And you linked to the opposite articles that everyone else was linking to this week.
I thought you would link to TNR's cover piece on how having kids too late will upend American society.
I am 32, single, just starting out on my career, and no marriage or family prospects anywhere in site. These things can change very quickly of course but I would be shocked if I was a dad at 33-34 (my parents were those ages at my birth and I was my mom's first kid). Many of my classmates from high school and college are married, well into their careers, property-owning, and many have kids. I also have friends who have a two month old and live in a tiny two bedroom flat in Queens and now are doing the find a real job waltz. I have a friend with a four month old and is also starting his own business.
I hope everyone comes out alright in the end. What is interesting is that Millenials seems to be getting married much younger than my late Gen X set. Purely anecdotal evidence though.
I had some books in college that were so out of print* that the only available copies were at the reserve desk. Some of these might be available on-line now, others not so much.
*Hernani by Victor Hugo and other bits of dramatic literature.
My broader point on the issue of teaching via apprenticeship is that we need more mentorship in the job structure especially for young employees but very few employers seem to be able to mentor. I can't tell how much of this is through lack of time or a simple non-desire.
One of my professors in law school told the class once that when she was an associate at a big firm, a partner would review everything she (and every other associate) wrote with a red-pen while the associate was in the partner's office.
People who graduated law school more recently do not seem to get this review. Job postings now always ask for people who can work independently. I take work independently as a euphemism for "We want to be able to give you a task and have it be done without asking for help or guidance." Ironically law students and newly minted lawyers are also given tons of lectures about the importance of mentors that we can ask questions to because otherwise we will fuck things up and that would be bad for the clients and us.
I think he is saying that there is still a lot of materials that is not digitized like many books and other research needs. Plus we still need librarians to help teach new students proper research. Also not every student has a laptop or computer.
I am also a romantic sap for libraries of the academic or public source. I think that it is vital for democracy on a local and national scale to support libraries as public spaces for the free flow of information. There is a glory to seeing strangers share a desk and reading books.
My mom was an public elementary school teacher and later education administrator. Though she graduated in a very different time.
As a lawyer, I also have continuing legal education credits and these cost a pretty penny along with bar dues. Bar Dues suffer a bit from price discrimination. I pay just as much as a veteran lawyer making 6 figures or more. Though I also pay as much as a legal aid lawyer making much less than me.
"Definitely, people have glommed on to the idea that education is good, without actually working out what specifically is good about it."
I consider education to be a natural good for reasons that it hopefully builds a society of curious and eager independent thinkers. Keep in mind I went to an undergrad that is a sort of self-selection for the intellectually precocious. Most people would probably have found us intolerable at 18, we loved being surrounded by like-minded souls. It is a special type of student that wants to go to a school like Vassar.
"I think there are good reasons why corporations don’t take apprentices. Remember that apprentices were bound to their masters for a period of many years and were generally paid little beyond room and board. A labour contract like that would be illegal today, and if you don’t like the idea of young people being paid subsistence wages at a job they’re not allowed to quit for several years, I think we’re going to have to leave education as a purchased service."
This is a good point and part of my reasons for wanting these subjects out of the university are snooty. I believe in the liberal-arts education and there was no such thing really as a practical major at Vassar. You could major in a pure science but not engineering. You could major in economics but not business, marketing, or accounting. Art but not Interior Design or Fashion Merchandising. The Drama major required at least half the classes be in dramatic literature, theory, and history. I have a love for "impractical" academics.
I also get snooty at engineer types who dismiss my BA, MFA, and JD as not being an education.
If not separate from university perhaps we can create streamlined programs for those degrees.
I think the United States needs to have a serious discussion about what the point is the point of a university education. Is it to create smart and efficient workers that will help the United States remain competitive in the global economy? Is it to produce citizens who are curious about the world and continue their educations sua sponte after graduation in order to protect Constitutional Government? Both? Neither?
