Tag: atlantic

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The end of reading . . . books?

The Pew Research Center reported last week that nearly a quarter of American adults had not read a single book in the past year. imgres-3As detailed in a follow-up article in today’s The Atlantic,

“They hadn’t cracked a paperback, fired up a Kindle, or even hit play on an audiobook while in their car. The number of non-book-readers has nearly tripled since 1978.

“If you are the sort of person who believes that TV and the Internet have turned American culture into a post-literate scrubland full of cat GIFs and reality TV spinoffs, then this news will probably reinforce your worst suspicions. But buried beneath it, I think there’s an optimistic story to tell about American book culture. It’s about the kids.

“Without question, the American bookworm is a rarer species than two or three decades ago, when we didn’t enjoy today’s abundance of highly distracting gadgets. In 1978, Gallup found that 42 percent of adults had read 11 books or more in the past year (13 percent said they’d read more than 50!).  Today, Pew finds that just 28 percent hit the 11 mark.

“But here’s why we shouldn’t proclaim the death of the book quite yet (aside from the fact that the vast majority of the country does still read them). First,  the number of books an American reads tends to be closely associated with their level of education. Even those with just a little bit of college read far more, on average, than high school grads or less. That may be because people who grow up reading are far more likely to enroll in higher education. But it seems at least somewhat likely that reading books in class conditions people to read books later in life. And the good news (for publishers, at least) is that today’s twenty-somethings, as a rule, go to college. A recent Department of Education study found that 85 percent of the high-school class of 2004 had at least some postsecondary education. Continue reading “The end of reading . . . books?”

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College women drinking

imagesYesterday, Slate writer Emily Yoffe published a story on the importance of teaching college women that binge drinking raises their risk of being raped. It was a story your mom probably would have approved of—prescriptive, groaningly fuddy-duddyish (“it’s possible to have fun without being drunk”), with the cadences of a health education video, writes Emily Matchar in today’s edition of The Atlantic:

“But the basic point seemed to me indisputably sensible: College-aged women should be taught that moderating their alcohol use is an important tool in staying safe from sexual assault. In this age of beer pong and Jäger bombs, when 64 percent of college women drink more than the recommended weekly amount, this seems well worth repeating.

“The Internet, apparently, did not agree. Within hours of publication, the story was generating furious responses. The popular blog Feministing called the piece a “rape denialism manifesto,” and accused Yoffe of “blaming women for their own rapes.” Salon called the piece “rape apologia,” and said Yoffe was helping promote “rape culture.” Writer Jessica Valenti tweeted, “I hope Emily Yoffe can sleep well tonight knowing she made the world a little bit safer for rapists.” These responses are distressing. The link between drinking and the risk of sexual assault is indisputable. And teaching women this fact should be seen as empowering, not victim-blaming.

“As Yoffe wrote, sexual assault is horrifyingly common on college campuses. A full 20 percent of college women will be sexually assaulted before graduation (men are not immune either; 1 in 10 rape victims are male). Eighty percent of the time, alcohol will be involved. “Most sexual assaults occurred after women voluntarily consumed alcohol,” reported a study in theAmerican Journal of College Health. Another study published in the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs showed that colleges with the most drinking had the highest rates of sexual assault. Continue reading “College women drinking”

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Saved by the internet of things

I know the coffee’s ready because the light in the Quartz kitchen is purple, not pink. Writing in The Atlantic, Tom Fernholz states:

“The light knows the coffee is ready is because there are sensors–heat and pressure–taped to the coffee maker. This is the internet of things. It will save us all from economic ruin.

“Or at least that’s what a new estimate from innovation guru Michael Mandel says. He figures that the “internet of things”–the increasing number of machines equipped with internet-connected sensors–will expand the US economy by $600 billion and $1.4 trillion in 2025, roughly the equivalent of boosting GDP by 2% to 5% over the intervening time period. That could be the difference between so-so growth to the kind of stable growth that drives down debt and unemployment.

