40.073657°, 94.432896°
Thursday, April 3, 2025
40.073657°, 94.432896°
Trump Is Promising a Manufacturing Renaissance. Is That Even Possible?
[ed. No.]
By the end of last year, after a fundamental reordering of the world economy, manufacturing employed about 8 percent of the nation’s workers.
Now, the country is wealthier than ever. Yet the economy looks, and feels, quite different — dominated by service work of all types, both lucrative and low-wage. Industrial hubs in the American interior have often withered, leaving many strongholds of Mr. Trump’s base on the economic fringes. (...)
But the economic story of the American 21st century has also been shaped by the deliberate pursuit of freer trade in the hope of lower prices, with the knowledge that doing so would put U.S. manufacturing employment at risk.
About 20 million people made their living from manufacturing in the heyday of U.S. manufacturing, which peaked in the 1970s. By the end of last year, manufacturing made up only about 8 percent of total employment.
“The funny thing about finance and economics is that we don’t really advance or learn anything over time, we just cycle through the same things, over and over, in different ways,” Brent Donnelly, the president of Spectra Markets, a market research firm, argues. “We vilify mercantilism and lionize free trade but are forced to rethink these religions when income inequality shatters social cohesion and decades of unreciprocated tariff cuts create an unlevel playing field.”
The Biden White House tried to remedy these socioeconomic dilemmas with a carrot-style approach to industrial policy. It sought to promote labor union empowerment across all sectors, but especially manufacturing, by backing groups like the United Automobile Workers in old industries and subsidizing new industries like green energy, with made-in-America qualifying provisions.
That approach — which will at least partly live on through the investments it spurred in the early 2020s and subsidies passed by Congress — was cut short in November. Now Mr. Trump’s style of industrial policy, based on the import tax “stick” of tariffs, is on the clock. (...)
But Mr. Setser says he still views tariffs as more of a targeted, defensive tool than one meant to address a chronic job loss.
“In most cases,” he argued, “the end result of tariffs is that it doesn’t solve a trade deficit, it just means you trade less, you import less, you export less, the overall deficit doesn’t typically change.” (...)
That’s partly because despite a boom in manufacturing construction, modern factories simply do not need as many workers as they used to.
by Talmon Joseph Smith, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
Now, the country is wealthier than ever. Yet the economy looks, and feels, quite different — dominated by service work of all types, both lucrative and low-wage. Industrial hubs in the American interior have often withered, leaving many strongholds of Mr. Trump’s base on the economic fringes. (...)
An expansive cohort of economists and business leaders remain deeply skeptical of the tariff campaign, however, and of its ability to reverse the decades-long drop in manufacturing employment — a decline with various global causes and unclear domestic remedies in an age of factories dominated by robotics.
While disagreement about Mr. Trump’s prescription for America’s manufacturing decline is widespread, few experts dispute his general diagnosis — echoed by a new breed of conservatives, including Vice President JD Vance — that deindustrialization caused a sort of pain that went unnoticed for too long.
A paper published this year by M.I.T. details the impact that the surge in imported Chinese goods at the dawn of this century had in the following years. It finds that while heartland regions hit hardest by this “China Shock” have rebounded somewhat, the individual workers whose jobs were affected have not.
Since the late 1970s, a powerful stew of forces has led to the offshoring of many factory jobs. As U.S.-based multinational corporations matured, executives and activist shareholders realized that they could often increase production at lower wages overseas, enabling higher profits and reduced prices for domestic consumers.
State and federal policymakers, frustrated by testy battles with labor unions in that era of inflation, often supported such adaptations by globalizing firms.
Over the years, the relatively high value of the U.S. dollar has made goods produced by exporters generally more expensive. And the nation’s trade deficits — in which American consumers buy more things from abroad than the value of things American producers sell abroad — are also a function of affluence.
While disagreement about Mr. Trump’s prescription for America’s manufacturing decline is widespread, few experts dispute his general diagnosis — echoed by a new breed of conservatives, including Vice President JD Vance — that deindustrialization caused a sort of pain that went unnoticed for too long.
A paper published this year by M.I.T. details the impact that the surge in imported Chinese goods at the dawn of this century had in the following years. It finds that while heartland regions hit hardest by this “China Shock” have rebounded somewhat, the individual workers whose jobs were affected have not.
Since the late 1970s, a powerful stew of forces has led to the offshoring of many factory jobs. As U.S.-based multinational corporations matured, executives and activist shareholders realized that they could often increase production at lower wages overseas, enabling higher profits and reduced prices for domestic consumers.
State and federal policymakers, frustrated by testy battles with labor unions in that era of inflation, often supported such adaptations by globalizing firms.
Over the years, the relatively high value of the U.S. dollar has made goods produced by exporters generally more expensive. And the nation’s trade deficits — in which American consumers buy more things from abroad than the value of things American producers sell abroad — are also a function of affluence.
But the economic story of the American 21st century has also been shaped by the deliberate pursuit of freer trade in the hope of lower prices, with the knowledge that doing so would put U.S. manufacturing employment at risk.
About 20 million people made their living from manufacturing in the heyday of U.S. manufacturing, which peaked in the 1970s. By the end of last year, manufacturing made up only about 8 percent of total employment.
“The funny thing about finance and economics is that we don’t really advance or learn anything over time, we just cycle through the same things, over and over, in different ways,” Brent Donnelly, the president of Spectra Markets, a market research firm, argues. “We vilify mercantilism and lionize free trade but are forced to rethink these religions when income inequality shatters social cohesion and decades of unreciprocated tariff cuts create an unlevel playing field.”
The Biden White House tried to remedy these socioeconomic dilemmas with a carrot-style approach to industrial policy. It sought to promote labor union empowerment across all sectors, but especially manufacturing, by backing groups like the United Automobile Workers in old industries and subsidizing new industries like green energy, with made-in-America qualifying provisions.
That approach — which will at least partly live on through the investments it spurred in the early 2020s and subsidies passed by Congress — was cut short in November. Now Mr. Trump’s style of industrial policy, based on the import tax “stick” of tariffs, is on the clock. (...)
But Mr. Setser says he still views tariffs as more of a targeted, defensive tool than one meant to address a chronic job loss.
“In most cases,” he argued, “the end result of tariffs is that it doesn’t solve a trade deficit, it just means you trade less, you import less, you export less, the overall deficit doesn’t typically change.” (...)
That’s partly because despite a boom in manufacturing construction, modern factories simply do not need as many workers as they used to.
by Talmon Joseph Smith, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Maddie McGarvey for The New York Times
[ed. I'd also add: killing green new energy funding/technologies (our most promising new manufacturing industries); more robotics and AI disruption just around the corner; time and logistics of replacing factories and workforces given the length and depth of retaliatory tariffs and associated economic and investment uncertainties. Oh, and undermining worker's unions, and defunding academic and industry R&D. We're not going back to the future. See also: 'Batsh*t Crazy' Trump Tariffs Should Be Seen as $7,000 Tax Hike on Workers, Says Economist (CD).]
