To make you count your blessings

"African-Americans remain 'among the most un-partnered and estranged individuals in the world.'" From "The Marriage Cure," Katherine Boo, August 18, 2003, The New Yorker.

The article is as much about the life of Americans at or below the poverty line as it is about the struggle of strengthening the family in the African-American community. A very powerful read.

A-B-C...Easy as 1-2-3

Interesting links that I've found when I was supposed to be working here in DC.

As a young, "hip," car-less Metro-loving (except for the fare increases, WMATA!) urbanite, this report on driving from The Atlantic a while ago rings true. "In 1978, nearly half of 16-year-olds and three-quarters of 17-year-olds in the U.S. had their driver's licenses, according to Department of Transportation data. By 2008, the most recent year data was available, only 31 percent of 16-year-olds and 49 percent of 17-year-olds had licenses, with the decline accelerating rapidly since 1998." Other interesting fact about growing up in America: Teen girls are now drinking more than teenage boys.

In Robot News: Creepy stuff from Japan - I guess since none of their citizens are having babies, they need to think outside the box? Actually, with this NYT interview with a robot, maybe we can robots of all ages (and to be honest, the conversation reported sounded a little more interesting than talking to some people...)

A heartwarming obit about a Chicago couple that lived their whole life together. Would that we could all be that lucky...And a more creepy story about cryonics fanatics that will live their lives with their partner - and then some.

More links: How a miracle 3-point-shot saved lives, from Sports Illustrated. Recommended...Stereotyping people by their favorite websites - Funny if you spend a lot of time on the Web.

The rest of the piece is pretty standard, but this paragraph from David Brooks today blew me away:

• "Democrats also passed a financial reform law. The law that originally created the Federal Reserve was a mere 31 pages. The Sarbanes-Oxley banking reform act, passed in 2002, was only 66 pages. But the 2010 financial reform law was 2,319 pages, an intricately engineered technocratic apparatus. As Mark J. Perry of the American Enterprise Institute noted, the financial reform law is seven times longer than the last five pieces of banking legislation combined."

And then for anyone who enjoys playing with Google translator as much as I do, this new translator is for you.

Attack of the Lynx, Death/Creepy Edition

Atul Gawande on end of life care: (A look at the role of hospice care and dying from a doctor that lends considerable light on things which have been called "death panels")

• “'Is she dying?' one of the sisters asked me. I didn’t know how to answer the question. I wasn’t even sure what the word 'dying' meant anymore. In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die."
  
• "A study led by the Harvard researcher Nicholas Christakis asked the doctors of almost five hundred terminally ill patients to estimate how long they thought their patient would survive, and then followed the patients. Sixty-three per cent of doctors overestimated survival time. Just seventeen per cent underestimated it. The average estimate was five hundred and thirty per cent too high. And, the better the doctors knew their patients, the more likely they were to err.
• The simple view is that medicine exists to fight death and disease, and that is, of course, its most basic task. Death is the enemy. But the enemy has superior forces. Eventually, it wins. And, in a war that you cannot win, you don’t want a general who fights to the point of total annihilation. You don’t want Custer. You want Robert E. Lee, someone who knew how to fight for territory when he could and how to surrender when he couldn’t, someone who understood that the damage is greatest if all you do is fight to the bitter end."

This lengthy but highly readable story from Vanity Fair is kind of like a much creepier modern-day version of "Catch Me if You Can": The "fake Rockefeller's" chutzpah is something to be amazed and cautioned by. Also amazing and creepy but in a different way is the idea behind IBM's Watson, ready to conquer the field of Jeopardy! And because computers that are as "smart" as us can't go wrong at all, here's a look at the story behind the virus known as "Conficker."

Speaking of technology, this story from Wisconsin will make you think twice about talking to strangers online...Even strangers you know. And elsewhere in the realm of the reproductive, one wonders whether such a "toothy" anti-rape device might have the unintended consequence of increasing violence when the rapist gets a taste of his own medicine? Or is that a risk we're willing to take? And will cultural liberals cry "American Imperialism" when they learn India is picking up on our morning-after pill habits? Or do we like this kind of values-imposition?

