ của cố đại tướng Cao Văn Viên, vị Tổng Tham Mưu Trưởng cuối cùng trong quân lực Việt Nam Cộng Hòa. Tác giả Lan Cao vừa được Viking Penguin phát hành cuốn sách thứ hai, có tên “The Lotus and the Storm,” sau khi xuất bản cuốn “Monkey Bridge” rất thành công của bà vào năm 1997.

A devotional anticipation is generated by the announcement of a new Haruki Murakami book. Readers wait for his work the way past generations lined up at record stores for new albums by the Beatles or Bob Dylan. There is a happily frenzied collective expectancy — the effect of cultural voice, the Murakami effect. Within seven days of its midnight release, “Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage” sold over one million copies in Japan.
COLORLESS TSUKURU TAZAKI AND HIS YEARS OF PILGRIMAGE
By Haruki Murakami
Translated by Philip Gabriel
386 pp. Alfred A. Knopf. $25.95.

You’re hosting a literary dinner party. Which three writers are invited?
Jhumpa Lahiri, Ann Patchett and Louise Erdrich. With three women, you know they will carry the conversation completely, no need for me to say a word, which is exactly how I like it. I love to hear women talk. I’ll make the salad, the seafood risotto, the rhubarb crisp, and clear the dishes, pour the wine, serve the coffee, and sit and smile. Afterward I’ll make it into a novella.

As I read those passages, I could not help reflecting on more recent history. Timberg does not draw the parallel, but I believe it is impossible to finish his account of the ordeals he went through and not think of all the men and women suffering in hospitals today from the wounds received in the even more thankless wars of Iraq and Afghanistan: “There is relief at having defied death and a kind of macho attitude that reflects the attention one is receiving and the camaraderie of fellow soldiers in similar circumstances,” Timberg writes. This is when we hear “the seriously injured serviceman who talks about how he’s not going to let his wounds beat him and how he just wants to get back into the fight.”
“Those are honest emotions, but they are situational,” Timberg adds. “The day ultimately comes when the attention diminishes, the good fellowship is no more because he is mostly alone, and he is faced with the chilling prospect of a lifetime of coping with what war has turned him into.”
BLUE-EYED BOY
A Memoir
By Robert Timberg
Illustrated. 304 pp. The Penguin Press. $27.95.

But the final agony that abandoned hundreds of thousands of America’s South Vietnamese allies, while heroically saving others, is an often-overlooked chapter, now starkly exposed in “Last Days in Vietnam” a documentary by Rory Kennedy that opens Friday.
“It’s shocking to me how few people know what happened,” Ms. Kennedy said.

Ivory Tower
a film directed by Andrew Rossi

Andrew Rossi’s documentary Ivory Tower prods us to think about the crisis of higher education. But is there a crisis? Expensive gambles, unforeseen losses, and investments whose soundness has yet to be decided have raised the price of a college education so high that today on average it costs eleven times as much as it did in 1978. Underlying the anxiety about the worth of a college degree is a suspicion that old methods and the old knowledge will soon be eclipsed by technology.