A Mile Wide, An Inch Deep

Nobody uses Facebook anymore. Hello! Two teenagers tried to explain Snapchat to me this week. It turns out it's not just for sexting . It's for sexting AND sending your friends pictures that aren't worthy of being kept. Frankly, that sounds even worse. I enjoy Facebook's feed of baby pictures and trip updates, but if you're going to interrupt my day with a picture I can only view for 10 seconds, at least make it worth my while and show some leg. Lord knows I don't need to keep up with what you're eating for lunch today. But I digress. My chief question at the end of the lesson was, "But how do you post articles and essays and have conversations about philosophical questions that are interesting to you but don't involve pictures?" The answer is, you don't. Apparently teenagers are not that big into sharing news articles. What. Ever. On that note, here's an interesting Atlantic article I stumbled across while looking up Cory Booker...

The theft of Jennifer Lawrence and other celebrities’ personal photos has prompted a now-predictable online discussion about victim-blaming, with self-appointed moralists condemning Lawrence for taking nude or sexually-explicit pictures in the first place and her defenders objecting to any discussion of taking reasonable precautions against becoming a victim. It’s a repeat of the societal conversations we have around rape, and while I get it, it wears me down. The Huffington Post posted a tweet from Farhad Manjoo , “I’ve never heard anyone respond to financial hacking by saying, Just don’t use online banking. That’s what you get for using credit cards.” But the truth is that we blame victims—of crime, of misfortune—all the time, blaming them for risky behavior, for bad one-off decisions, even as we ignore how many risks we take ourselves, or how many of our own stupid decisions turn out well when they might just as easily have been deadly. And here’s a test case: If you hear that s...

James comes into kindergarten with a very different skill set than most of his peers at our neighborhood school, a skill set that seems to hold a mirror up to our family, reflecting our generation, our economic class, our culture, even our personal quirks. He knows his letters, alphabet sounds, numbers, sight words. He knows every train part ever made, from the couplings to the traction rods, and can describe to you how steam and diesel engines differ in their production of energy. He knows every dinosaur ever discovered (or so it seems) and pronounces their names better than I do. He easily types "dinosaur" into the iPad, using it with better skill than most adults. But he can't write his name or put on his shoes and he will NOT draw. He's always had parents culturally willing and financially able to give him maximum attention, to read to him, to facilitate with books and videos and flashcards and toys and trips to far-flung museums his intellectual obsessions, but...