When I’m 84
The world still needs Ringo Starr.
Let’s start with something that I’m not proud of but feels important to disclose up front. Last spring, I was interviewing Ringo Starr at the Sunset Marquis hotel, in West Hollywood, when I committed an embarrassing breach of journalistic ethics: As we were wrapping up, I asked Starr if he would pose for a photo with me.
“Or is that grossly unprofessional?” I asked, trying to come off as sheepish and apologetic.
Starr smirked.
“No, no, everybody’s unprofessional,” he said. “Don’t feel special.”
Let’s start with something that I’m not proud of but feels important to disclose up front. Last spring, I was interviewing Ringo Starr at the Sunset Marquis hotel, in West Hollywood, when I committed an embarrassing breach of journalistic ethics: As we were wrapping up, I asked Starr if he would pose for a photo with me.
Starr smirked.
“No, no, everybody’s unprofessional,” he said. “Don’t feel special.”
He moved next to me and flashed a compulsory peace sign as his publicist snapped our photo. “Everybody does it,” she said, and then handed me a white “peace and love” bracelet as a parting gift. Starr flashed another peace sign—a double this time.
Okay, end of disclosure. From here on, this will be a sober and detached treatment of a seminal figure in the history of popular music. (Also: The photo can be viewed on my Instagram.)
Ringo Starr is 84 years old and has lived quite an extraordinary life. I realize I am late to this story.
He is among the most scrutinized, fetishized, analyzed, and catechized people in history. I admit to feeling out of my depth, if this was not already clear. Usually, I write about politics. I am not accustomed to interacting with Beatles. As opposed to, say, congressmen.
That first day I met him, Starr had a new record to promote—a solo record, it still feels necessary to say. I had been granted a brief slot on his schedule around the release of Crooked Boy, a four-track collection that features the Strokes’ guitarist Nick Valensi. Starr had a packed interview dance card, with a procession of podcasters, YouTubers, and other species that didn’t exist when he and his Liverpool mates first started doing this, back when America’s chief influencer was Ed Sullivan.
Starr greeted me with a light fist bump, in keeping with his hypervigilance about avoiding germs.
“You might be one of the most-interviewed people in the world,” I felt the need to say.
“I am,” he confirmed.
I wondered how I could make this interesting. “Well, just make it short,” Starr suggested, as we headed out onto the patio adjacent to his suite.
“So, how short?” I asked. “Like, three minutes, two minutes?”
“You can have the whole three!” Starr said, and then punctuated his sentence, as he punctuates many of his sentences, with a dry and devilish giggle. Four quick “hah”s jackhammered in succession. He tends to speak in quips, toggling between his two dominant modes, seen-it-all sarcasm and glib nonchalance.
Born Richard Starkey, he became Sir Richard Starkey when he was knighted in 2018. I asked his excellency whether I should address him as “Ringo” or “Richard” (or “Richie,” as intimates call him). “You’ll call me Ringo, because I don’t know you,” he said. “A-hah-hah-hah-hah.”
“My family don’t call me that,” he added.
After a few minutes, the publicist started gesturing in my direction. I feared this was the universal “wrap it up” sign, but no, false alarm (she was just trying to get a photographer’s attention). “This is longer than three minutes, you know,” Starr took the opportunity to observe, affecting a sneer. Or maybe he was not affecting it.
Starr looks remarkably well maintained for his age. This is a testament to the preservative power of his fitness regimen, strict sobriety, a vegetarian diet, and lots of hair dye. He is also one of those rare figures whose face has been such a fixture of our cultural lives for so long that his actual, three-dimensional presence in front of you elicits a double take. Is this the genuine cargo or some wiry wisp of a Ringo impersonator?
It feels perfectly suitable to describe him as “looking exactly like Ringo Starr” and expect to be understood. He has the shaped beard, the little red shades, and a peace-sign pendant on a necklace. He appears just as he has in countless pop-art pieces and wax museums, and that Simpsons episode in which Starr, playing himself, turns out to be Marge’s artistic muse.
Everyone scurrying in and out of Ringo’s suite looks famous, or almost famous. They include a swarm of well-wishers and maybe some actual friends whom Starr has gotten by with a little help from. I was struck by how Starr’s presence arouses giddiness even in other rock stars. Valensi told me that when people hear that he worked with Starr, they tend to transform into elated teenagers. “Everybody who I tell that to is just so phenomenally either excited for me, or is baffled, and kind of questioning, How did that happen? ” he said. “My wife and my mom, and my sisters, and even close friends who are musicians—everybody just kind of wants to know what the whole thing was like.”
People who spotted Starr moving through the Sunset Marquis kept shouting out “Peace and love” at him. This of course has been Starr’s personal mantra, greeting, and aloha for most of his post-Beatles decades.
“Peace and love, peace and love,” Starr said back to a cluster of onlookers, sounding cheerfully bored. At one point, I watched Starr pause and puff out his cheeks into an ostentatious deep breath. I imagine that’s one of the hassles of immortality: It tends to go on forever.
I have always been a Ringo guy. This was true long before the Fab Four were reduced to an antique duo of Starr and Paul McCartney, now 82. Starr had seven straight top-10 singles after the Beatles broke up, and those early solo tracks were among the first pop songs I remember hearing on the radio when I was a kid. “It Don’t Come Easy” was released in 1971, when I was 6, and played in heavy rotation on the local pop station, WRKO-AM, Boston. It was one of my first favorite songs.
Starr always seemed like the friendliest and most life-size of the four Beatles. The others felt less accessible than the droopy-eyed drummer with the cartoon-cowboy name and childlike tunes. Ringo was yellow submarines and octopus gardens, the mascot little brother, despite being the eldest Beatle, and the best at flittering above the feuds that afflicted the trio of geniuses around him.
Starr was the fastest to comic relief and most averse to pretension in any form. “There you go, hiding behind a smoke screen of bourgeois clichés,” he says in Richard Lester’s 1964 comedy, A Hard Day’s Night, after a stagehand has accused Starr of being “rather arbitrary” for not letting him touch his drum kit. I latched on to this line immediately. In high school, when certain highfalutin friends would try out their fancy SAT words, I would tell them, “There you go, hiding behind a smoke screen of bourgeois clichés.” (Admittedly, this itself was rather arbitrary on my part.)
“He’s the most sympathetic of all the Beatles,” T Bone Burnett, the legendary producer and guitarist, told me. When I spoke with him, Burnett had just produced a new Starr record, a country album called Look Up, which came out in January and has since become one of the biggest hits of his solo career. “Nobody has generated more goodwill than Ringo,” Burnett added. “Not a single person in the world.”
by Mark Leibovich, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Dina Litovsky
Okay, end of disclosure. From here on, this will be a sober and detached treatment of a seminal figure in the history of popular music. (Also: The photo can be viewed on my Instagram.)
Ringo Starr is 84 years old and has lived quite an extraordinary life. I realize I am late to this story.
He is among the most scrutinized, fetishized, analyzed, and catechized people in history. I admit to feeling out of my depth, if this was not already clear. Usually, I write about politics. I am not accustomed to interacting with Beatles. As opposed to, say, congressmen.
