"It used to be young creative types started magazines that defined the culture. Think Spy in the mid-1980s or even Might in the 1990s. The digital era hasn’t quite had that. One effort underway, naturally in the Williamsburg area of Brooklyn, wants to change that." —Guess what's going to be Spy for millennials. Just guess! Okay, pencils down. Here's your answer. The sad thing is, given millennials, you can sort of see the point.
Here's a cute story about an adorable 7-year-old who happens to be a prodigy at the piano and in science. It is important not to remember, as you watch it, that eventually the light and joy you see in his eyes here will be replaced with the dullness of sorrow and his life will become a sad mess of recrimination and failure, as all lives do. Because thinking about something like that could really bring you down.
"Teenagers who drink lots of soft drinks get into more fights and carry more weapons than their peers who drink less, found a new study. And while the study couldn’t determine whether soft drinks actually cause violence, the findings add to a growing — yet still controversial — body of research on the effects of nutrition on behavior." Older readers might not want to click through, as the article goes on to reference "a notorious 1979 San Francisco murder trial, lawyers blamed the killer’s actions on his recent switch from a health-food diet to one filled with Coca-Cola and other junk food," which… really? It is incredibly painful to [...]
"Odd Future is filled with tons of controversy and they're going to have a lot trouble moving forward, becoming 'mainstream.' But Tyler the Creator is going to work hard at that. And so far he has a ton of Notre Dame fans. But even haters." —Some students at the tony Los Angeles Catholic school Academy of Notre Dame de Namur love the rap group Odd Future. Others do not. Student documentarian Arman Mahramzade examines the phenomenon.
Why do our young people hate soup? "Soup consumption by those under 25 is declining twice as fast as the under 25 demographic is declining relative to the total population. Between 2001 and 2010 the US population under the age of 25 declined as a percentage of the overall population by 60 bps while the percentage of soup consumers under the age of 24 (defined as anyone who consumed canned soup in the past 6 months) declined by 130 bps, or over double the decline relative to the overall population." Hispanics aren't helping either, "soup penetration in Hispanic households has declined from 50% in 2001 to 47% in 2010, [...]
Good to see that America's youth is concerned about consequences: "A motive has been revealed in the Arlington Heights home burglary from three weeks ago, where burglars poisoned the family goldfish by pouring hot sauce, ketchup, mustard and spices into the fish tank. According to police, a 16-year-old resident broke in and killed the family's three pet fish by pouring condiments into their tank because he didn't want to leave any witnesses, even telling an accomplice, 'We can't let them live, they're witnesses!'"
"According to a new Nielsen study examining teenage mobile-phone usage around the world, American teens text more than six times an hour while they are awake."
I do a lot of pretty random stupid shit thinking that I will write about it. Most of my activities turn out to be useless, though there’s always the idea that I could hit upon something so I live in this constant state of expectation that’s not as exciting as it sounds and is actually mildly depressing. This is because the pretense of adventure, day in and day out, when hardly anything actually ever happens eventually wears on you, especially when you are not rich. As much as one tries to tell oneself that things are being accomplished, such encouragement is no match for the more persistent mantra which goes [...]
When a kiddy-fiddler commandeers your cul-de-sac: "C. has a problem perhaps too serious to be called a quandary. A few months ago, she says, her family received a flier from the local sheriff. A registered sex offender was moving to her street of small, single-family homes. Hers is a long street, though, and she expected the offender to be some distance away and easily avoidable. Instead, he bought the house next door." What to do, what to do? The answer is simple, really: just move to Manhattan.
"So if teens think as well as adults do and recognize risk just as well, why do they take more chances? Here, as elsewhere, the problem lies less in what teens lack compared with adults than in what they have more of. Teens take more risks not because they don't understand the dangers but because they weigh risk versus reward differently: In situations where risk can get them something they want, they value the reward more heavily than adults do." —This is a good read on how the teen brain works. God, you couldn't pay me enough to be that age again. [Via]
"What is so downright perplexing is that the young now seem so much more severely serious than the old. Even so much more conservative in a special sense—the sense of honoring and cherishing the very best that's in them—like sincerity, openness, honesty and love. While the middle-aged so often express cynicism and self-disappointment." —Can you guess where that's from? The answer may surprise you.
