Brandon Kepley

[Barack Obama @BarackObama]

Michelle and I loved reading to this bright group of kids today!

We hope this new Chicago Public Library branch at the Obama Presidential Center will be a place where folks come to read, check out books, and connect with one another for years to come.

[Kevin McLeod @bannon1975]

The teacher who reads aloud to their class every day, not as a lesson, just as a gift, is building something.
Not reading skills. Not comprehension scores. A shared imagination.
A room full of children who have all been to the same place together.
Who have all felt the same thing at the same moment. That's not a literacy intervention. That's a community.

[OptaSTATS @OptaSTATS]

Ayo Dosunmu of the @Timberwolves is the first player in NBA history with:

40+ points
75% FG shooting
5+ threes without a miss
10+ FT without a miss

...in any game (regular season or playoffs, off the bench or not).

[Good Morning America @GMA]

The Los Angeles Unified school board has voted to require screen time limits and encourage the use of pen and paper for assignments, becoming the first major school district to do so. @SamChampion reports.

[Brandon Kepley @bkepley]

@wischlist Gill Williams Battle Anderson Ivisic

[Seth Davis @SethDavisHoops]

Illinois has one of the great fan bases in all of sports.

Live it up Illini Nation!!!! See you in Indy!!

[WCIA 3 Sports @WCIA3sports]

ELITE STATUS: Keaton Wagler has met the criteria to have his jersey raised to the rafters of State Farm Center

https://t.co/BRrxxy8TiL

[Illinois Men's Basketball @IlliniMBB]

Keaton Wagler
AP Second Team All-America

[Illinois Men's Basketball @IlliniMBB]

Keaton Wagler
Sporting News Second-Team All-America

[Jonathan Haidt @JonHaidt]

Still more evidence that EdTech harmed American education: Across states, the year that the state imposed mandates requiring computers/tablets, that's the year that test scores stopped rising and in most cases started falling.

From Jared Cooney Horvath
https://t.co/TSH1bfp8lA

[Tom Loveless @tomloveless99]

Strikes me as a bit odd that all of our major reading assessments are now delivered on screens, with the results showing a steady decline in students' ability to read--and literacy experts suspecting that screens are contributing to the decline.

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

If your child becomes a reader, about 80% of the education job is already done. That's my honest assessment after working in education for over thirty years. Everything else is secondary. Most parents think science education is important. Yes it is. But if you can't read the biology textbook, you're not going to learn biology.

Reading is the meta-skill that enables all other skills. History requires reading. Science requires reading. Even math increasingly requires reading as it becomes more sophisticated. The child who reads voraciously will figure out everything else. The child who doesn't will struggle with everything.

[Raoul Duke @batcountry1980]

It’s pretty amazing how the mid-1960s Bob Dylan, the polka-dot-shirted, speed-freak jangle street poet, has become for many the archetypal Dylan. That wiry, electric image looms over his entire career, even though it lasted barely fourteen months: the three-album blaze of Bringing It All Back Home, Highway 61 Revisited, and Blonde on Blonde.

It’s in no small part down to the sheer excitement of the music. For all the relentless brilliance of his albums before and after this era, these records cast the longest shadow because they pulse with a singular electricity. And none more so than Highway 61 Revisited.

Bringing It All Back Home is a fantastic record. But it’s very much Dylan pouring his enigmatic, torrent-of-consciousness poetry into forms that already existed: blues riffs, folk-rock templates. He’s straddling two worlds here, electrifying the old rather than fully inventing the new.

Blonde on Blonde is majestic, a sprawling Nashville nocturnal fever-dream, hazy and immersive, backed by that thin wild mercury sound. Its greatness is beyond dispute, but it doesn’t thrill me like my favourite of this era.

Highway 61 Revisited is the pinnacle, the album where Dylan doesn’t just go electric, he bends rock ’n’ roll to his will and remakes it in his own image. With a group behind him more pioneers than musicians, every song is a voyage into strange new worlds. The music is as thrilling and adventurous as the lyrics, a relentless, high-velocity assault of razor-sharp social satire, biblical thunder, and carnivalesque absurdity. This is the surrealist rock ’n’ roll prophet operating at absolute maximum velocity.

[ᗰᗩƳᖇᗩ @LePapillonBlu2]

‘Til the day I die, I will never understand how this wasn’t the end of it, right from the very beginning.

[Craig Baird - Canadian History Ehx @CraigBaird]

John Candy and Catherine O'Hara both made the world a better place.

[Robert Rosenthal @ALionEye]

Big Ten wins in the 2020's:

1. Illinois 89
2. Purdue 88

[Brandon Kepley @bkepley]

@itsAntWright Now you know.

[Brandon Kepley @bkepley]

@ALionEye I said the EXACT same thing!

[Boze Herrington, Library Owl 😴🧙‍♀️ @SketchesbyBoze]

We live in a culture that is deeply anti-intellectual. Most people don’t read, higher ed is being dismantled by Big Tech, you get bullied for having a vocabulary. Powerful machines have been built to ensure your ignorance & conformity. We are speeding towards Fahrenheit 451.

[TheJewishAlly @TheJewishAlly]

•It is reported that her mother lives in a $1.4 million home in Tennessee.
•It is reported that her father lives in a $700,000 home in Rochester, New York.
•It is reported that her father owns rental properties and is a landlord.
•She attended elite private universities, with tuition exceeding $60,000 per year.
•Her family’s stability and lifestyle were built through property ownership, private education, and capital growth.
•She benefited directly from the American system of homeownership and wealth building, while advocating policies that restrict those same paths for others.
•This is a clear case of good for me and my family, not for you.
•A 37 year old public figure breaking down under basic scrutiny raises serious concerns about the ability to handle the pressure of participating in, shaping, and advocating policy within New York City.

US homeownership rates (recent data):
•Overall: ~65–66%
•White: ~72–74%
•Asian: ~61–63%
•Hispanic/Latino: ~49–51%
•Black/African American: ~45–47%

Who remembers Bill Clinton during his administration, openly celebrating rising homeownership as proof the American Dream was working?

These are not people who want the American Dream for you or for anyone else.

Socialism is taught in theory, not lived in practice. It fails in every real world implementation, and it will fail here too, ruining lives in the process.