The truth is that a lot of subjects like accounting, business, marketing, do not need to be taught in the university setting. They should be taught via apprenticeship but our corporations have hoisted the responsibility on the education system and this increases student debt. It also seems unfair and unwise to make people who want to be teachers and social workers go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for a professions which are not known for financial gain. We can probably get more people to become teachers if they did not fear the specter of life-long student debt. Same with many other needed but low-paid professions.
My general stance is that the point and purpose of an education is to become a curious and well-rounded citizen but I am told this is quaint. It should also be noted that I attended a small-liberal arts college (Vassar). I needed this kind of higher educational setting. All of my classes (except one or two) were below 30 students. Many were below 20 students. Hence almost everything except language was a seminar without being officially labeled one and we often sat around a table conference style. I would have been lost and drowned at a large university like Pitt, Cal, or even Cornell. In my Masters program, my subsection had 9 people and my law school could roughly be described as being equivalent to a small-liberal arts college because each year was capped at about 230 students. Harvard Law admits about 500-600 students a year.
Many of my classmates in law school attended the UC system. Usually Cal or Santa Cruz. They often looked amazed when I described what Vassar and grad school was like. They found it too intimate to be in classes of 9 or even 20-30. They wanted the large lecture setting where they could be a face in the crowd (or just not show up and still get As.)
In short, the problems of the American system are also its strengths. While my European friends think our system is bonkers*, I think it does provide a wide-range of options that allow for multiple types of learning and experience. As far as I can tell, most other nations do not have institutions like Williams, Vassar, Hampshire, Smith, Oberlin, Kenyon, etc. Maybe the individual colleges at OxBridge are like that but not much else. Our system also allows for people to attend college and university later in life.
*I often need to explain that just because Harvard and Vassar are private colleges and universities, it does not mean that they are for-profit**. A European friend of mine had his mind blown a bit when I told him this. He thought that private universities were just part of the American love affair of capitalism and that Harvard and Yale were no different than a place like the University of Phoenix.
**Of course many private universities have endowments that give a ton of money.
Maybe sexuality was the wrong word but how people express their relationships.
I don't know what the socio-economic status of the Singaporean girl was but it struck me as being interesting that she used the same tones and words that I heard from upper-middle class American women who grew up in the suburbs and were college-educated.
I have never been to Signapore and ancedote is not data but I used to belong to another internet community and there was a young woman from Singapore in the community. She attitudes and behaviors towards sex did not seem too different from a similar American woman (read: Young, college-educated, professional). She talked about her boyfriend in the same tones that I hear American women.
I have no idea whether her parents talked to her or not but it is interesting to theorize whether the Internet will have a homogeneousizing effect on sexuality.
I suppose. In some ways, I think that liberal parents (especially of the upper-middle class professional mode) can be more strict than conservative parents.
Bush II and his wife seemed rather indulgent as parents. I remember during 2004 that one of the step-kids of Kerry said that there were strict rules about watching TV and that they had to write a report about what they saw on TV. My parents banned TV watching during school nights when I was in high school.
The issue with your proposal in the second paragraph is how would emergency responders tell whether someone was wearing their seatbelt or not. Sometimes seatbelts and airbags fail. Also the accident still needs to be cleared whether people were wearing seatbelts or not. If a person needs to be pried from his or her car, they might as well be taken to the hospital and treated. I think your ideal would just create a cottage industry for lawyers arguing whether someone was wearing a seat belt or not. I am not sure whether this is your intended effect but thanks for the work. ;)
Honestly, this is one area where conservatives and liberals tend to disagree on freedom(TM) and the conservative argument just causes me to scratch my head in confusion. I have seen many right-leaning folks (not accusing you) of saying that they wear seatbelts and require their passengers to do the same. However, it seems to cause them temper tantrums that wearing a seat belt or a helmet is the law. They get table-banging, blood-pressure popping angry at the idea and think it is a great tyranny. I just look at them confused. This is what makes them angry? Especially because many of these people are against Same-Sex Marriage and support DOMA. DOMA is an actual and serious abridgment of freedom. People are strange I suppose.