That first day I met him, Starr had a new record to promote—a solo record, it still feels necessary to say. I had been granted a brief slot on his schedule around the release of Crooked Boy, a four-track collection that features the Strokes’ guitarist Nick Valensi. Starr had a packed interview dance card, with a procession of podcasters, YouTubers, and other species that didn’t exist when he and his Liverpool mates first started doing this, back when America’s chief influencer was Ed Sullivan.
Starr greeted me with a light fist bump, in keeping with his hypervigilance about avoiding germs.
“You might be one of the most-interviewed people in the world,” I felt the need to say.
“I am,” he confirmed.
I wondered how I could make this interesting. “Well, just make it short,” Starr suggested, as we headed out onto the patio adjacent to his suite.
“So, how short?” I asked. “Like, three minutes, two minutes?”
“You can have the whole three!” Starr said, and then punctuated his sentence, as he punctuates many of his sentences, with a dry and devilish giggle. Four quick “hah”s jackhammered in succession. He tends to speak in quips, toggling between his two dominant modes, seen-it-all sarcasm and glib nonchalance.
Born Richard Starkey, he became Sir Richard Starkey when he was knighted in 2018. I asked his excellency whether I should address him as “Ringo” or “Richard” (or “Richie,” as intimates call him). “You’ll call me Ringo, because I don’t know you,” he said. “A-hah-hah-hah-hah.”
“My family don’t call me that,” he added.
After a few minutes, the publicist started gesturing in my direction. I feared this was the universal “wrap it up” sign, but no, false alarm (she was just trying to get a photographer’s attention). “This is longer than three minutes, you know,” Starr took the opportunity to observe, affecting a sneer. Or maybe he was not affecting it.
Starr looks remarkably well maintained for his age. This is a testament to the preservative power of his fitness regimen, strict sobriety, a vegetarian diet, and lots of hair dye. He is also one of those rare figures whose face has been such a fixture of our cultural lives for so long that his actual, three-dimensional presence in front of you elicits a double take. Is this the genuine cargo or some wiry wisp of a Ringo impersonator?
It feels perfectly suitable to describe him as “looking exactly like Ringo Starr” and expect to be understood. He has the shaped beard, the little red shades, and a peace-sign pendant on a necklace. He appears just as he has in countless pop-art pieces and wax museums, and that Simpsons episode in which Starr, playing himself, turns out to be Marge’s artistic muse.
Everyone scurrying in and out of Ringo’s suite looks famous, or almost famous. They include a swarm of well-wishers and maybe some actual friends whom Starr has gotten by with a little help from. I was struck by how Starr’s presence arouses giddiness even in other rock stars. Valensi told me that when people hear that he worked with Starr, they tend to transform into elated teenagers. “Everybody who I tell that to is just so phenomenally either excited for me, or is baffled, and kind of questioning, How did that happen? ” he said. “My wife and my mom, and my sisters, and even close friends who are musicians—everybody just kind of wants to know what the whole thing was like.”
People who spotted Starr moving through the Sunset Marquis kept shouting out “Peace and love” at him. This of course has been Starr’s personal mantra, greeting, and aloha for most of his post-Beatles decades.
“Peace and love, peace and love,” Starr said back to a cluster of onlookers, sounding cheerfully bored. At one point, I watched Starr pause and puff out his cheeks into an ostentatious deep breath. I imagine that’s one of the hassles of immortality: It tends to go on forever.
I have always been a Ringo guy. This was true long before the Fab Four were reduced to an antique duo of Starr and Paul McCartney, now 82. Starr had seven straight top-10 singles after the Beatles broke up, and those early solo tracks were among the first pop songs I remember hearing on the radio when I was a kid. “It Don’t Come Easy” was released in 1971, when I was 6, and played in heavy rotation on the local pop station, WRKO-AM, Boston. It was one of my first favorite songs.
Starr always seemed like the friendliest and most life-size of the four Beatles. The others felt less accessible than the droopy-eyed drummer with the cartoon-cowboy name and childlike tunes. Ringo was yellow submarines and octopus gardens, the mascot little brother, despite being the eldest Beatle, and the best at flittering above the feuds that afflicted the trio of geniuses around him.
Starr was the fastest to comic relief and most averse to pretension in any form. “There you go, hiding behind a smoke screen of bourgeois clichés,” he says in Richard Lester’s 1964 comedy, A Hard Day’s Night, after a stagehand has accused Starr of being “rather arbitrary” for not letting him touch his drum kit. I latched on to this line immediately. In high school, when certain highfalutin friends would try out their fancy SAT words, I would tell them, “There you go, hiding behind a smoke screen of bourgeois clichés.” (Admittedly, this itself was rather arbitrary on my part.)
“He’s the most sympathetic of all the Beatles,” T Bone Burnett, the legendary producer and guitarist, told me. When I spoke with him, Burnett had just produced a new Starr record, a country album called Look Up, which came out in January and has since become one of the biggest hits of his solo career. “Nobody has generated more goodwill than Ringo,” Burnett added. “Not a single person in the world.”
by Mark Leibovich, The Atlantic | Read more:
Image: Dina Litovsky
Wednesday, April 2, 2025
Trump Tariffs Hit Antarctic Islands Inhabited by Zero Humans and Many Penguins
Trump announced the countries now subject to tariffs in a Wednesday press conference, using a poster as a prop. Additional countries—including the Heard and McDonald Islands, which are, incidentally, not countries—were listed on sheets of paper distributed to reporters.
One of the sheets claims that the Heard and McDonald Islands currently charge a “Tariff to the U.S.A.” of 10 percent, clarifying in tiny letters that this includes "currency manipulation and trade barriers." In return, the sheet says that the US will charge "discounted reciprocal tariffs" on the islands at a rate of 10 percent.
The islands are small. Their reported 37,000 hectares of land makes them a little larger than Philadelphia. According to UNESCO, which designated the islands as a World Heritage Site in 1997, they are covered in rocks and glaciers. Heard Island is the site of an active volcano, and McDonald Island is surrounded by several smaller rocky islands. The islands are home to large populations of penguins and elephant seals.
by Caroline Haskins and Leah Feiger, Wired | Read more:
Image: Inger VanDyke/Getty
[ed. These are not serious people (except when it comes to screwing up government, the economy, and U.S. corporate supply chains worldwide). Other tariffs include: Aruba, Turks and Caicos Islands, Bahamas, Lesotho, Fiji, Ethiopia... : Here's every country facing reciprocal tariffs announced by Trump on 'Liberation Day' (Yahoo Finance).]
Should You Blow Up Your Life?
My friend Leila came to me the other night with an urgent question. Should I blow up my life? she wondered. Am I delusional? What if I regret it?