Attack of the Lynx! [Part VI]

Some of these are a little older than others, but all caught my interest at some point so you will be interested too :)

• Baby dies because parents are too busy playing video games.
• 6-year-old becomes youngest girl in Oregon history to commit suicide
• Woman sues Canadian company for sending her phone bill...which reveals her secret affair.
• Was the 20th Century the Playboy Century (How Hugh Hefner Changed America)?
• Perhaps related, the lefty Daily Beast gives you 15 ways to predict divorce.
• Trenchant analysis from The Atlantic: What happens when the so-called "Best and Brightest" fail?
• And what does it say about our country when 20 percent of American atheists profess a belief in God?? (Or our polling, as the case may be.)
• And on two lighter notes to end, check out where ND ranks on the most expensive season tickets in college football.
• And how do you see colors? :)

Google is treating me badly so I'm not sure if this got published or not...Apologies if I bore you with my repetition.

Sentence of the Day: June 16, 2010

"Mental health professionals tell the story of a note left behind by a man who jumped off San Francisco's Golden Gate Bridge. If one person smiles at me on the way to the bridge, the man wrote, I will not jump."

Woollahra's Citizen of the Year, 84-year-old Don Ritchie.

Douthat on Meritocracy

"If Robert Rubin’s mistakes helped create an out-of-control financial sector, then naturally you need Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers — Rubin’s protégés — to set things right. After all, who else are you going to trust with all that consolidated power? Ron Paul? Dennis Kucinich? Sarah Palin?

This is the perverse logic of meritocracy. Once a system grows sufficiently complex, it doesn’t matter how badly our best and brightest foul things up. Every crisis increases their authority, because they seem to be the only ones who understand the system well enough to fix it."

Trenchant. That's the basic gist, although the whole thing is more or less interesting.

Pre-Ceremonial Sex

My latest paper, expertly covering the arguments on pre-ceremonial sex, is now up at http://www.nd.edu/~pbrown6/Ceremony.html I have a new bio and resume up, too, so that's cool.

Link Dump, Special Health Care Edition

If you don't care about American politics, this post may not contain much valuable information for you. However, if you're reading this blog, you probably should care about American politics, because it almost certainly impacts your life. With that caveat...

First, some explanation/analysis of the health care bill signed into law by President Obama today. David Frum is his usually contrariarian but common-sense-filled self in a nice explanation of what the law will do on CNN.com. "[T]oday's defeat for free-market economics and Republican values is a huge win for the conservative entertainment industry." Tyler Cowen predicts the effects of the bill (warning: a little wonky) on the middle class. Nate Silver runs through the math of repeal (not likely.) The editors of National Review offer a conservative call to arms - Some substantive critiques, but I tire of invective rhetoric. And of course, no truly great reform can be enacted without asking that all-important question: How does it affect the Amish?

David Brooks has had some excellent columns lately that I haven't had a chance to post. From Feburary 2: "According to Julia Isaacs of the Brookings Institution, the federal government now spends $7 on the elderly for each $1 it spends on children...In the private sphere, in other words, seniors provide wonderful gifts to their grandchildren, loving attention that will linger in young minds, providing support for decades to come. In the public sphere, they take it away."
Then, later in Feburary, he turns his sights on the role of the elite (again): "As we’ve made our institutions more meritocratic, their public standing has plummeted. We’ve increased the diversity and talent level of people at the top of society, yet trust in elites has never been lower...The promise of the meritocracy has not been fulfilled. The talent level is higher, but the reputation is lower."

And have I mentioned that I love Ross Douthat - From February 23, a great post: This isn't the GOP he (or I, if I may humbly associate with the thought) had in mind. "Republicans are well on their way to sounding like Bill Clinton circa 1996 on entitlements, and Jim DeMint on everything else."