Though for copyright, starting a suit can show other potential infringers that you are willing to litigate and that can have a silencing effect on people.
I think that is true for trademark* but not for copyright. A copyright is a monopoly, trademark is based on use. Even then, the big issue is preventing a trademark from becoming "generic". The most famous example of this in the US is that "aspirin" became a generic term for headache medicine. In Europe, Bayer still holds a trademark on Aspirin. Xerox had to spend a lot of money on a PR campaign to make sure that Xerox did not become a generic term for "photocopy"
American society is sexually repressed in that we are still having strong socio-political battles over things like proper sex education. There are still a lot of people with a lot of political clout who think that official US policy should be Abstinence Only. They do not want high school students taught on the proper uses of contraception.
You are right to note though that most Americans will have sex before they get married and many will have sex before they are college freshman. This is why we have a problem with teen pregnancy. Ironically or not, there is more teen pregnancy in red states with Abstinence Only sex-ed policies.
America also has a problem with drinking because we have a too-high legal drinking age (21) and many parents do not teach their kids to drink responsibly. My parents use to drink a bit of alcohol with dinner every night and taught me that was the purpose of drinking. Many Americans seem to think that the purpose is to get smashed.
Contrast this to the Scandanavian where it is apparently normal and acceptable for teenagers to have their boyfriends and girlfriends sleep over with parental permission (after a frank and open discussion about sex with their parents). Or France and Italy where parents teach their kids how to drink in moderation and allow them a little bit of alcohol to build up tolerance.
American parents seem to just want to avoid awkward conversations with their kids.
"As to seat belts, absolutely. It’s your business and your business only."
Is it really? Seat-belts save lives just like sleep-hours for long-haul bus drivers. Seat Belts do not prevent an accident but it does prevent someone from being hurt more than they would if they did not have a seat belt. A seat belt might diminish or erase the need for emergency medical response and then free resources that can be used for more unpreventable accidents like a person who has a heart attack at work and needs to be rushed to the hospital. The seat belt might also make an accident a quicker clean up and let traffic flow normally at a quicker pace.
A parody of 50 shades can only improve the dreck of the original.
Here we should also note the irony that 50 shades started out as Twilight fanfic. So that is probably the biggest hypocrisy. 50 shades started out as a copyright violation.
Though I am very curious about how free speech, fair use, and fanfic interact with copyright law. I wonder how the courts would view it.
Is Hollywood being hypocritical? I'm not sure. From my study of Intellectual Property, a good deal of the lawsuits covering copyright and trademark infringement are more about being butt-hurt than anything else. Matel sued the band Aqua/Universal Music over the song Barbie Girl. Judge Kozinski (spelling?) told both the plaintiff and defendant that they needed to chill out in his published opinion.
What is your solution? What do you want society to be like? Would you rather us be puritans who did not read 50 shades or abandon Evangelical Christianity all together?
The entirety of the Human Condition might be hypocrisy. You can't have it both ways but both ways is the only way we seem to want it.
It might also be worth noting that Hollywood is not an Evangelical industry. Almost every major studio (exceptions Universal Artists and Disney*) were founded by poor Eastern European Jewish Immigrants. The Hayes Code was once described as "Catholics making Jewish films safe for a Protestant audience". I can't remember where I heard or read that description.
*Disney was a notorious anti-Semite and racist of course.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “When to Get Married, Revisited”
And you linked to the opposite articles that everyone else was linking to this week.
I thought you would link to TNR's cover piece on how having kids too late will upend American society.
I am 32, single, just starting out on my career, and no marriage or family prospects anywhere in site. These things can change very quickly of course but I would be shocked if I was a dad at 33-34 (my parents were those ages at my birth and I was my mom's first kid). Many of my classmates from high school and college are married, well into their careers, property-owning, and many have kids. I also have friends who have a two month old and live in a tiny two bedroom flat in Queens and now are doing the find a real job waltz. I have a friend with a four month old and is also starting his own business.