Below are some of the things I talked about with Leila (not her real name, obviously) over tea and ginger cake. These thoughts come from my own life and from the lives of many women who have written me since All Fours came out, as well as the conversations I had while writing it. Please give your own advice to Leila in the comments. Feel free to speak to the complications of children, financial dependency, etc. – we are making big decisions in an unjust, difficult world. This post could be a nice place for women to go when they are having this feeling. (Note: Leila is married to a man so these are slanted a bit that way but most should be applicable to everyone.) (Also this is heavily biased; Leila already had a lot of people telling her to stay and work it out.)
- I do believe (and I tell this to my child) that romantic relationships are usually not supposed to be lifelong, but rather a season of a particular length, to be determined. People default to "lifelong" in part because it can be really hard to trust your gut about the length of the season. Some relationships only last a few weeks (or a night) but you spend the rest of your life using things you learned from them. No length is better or more profound than any other length. But knowing the right length is profound, letting relationships change and perhaps even come back as friendships, that is very meaningful. My very best man-friend was once my worst boyfriend.
- In the case of a long relationship, you better hope you're not the exact same person you were at the start. And that alone can be reason to leave. You simply know yourself better now, you would not choose that person if you met them now or you perhaps you would choose them all over again but you would describe yourself and your needs much differently in those first dates and: they might not have chosen you. It might have just been a fling if they had known who you really were and what you wanted. (For example: you're really, not just a little, bisexual. You're devoted and consistent but not monogamous. You see yourself primarily as a solo adventurer, not in terms of a couple. Etc.)
- Often there is a new person involved in this crisis. Indeed it is the new person who makes it a crisis, who brings it to a breaking point. Most of the time this new person does not endure but they are still very significant in the story of your life (a friend of mine calls these people crowbars — they get you out.) What I really think is that you are not doing it for this new person, but for this new side of yourself. The new love speaks to this side of you so it seems very tied to them. It’s hard to trust your new side because it has no credit score, no deeds in its name. You don't know how trustworthy or good it is. In fact every instinct and every friend may tell you it's for sure untrustworthy and not good — it's tearing up your home! Home good! New side of you bad! I would generally say: take risks in order to know yourself. (...)
- One friend had an elaborate plan designed to make her leaving the marriage more palatable and understandable to her husband. It involved several lies and I was nodding for a while, it seemed plausible, maybe even kind. But then I remembered something! "Maybe he doesn't need to understand or approve of what you’re doing?" She laughed in horror – it was, after all, a plan to leave him. This is where it gets tricky. Because for a long while you are still a part of him, like trees with entangled roots. So it is very hard to think your desires aren’t dangerous. It feels almost suicidal. The confusion of this probably stops a lot of women in their tracks.
- As you are so busily trying to think of how to not hurt your partner you might consider that a wife who doesn't want to be with him might not be such a great prize. He might be able to do better. And you might want this for him.
- The one person I know who regrets blowing up her long marriage did it very abruptly, with no conversation before, no couples therapy, no period of questioning. She was trying to be a good person: she had fallen in love with someone new and did not want to cheat. The new love did not ultimately work out and the whole thing seemed like madness in retrospect. But when I ask her if she wishes she was still with her long-time partner she says, Not usually. She just can’t believe how black and white her thinking was back then. And some nights she does wonder if she made a big mistake.
by Miranda July, Substack | Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Dissenting opinions: Ladies, Miranda July is Not Your Friend (IFFS); and, Miranda July's Lucrative Fantasies (Freddie deBoer):]
"For example, you may remember a now-ancient controversy about whether women “can have it all.” This was a big, meaty, thinkpiece-and-take-generating debate years back. What “having it all” meant was never entirely clear, but the basic debate concerned whether women had to choose between having their careers and raising children/having a family. Of course, the answer to all of these questions depends a great deal on whether the woman and her partner have the socioeconomic flexibility to pay for various kinds of child care; this (correct) observation was often dropped on social media like some kind of gnostic bauble. Some attempted to connect the debate to other flashpoints of modern female identity, like the endlessly-blogged “cool girl” speech featured in Gone Girl. I stayed out of this fray, at the time, but privately I held with those who were pointing out that “having it all” was an unrealistic goal for anyone, not just for women. Yes, there are of course unique difficulties when it comes to women both flourishing in their careers and starting a family, and these are no doubt influenced not just by biology but by structural sexism. Still, everyone’s ambitions are constrained in prosaic ways in life, including men, and (like the directive to be cartoonishly self-confident) the goal of it having it all becomes just another set of expectations that women can’t possibly meet. (...)
Which brings me to Miranda July and the micro-movement she’s spawned with her book All Fours: convincing aging women that they should leave their long-term partners, or stop looking for one, and just spend the rest of their lives cycling through one lover after another, enjoying a pleasantly hedonistic existence unbound by the restrictions of conventional morality - and, it seems, by mortality and time, which have conspicuously little presence in all of this. July’s book is a novel and does not advocate for a specific path for women, but her extremely successful newsletter more or less does, and the large online movement July has sparked certainly prefers to embrace the ethos of Just Dump Your Husband Already. This has all been aided by a massive amount of attention from media, both traditional and new - very large presence of Lady Podcasts, mentions in Emily Gould’s newsletter for the Cut, a profound fixation in the New York Times. Here’s Marie Solis with the initial worshipful profile, here’s Alyson Krueger with that classic indicator of social importance, an NYT Style-section trend piece, here’ss Mirielle Silcoff with a charming little bit of football-spiking, protesting against depictions of aging women that make them appear unfulfilled or sexless. (Protesting, perhaps, too much.) We could get into the whole phenomenon here of people being moved to explicitly explain and justify their happiness to others, in the pages of the New York Times no less; you can’t help but wonder who exactly they’re trying to convince. Still, if your wife writes thinkpieces for the Times you might want to keep a close eye on her Pinterest.
As I wrote recently, what media sells in 2025 is permission; that is our product. Apparently a lot of women were waiting for a particular kind of permission that Miranda July has provided. What’s remarkable about all of this cheering on of July in our most elite publications is not just its sheer volume, but also how untouched it is by skepticism or pushback. It’s not just that a certain kind of person at a certain kind of publication wants this story told; they also don’t want to hear anyone object to it. And I think this is the “Can women have it all?” phenomenon again, where saying that a particular kind of happiness for women is genuinely unattainable is too easily represented as saying that you don’t want them to attain it."
"For example, you may remember a now-ancient controversy about whether women “can have it all.” This was a big, meaty, thinkpiece-and-take-generating debate years back. What “having it all” meant was never entirely clear, but the basic debate concerned whether women had to choose between having their careers and raising children/having a family. Of course, the answer to all of these questions depends a great deal on whether the woman and her partner have the socioeconomic flexibility to pay for various kinds of child care; this (correct) observation was often dropped on social media like some kind of gnostic bauble. Some attempted to connect the debate to other flashpoints of modern female identity, like the endlessly-blogged “cool girl” speech featured in Gone Girl. I stayed out of this fray, at the time, but privately I held with those who were pointing out that “having it all” was an unrealistic goal for anyone, not just for women. Yes, there are of course unique difficulties when it comes to women both flourishing in their careers and starting a family, and these are no doubt influenced not just by biology but by structural sexism. Still, everyone’s ambitions are constrained in prosaic ways in life, including men, and (like the directive to be cartoonishly self-confident) the goal of it having it all becomes just another set of expectations that women can’t possibly meet. (...)
