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①Mr. Koziatek is part of something pioneering. ②He is a teacher at a New Hampshire high school where learning is not something of books and tests and mechanical memorization, but practical. ③When did it become accepted wisdom that students should be able to name the 13th president of the United States but be utterly overwhelmed by a broken bike chain?

①As Koziatek knows, there is learning in just about everything. ②Nothing is necessarily gained by forcing students to learn geometry at a graffitied desk stuck with generations of discarded chewing gum. ③They can also learn geometry by assembling a bicycle.

①But he’s also found a kind of insidious prejudice. ②Working with your hands is seen as almost a mark of inferiority. ③Schools in the family of vocational education “have that stereotype ... that it’s for kids who can’t make it academically,” he says.

①On one hand, that viewpoint is a logical product of America’s evolution. ②Manufacturing is not the economic engine that it once was. ③The job security that the US economy once offered to high school graduates has largely evaporated. ④More education is the new principle. ⑤We want more for our kids, and rightfully so.

①But the headlong push into bachelor’s degrees for all—and the subtle devaluing of anything less—misses an important point: That’s not the only thing the American economy needs. ②Yes, a bachelor's degree opens more doors. ③But even now, 54 percent of the jobs in the country are middle-skill jobs, such as construction and high-skill manufacturing. ④But only 44 percent of workers are adequately trained.

①In other words, at a time when the working class has turned the country on its political head, frustrated that the opportunity that once defined America is vanishing, one obvious solution is staring us in the face. ②There is a gap in working-class jobs, but the workers who need those jobs most aren't equipped to do them. ③Koziatek’s Manchester School of Technology High School is trying to fill that gap.

2

①While fossil fuels—coal, oil, gas—still generate roughly 85 percent of the world’s energy supply, it’s clearer than ever that the future belongs to renewable sources such as wind and solar. ②The move to renewables is picking up momentum around the world: They now account for more than half of new power sources going on line.

①Some growth stems from a commitment by governments and farsighted businesses to fund cleaner energy sources. ②But increasingly the story is about the plummeting prices of renewables, especially wind and solar. ③The cost of solar panels has dropped by 80 percent and the cost of wind turbines by close to one-third in the past eight years.

①In many parts of the world renewable energy is already a principal energy source. ②In Scotland, for example, wind turbines provide enough electricity to power 95 percent of homes. ③While the rest of the world takes the lead, notably China and Europe, the United States is also seeing a remarkable shift. ④In March, for the first time, wind and solar power accounted for more than 10 percent of the power generated in the US, reported the US Energy Information Administration.

①President Trump has underlined fossil fuels—especially coal—as the path to economic growth. ②In a recent speech in Iowa, he dismissed wind power as an unreliable energy source. ③But that message did not play well with many in Iowa, where wind turbines dot the fields and provide 36 percent of the state’s electricity generation—and where tech giants like Microsoft are being attracted by the availability of clean energy to power their data centers.

①The question “what happens when the wind doesn’t blow or the sun doesn’t shine?” has provided a quick put-down for skeptics. ②But a boost in the storage capacity of batteries is making their ability to keep power flowing around the clock more likely.

①The advance is driven in part by vehicle manufacturers, who are placing big bets on battery-powered electric vehicles. ②Although electric cars are still a rarity on roads now, this massive investment could change the picture rapidly in coming years.

①While there’s a long way to go, the trend lines for renewables are spiking. ②The pace of change in energy sources appears to be speeding up—perhaps just in time to have a meaningful effect in slowing climate change. ③What Washington does—or doesn’t do—to promote alternative energy may mean less and less at a time of a global shift in thought.

 

 

 

3

①The power and ambition of the giants of the digital economy is astonishing—Amazon has just announced the purchase of the upmarket grocery chain Whole Foods for $13.5bn, but two years ago Facebook paid even more than that to acquire the WhatsApp messaging service, which doesn’t have any physical product at all. ②What WhatsApp offered Facebook was an intricate and finely detailed web of its users’ friendships and social lives.