And because it wouldn't be a true post without a mention of culture and/or sex, here's an academic article on the shift in teenage sexuality over the past 100 years. From the abstract: "As contraception has become more effective there is less need for parents, churches and states to inculcate sexual mores. Technology affects culture." From the paper: "In 1900, only 6% of U.S. women would have engaged in premarital sex by age 19. Now, 75% have experienced this." Haven't read the whole thing yet, but plan to...

The Campus Rape "Epidemic"?

Heather MacDonald with a provocative article in an article from the City Journal last year:

• The 2006 violent crime rate in Detroit, one of the most violent cities in America, was 2,400 murders, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults per 100,000 inhabitants—a rate of 2.4 percent. The one-in-four statistic would mean that every year, millions of young women graduate who have suffered the most terrifying assault, short of murder, that a woman can experience. Such a crime wave would require nothing less than a state of emergency—Take Back the Night rallies and 24-hour hotlines would hardly be adequate to counter this tsunami of sexual violence. Admissions policies letting in tens of thousands of vicious criminals would require a complete revision, perhaps banning boys entirely.
• In short, believing in the campus rape epidemic depends on ignoring women’s own interpretations of their experiences—supposedly the most grievous sin in the feminist political code.
  
• Campus rape ideology holds that inebriation strips women of responsibility for their actions but preserves male responsibility not only for their own actions but for their partners’ as well.
• [I]f the rape industrialists are so sure that foreseeable and seemingly cooperative drunken sex amounts to rape, there are some obvious steps that they could take to prevent it. Above all, they could persuade girls not to put themselves into situations whose likely outcome is intercourse. Specifically: don’t get drunk, don’t get into bed with a guy, and don’t take off your clothes or allow them to be removed. Once you’re in that situation, the rape activists could say, it’s going to be hard to halt the proceedings, for lots of complex emotional reasons. Were this advice heeded, the campus “rape” epidemic would be wiped out overnight.
• Modern feminists defined the right to be promiscuous as a cornerstone of female equality. Understandably, they now hesitate to acknowledge that sex is a more complicated force than was foreseen. Rather than recognizing that no-consequences sex may be a contradiction in terms, however, the campus rape industry claims that what it calls campus rape is about not sex but rather politics—the male desire to subordinate women...But it is an absurd description of the barnyard rutting that undergraduate men, happily released from older constraints, seek. The guys who push themselves on women at keggers are after one thing only, and it’s not a reinstatement of the patriarchy. Each would be perfectly content if his partner for the evening becomes president of the United States one day, so long as she lets him take off her panties tonight.

Truer words, I fear, have never been spoken.

First Day of Semester Link Dump

Science Daily brings you a list of the "Happiest States"...Take a look at where your state ranks, and then compare red and blue states. It's quite interesting. Top 5 in happiness: 1) Louisiana, 2) Hawai'i, 3) Florida, 4) Tennessee, 5) Arizona. Bottom 6: 46) California 47) Indiana, 48) Michigan, 49) New Jersey, 50) Connecticut, 51) New York.

Two articles from The Chronicle of Higher Education that I thought were interesting.
They first disillusion anyone thinking about making a career as a college professor/looking at grad school, saying, "If you cannot find a tenure-track position, your university will no longer court you; it will pretend you do not exist and will act as if your unemployability is entirely your fault. It will make you feel ashamed, and you will probably just disappear, convinced it's right rather than that the game was rigged from the beginning." Thanks.

Also, William Deresiewicz talks about how technology might be bringing us "The End of Solitude:"

• "The great contemporary terror is anonymity."
• "Visibility secures our self-esteem, becoming a substitute, twice removed, for genuine connection. Not long ago, it was easy to feel lonely. Now, it is impossible to be alone...[But] What does friendship mean when you have 532 "friends"?"
• "If boredom is the great emotion of the TV generation, loneliness is the great emotion of the Web generation."
  

In a similar vein, Lane Wallace asks the question: "More confidants, less confidences?" "You can go deep, or broad, but generally not both. Quality begins to degrade if increasing quantity is demanded in the same time frame. If you have 10 priorities, you really have none. The same goes for intimacy. Just ask anyone who's tried to balance multiple intimate relationships at the same time."