Which brings me to Miranda July and the micro-movement she’s spawned with her book All Fours: convincing aging women that they should leave their long-term partners, or stop looking for one, and just spend the rest of their lives cycling through one lover after another, enjoying a pleasantly hedonistic existence unbound by the restrictions of conventional morality - and, it seems, by mortality and time, which have conspicuously little presence in all of this. July’s book is a novel and does not advocate for a specific path for women, but her extremely successful newsletter more or less does, and the large online movement July has sparked certainly prefers to embrace the ethos of Just Dump Your Husband Already. This has all been aided by a massive amount of attention from media, both traditional and new - very large presence of Lady Podcasts, mentions in Emily Gould’s newsletter for the Cut, a profound fixation in the New York Times. Here’s Marie Solis with the initial worshipful profile, here’s Alyson Krueger with that classic indicator of social importance, an NYT Style-section trend piece, here’ss Mirielle Silcoff with a charming little bit of football-spiking, protesting against depictions of aging women that make them appear unfulfilled or sexless. (Protesting, perhaps, too much.) We could get into the whole phenomenon here of people being moved to explicitly explain and justify their happiness to others, in the pages of the New York Times no less; you can’t help but wonder who exactly they’re trying to convince. Still, if your wife writes thinkpieces for the Times you might want to keep a close eye on her Pinterest.
As I wrote recently, what media sells in 2025 is permission; that is our product. Apparently a lot of women were waiting for a particular kind of permission that Miranda July has provided. What’s remarkable about all of this cheering on of July in our most elite publications is not just its sheer volume, but also how untouched it is by skepticism or pushback. It’s not just that a certain kind of person at a certain kind of publication wants this story told; they also don’t want to hear anyone object to it. And I think this is the “Can women have it all?” phenomenon again, where saying that a particular kind of happiness for women is genuinely unattainable is too easily represented as saying that you don’t want them to attain it."
Tuesday, April 1, 2025
Starliner’s Flight to the Space Station Was Wilder Than We Thought
As it flew up toward the International Space Station last summer, the Starliner spacecraft lost four thrusters. A NASA astronaut, Butch Wilmore, had to take manual control of the vehicle. But as Starliner's thrusters failed, Wilmore lost the ability to move the spacecraft in the direction he wanted to go.
He and his fellow astronaut, Suni Williams, knew where they wanted to go. Starliner had flown to within a stone's throw of the space station, a safe harbor, if only they could reach it. But already, the failure of so many thrusters violated the mission's flight rules. In such an instance, they were supposed to turn around and come back to Earth. Approaching the station was deemed too risky for Wilmore and Williams, aboard Starliner, as well as for the astronauts on the $100 billion space station.
But what if it was not safe to come home, either?
"I don't know that we can come back to Earth at that point," Wilmore said in an interview. "I don't know if we can. And matter of fact, I'm thinking we probably can't."
Starliner astronauts meet with the media
On Monday, for the first time since they returned to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle two weeks ago, Wilmore and Williams participated in a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Afterward, they spent hours conducting short, 10-minute interviews with reporters from around the world, describing their mission. I spoke with both of them.
Many of the questions concerned the politically messy end of the mission, in which the Trump White House claimed it had rescued the astronauts after they were stranded by the Biden administration. This was not true, but it is also not a question that active astronauts are going to answer. They have too much respect for the agency and the White House that appoints its leadership. They are trained not to speak out of school. As Wilmore said repeatedly on Monday, "I can't speak to any of that. Nor would I."
So when Ars met with Wilmore at the end of the day—it was his final interview, scheduled for 4:55 to 5:05 pm in a small studio at Johnson Space Center—politics was not on the menu. Instead, I wanted to know the real story, the heretofore untold story of what it was really like to fly Starliner. After all, the problems with the spacecraft's propulsion system precipitated all the other events—the decision to fly Starliner home without crew, the reshuffling of the Crew-9 mission, and their recent return in March after nine months in space.
I have known Wilmore a bit for more than a decade. I was privileged to see his launch on a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan in 2014, alongside his family. We both are about to become empty nesters, with daughters who are seniors in high school, soon to go off to college. Perhaps because of this, Wilmore felt comfortable sharing his experiences and anxieties from the flight. We blew through the 10-minute interview slot and ended up talking for nearly half an hour.
It's a hell of a story.
Launch and a cold night
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft faced multiple delays before the vehicle's first crewed mission, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on June 5, 2024. These included a faulty valve on the Atlas V rocket's upper stage, and then a helium leak inside Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.
The valve issue, in early May, stood the mission down long enough that Wilmore asked to fly back to Houston for additional time in a flight simulator to keep his skills fresh. Finally, with fine weather, the Starliner Crew Flight Test took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It marked the first human launch on the Atlas V rocket, which had a new Centaur upper stage with two engines.
Sunita "Suni" Williams: "Oh man, the launch was awesome. Both of us looked at each other like, 'Wow, this is going just perfectly.' So the ride to space and the orbit insertion burn, all perfect."
The heroes in Mission Control
As part of the Commercial Crew program, the two companies providing transportation services for NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing, got to decide who would fly their spacecraft. SpaceX chose to operate its Dragon vehicles out of a control center at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Boeing chose to contract with NASA's Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston to fly Starliner. So at this point, the vehicle is under the purview of a Flight Director named Ed Van Cise. This was the capstone mission of his 15-year career as a NASA flight director.
Wilmore: "Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That's a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, 'What do you think?' they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control."
From the outside, as Starliner approached the space station last June, we knew little of this. By following NASA's webcast of the docking, it was clear there were some thruster issues and that Wilmore had to take manual control. But we did not know that in the final minutes before docking, NASA waived the flight rules about loss of thrusters. According to Wilmore and Williams, the drama was only beginning at this point.
[ed. FOD.]
But what if it was not safe to come home, either?
"I don't know that we can come back to Earth at that point," Wilmore said in an interview. "I don't know if we can. And matter of fact, I'm thinking we probably can't."
Starliner astronauts meet with the media
On Monday, for the first time since they returned to Earth on a Crew Dragon vehicle two weeks ago, Wilmore and Williams participated in a news conference at Johnson Space Center in Houston. Afterward, they spent hours conducting short, 10-minute interviews with reporters from around the world, describing their mission. I spoke with both of them.
Many of the questions concerned the politically messy end of the mission, in which the Trump White House claimed it had rescued the astronauts after they were stranded by the Biden administration. This was not true, but it is also not a question that active astronauts are going to answer. They have too much respect for the agency and the White House that appoints its leadership. They are trained not to speak out of school. As Wilmore said repeatedly on Monday, "I can't speak to any of that. Nor would I."
