A week ago one of my eleventh-grade students approached me after class. “It will be starting again,” he began. “This time the target will be against the military government. The first set of demonstrations will be this Friday, but they will continue until a second wave of the uprising will begin. This time it will demand the resignation of the SCAF"—the Supreme Council of Armed Forces. "It will be bloody and you should not go to the demonstrations. Maybe once all of the people come out, then you can come. For now there is widespread fear of Israeli spies and you will not be safe in these places for the next few weeks.” READ MORE

The comments on this Dealbook piece about how Wall Street has reconstituted the notion of employment as bottom-line cyclical churn are 100% mean, as you'd expect. ("I can't help but wonder if any of these laid-off wunderkinds ever ask themselves whether they contributed to the current economic situation," for example. And: "My God these people are pathetic. Even when they're laid off and collecting unemployment, they still sound like insufferable snobs.") But the sheer numbers involved in the way financial firms chew up and spit out young people are pretty bad. These are the very kids who were the children of the subjects of New York magazine parenting articles: we cared about them when we worried they were probably autistic, and then when their young parents were striving to get them into the best preschools, and then again when the kids spent the next sixteen years trying to beat each other on the SATs and the GPAs and the extracurriculars, so why shouldn't we care about them now that they've entered a workforce where they regularly get kicked to the curb because some dickface in management has to sack a quota of analysts to make his now-regular layoff goal? When you're laid off twice by 28, that's rough! And that's tens and tens of thousands of young people who were sold a dream and an expectation about merit, performance and success, and now they're figuring out one by one that it was literally all a lie. Probably half these kids will turn out bitter and evil and scheming, but, if we're lucky, half the kids will figure out that the prevailing corporate system of doing business is utterly screwed. Maybe a few will even do something about it.

"The typical U.S. household headed by a person age 65 or older has a net worth 47 times greater than a household headed by someone under 35, according to an analysis of census data released Monday. While people typically accumulate assets as they age, this gap is now more than double what it was in 2005 and nearly five times the 10-to-1 disparity a quarter-century ago, after adjusting for inflation." READ MORE

Here is the most dramatic quote you will read in the newspaper today, from the organizer of a summer camp for girls that teaches them how awesome "manufacturing" is: "Not letting your children learn the hands-on component of the theory of science is killing us as a nation. You have to stop giving kids books and start giving them tools.” READ MORE

As I’ve been watching the NBA playoffs this spring, I’ve reached an unhappy milestone: I’m now old enough to dread learning the birthdates of professional athletes. READ MORE

This is not quite what I expected to see in response to the death of Osama bin Laden. I guess it makes sense? It must have been weird for them to have tried to understand 9/11 in 5th grade. Good thing we don't have a draft. I guess. READ MORE

I went to get keys made again yesterday, because I'm always running out of keys. As usual in the keymaking process, I tried to go to Home Depot first but they don't do Medeco keys, so I'm always disappointed. Eventually I got to the Ace, where the nice wacky young girl works in the back. Her name is sort of like Candi, so I'll call her that. I decided I was going to get a bunch of keys, three of each. Candi does keys but she doesn't do Medeco keys, but a guy there knows how, even without the stupid card you're supposed to have. "Meehhhdecooo," Candi sighed into the intercom, and he came in from mopping out back to do it. The mop handle had just hit him in the head and he had a red mark. They resumed a conversation from earlier about the business of recycling pallets. They got the idea because there's a guy who comes around every week in his pickup truck, and he takes their pallets to the pallet recycling place, and he's getting paid three bucks a pallet. Actually they're paying a little less now, something like under three bucks. The price just went down. READ MORE

For the young folks, this might be their first government shutdown as an adult! Like there's a lot of you who apparently remember where they were when Kurt Cobain died 17 years ago but the government shutdown of 1995 is a little hazy. It's okay, the mind is like that! You certainly won't remember the late 70s, when the government shut down constantly, and everyone wore sweaters indoors. (Sorry, that was a joke for the old people.) So you should know there's nothing to be frightened of! Except: READ MORE

Teenagers aren’t having much sex these days. And why should they? If it’s not the AIDS resurgence or public displays of adolescent pregnancy, it’s HPV, or syphilis (yes, syphilis) or any other number of other pestilences that rot your organs and turn your genitals to corrugated mush. READ MORE