SF New Mexican:
Chess may help strugging students?
Reuters:
Graphic, Violent Images Can Curb Kids’ Aggression. I believe I’ve told the story of the young black man, in gangster drag, I encountered in a Manhattan emergency room in the ‘90’s. Gunshot. He was screaming, “It ain’t supposed to hurt so much, man” in between shrieks. “This ain’t cool!” Expletives, well-placed.
When minicam crews first hit the streets, in the late 70’s, we had gore on every evening news show. I believe, when Reagan reached office in the 80’s, the novelty had worn off. Still, it illustrated graphically the results of violence. I’d never want to go back there, but maybe teenagers should be exposed to such things, as a balance to the dozens of gunshots they experience through television every night.
Dreams.
After seeing “Van Helsing” over the weekend with the other half of the “Skull and Cactus Society”, and then viewing “Mostly Martha” on DVD ... I had a dream that Van Helsing showed up, proper kitchen knife in each hand, and served me werewolf tacos and werewolf burgers, while saving the lovely chef from being boiled to death by an Italian Dracula.
Gotta love the subconscious.
Femail.co.UK:
Curvy look is girl’s best friend. “Men are more likely to stray if their partners are slender, a survey has found.”
Washington Monthly:
Jack of Smarts. A sad underestimation of the value of poker. Min/max, strategy ... all missed.
Spiked-Online:
Ageing, the future is affordable. Here in Santa Fe, we have quite a few retirees. Given my age (44), and exposure to many others significantly older than I am ... I think the ‘risk’ of a larger proportion of older folks in the general population is rigidity. Particularly rigidity in opinion. But I’d best point you to James Hillman, The Force of Character.
NY Times:
Freed From Captivity in Iraq, Japanese Return to More Pain. For attempting to perform merciful acts, to uncover truths hidden, without government sanction ... the recovered hostages are shunned. Why does this sound so foreign to us in America? Time to revisit Frederick Jackson Turner and the Frontier Thesis.
Boston Review:
Reason and Terror. “We also do not want the political agenda to be hijacked by a peril, which, while real and fearsome, should not eclipse the many others that may be still more important: AIDS, for example, will kill a thousand times more people than terrorists will ever kill. And while we may be prepared to put up with some infringements on our civil liberties, we can do without those that come merely from overestimating the threat.” Yet woe betide the politician who underestimates it. A very excellent article on America’s climb out of paranoia [hopefully, that is].
Edge:
Learning to expect the unexpected. If you haven’t time for anything else, ponder the last six paragraphs.
Chronicle of Higher Ed:
The unexamined life may be your own.
NY Times Fashion & Style:
Zapping old flames into digital ash. Some of the girls I went out with stored ‘old flames’ in shoeboxes in the back of the closet ... hauling them out occasionally for a dose of melancholy.
SF New Mexican via Washington Post/LA Times:
Tots’ TV-watching spurs attention disorder, research suggests. I can’t say as I’m especially surprised. What you train a growing brain to do, it will do. I have a hard enough time following the ‘white flash’ commercials these days ... I mute, and switch to a black video screen until approximately done. ‘Television as a babysitter’ always seems to reap unwanted dividends ...
SF Gate:
Telegraph.UK:
Driven to distraction. “Why is this sort of behaviour so common in theatres nowadays? Presumably because we live in a restless channel-flicking culture, where concentration is no longer a virtue.”
Nature:
Women look best once a month. Science can be ungenerous, sometimes.
Brain, Child:
What motherhood does to and for you.
Guardian.UK:
How the chattering classes turned to talk. Attendance to lectures and debates on the upswing, in Britain. I feel so much hope over this circumstance ...
SF Gate:
A work of art, or a harbinger of violence? I guess if some art student painted a modern-day version of “Guernica,” they’d get expelled, psychoanalyzed, sliced, diced and anathematized. School administrators are not qualified ... read trained ... to recognize pathology. Most ‘school psychologists’ have but bachelor’s degrees.
NY Times:
Weekly Standard:
The Perpetual Adolescent. “Adolescence triumphed, becoming a permanent condition. As one grew older, one was presented with two choices, to seem an old fogey for attempting to live according to one’s own standard of adulthood, or to go with the flow and adapt some variant of pulling one’s long gray hair back into a ponytail, struggling into the spandex shorts, working on those abs, and ending one’s days among the Rip Van With-Its. Not, I think, a handsome set of alternatives.” I have been lamenting the lack of ‘adult’ archetypes in popular culture today. This points the same finger.
New York Review of Books:
The recovered-memory trap. “The reason why psychotherapists ought to familiarize themselves with actual knowledge about the workings of memory, and why their professional societies should stop waffling and promulgating misinformation about it, is not that good science guarantees good therapy; it is simply that pseudoscience inevitably leads to harm.”
ABC News:
Anger creates bigotry against others. “We can create prejudice ‘out of thin air.’”
LA Times:
Dufresne, Psychoanalysis is Dead. Another link to go with it.
Chronicle of Higher Ed:
Before teaching ethics, stop kidding yourself. “To be sure, many believe that they do not have an obligation to try to personally feed strangers who claim to be hungry. After all, what if they use the money for drugs or booze? I think such reasoning is cynical and patronizing—unless, of course, I am in a rush and have only tens and twenties on me.”
Buy them a “Happy Meal,” professor, instead of handing out cash; you’ve just shown an example of the necessity of ‘analytical acumen’ [that you call ‘a fantasy’]. But I agree, largely. The dominant cultural stereotypes are about what you can get away with, not what you stand for. The majority of us know what’s right, what’s wrong ... but we not only are lazy in execution—many don’t understand how they’re applicable to specific situations.
The Chronicle also celebrates the adjective. How very niminy-piminy.
Reason:
Teenage Wasteland. Teens, victims or survivors?