So when Ars met with Wilmore at the end of the day—it was his final interview, scheduled for 4:55 to 5:05 pm in a small studio at Johnson Space Center—politics was not on the menu. Instead, I wanted to know the real story, the heretofore untold story of what it was really like to fly Starliner. After all, the problems with the spacecraft's propulsion system precipitated all the other events—the decision to fly Starliner home without crew, the reshuffling of the Crew-9 mission, and their recent return in March after nine months in space.
I have known Wilmore a bit for more than a decade. I was privileged to see his launch on a Soyuz rocket from Kazakhstan in 2014, alongside his family. We both are about to become empty nesters, with daughters who are seniors in high school, soon to go off to college. Perhaps because of this, Wilmore felt comfortable sharing his experiences and anxieties from the flight. We blew through the 10-minute interview slot and ended up talking for nearly half an hour.
It's a hell of a story.
Launch and a cold night
Boeing's Starliner spacecraft faced multiple delays before the vehicle's first crewed mission, carrying NASA astronauts Butch Wilmore and Suni Williams launched on June 5, 2024. These included a faulty valve on the Atlas V rocket's upper stage, and then a helium leak inside Boeing's Starliner spacecraft.
The valve issue, in early May, stood the mission down long enough that Wilmore asked to fly back to Houston for additional time in a flight simulator to keep his skills fresh. Finally, with fine weather, the Starliner Crew Flight Test took off from Cape Canaveral, Florida. It marked the first human launch on the Atlas V rocket, which had a new Centaur upper stage with two engines.
Sunita "Suni" Williams: "Oh man, the launch was awesome. Both of us looked at each other like, 'Wow, this is going just perfectly.' So the ride to space and the orbit insertion burn, all perfect."
Barry "Butch" Wilmore: "In simulations, there's always a deviation. Little deviations in your trajectory. And during the launch on Shuttle STS-129 many years ago, and Soyuz, there's the similar type of deviations that you see in this trajectory. I mean, it's always correcting back. But this ULA Atlas was dead on the center. I mean, it was exactly in the crosshairs, all the way. It was much different than what I'd expected or experienced in the past. It was exhilarating. It was fantastic. Yeah, it really was. The dual-engine Centaur did have a surge. I'm not sure ULA knew about it, but it was obvious to us. We were the first to ride it. Initially we asked, 'Should that be doing that? This surging?' But after a while, it was kind of soothing. And again, we were flying right down the middle."
After Starliner separated from the Atlas V rocket, Williams and Wilmore performed several maneuvering tests and put the vehicle through its paces. Starliner performed exceptionally well during these initial tests on day one.
Wilmore: "The precision, the ability to control to the exact point that I wanted, was great. There was very little, almost imperceptible cross-control. I've never given a handling qualities rating of "one," which was part of a measurement system. To take a qualitative test and make a quantitative assessment. I've never given a one, ever, in any test I've ever done, because nothing's ever deserved a one. Boy, I was tempted in some of the tests we did. I didn't give a one, but it was pretty amazing."
Following these tests, the crew attempted to sleep for several hours ahead of their all-important approach and docking with the International Space Station on the flight's second day. More so even than launch or landing, the most challenging part of this mission, which would stress Starliner's handling capabilities as well as its navigation system, would come as it approached the orbiting laboratory.
Williams: "The night that we spent there in the spacecraft, it was a little chilly. We had traded off some of our clothes to bring up some equipment up to the space station. So I had this small T-shirt thing, long-sleeve T-shirt, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm cold.' Butch is like, 'I'm cold, too.' So, we ended up actually putting our boots on, and then I put my spacesuit on. And then he's like, maybe I want mine, too. So we both actually got in our spacesuits. It might just be because there were two people in there."
Starliner was designed to fly four people to the International Space Station for six-month stays in orbit. But for this initial test flight, there were just two people, which meant less body heat. Wilmore estimated that it was about 50° Fahrenheit in the cabin.
Wilmore: "It was definitely low 50s, if not cooler. When you're hustling and bustling, and doing things, all the tests we were doing after launch, we didn't notice it until we slowed down. We purposely didn't take sleeping bags. I was just going to bungee myself to the bulkhead. I had a sweatshirt and some sweatpants, and I thought, I'm going to be fine. No, it was frigid. And I even got inside my space suit, put the boots on and everything, gloves, the whole thing. And it was still cold."
Time to dock with the space station
After a few hours of fitful sleep, Wilmore decided to get up and start working to get his blood pumping. He reviewed the flight plan and knew it was going to be a big day. Wilmore had been concerned about the performance of the vehicle's reaction control system thrusters. There are 28 of them. Around the perimeter of Starliner's service module, at the aft of the vehicle, there are four "doghouses" equally spaced around the vehicle.
Each of these doghouses contains seven small thrusters for maneuvering. In each doghouse, two thrusters are aft-facing, two are forward-facing, and three are in different radial directions (see an image of a doghouse, with the cover removed, here). For docking, these thrusters are essential. There had been some problems with their performance during an uncrewed flight test to the space station in May 2022, and Wilmore had been concerned those issues might crop up again.
Wilmore: "Before the flight we had a meeting with a lot of the senior Boeing executives, including the chief engineer. [This was Naveed Hussain, chief engineer for Boeing's Defense, Space, and Security division.] Naveed asked me what is my biggest concern? And I said the thrusters and the valves because we'd had failures on the OFT missions. You don't get the hardware back. (Starliner's service module is jettisoned before the crew capsule returns from orbit). So you're just looking at data and engineering judgment to say, 'OK, it must've been FOD,' (foreign object debris) or whatever the various issues they had. And I said that's what concerns me the most. Because in my mind, I'm thinking, 'If we lost thrusters, we could be in a situation where we're in space and can't control it.' That's what I was thinking. And oh my, what happened? We lost the first thruster."
When vehicles approach the space station, they use two imaginary lines to help guide their approach. These are the R-bar, which is a line connecting the space station to the center of Earth. The "R" stands for radius. Then there is the V-bar, which is the velocity vector of the space station. Due to thruster issues, as Starliner neared the V-bar about 260 meters (850 feet) from the space station, Wilmore had to take manual control of the vehicle.
Wilmore: "As we get closer to the V-bar, we lose our second thruster. So now we're single fault tolerance for the loss of 6DOF control. You understand that?"
Here things get a little more complicated if you've never piloted anything. When Wilmore refers to 6DOF control, he means six degrees of freedom—that is, the six different movements possible in three-dimensional space: forward/back, up/down, left/right, yaw, pitch, and roll. With Starliner's four doghouses and their various thrusters, a pilot is able to control the spacecraft's movement across these six degrees of freedom. But as Starliner got to within a few hundred meters of the station, a second thruster failed. The condition of being "single fault" tolerant means that the vehicle could sustain just one more thruster failure before being at risk of losing full control of Starliner's movement. This would necessitate a mandatory abort of the docking attempt.
Wilmore: "We're single fault tolerant, and I'm thinking, 'Wow, we're supposed to leave the space station.' Because I know the flight rules. I did not know that the flight directors were already in discussions about waiving the flight rule because we've lost two thrusters. We didn't know why. They just dropped."