I hope everyone comes out alright in the end. What is interesting is that Millenials seems to be getting married much younger than my late Gen X set. Purely anecdotal evidence though.
On “Is Unbundling the University Such a Bad Thing?”
I had some books in college that were so out of print* that the only available copies were at the reserve desk. Some of these might be available on-line now, others not so much.
*Hernani by Victor Hugo and other bits of dramatic literature.
"
My broader point on the issue of teaching via apprenticeship is that we need more mentorship in the job structure especially for young employees but very few employers seem to be able to mentor. I can't tell how much of this is through lack of time or a simple non-desire.
One of my professors in law school told the class once that when she was an associate at a big firm, a partner would review everything she (and every other associate) wrote with a red-pen while the associate was in the partner's office.
People who graduated law school more recently do not seem to get this review. Job postings now always ask for people who can work independently. I take work independently as a euphemism for "We want to be able to give you a task and have it be done without asking for help or guidance." Ironically law students and newly minted lawyers are also given tons of lectures about the importance of mentors that we can ask questions to because otherwise we will fuck things up and that would be bad for the clients and us.
"
I think he is saying that there is still a lot of materials that is not digitized like many books and other research needs. Plus we still need librarians to help teach new students proper research. Also not every student has a laptop or computer.
I am also a romantic sap for libraries of the academic or public source. I think that it is vital for democracy on a local and national scale to support libraries as public spaces for the free flow of information. There is a glory to seeing strangers share a desk and reading books.
"
My mom was an public elementary school teacher and later education administrator. Though she graduated in a very different time.
As a lawyer, I also have continuing legal education credits and these cost a pretty penny along with bar dues. Bar Dues suffer a bit from price discrimination. I pay just as much as a veteran lawyer making 6 figures or more. Though I also pay as much as a legal aid lawyer making much less than me.
"
"Definitely, people have glommed on to the idea that education is good, without actually working out what specifically is good about it."
I consider education to be a natural good for reasons that it hopefully builds a society of curious and eager independent thinkers. Keep in mind I went to an undergrad that is a sort of self-selection for the intellectually precocious. Most people would probably have found us intolerable at 18, we loved being surrounded by like-minded souls. It is a special type of student that wants to go to a school like Vassar.
"I think there are good reasons why corporations don’t take apprentices. Remember that apprentices were bound to their masters for a period of many years and were generally paid little beyond room and board. A labour contract like that would be illegal today, and if you don’t like the idea of young people being paid subsistence wages at a job they’re not allowed to quit for several years, I think we’re going to have to leave education as a purchased service."
This is a good point and part of my reasons for wanting these subjects out of the university are snooty. I believe in the liberal-arts education and there was no such thing really as a practical major at Vassar. You could major in a pure science but not engineering. You could major in economics but not business, marketing, or accounting. Art but not Interior Design or Fashion Merchandising. The Drama major required at least half the classes be in dramatic literature, theory, and history. I have a love for "impractical" academics.
I also get snooty at engineer types who dismiss my BA, MFA, and JD as not being an education.
If not separate from university perhaps we can create streamlined programs for those degrees.
"
Great essay.
I think the United States needs to have a serious discussion about what the point is the point of a university education. Is it to create smart and efficient workers that will help the United States remain competitive in the global economy? Is it to produce citizens who are curious about the world and continue their educations sua sponte after graduation in order to protect Constitutional Government? Both? Neither?
The truth is that a lot of subjects like accounting, business, marketing, do not need to be taught in the university setting. They should be taught via apprenticeship but our corporations have hoisted the responsibility on the education system and this increases student debt. It also seems unfair and unwise to make people who want to be teachers and social workers go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for a professions which are not known for financial gain. We can probably get more people to become teachers if they did not fear the specter of life-long student debt. Same with many other needed but low-paid professions.