My theory is they're all busy with the texting and the videogames: "A growing number of teens and young adults say they have never had sexual contact with another person, according to the largest and most in-depth federal report to date on U.S. sexual behavior, sexual attraction and sexual identity. The study, issued today by the National Center for Health Statistics, reports that 27% of young men and 29% of young women ages 15-24 say they've never had a sexual encounter."
The future is now: "Last year while writing about students entering their first year of college I made an interesting observation: these newly commissioned freshman don’t use wristwatches. In fact, the wristwatch is so alien to this group of late teens, that even the mere action of pointing to a wrist to ask someone the time is akin to speaking an unfamiliar foreign language. (They use mobile phones and laptops to tell the time.)"
For those of you who are of the opinion that our young people are coddled and soft, too busy playing their video games and posting pictures of Justin Bieber to their Facebook pages, a disturbing new report shows exactly how far America's youth has fallen in just a few short years.
A major Federal study released today reported that underage drinking rates among 8th, 10th and 12th graders are at their lowest levels since the study’s inception, according to the Distilled Spirits Council.
The 2010 Monitoring the Future Survey, jointly released by the National Institute on Drug Abuse and the University of Michigan, noted as a highlight of [...]
"Lindgren was speaking to 70 students at Columbia Journalism School’s storied Pulitzer World Room, after he'd been introduced by journalism professor Victor Navasky, who himself had served as editor of The New York Times Magazine in the 1970s. Navasky told the students the early "New Journalism" practitioner John Hersey was Lindgren’s personal hero and asked who there knew about Hersey’s 1946 New Yorker story 'Hiroshima.' One student raised her hand."
Of the 43 million U.S. citizens who are between 10 and 19, only about 3 million have received naked pictures from someone by cellphone, survey says. And only a million of them have sent naked pictures of themselves or took naked photos of others to send! All this talk about sexting and that's all that's going on? That's about the usual carve-out for "people who will never hold elected office or teach or be lawyers," generationally speaking, so no need to work about the sexting epidemic. This is why you're supposed to have 3 or 5 children, so a couple of them can drop out along the path [...]
"With stars ages 30 and above, they generally have a much more full, legible signature. When you deal with these new people like [teen actress] Elle Fanning, you're lucky if you get an E and F and a heart for her signature." —Is handwriting dead? Sure, why the hell not.
Science, why are teenagers so stupid?
Our brains have networks of neurons that weigh the costs and benefits of potential actions. Together these networks calculate how valuable things are and how far we’ll go to get them, making judgments in hundredths of a second, far from our conscious awareness. Recent research reveals that teen brains go awry because they weigh those consequences in peculiar ways…. The rush of hormones at puberty helps drive the reward-system network toward maturity, but those hormones do nothing to speed up the cognitive control network. Instead, cognitive control slowly matures through childhood, adolescence, and into early adulthood. Until it catches up, teenagers [...]
The editorial board of The Daily Pennsylvanian is extremely disappointed with its fellow students! You see, "A group of students stormed out of Irvine Auditorium in protest while [Newt] Gingrich was still speaking. One of them shouted as he left." HOW UNCOUTH. What's more? Someone called him a "salamander" and "some students hung posters of the politician’s face and some of his controversial quotes on doors of bathroom stalls and above urinals." What in the world is going on at UPenn that these children are so remarkably measured and polite in their demonstrations against a visiting antisocial fraud-adoring grifter?
Worried about what our youngest children are learning these days? Well, maybe math and reading acquisition is on the decline, but they're still great at picking up other things: "A child's taste preferences begin at home and most often involve salt, sugar and fat. And, researchers say, young kids learn quickly what brands deliver the goods. In a study of preschoolers ages 3 to 5, involving two separate experiments, researchers found that salt, sugar and fat are what kids most prefer — and that these children already could equate their taste preferences to brand-name fast-food and soda products."