After Starliner separated from the Atlas V rocket, Williams and Wilmore performed several maneuvering tests and put the vehicle through its paces. Starliner performed exceptionally well during these initial tests on day one.
Wilmore: "The precision, the ability to control to the exact point that I wanted, was great. There was very little, almost imperceptible cross-control. I've never given a handling qualities rating of "one," which was part of a measurement system. To take a qualitative test and make a quantitative assessment. I've never given a one, ever, in any test I've ever done, because nothing's ever deserved a one. Boy, I was tempted in some of the tests we did. I didn't give a one, but it was pretty amazing."
Following these tests, the crew attempted to sleep for several hours ahead of their all-important approach and docking with the International Space Station on the flight's second day. More so even than launch or landing, the most challenging part of this mission, which would stress Starliner's handling capabilities as well as its navigation system, would come as it approached the orbiting laboratory.
Williams: "The night that we spent there in the spacecraft, it was a little chilly. We had traded off some of our clothes to bring up some equipment up to the space station. So I had this small T-shirt thing, long-sleeve T-shirt, and I was like, 'Oh my gosh, I'm cold.' Butch is like, 'I'm cold, too.' So, we ended up actually putting our boots on, and then I put my spacesuit on. And then he's like, maybe I want mine, too. So we both actually got in our spacesuits. It might just be because there were two people in there."
Starliner was designed to fly four people to the International Space Station for six-month stays in orbit. But for this initial test flight, there were just two people, which meant less body heat. Wilmore estimated that it was about 50° Fahrenheit in the cabin.
Wilmore: "It was definitely low 50s, if not cooler. When you're hustling and bustling, and doing things, all the tests we were doing after launch, we didn't notice it until we slowed down. We purposely didn't take sleeping bags. I was just going to bungee myself to the bulkhead. I had a sweatshirt and some sweatpants, and I thought, I'm going to be fine. No, it was frigid. And I even got inside my space suit, put the boots on and everything, gloves, the whole thing. And it was still cold."
Time to dock with the space station
After a few hours of fitful sleep, Wilmore decided to get up and start working to get his blood pumping. He reviewed the flight plan and knew it was going to be a big day. Wilmore had been concerned about the performance of the vehicle's reaction control system thrusters. There are 28 of them. Around the perimeter of Starliner's service module, at the aft of the vehicle, there are four "doghouses" equally spaced around the vehicle.
Each of these doghouses contains seven small thrusters for maneuvering. In each doghouse, two thrusters are aft-facing, two are forward-facing, and three are in different radial directions (see an image of a doghouse, with the cover removed, here). For docking, these thrusters are essential. There had been some problems with their performance during an uncrewed flight test to the space station in May 2022, and Wilmore had been concerned those issues might crop up again.
Wilmore: "Before the flight we had a meeting with a lot of the senior Boeing executives, including the chief engineer. [This was Naveed Hussain, chief engineer for Boeing's Defense, Space, and Security division.] Naveed asked me what is my biggest concern? And I said the thrusters and the valves because we'd had failures on the OFT missions. You don't get the hardware back. (Starliner's service module is jettisoned before the crew capsule returns from orbit). So you're just looking at data and engineering judgment to say, 'OK, it must've been FOD,' (foreign object debris) or whatever the various issues they had. And I said that's what concerns me the most. Because in my mind, I'm thinking, 'If we lost thrusters, we could be in a situation where we're in space and can't control it.' That's what I was thinking. And oh my, what happened? We lost the first thruster."
When vehicles approach the space station, they use two imaginary lines to help guide their approach. These are the R-bar, which is a line connecting the space station to the center of Earth. The "R" stands for radius. Then there is the V-bar, which is the velocity vector of the space station. Due to thruster issues, as Starliner neared the V-bar about 260 meters (850 feet) from the space station, Wilmore had to take manual control of the vehicle.
Wilmore: "As we get closer to the V-bar, we lose our second thruster. So now we're single fault tolerance for the loss of 6DOF control. You understand that?"
Here things get a little more complicated if you've never piloted anything. When Wilmore refers to 6DOF control, he means six degrees of freedom—that is, the six different movements possible in three-dimensional space: forward/back, up/down, left/right, yaw, pitch, and roll. With Starliner's four doghouses and their various thrusters, a pilot is able to control the spacecraft's movement across these six degrees of freedom. But as Starliner got to within a few hundred meters of the station, a second thruster failed. The condition of being "single fault" tolerant means that the vehicle could sustain just one more thruster failure before being at risk of losing full control of Starliner's movement. This would necessitate a mandatory abort of the docking attempt.
Wilmore: "We're single fault tolerant, and I'm thinking, 'Wow, we're supposed to leave the space station.' Because I know the flight rules. I did not know that the flight directors were already in discussions about waiving the flight rule because we've lost two thrusters. We didn't know why. They just dropped."
The heroes in Mission Control
As part of the Commercial Crew program, the two companies providing transportation services for NASA, SpaceX, and Boeing, got to decide who would fly their spacecraft. SpaceX chose to operate its Dragon vehicles out of a control center at the company's headquarters in Hawthorne, California. Boeing chose to contract with NASA's Mission Control at Johnson Space Center in Houston to fly Starliner. So at this point, the vehicle is under the purview of a Flight Director named Ed Van Cise. This was the capstone mission of his 15-year career as a NASA flight director.
Wilmore: "Thankfully, these folks are heroes. And please print this. What do heroes look like? Well, heroes put their tank on and they run into a fiery building and pull people out of it. That's a hero. Heroes also sit in their cubicle for decades studying their systems, and knowing their systems front and back. And when there is no time to assess a situation and go and talk to people and ask, 'What do you think?' they know their system so well they come up with a plan on the fly. That is a hero. And there are several of them in Mission Control."
From the outside, as Starliner approached the space station last June, we knew little of this. By following NASA's webcast of the docking, it was clear there were some thruster issues and that Wilmore had to take manual control. But we did not know that in the final minutes before docking, NASA waived the flight rules about loss of thrusters. According to Wilmore and Williams, the drama was only beginning at this point.
by Eric Berger, Ars Technica | Read more:
Image: NASA
'Our Kids Are the Least Flourishing Generation We Know Of’
In March of last year, Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist, published a book called “The Anxious Generation,” which caused, let’s call it, a stir.
I always found the conversation over this book to be a little annoying because it got at one of the difficulties we’re having in parenting and in society: a tendency to instrumentalize everything into social science. Unless I can show you on a chart the way something is bad, we have almost no language for saying it’s bad.
This phenomenon is, to me, a collapse in our sense of what a good life is and what it means to flourish as a human being.
But a year later, two things have happened. One: Haidt’s book has never left the best-seller list. That is rare. It has struck a chord.
Two: Policy is moving in Haidt’s direction. We are seeing a genuine policy revolution, happening in places governed by both Republicans and Democrats, in how we treat children in this era of social media. And I feel a lot more confident, as a parent, that we’re going to figure this out by the time my kids are old enough for it to matter.
But then, of course, the truck of artificial intelligence is about to T-bone whatever consensus we come to socially — which, to be quite honest, scares the hell out of me. (...)