My general stance is that the point and purpose of an education is to become a curious and well-rounded citizen but I am told this is quaint. It should also be noted that I attended a small-liberal arts college (Vassar). I needed this kind of higher educational setting. All of my classes (except one or two) were below 30 students. Many were below 20 students. Hence almost everything except language was a seminar without being officially labeled one and we often sat around a table conference style. I would have been lost and drowned at a large university like Pitt, Cal, or even Cornell. In my Masters program, my subsection had 9 people and my law school could roughly be described as being equivalent to a small-liberal arts college because each year was capped at about 230 students. Harvard Law admits about 500-600 students a year.
Many of my classmates in law school attended the UC system. Usually Cal or Santa Cruz. They often looked amazed when I described what Vassar and grad school was like. They found it too intimate to be in classes of 9 or even 20-30. They wanted the large lecture setting where they could be a face in the crowd (or just not show up and still get As.)
In short, the problems of the American system are also its strengths. While my European friends think our system is bonkers*, I think it does provide a wide-range of options that allow for multiple types of learning and experience. As far as I can tell, most other nations do not have institutions like Williams, Vassar, Hampshire, Smith, Oberlin, Kenyon, etc. Maybe the individual colleges at OxBridge are like that but not much else. Our system also allows for people to attend college and university later in life.
*I often need to explain that just because Harvard and Vassar are private colleges and universities, it does not mean that they are for-profit**. A European friend of mine had his mind blown a bit when I told him this. He thought that private universities were just part of the American love affair of capitalism and that Harvard and Yale were no different than a place like the University of Phoenix.
**Of course many private universities have endowments that give a ton of money.
On “Suck This!”
You introduce them to Stars! This is the obvious answer and Stars are my favorite Canadian band:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55FMOJMhV9s
"
Play Barcuda proudly!
On “The Hypocrisy of Hollwood as a Model for American Society”
I saw that performance at the Brooklyn Academy of Music and his schlong
"
Maybe sexuality was the wrong word but how people express their relationships.
I don't know what the socio-economic status of the Singaporean girl was but it struck me as being interesting that she used the same tones and words that I heard from upper-middle class American women who grew up in the suburbs and were college-educated.
"
Sigh..............................................................
"
I think your second sentence is one of the best understatements I have ever read.
"
What do they think Jesus did at the wedding where he turned water into wine?
"
I really don't get teatotalling in Christianity for these two reasons:
1. The still read the Torah (I refuse to call it the Old Testament) and Torah presented wine as being good and they are literalists.
2. Didn't Jesus turn Water into Wine as one of his Miracles? How do teatoatlling Evangelicals deal with this issue?
"
This is a fair point.
I have never been to Signapore and ancedote is not data but I used to belong to another internet community and there was a young woman from Singapore in the community. She attitudes and behaviors towards sex did not seem too different from a similar American woman (read: Young, college-educated, professional). She talked about her boyfriend in the same tones that I hear American women.
I have no idea whether her parents talked to her or not but it is interesting to theorize whether the Internet will have a homogeneousizing effect on sexuality.
On “Two Lesser Known Freedom of Speech Cases”
I think longer. I remember those ads from the 1990s!
On “The Hypocrisy of Hollwood as a Model for American Society”
I suppose. In some ways, I think that liberal parents (especially of the upper-middle class professional mode) can be more strict than conservative parents.
Bush II and his wife seemed rather indulgent as parents. I remember during 2004 that one of the step-kids of Kerry said that there were strict rules about watching TV and that they had to write a report about what they saw on TV. My parents banned TV watching during school nights when I was in high school.
