July 5: (Two) Week(s) in Review

Last week the Virtus clan was on a mini-vacation in the Colorado mountains. With very little to miss, today’s entry recaps the best of the past fortnight. Highlight? The Franklin Center shined its Citizen Spotlight on me and co-editor Joshua Sharf. Hope everyone had a Happy Independence Day!

From the Ed Is Watching Blog

• Friedman Survey Finds Big Shift on Standardized Testing, Not to Mention….
• Florida Doubles Number of States with Cutting-Edge Choice through ESAs
• Holyoke’s Pursuit of Innovation Status Raises Real Questions to Answer

Finished One Good(read) Book This Fortnight
Frozen in Time: An Epic Story of Survival and a Modern Quest for Lost Heroes of World War II by Mitchell Zuckoff
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Zuckoff recaps another obscure but remarkable World War II survival tale from one of the world’s most remote locations. He keeps the pages turning by weaving together two tales — first, the story of a B-17 crew that crash landed on a Greenland glacier in November 1942 and the numerous attempts launched to rescue them; and second, the contemporary firsthand account to locate and recover the remains of one of the failed rescue attempts, a Coast Guard plane that lost all three lives on board trying to save one of the B-17 crew. It’s hard to decide which of the two tales is more filled with teeth-clenching suspense. If you’re like me, it won’t take many chapters to feel yourself bound up in the fates of the people and missions that lie at the heart of this book. Nor will you stop marveling why Hollywood hasn’t yet made it into an epic blockbuster.

View all my reviews

Top Facebook Links of the Fortnight

1. Let’s Think Through A Policy Change First, OK?: Ari Armstrong: Ft. Collins Should Bag Its Bad Bag Fee Idea (Complete Colorado)
2. Save the Apostrophe: Punctuated Equilibrium (The Atlantic)
3. Because Our Intellectual Elites Know Better: The Declaration of Independence, Fixed (The American Interest)
4. An Avoidable PR Nightmare: White Sox Unintentionally Hold KKK Night (Eleven Warriors)
5. When the Teachers Union Becomes Management, Denver Edition: Which Side Are You On? (Intercepts)

Twitter Verse of the Fortnight: And the men marveled, saying, “What sort of man is this, that even winds and sea obey him?” http://bible.com/59/MAT8.27