①Facebook promised the European commission then that it would not link phone numbers to Facebook identities, but it broke the promise almost as soon as the deal went through. ②Even without knowing what was in the messages, the knowledge of who sent them and to whom was enormously revealing and still could be. ③What political journalist, what party whip, would not want to know the makeup of the WhatsApp groups in which Theresa May’s enemies are currently plotting? ④It may be that the value of Whole Foods to Amazon is not so much the 460 shops it owns, but the records of which customers have purchased what.

①Competition law appears to be the only way to address these imbalances of power. But it is clumsy. ②For one thing, it is very slow compared to the pace of change within the digital economy. ③By the time a problem has been addressed and remedied it may have vanished in the marketplace, to be replaced by new abuses of power. ④But there is a deeper conceptual problem, too. ⑤Competition law as presently interpreted deals with financial disadvantage to consumers and this is not obvious when the users of these services don’t pay for them. ⑥The users of their services are not their customers. ⑦That would be the people who buy advertising from them—and Facebook and Google, the two virtual giants, dominate digital advertising to the disadvantage of all other media and entertainment companies.

①The product they’re selling is data, and we, the users, convert our lives to data for the benefit of the digital giants. ②Just as some ants farm the bugs called aphids for the honeydew they produce when they feed, so Google farms us for the data that our digital lives yield. Ants keep predatory insects away from where their aphids feed; Gmail keeps the spammers out of our inboxes. ③It doesn’t feel like a human or democratic relationship, even if both sides benefit.

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①To combat the trap of putting a premium on being busy, Cal Newport, author of Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World, recommends building a habit of “deep work”—the ability to focus without distraction.

①There are a number of approaches to mastering the art of deep work—be it lengthy retreats dedicated to a specific task; developing a daily ritual; or taking a “journalistic” approach to seizing moments of deep work when you can throughout the day. ②Whichever approach, the key is to determine your length of focus time and stick to it.

①Newport also recommends “deep scheduling” to combat constant interruptions and get more done in less time. ②“At any given point, I should have deep work scheduled for roughly the next month. ③Once on the calendar, I protect this time like I would a doctor’s appointment or important meeting,” he writes.

①Another approach to getting more done in less time is to rethink how you prioritise your day—in particular how we craft our to-do lists. ②Tim Harford, author of Messy: The Power of Disorder to Transform Our Lives, points to a study in the early 1980s that divided undergraduates into two groups: some were advised to set out monthly goals and study activities; others were told to plan activities and golds in much more detail, day by day.

①While the researchers assumed that the well-structured daily plans would be most effective when it came to the execution of tasks, they were wrong: the detailed daily plans demotivated students. ②Harford argues that inevitable distractions often render the daily to-do list ineffective, while leaving room for improvisation in such a list can reap the best results.

①In order to make the most of our focus and energy, we also need to embrace downtime, or as Newport suggests, “be lazy.”

①“Idleness is not just a vacation, an indulgence or a vice; it is as indispensable to the brain as vitamin D is to the body… [ idleness] is, paradoxically, necessary to getting any work done, ” he argues.

①Srini Pillay, an assistant professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, believes this counterintuitive link between downtime and productivity may be due to the way our brains operate. ②When our brains switch between being focused and unfocused on a task, they tend to be more efficient.

①“What people don’t realise is that in order to complete these tasks they need to use both the focus and unfocus circuits in their brain,” says Pillay.

 

 

 

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A fifth grader gets a homework assignment to select his future career path from a list of occupations. He ticks “astronaut” but quickly adds “scientist” to the list and selects it as well. The boy is convinced that if he reads enough, he can explore as many career paths as he likes. And so he reads—everything from encyclopedias to science fiction novels. He reads so passionately that his parents have to institute a “no reading policy” at the dinner table.

That boy was Bill Gates, and he hasn’t stopped reading yet—not even after becoming one of the most successful people on the planet. Nowadays, his reading material has changed from science fiction and reference books: recently, he revealed that he reads at least 50 nonfiction books a year. Gates chooses nonfiction titles because they explain how the world works. “Each book opens up new avenues of knowledge,” Gates says.