"
The issue with your proposal in the second paragraph is how would emergency responders tell whether someone was wearing their seatbelt or not. Sometimes seatbelts and airbags fail. Also the accident still needs to be cleared whether people were wearing seatbelts or not. If a person needs to be pried from his or her car, they might as well be taken to the hospital and treated. I think your ideal would just create a cottage industry for lawyers arguing whether someone was wearing a seat belt or not. I am not sure whether this is your intended effect but thanks for the work. ;)
Honestly, this is one area where conservatives and liberals tend to disagree on freedom(TM) and the conservative argument just causes me to scratch my head in confusion. I have seen many right-leaning folks (not accusing you) of saying that they wear seatbelts and require their passengers to do the same. However, it seems to cause them temper tantrums that wearing a seat belt or a helmet is the law. They get table-banging, blood-pressure popping angry at the idea and think it is a great tyranny. I just look at them confused. This is what makes them angry? Especially because many of these people are against Same-Sex Marriage and support DOMA. DOMA is an actual and serious abridgment of freedom. People are strange I suppose.
"
Though for copyright, starting a suit can show other potential infringers that you are willing to litigate and that can have a silencing effect on people.
"
I think that is true for trademark* but not for copyright. A copyright is a monopoly, trademark is based on use. Even then, the big issue is preventing a trademark from becoming "generic". The most famous example of this in the US is that "aspirin" became a generic term for headache medicine. In Europe, Bayer still holds a trademark on Aspirin. Xerox had to spend a lot of money on a PR campaign to make sure that Xerox did not become a generic term for "photocopy"
"
American society is sexually repressed in that we are still having strong socio-political battles over things like proper sex education. There are still a lot of people with a lot of political clout who think that official US policy should be Abstinence Only. They do not want high school students taught on the proper uses of contraception.
You are right to note though that most Americans will have sex before they get married and many will have sex before they are college freshman. This is why we have a problem with teen pregnancy. Ironically or not, there is more teen pregnancy in red states with Abstinence Only sex-ed policies.
America also has a problem with drinking because we have a too-high legal drinking age (21) and many parents do not teach their kids to drink responsibly. My parents use to drink a bit of alcohol with dinner every night and taught me that was the purpose of drinking. Many Americans seem to think that the purpose is to get smashed.
Contrast this to the Scandanavian where it is apparently normal and acceptable for teenagers to have their boyfriends and girlfriends sleep over with parental permission (after a frank and open discussion about sex with their parents). Or France and Italy where parents teach their kids how to drink in moderation and allow them a little bit of alcohol to build up tolerance.
American parents seem to just want to avoid awkward conversations with their kids.
"
"As to seat belts, absolutely. It’s your business and your business only."
Is it really? Seat-belts save lives just like sleep-hours for long-haul bus drivers. Seat Belts do not prevent an accident but it does prevent someone from being hurt more than they would if they did not have a seat belt. A seat belt might diminish or erase the need for emergency medical response and then free resources that can be used for more unpreventable accidents like a person who has a heart attack at work and needs to be rushed to the hospital. The seat belt might also make an accident a quicker clean up and let traffic flow normally at a quicker pace.
"
A parody of 50 shades can only improve the dreck of the original.
Here we should also note the irony that 50 shades started out as Twilight fanfic. So that is probably the biggest hypocrisy. 50 shades started out as a copyright violation.
Though I am very curious about how free speech, fair use, and fanfic interact with copyright law. I wonder how the courts would view it.
"
I am not really sure what to make of this post.
Is Hollywood being hypocritical? I'm not sure. From my study of Intellectual Property, a good deal of the lawsuits covering copyright and trademark infringement are more about being butt-hurt than anything else. Matel sued the band Aqua/Universal Music over the song Barbie Girl. Judge Kozinski (spelling?) told both the plaintiff and defendant that they needed to chill out in his published opinion.
What is your solution? What do you want society to be like? Would you rather us be puritans who did not read 50 shades or abandon Evangelical Christianity all together?
The entirety of the Human Condition might be hypocrisy. You can't have it both ways but both ways is the only way we seem to want it.
It might also be worth noting that Hollywood is not an Evangelical industry. Almost every major studio (exceptions Universal Artists and Disney*) were founded by poor Eastern European Jewish Immigrants. The Hayes Code was once described as "Catholics making Jewish films safe for a Protestant audience". I can't remember where I heard or read that description.
*Disney was a notorious anti-Semite and racist of course.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.