New Releases by Michael Cohen

"This paper attempts to balance our knowledge of holoprosencephalic spectra and continuities with important distinctions and discontinuities. Prevalence studies and syndrome delineation are briefly reviewed. The following topics receive detailed coverage: human teratogens, special aspects of forebrain and hindbrain malformations, aprosencephaly/atelencephaly, association with neural tube defects, current assessment of "facial principles," and endocrine abnormalities."

The widening mismatch between the skills of the work force and the skill demands of the workplace underlie the need for school restructuring. Within the categories of school-level, school-district, and state-level issues, a discussion about and suggestions for restructuring U.S. education in order to improve its productivity and student acquisition of higher order thinking skills comprise the crux of this document. Educational goals, the structure of knowledge, instructional tasks and activities, instructional group size and composition, and instructional time are reviewed and analyzed as school-level issues. School district role, central office functions, the balance between centralized control and local autonomy, present and alternative governance structures, personnel policies and practices, and collective bargaining are analyzed within the rubric of school district issues. A discussion of state-level issues suggests setting educational goals, stimulating local innovation, and rethinking state accountability systems. In response to the educational challenges that schools face, fundamental changes in the way local districts and states operate will determine the way schools are structured, instruction is provided, and staff roles and responsibilities are defined. (24 references) (JAM)

In this essay collection, Michael Cohen presents the odd idea of the suicide note as a writing project that can be critiqued like any other, describes encounters with illegal border crossers in south Texas, and ponders the sudden popularity of books about atheism. Books are a frequent subject here, and Cohen makes an argument for The Maltese Falcon as the Great American Novel, searches for the perfect, the Platonic, nature handbook, and compares playing golf to reading about it. Reading is, for him, as engrossing a form of experience as any other—say hitchhiking through the Southwest with an old friend, the joys of flying small planes, or the charm of studying ancient Greek while people-watching at the gym, all experiences chronicled here. He looks back at the effect a 1956 collision of two airliners over the Grand Canyon had on him as a kid fond of flying, and how he learned about the joys of good food during a wanderjahr in Europe. Many of these essays begin with a question: whether Americans deserve their reputation for materialism, why we seem to have lost the climate change battle, and whether talking to yourself might really be beneficial. Another frequent topic is how our ideal places cannot avoid being bruised by time. He looks at what happened as the Tucson bars of his college days closed or morphed into very different places. He traces seasonal changes in the desert. He notes what happens to its effect when a giant cross beside I-40 in Texas is joined by equally giant windmills. And he takes a mind’s-eye tour through Paris’s terrace cafés and their literary associations after the 2015 terrorist attack there. Michael''s previous collection with IP is A Place to Read.