What We’re Reading: December 17, 2015

Focus Fracas (Chronicle of Higher Education)
by Frank Furedi
“Serious reading, I’m told, has become a lost art. Indeed, the precarious status of people’s attention has acquired the status of conventional truth.”

The Necessary Recklessness of Campus Protests (Atlantic)
by Nshira Turkson
“Over the past few weeks, college students in the U.S. and abroad have turned into activists, demonstrating against racial injustice on their campuses. Critiques, of course, pursue these protests. A large portion focus on behaviors they term reckless.”

When 8-Year Olds Kill: What Happens To The Youngest Murderers (Vocativ)
by James King
“Juveniles who commit murder can also still spend their entire lives behind bars, even when parole is an option, at the discretion of probation boards who’d approve their appeals for release.”

In San Bernardino, an Epidemic of Questionable Arrests at School (KQED)
by By Susan Ferriss and Amy Isackson
“Muniz’s arrest in November 2012 sounds extreme, but it was hardly isolated. In fact, he was one of tens of thousands of juveniles arrested by school police in San Bernardino County over the last decade. The arrests were so numerous in this high-desert region known as the Inland Empire that they surpassed arrests of juveniles by municipal police in some of California’s biggest cities.”