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“More broadly, the argument he’s making is a reply to economists like Robert Gordon and Tyler Cowen who fear that the big gains in productivity that supported an expanding middle class and the modern welfare state won’t be replicated anytime soon. This has major social repercussions–namely a scenario known as the great stagnation. The internet, for all the ways its changed our lives, has offered its gains largely in the form of consumer surplus–free stuff on the internet you used to pay for, in short–that is great and important but not necessarily

money in your pocket.

“Today’s internet of things is limited to consumer surplus, like Quartz’s coffee pot monitor or our weather bulb.

“But the future internet of things will be a different beast, because by definition it takes the internet out of the world of abstraction and into industries–manufacturing, energy, transportation–where productivity gains would have a more tangible impact. For instance, while some trash cans are spying on you, others, made by BigBelly Solar, are keeping track of how full they are so garbage collectors can plan their routes more efficiently, saving fuel and time. The largest gains are still to come: Sticking sensors on a turbine to know exactly when it will break down and how to fix it sounds great, but actually handling all that data in a meaningful way isn’t easy.

“Another hope Mandel holds out for the technology is to make on-the-job-training easier by making machines more responsive to their users.

“Does it all sound too good to be true? Absolutely. The estimates cited are a ballpark take on figures produced by McKinsey and Co., not necessarily the gold standard of foresight. The amount of investment needed to take advantage of this technology is high, and it will be years before different systems can be integrated in ways that allow companies, individuals, and eventually governments to appreciate their benefits. But the creeping networks might be the last hope of preserving growth.”
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The “Ownership Society” downside

More than four years ago, President Obama assumed office promising dramatic reform to the housing market.imgres

After all, it was the housing market that triggered the financial crisis, and the vast proliferation of low-quality loans that had fueled the housing bubble, state a piece in today’s The Atlantic.

“But politics delayed those reforms, and now the president is reopening the issue with a call to wind down the two main federal mortgage agencies, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. “For too long, these companies were allowed to make big profits buying mortgages, knowing that if their bets went bad, taxpayers would be left holding the bag,” the president said this week. “It was ‘heads we win, tails you lose.'”

“Well, not entirely. The U.S. government and taxpayers did rescue these agencies in 2009 (to the tune of nearly $200 billion), and, after injecting them with capital and essentially nationalizing them, these companies started to turn a profit as the housing market slowly recovered. This month, they contributed more than $15 billion to the U.S. Treasury, and have been one factor in sharply reducing government deficits.

“Even more, Obama’s targeting of Fannie and Freddie is part of a larger narrative — on both the left and the right — that banks and government colluded to produce the financial crisis and the continuing drag on the United States. To be fair, Obama in the same speech this week acknowledged that much of the housing crisis was the product of “banks and the government…[making] everyone feel like they had to own a home, even if they weren’t ready and didn’t have the payment.” But that chord is a decidedly minor one in a general atmosphere of blame. Continue reading “The “Ownership Society” downside”

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Considering gender and shame

Women and men experience shame differently, according to Brene Brown in a new book discussed in a recent article in the Atlantic.  As the essay begins: “I recently devoted a lot of energy to avoiding an uncomfortable conversation with my wife. It involved, as many uncomfortable conversations with spouses do, the distribution of unpaid labor in our house, as well as the distribution of responsibility for paying the bills. It was difficult for her to see, and for me to explain, why it seemed like she was shouldering more than her fair share of both.images

“The reason for the imbalance was that I had been devoting more time to chasing implausible dreams of the writerly variety than to doing household chores, which, in my capacity as a (mostly) stay-at-home dad, would seem like something I should be able to stay on top of.”I started thinking about this book I had read, Daring Greatly: How the Courage to Be Vulnerable Transforms the Way We Live, Love, Parent, and Lead, by Brené Brown, on a hunch that it might shed some light on why I was dreading this conversation.  Continue reading “Considering gender and shame”