Friday Link-O-Ramaaaaa

*** MAN UP: There are lots of ways to increase young men's engagement in education: Why aren't they being implemented? Christina Hoff Sommers has written a book about it, The War Against Boys, and has this article in The Atlantic: How to Make School Better for Boys.

As the United States moves toward a knowledge-based economy, school achievement has become the cornerstone of lifelong success. Women are adapting; men are not. Yet the education establishment and federal government are, with some notable exceptions, looking the other way.

Women in the United States now earn 62 percent of associate’s degrees, 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees, 60 percent of master’s degrees, and 52 percent of doctorates. College admissions officers were at first baffled, then concerned, and finally panicked over the dearth of male applicants. If male enrollment falls to 40 percent or below, female students begin to flee. Officials at schools at or near the tipping point (American University, Boston University, Brandeis University, New York University, the University of Georgia, and the University of North Carolina, to name only a few) are helplessly watching as their campuses become like retirement villages, with a surfeit of women competing for a handful of surviving men.  Henry Broaddus, dean of admissions at William and Mary, explains the new anxiety: “[W]omen who enroll … expect to see men on campus. It’s not the College of Mary and Mary; it’s the College of William and Mary.”

The article even gives a shout-out to South Dakota School of Mines & Technology, where my wife hangs out. Now I see why …

Young men may be a vanishing breed on the college campus, but there are some colleges that have no trouble attracting them—schools whose names include the letters T-E-C-H. Georgia Tech is 68 percent male; Rochester Institute of Technology, 68 percent; South Dakota School of Mines and Technology, 74 percent. This affinity pattern points to one highly promising strategy for reconnecting boys with school: vocational education, now called Career and Technical Education (CTE).

*** Are you ready for some football? From the NYT:

Here now is a book by Nate Jackson called “Slow Getting Up: A Story of NFL Survival From the Bottom of the Pile,” and it’s everything you want football memoirs to be but never are: hilarious, dirty, warm, human, honest, weird. 

Mr. Jackson played six seasons (twice as long as the average National Football League career), from 2002 to 2008, with the San Francisco 49ers and the Denver Broncos, mostly at tight end. He managed to escape with some brain cells intact. He’s that unicornlike rarity among former football players: He can write.

About pain and the media, he notes how players are schooled to talk to reporters. “Do say: We’re taking this thing one game at a time and we’ll see what happens. Don’t say: Man, I really would like to go home and eat a heroin sandwich.”

*** Todd Epp is a longtime friend of mine and was a columnist for my Tea & Harrisburg Champion newspaper (RIP). He has a new blog and offered his personal take on the Syria situation:

What is happening to Syrians at the hands of Bashir Assad is personal to me and not just some story on the TV or in the newspaper. 

Earlier this year, I literally touched Syrian Kurd men, women and children while helping a Kurdish friend of mine distribute aid at a makeshift refugee camp near Erbil, Kurdistan, Iraq.

*** Whether or not you follow politics, I find Rand Paul to be an interesting politico. Once dismissed by the GOP establishment as a gadfly, Paul is starting to look a lot like the leader of his party — and his enemies are panicking. “There’s a big transition in the Republican Party,” the Kentucky senator says in a BuzzFeed interview.

*** The 2013 Man Booker Prize shortlist is the best in living memory says Gaby Wood, a former judge of the award. Man Booker Prize for Fiction is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original full-length novel, written in the English language, by a citizen of the Commonwealth of Nations, Ireland, or Zimbabwe.

Books nominated:

We Need New Names by NoViolet Bulawayo
The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton
Harvest by Jim Crace
The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri
A Tale For The Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
The Testament Of Mary by Colm Toibin

*** W Is for Wasted: Sue Grafton is closing in on the end of the alphabet.

*** And it seems J.K. Rowling isn’t done riding that Harry Potter broom$tick. As NPR's Mark Memmott reported Thursday, J.K. Rowling is writing a screenplay for Warner Bros. set in the magical universe of Harry Potter. The screenplay, called Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, will be based on Harry Potter's textbook of the same name.