Category Archives: Current Affairs

Actor and NYT contributor Ben Stein notes in passing:

…Adolescents dominate movies and television because they are the main consumers of mass culture. But far more than that, and partly because of mass culture, adolescents, with their short attention spans, their demand for a painless life, their need to blame everyone else for their problems, and their perpetual sense of victimization despite having just been given new Beemers, are the model for the whole society right now.

If you do believe that teens’ unpleasant characteristics are partly due to their unusually high consumption of and influence over mass culture, as Stein seems to say, I have good news: The process of moving down the Long Tail from mass culture to more sophisticated niche culture is accelerating in the lives of teenagers thanks to the internet.

Pre-college teens needn’t settle for what popular culture or popular media, warts and all, serves them. If they want, they can develop a much richer cultural palette.

If you surveyed teenagers 20 years ago on their favorite books and music, I would guess the answers across certain demographics would be similar. After all, you had to take what was given to you on the finite number of TV and radio stations and books at your local library or bookstore.

Now college students can fulfill the “drive to differentiate” in technology-enabled ways which would substantially diversify the results of such a survey if conducted today. It’s now easier to maintain exotic interests, to listen to music bands no one has heard of, to read the first-time novelist’s novel, to download a British sitcom out of the mainstream.

So, if you agree with Stein that some of teenagers’ less attractive behaviors stem from consuming a mass culture that glorifies materialism, hedonism, and any other bad-sounding -ism you can think of — and that the less attractive behavior is compounded when consumed en masse, i.e, the shared consumption experience provides social proof for the resulting behavior — then there’s reason to be hopeful: the internet empowers people at a younger age to begin to move down that long tail earlier, carve out their own little niche, use Wikipedia to satisfy curiosities, learn about foreign cultures, select from millions of books, and so forth.

Teens today have the luxury of not having to watch Jon Stewart or Oprah or read Danielle Steele (or follow any other modern-day cultural influence) to be considered in-the-know from a culture perspective, because they can find and develop their own communities around their own interests and revere the niche-community’s own influences. Personally speaking, I will graduate adolescence knowing less than some about “popular culture,” but this hasn’t left me out of a conversation. I just joined a smaller, more individualized one (this blog, among others). Is this an option my parents’ generation had? I doubt it.

Slowly but surely, the stranglehold of mass culture on everybody (and especially teens, as its largest customer) is decreasing. This should make people like Ben Stein happy.

Bloggerheads has an entertaining 20 minute diavlog between Bob Wright (New America Foundation) and Micky Kraus (Slate blogger). The subject is one of many recent lows in U.S. politics — Ann Coulter calling John Edwards a faggot in a speech.

Micky, who has come under fire from Andrew Sullivan, argues that "faggot" is not as derogatory as "nigger" or "raghead". The issue over certain charged words is fascinating and complex. On the one hand, bigotry is unacceptable and any word associated with bigotry should not be said in polite conversation. On the other hand, sometimes folks who seek to abolish the utterance of offensive words actually give it more power.

On a side note, notice Wright’s rhetorical / argumentative strategies in the diavlog — very sophisticated.

This photo from NBC’s Baghdad bureau gives another perspective on "just another day in Iraq". Click to enlarge.

(Hat tip: Jeff Maurone)

Ross Douthat writes an excellent, wise blog called The American Scene, a right-leaning take on politics and culture.

Ross reminds us today that education is not everything; it certainly is not the cure-all for our economic anxieties people like to make it out to be. As Ross notes, it’s a sexy line: "We need to make college graduation a universal aspiration for everyone."

Not so fast.

Here’s Clive Crook in the Atlantic ($), in which he smartly argues that a college education will increase your enlightenment but not necessarily your productivity, especially as the social signaling value of a degree decreases since the total number of degrees are increasing.

Crook notes:

For countless other jobs that once required little or no formal academic training—preschool teacher, medical technician, dental hygienist, physical-therapy assistant, police officer, para­legal, librarian, auditor, surveyor, software engineer, financial manager, sales manager, and on and on—employers now look for a degree. In some of these instances, in some jurisdictions, the law requires one. All of these occupations are, or soon will be, closed to nongraduates.

Dental hygienists and physical therapists need bachelor degrees? Please. What society is missing, according to Crook, are not more wannabe intellectuals but folks who posses specialized skills in specialized industries, skills that can be acquired quicker and less expensively than at a conventional liberal arts school. Here’s my earlier post mentioning why it’s a pity vocational schools aren’t more respected.

Crook concludes:

The most valuable attribute for young people now entering the workforce is adaptability. This generation must equip itself to change jobs readily, and the ability to retrain, whether on the job or away from the job, will be crucial. The necessary intellectual assets are acquired long before college, or not at all. Aside from self-discipline and the capacity to concentrate, they are preeminently the core-curriculum skills of literacy and numeracy.

The first stop of Jimmy Carter’s four-nation African trip was Ghana, where he visited his projects to wipe out the Guinea worm, a horrendous two-foot-long parasite that lives inside the body and finally pops out, causing excruciating pain.

Mr. Carter was shaken by the victims he met, including a 57-year-old woman with a Guinea worm coming out of her nipple.

“She and her medical attendants said she had another coming out her genitals between her legs, and one each coming out of both feet,” Mr. Carter added. “And so she had four Guinea worms emerging simultaneously.”

“Little 3-, 4- and 5-year-old children were screaming uncontrollably with pain” because of the worms emerging from their flesh, Mr. Carter said. “I cried, along with the children.”

– Nick Kristof’s column in the New York Times (subscribers only).

Elsewhere in the NYT:

• Jim Holt, the clearest writer on philosophy I’ve read, reviews The Human Touch: Our Part in the Creation of the Universe
• Jagdish Bhagwati (of In Defense of Globalization) reviews a book that says "not so fast" on China’s inevitable rise, and concludes that we’ll have to wait and see how the country evolves.
• The "Fiction Chronicle" notes what appears to be a fascinating forthcoming book by a San Francisco artist: a collection of photographs taken by blind teenagers.
• David Brooks, in his infinite wisdom, notes ($) that the "Tragic Vision" (Pinker) or the "Constrained Vision" (Sowell) has won: "The idea that there is a universal human nature; that it has nasty, competitive elements; that we don’t understand much about it; and that the conventions and institutions that have evolved to keep us from slitting each other’s throats are valuable and are altered at great peril."