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.

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."

Book: “God’s Continent,” Philip Jenkins

• “Though ancient churches stand as visible monuments, defining the landscape of cities and villages, most have lost their traditional role as thriving centers of community. At least in its institutional form, and that is an important distinction, European Christianity seems to be terminally ill.”
• “In some Muslim nations, around 90 percent declare that religion “plays a very important role” in their lives, while the U.S. figure in 2002 was about 60 percent. The average figure for Europeans was 21 percent, though of course with national variations…Between 1973 and 1994, the proportion of French people claiming no religion grew from 11 percent to 34 percent.”
• “German sociologist Ulrich Beck notes…’there is a rough rule of thumb according to which the closer one gets to the Pope, the fewer children one has.’”
• “The clearest example of institutional implosion is Ireland, which as recently the 1970s enjoyed the highest level of religious practice in Europe: 85 percent to 90 percent of Catholics regularly attended Sunday mass.”
• John Bruton, former Irish PM, calls the attitude towards religion in the EU “a form of secular intolerance in Europe that is every bit as strong as religious intolerance of the past.”
• “The steady march of gay marriage laws suggests a near collapse of the political power of the churches, though such changes have not occurred without fervent efforts at resistance. In Ireland as recently as 1995, a referendum on the question of legalizing divorce still showed 49.72 percent opposed to even this reform.”
• “While few advocate prohibition, many secular commentators agree that drink culture in Britain has become uncontrollable and dangerous, a serious incentive to violence and sexual assault, and that much greater restraint is needed. Yet the Anglican church has not spoken powerfully on the issue, largely because it does not want to be seen interfering in personal morality. Historically, such reticence is very new, and it could well fade if and when Christians and Muslims do make common cause.”
• “Death and resurrection are not just fundamental doctrines of Christianity; they represent a historical model of the religion’s structure and development.”

Books: "The Numerati," Stephen Baker, and "The Gun Seller," Hugh Laurie

“The Numerati,” Stephen Baker

• "Turning us into simple numbers was what happened in the industrial age. That was yesterday’s story…We’re witnessing (as well as experiencing) the mathematical modeling of humanity. It promises to be one of the great undertakings of the twenty-first century."


• "A Carnegie Mellon University study recently showed that simply by disclosing gender, birth date, and postal zip code, 87 percent of people in the United States could be pinpointed by name."

“The Gun Seller,” Hugh Laurie

• "'We want different things. Men want to have sex with a woman. Then they want to have sex with another woman. And then another. Then they want to eat corn flakes and sleep for a while, and then they want to have sex with another woman, and another, until they die. Women,’ and I thought I’d better pick my words a little more carefully when describing a gender I didn’t belong to, ‘want a relationship. They may not get it, or they may sleep with a lot of men before they do get it, but ultimately that’s what they want. That’s the goal. Men don’t have goals. Natural ones. So they invent them, and put them at either end of a football pitch. And then they invent football. Or they pick fights, or try and get rich, or start wars, or come up with any number of daft bloody things to make up for the fact that they have no real goals.’
  ‘Bollocks,’ said Ronnie.
  ‘That, of course, is the other main difference.'"

A post for women, to start the New Year off right

Can we finally acknowledge that maybe, just maybe, the "glass celing" is becoming a relic of the 20th Century? The Economist reports that "within the next few months women will cross the 50% threshold and become the majority of the American workforce."

In that vein...I had this link saved from last June but forgot about it. Esquire magazine asks: "Where Have All the Loose Women Gone?" "Over the years, as women became educated and gained control over their lives, they wanted more stuff, more choices, more men. If you have a great-grandmother, ask her and she'll tell you: The chance to try people out for a while before you marry them is one of the best things that happened in the twentieth century. But the post-post-feminist maelstrom that is Danica Patrick and the Real Housewives of Wherever and Secretary Clinton versus Beauty Queen Palin means that women can wield real power, but it comes at the cost of confusion — professional, social, and sexual. Sex has become a minefield just too tricky to navigate as they build a career or a family or a reality-TV-show franchise. They go elsewhere. Which is a disaster for men. Until now, feminism has been the best thing that ever happened to us..."

Now more stuff from the archives: Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic examines "A Boy's Life" Or is a girl's? Children as young as 5 are now being diagnosed as being transgender, and increasingly turning to medical remedies to their sense of confusion:

• "The change is fueled mostly by a community of parents who, like many parents of this generation, are open to letting even preschool children define their own needs."
• "Overall, though, Tuerk’s explanation touches on something deeper than latent homophobia: a subconscious strain in American conceptions of childhood. You see it in the hyper- vigilance about “good touch” and “bad touch.” Or in the banishing of Freud to the realm of the perverse. The culture seems invested in an almost Victorian notion of childhood innocence, leaving no room for sexual volition, even in the far future."

Kay S. Hymowitz in the City Journal examines the biological urges that causes the Femina Sapiens to want a career and children -And if they are compatible. "Women have many more oxytocin receptors in their brains than men do, and those receptors rev up during orgasm, childbirth, and breast-feeding—signaling that at a biological level, the boundaries most of us take as axiomatic between sexual pleasure, reproduction, and mothering are not all that clear. Hrdy goes so far as to conclude that “the ‘afterglow’ from climax is an ancient ‘maternal’ rather than sexual response.” In females, in other words, the maternal urge shapes the sexual urge." Likewise, Lori Gottlieb wonders "Is it better to be alone, or to settle?" Her advice? "Marry Him!"

