This story on a Florida family ‘giving up on’ small-town life irritated me. It trumpets the inability of a big-city family to adjust to small-town life in North Dakota. But at the end of the story, we read:
Jeanette said the main reason she wants to move back to the Miami area is to care for her elderly parents. Michael said he couldn’t convince his wife’s parents to join them in Hazelton.
A new Kaiser Family Foundation study says that kids 8 to 18 spend almost 8 hours a day immersed in electronic media. My kids might like to do that, but they’re not even here and awake 8 hours a day in most cases. They’re at school, or playing sports, or at a friend’s house (playdates are increasingly video-game driven, it is true).
But on school days, the TV is off during meals. They go to an after-care program that limits screen time to 30 minutes or so. When they come home, they spend at least an hour or two on homework, or basketball practice, or piano, or Cub Scouts, or some family project. The TV is generally off during meals. After dinner, they finish their homework or they read or they play until it’s time for bed, when we work on things like spelling, and we read. But even if we had the TV on the entire time they were awake, it would amount to no more than four hours of electronic media.
Obviously they don’t yet have cell phones. Though the older one *really* wants one. ‘Dad, can i get a cell phone? When can I get a cell phone? So-and-so has a cell phone and he’s in 5th grade. So I can get a cell phone when I’m in 5th grade, right? Dad, can I get a cell phone?’
I’m old-fashioned and still think of phones as need-based, things you get when you need to make calls (i.e., I want to know where you are). I don’t disagree with articles like this one, Why an iPhone could actually be good for your three-year-old, and I have told other parents that gaming helps kids learn to collaborate, an important life skill. I also know that gaming is a kind of social currency for kids, especially boys, just like sports. I know my son wants a cell phone for gaming and sending text messages, and because kids he likes have them and he wants to be like them. But I also know how easy it is to do something you’ll regret online. I can only imagine what sort of stuff I would have posted in my youth.
So I’m starting now to help instruct him on what to do and not to do online. I set up a Web-based email for him, so his email use isn’t tethered to my computer forever (though practically speaking, it’s tethered there for now). I’m there to help him learn about spam and to make sure he doesn’t click on things. I’m not there to read his emails (though he does ask for spelling help).
I hope he doesn’t abandon everything else for the sake of the screen. But if he does, maybe he’ll become a national champion, like this kid.
One of this blog’s loyal readers coined a name for ambiguous headlines (i.e., Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim): Crash blossoms. Read about it in this eponymous NYT On Language column. The loyal reader is Dan Bloom. Congrats, Dan!
Check out this comment by Judd Gregg from today’s Wall Street Journal article on the massive deficits the Congressional Budget Office says our government will run for the next decade.
“These numbers are just staggering, and it appears that the sky is the limit for this tax-spend-and-borrow Democratic majority,” Sen. Judd Gregg (R., N.H.), the senior Republican on the budget panel said. “Despite all of the dire news about our mountain of debt, the spending spree continues, and only lip service is being paid to the issue of debt reduction.”
Yes, the numbers are staggering. But so is his disconnect from reality. Gregg was there during the tax-cut-spend-and-borrow years of the Republican majority. He can’t seriously forget that Bush inherited surpluses and wound up with (then) record deficits. Is Gregg trying to make up for accepting the job as Obama’s Commerce Secretary?
Sandy Pentland, an MIT researcher who looks back to look forward, says that our pre-language communications skills are so important that
“We think face time with colleagues is vital, as much as 2.5 times as important to success as additional access to information. Results aren’t final, but we think we can increase productivity by 10% at no cost just by rearranging the environment to promote more employee interaction.”
More on his thoughts on why this is so in this interview on whether we can measure the power of charisma.
“Compulsively readable” was what the Boston Globe had to say about Shankar Vedantam’s new
book, “The Hidden Brain.” I met Shankar via the Templeton-Cambridge Journalism Fellowships, and I’m not surprised. All of us who know him admire his work ethic, his clearheadedness and his extraordinary ability to make obscure things make sense. I’m looking forward to reading the book — and hoping he’ll give a reading while he’s here.
Everybody should have a little Morris Robinson ringing in their ears.
The Boston Globe Ideas section ran Genesis, the Soap Opera, my Q&A with John Coats, author of the recent book “Original Sinners.” It weaves in stories from Genesis with stories from his life that reflect those in Genesis. He’s attempting to reclaim the book of Genesis for everyone, not just believers. I mostly enjoyed the book, and did see some of myself in some of the stories (though his yarns are better than mine).
It’s a good read, fun and rich and earthy, and thought-provoking. I might post some of the stuff I had to cut, since I found it difficult to cut.
Amy Green weighs in on the dilemma of Demand Studios, which advertises via SPJ to find writers, but pays what looks to be far less than a living wage. Still, Demand has extraordinary success getting copy. (Disclosure: I am vice-chair of the SPJ’s freelance committee, which Amy chairs, and was one of the people who read Amy’s post beforehand and made suggestions.) It baffles anyone who tries to make a living at writing why people would work for wages that wouldn’t keep a kid in candy (well, diapers, anyway). Hey, you can make $15 for an article? Nobody but a blockhead would write for that, as Samuel Johnson might have said.
In truth, writers probably would make more from Demand than as playwrights. People strive to write plays, to write poetry, to write novels and non-fiction books of all sorts, almost none of which pay the bills.
I don’t disagree with Amy’s column. Demand could wreak havoc on the market for writers of service journalism, and I would probably quit writing rather than write for Demand’s wages. But I find it hard to get angry about the company. I don’t think it abuses people. It pays something to everyone who writes for it, which is more than Huffington Post can say. I didn’t get mad about Elance and other exchanges that gutted the price for certain kinds of programming gigs. I even wrote a mildly fascinated piece about Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk, which contracts out work that often pays in pennies. You might think nobody in the U.S. would do this work, but in fact they do.
Demand is a symptom of something, not a cause of it. That something looks like the demise of writing’s version of shoeing horses, run-of-the-mill, everyday how-to writing. It might also eliminate higher-end service journalism, but that remains to be seen.
I missed plenty of good content online while I was offline, of course. Here’s some things I’ve browsed since my return. The last two entries in the Washtenaw Jail diaries, part one and part two. A generally gripping read.
A good post on what it takes to freelance.
A meaty conversation about that silly article Did Christianity Cause the Crash?
And I’m spending some time listening to bubbly music.