 Publish and be bombed It’s 40 years since the release of The Hunt for Red October. Tom Clancy’s novel about a rogue Soviet captain of a high-tech submarine attempting to defect to the US was one of the first “techno-thrillers,” fiction involving detailed descriptions of military systems and tactics: Dale Brown and Stephen Coonts were among those who followed suit. But military fiction has a long history and has often shaped military fact, writes the former Australian general Mick Ryan in Engelsberg Ideas. Fiction is “a speculative tool for contemplating the future of conflict,” examining not just technological changes but geopolitical ones: Clancy’s Red Storm Rising, for instance, imagines a conventional clash between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, as does the British General John Hackett’s 1980 novel The Third World War: August 1985. More recent works draw pictures of potential clashes with China and Russia — Ryan’s own White Sun War depicts a Chinese invasion of Taiwan. The Hunt for Red October, though, “set a new standard [for authors] who hope to use fiction to plan for the future of war.” Superb owl Duolingo is the most downloaded language-learning app in the world. The little green owl who threatens you, in a cheerful sort of way, for failing to do your Mandarin lessons each day is famous. But does it actually help you speak new languages? Imogen West-Knights used it with four: The last was Swedish. She’d moved to Sweden and wanted to gain some control over her new life, she writes in The Dial: “If I could understand what was going on at the post office, that was at least one thing I wouldn’t have to worry about.” But despite all the effort, when she arrived, “I had a rude awakening. I could not speak Swedish.” Lots of people find similar things. Duolingo is, West-Knights says, good for a beginner’s grasp of a language, for listening and reading, grammar and vocab. But “the speaking element is trash,” one user told her, and that was a common experience: “Practically everyone I spoke to told me that speaking was far and away their weakest suit.” The app is introducing artificial intelligence-based conversation bots, but they don’t work brilliantly yet. Still, users remain obsessed: One “forced herself to complete her daily lesson while in labor with her son,” to maintain her 1,738-day streak. Reading between the lines A meme is going around about US literacy: That in 1979, fewer than 1% of US adults were illiterate, and that now it is upwards of 16%. It is, says the economist Maxwell Tabarrok, false: The two numbers measure different things. The 1979 figure was people who literally could not write their name; the modern figure, people who passed a comprehension test. In reality, the long-term trend on literacy rates is flat. But you don’t have to make stuff up if you want to criticize US education policy, Tabarrok writes in Maximum Progress. Inflation-adjusted spending per pupil has tripled since 1970, with no improvement in reading scores. The average number of years people spend in school has gone up by three years, but performance is stagnant. One explanation could be that the extra schooling is not about building human capital, but “a socially inefficient zero-sum competition,” an arms race of signaling that it would be best if we abandoned. |