• "When we’re holding out for deep romantic love, we have the fantasy that this level of passionate intensity will make us happier. But marrying Mr. Good Enough might be an equally viable option, especially if you’re looking for a stable, reliable life companion. Madame Bovary might not see it that way, but if she’d remained single, I’ll bet she would have been even more depressed than she was while living with her tedious but caring husband."
• "Those of us who choose not to settle in hopes of finding a soul mate later are almost like teenagers who believe they’re invulnerable to dying in a drunk-driving accident. We lose sight of our mortality. We forget that we, too, will age and become less alluring. And even if some men do find us engaging, and they’re ready to have a family, they’ll likely decide to marry someone younger with whom they can have their own biological children. Which is all the more reason to settle before settling is no longer an option."
  

Keeping on the sexual warfare front, Ross Douthat (before he started writing columns for the NYT,) asks the uncomfortable but intriguing and important question: Does looking at pornography make you an adulterer?

• "Nothing in the long history of erotica compares with the way millions of Americans experience porn today, and our moral intuitions are struggling to catch up."
• "If it’s cheating on your wife to watch while another woman performs sexually in front of you, then why isn’t it cheating to watch while the same sort of spectacle unfolds on your laptop or TV? Isn’t the man who uses hard-core pornography already betraying his wife, whether or not the habit leads to anything worse?"
• Has the Internet changed the nature of masturbation: Is there a difference between one-way longing for a magazine pinup and reciprocal acts of eroticism online?
• "This isn’t to say the distinction between hiring a prostitute and shelling out for online porn doesn’t matter; in moral issues, every distinction matters. But if you approach infidelity as a continuum of betrayal rather than an either/or proposition, then the Internet era has ratcheted the experience of pornography much closer to adultery than I suspect most porn users would like to admit."
• The language used by a man quoted in the article is that "of a man who has internalized a view of marriage as a sexual prison, rendered bearable only by frequent online furloughs with women more easily exploited than his spouse."
  

Finally, a special random bonus: The Danish newspaper Politicken announces that "Obama is Greater Than Jesus." No comment.

Post-Christmas Sale

From The Economist: "In 2008 37% of government workers were unionised, nearly five times the share in the private sector (see chart), and the same share that was unionised 25 years earlier. Over that period, the share of unionised private-sector jobs collapsed from 17% to 8%...As a result, public-sector workers are spoiled rotten."

William Deresiewicz in The Chronicle of Higher Education has an interesting question: We live at a time when friendship has become both all and nothing at all...Romantic partners refer to each other as boyfriend and girlfriend. Spouses boast that they are each other's best friends. Parents urge their young children and beg their teenage ones to think of them as friends. Adult siblings, released from competition for parental resources that in traditional society made them anything but friends (think of Jacob and Esau), now treat one another in exactly those terms. Teachers, clergymen, and even bosses seek to mitigate and legitimate their authority by asking those they oversee to regard them as friends. We're all on a first-name basis, and when we vote for president, we ask ourselves whom we'd rather have a beer with. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has put it, we're friends with everyone now. Yet what, in our brave new mediated world, is friendship becoming?" The answer is lengthy, but worth reading, if only to open your mind that what we view as "friendship" is fairly modern invention.

From Reuters Japan: A government study researching teen pregnancy says that "Teens who skip breakfast as middle school students tend to have sex at an earlier age than those who start the day with a proper meal."

And Dave Barry's take on 2009 is hysterical, as usual. Love that man.

Some early Christmas presents for you all

A couple thoughts from my First Amendment professor's end-of-semester lecture. Let me know if you find them as thought-provoking as I did:

• How would you change the way you live your life if you knew that you would receive $5,000,000 a year for the rest of your life?
• For the rest of your life, you will never again be as free as you are right now as a college student.
  

I love the way this is described: The Aids Healthcare Foundation is trying to make sure that all films which "demonstrate unprotected exchange of bodily fluids" are required to protect their actors/actresses from AIDS...

This little post at a site called "The League of Ordinary Gentlemen" may describe a little of why I really do enjoy "The Office:"
"Of course, just like most of us don’t have the body types of movie-stars, most of us will also not be millionaires or celebrities. Most of us will only ever achieve moderate financial success. Most of us will only be content with our work. We will dislike many of our bosses and co-workers and will have to learn to live with them as best we can, just like we learn to live with our imperfect families. Are we all just under-achievers then?...Really, all the characters are in one way or another. I think the show is about hope more than it is about despair. It is about how we achieve something good in our lives beyond our work and career."

In this difficult economics times, it's nice to know there's one industry that's still growing: USA Today reports that "Federal employees making salaries of $100,000 or more jumped from 14% to 19% of civil servants during the recession's first 18 months — and that's before overtime pay and bonuses are counted."

I've seen videos like this before, but it never hurts to see it again. The American Museum of National History presents: The Universe, as we know it.

If you haven't been reading Ross Douthat regularly, you should. Here's his take on James Cameron's Avatar.

And this has been making the rounds recently, but if you haven't heard what English sounds like to foreign speakers, it's pretty amusing.

Quote of the month:

Courtesy of David Brooks's piece "Cellphones, Texts and Lovers" in today's NYT:

• "In today’s world, the choice of a Prius can be a more sanctified act that the choice of an erotic partner."

And he's absolutely right.

XKCD has too much time on its/their(?) hands, but the result is pretty epic: Movie Narrative Charts.

Also, I came across this letter in the National Archives museum and thought it was amazing. Read it and laugh at how some things never change: "If you do we shall just about die."