Word: bird
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...Boys still outscored girls overall, thanks largely to boys' 536 average on the math section, compared with girls' 502. But boys now lead on the reading section by just 3 points, 505 to 502; the gap was 8 points last year. What changed? The new test has no analogies ("bird is to nest" as "dog is to doghouse"), and boys usually clobbered girls on analogies...
...Boys still outscored girls overall, thanks largely to boys? 536 average on the math section, compared with girls? 502. But boys now lead on the reading section by just three points, 505 to 502; that gap was eight points last year. What changed? The new test has no analogies (?bird is to nest? as ?dog is to doghouse?), and boys usually clobbered girls on analogies...
...Bird watching isn't actually Franzen's main gig. You probably know him as the author of the huge 2001 best seller The Corrections, a symphony of Midwestern, middle-class mental suffering that conveys depression and anxiety more entertainingly and eloquently than almost any book I've ever read, and which almost instantly made him the premier literary novelist in his age bracket. You might also possibly remember Franzen as the man who rather too honestly expressed his ambivalence over being chosen for Oprah Winfrey's book club, prompting Winfrey to honestly, unambivalently rescind her invitation to come...
...less fearful Franzen is a less tightly wound Franzen. After The Corrections, he got cable and developed what he calls "a Law & Order problem of significant dimensions." He stopped hunching his shoulders. He took up bird watching. "I spent whole days doing that, which would have been inconceivable, first 20 years out of college," he says. "To do something just for fun, for a whole day, on a weekday? That was totally new." Although based in Manhattan, he and his girlfriend spend part of the summer near San Jose, Calif. Basically, he's happy for the first time...
...fear and embarrassment and disappointment, but you can never quite go cold turkey. "The double bind, the problem of consciousness mixed with nothingness, never goes away," Franzen writes in The Discomfort Zone. And he never does find that owl. But somehow it doesn't really bother him. "Much of bird watching is about disappointment," he says. "Part of the appeal is that really, more often than not, you don't see what you're looking for. The great pursuits are more about failure than about success...