Hi all! I promised a return and then didn’t deliver. Where am I? Out of the blue, I got assigned a great research topic, with a speedy turnaround and a nice paycheck. My in-laws are arriving here at noon on Thursday. Will I finish my work, clean the house, and prep meals in the next 24 hours? Oh, the drama. While I don’t have time to write something long and coherent, I do have time to post some links:

My spec ed kid spent all last year in a literal basement. (How can they do that?) But the spec ed kids in Minneapolis are being shunted to a virtual basement. (Evil!) MPS says they don’t have enough staff.

The Sec of Ed @SecCardona just said on @cnn that schools used their fed $$ to provide tutoring/summer programs for kids who fell behind during covid. HAHA! My spec ed kid got zippo. Had to hire a lawyer and spend a year fighting to get him comp ed. Please interview parents, @CNN.

— laura mckenna (@laura11D) August 16, 2022

We’re talking about this New Yorker article on Serena Williams. She’s truly an amazing person. This article reminded to check out the King Richard and her Vogue essay. I love this paragraph about how her dad recognized the importance of the serve and how he trained the girls.

What makes her toss so effective is its precision and its consistency; what makes its precision and consistency possible is her ease. There is tension in the moment—some of her best serving happens under duress—but none in her left hand. She cradles the ball delicately. Her toss does not drift under pressure, nor drop when she’s tight. It takes a lot of training to achieve that kind of consistency, no matter the situation, no matter the choice of serve. It involves a mastery that is not only mechanical but psychological. There are stories about Venus and Serena as children throwing footballs to develop the motion and rotational power of their shoulders. Richard Williams understood how fundamental the serve was, and how his daughters could gain a competitive advantage by mastering it perfectly and early. 

Sometimes I wonder if we should have trained our kids with the same dedication as Richard Williams. Ah well. They’re fine.

I continue to be fascinated about the collision between celebrity and philanthropy worlds that is Meghan and Harry. They are trying so super hard to make philanthropy into a global, profitable brand, and it’s just not working. They just announced that they are going to visit their favorite charities in the UK (while dragging along Netflix cameras), but without visiting his brother, who will be a 10 minute walk from their UK house. You gotta read the hate comments that some poor organization is getting, because they agree to host the pair. He has a memoir coming out at the end of the year, which will could allege that the British government had something to do with Diana’s death and had nothing to do with the fact that the driver was drunk.

Watching: Reservation Dogs, What We Do In the Shadows. Next up: The Boys

Reading: How The Other Half Learns – a profile of the Success Academy charter school and its founder, Eva Moskowitz.

Picture: Carbs and Caffeine in Quebec City.