Ezra Klein: Jon Haidt, welcome to the show.
Jonathan Haidt: Ezra, it’s great to be back with you.
I want to begin with the big question: What is childhood for?
Childhood is evolution’s answer to: How do you have a big-brained cultural creature?
You have to play a lot. You have to practice all sorts of things — all sorts of maneuvers and social skills — in order to tell your brain how to wire up to have the adult form.
If you focus on brain development, especially for a big-brained cultural species like ours, there’s a plastic period where stuff comes in and shapes who you are. And once you’ve got that, you’re ready to convert to the adult form — be reproductive, have a baby.
But if you don’t have play in childhood, you’re not going to reach adulthood properly.
You had one statistic in the book that I think I’ve actually read before, but every time I read it, it shocks me anew, maybe now because I have a 5-year-old who just turned 6: At 5 years old, the human brain is 90 percent of its adult size, and it has more neurons than it will when you’re an adult.
That’s right. We’re used to thinking of bodily growth as just: Time equals bigger. But the brain is this amazing thing that has all these neurons, which have the potential to connect in all kinds of ways. And as neuroscientists say, neurons that fire together wire together.
So if you repeatedly climb trees or do archery, systems will form in your brain that make you really good at that. Whereas if you repeatedly swipe and tap, swipe and tap, and just respond to emotional stimuli, your brain is going to wire to do that.
I guess you’re an older millennial. How did you grow up?
I am among the eldest of millennials.
The millennial elders. Tell me: At what age could you go out on your bicycle with your friends and go around the neighborhood?
I don’t remember exactly, but I lived on a cul-de-sac in a suburb, and I do remember I spent a lot of time as part of a roaming pack of kids who lived on my street. We would be playing kickball on somebody’s garage door. The other thing I remember about it that I feel like I see less of now is that it was highly age diverse.
Exactly. So this is what human childhood has always been. There are periods, like the Industrial Revolution, where maybe kids didn’t have a childhood. But Peter Gray, a developmental psychologist who co-founded Let Grow with me, has some writing on hunter-gatherers. And hunter-gatherers raise their kids in that way. There’s no thought that the mother has to be supervising the 4-, 5-, 6-, 7-, 9-year-olds. They’re all off playing with the other kids.
And there are 9- and 10-year-olds there. So they learn to look out for each other. The older kids learn to care for the younger kids. And remember, the younger kids are trying to wire up their brain to: What is a functional member of this society? And the best role models for them are not kids their age — it’s kids a few years older.
In America, in the West, we’ve got these factory kinds of schools where we put all the 8-year-olds together and then all the 9-year-olds together. But the healthiest is what you just said.
So my point is: Everyone before the millennials had this childhood. Millennials are the transitional generation. So you were on the elder side — you got it. Even though the rates are microscopic in this country, and even though crime was plummeting in this country in the ’90s — you can see it in the charts — that’s the decade when we really pulled our kids in.
We thought: They’ll get abducted. We can’t let them go in a different aisle of a supermarket. Or a man with a white van — all this crazy stuff comes in in the ’90s.
Something you mentioned about the ’90s in the book: I am familiar with this statistic that, despite working two jobs much more often than they did in the past, despite fathers being more involved, both parents spend much more time with their kids than they did before.
But I hadn’t realized that was not a steady increase over the decades. It sharply increased in the ’90s.
That’s right. There’s this weird graph that I have in the book that shows the number of hours that women spend parenting — what you would consider time with your kid doing something.
And the astonishing thing is that in the ’50s, ’60s and ’70s, women were not spending five hours a day parenting because the kids were raised the way that you just said.
It’s not the parent’s job to socialize the child all along. It’s the parent’s job to provide the right environment to provide certain kinds of moral frameworks.
But the real work of brain development doesn’t happen when you’re with your parents. Your parents are home base — they’re your attachment figure. When you feel securely attached, then you go off and explore. That’s what other mammals do. You go off progressively farther from your home base, and that’s where the learning happens.
It’s playing kickball. It’s trying to decide: What do we do today? Or: Oh, he broke the rules. No, he didn’t.
I want to get at a tension in there, at least with the culture of modern parenting. I think a lot of parents believe that the simplest way to ask whether you were a good parent this week is how much time you spent with your children.
Yes. Quality time.
Quality time. I feel that. And you’re saying here that’s not true?
It’s definitely not true. You want to give your kids a quality childhood. You want to be a quality parent. But that doesn’t mean that you have to spend a lot of quality time with your kid.
You need a warm, trusting, loving relationship. You need to provide structure and order and discipline. But this is what changed in the ’90s, and it’s in part because we stopped trusting our neighbors.
If you think of all the Robert Putnam stuff about “Bowling Alone” and the loss of social capital, we used to at least trust that if our kids were out playing without us, other adults would look out for them. If something really went wrong, they could knock on a door, and someone would help. But we begin losing that trust.
This is really bad for the kids because they don’t grow as much if their attachment figure is there. And it’s really bad for the adults — especially women. Mothers pick up a lot of this, even though they’re working outside the home.
So yes, modern parenting is not good for the kids — and certainly not good for the adults.
If you’re tracking dynamics here: In the ’90s, we’re getting more afraid of danger. You’re having this deterioration in social trust, this deterioration of the idea that the whole is community parenting your kid.
And it’s right about now that you begin having an explosion in screen possibilities. When I was younger, I remember Nickelodeon emerging. Before then, there wasn’t a TV channel that was programming for children at all times. There were kids’ shows, but not all the time. And obviously from there, you get an explosion of cable channels. And then, eventually, the internet, iPads, iPhones and video game consoles and all the rest of it. So talk about the handoff.
It’s the conversion over to this smartphone-based, tablet-based childhood. That’s when all the indicators of mental illness start rising, around 2012, 2013.
Now, I focused on the 2010 to 2015 period. But I think your question points out something I hadn’t really thought much about, which is cable TV.
I was born in 1963, so I grew up in the late ’60s and early ’70s on “I Dream of Jeannie” and “Gilligan’s Island.” And I showed those shows to my kids, and I said: This is so stupid. They were really simple plots. But that’s all we had.
Whereas you had cable, which was more engaging. (...)
When you look at old movies from the ’30s and ’40s, there was a really tight moral order. It would be dramatic whether a woman could go into a man’s apartment. So there was a really intense moral order around gender, around all sorts of things.
And that, of course, begins to loosen up in the ’60s. And there are many good things that happened because of that. But one of the concerns about modern secular society has been that you gradually lose this moral framework within which to raise children.
I’m really aware now of how we’re all influenced by our parents and just maybe a little bit by our grandparents. Culture has always come down vertically through generations. But that link is getting weakened.
So I think there is a progressive weakening of a sense of a moral order, which affects how you parent. And then we end up with an amoral focus on grades and, I guess, be nice and a few other things. But it’s a very thin moral gruel, I’d say.
by Ezra Klein, NY Times | Read more:
Image: Ezra Klein podcast, NY Times
Image: Ezra Klein podcast, NY Times
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