Talkin' 'bout my generation

This 29-year-old writer worries that Chelsea Clinton is too serious and private for the sarcastic and unrestrained Facebook generation:

We're ironic, sarcastic and self-deprecating, a reflection of the pop culture and politics that played out while we grew up in the 1980s, 1990s and onward....People my age shed privacy at the nearest high-speed Internet connection and, more often than not, display the very grown-up qualities of self-awareness and self-reflection....

To many [college students], she comes off more like a simulacrum of a young person -- or some grandparent's idealized vision of a young person -- parachuting into the college scene, where most voters prefer the other guy....

Chelsea is no longer a teenager on the prospective frosh tour. She's touring colleges as a 28-year-old saleswoman. Yet she's clinging to her privacy as she did a decade earlier, which, to her contemporaries, could make it all the more difficult to buy what she's selling. Maybe it's time to finally meet the press and -- not to micromanage my new Facebook friend too much, but -- act our age.

Apparently, trying to have some privacy and not blab your whole life on the Internet is soooooo last generation.

This Yale Law school student worries that her classmates just aren't nice enough:

They can be inspirational, and I am lucky to be able to learn from them. But they are not always nice people.

You know what I mean by "nice." I mean the kind of "nice" that involves showing compassion not merely because membership in community service groups demands it. The kind of "nice" that involves sharing notes with a student who is sick or lending a textbook to a friend who doesn't have one. The kind of selfless, genuine "nice" that makes this world a better place -- but won't get you accepted to college.

....I'm saying that sometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to "do what is right."

This is not a worry that I have ever shared. Maybe she should stop hanging out with law school kids.

And this writer declares that "awkward" has replaced "random" as the word that the kids these days are overusing to the point of destroying all meaning:

Awk-ward: Sing the second syllable a minor third lower than the first.

It is the era of awkward.

It is as if the world has suddenly become blessedly simplified. Every complex negative experience can now be encapsulated in two syllables.

I would have nominated "ridiculous".

It's not just Congress

Colbert King shines a light on the earmarks in the latest DC budget:

Overnight, a colossal snow job was done on residents of the nation's capital: $56 million of taxpayer funds was placed in the pockets of local groups -- some deserving, some not -- with a minimum of public debate or scrutiny.

A few education links

- Colbert King fears, based on DC's track record, that the historic Thaddeus Stevens Elementary School, the first school built in DC for freed slaves after the Civil War, will be destroyed when the school is closed for under-enrollment and poor performance. Mark Lerner has an idea for how to save the school building.

- Do you remember the wonderful documentary Spellbound about the national spelling bee? One of the featured spellers was from DC:

Ashley, an African-American girl in southeast Washington, D.C., who has little community support or recognition. Ashley's mother sits smoking at her kitchen table, listing the obstacles her daughter has had to overcome, bitter over the lack of attention: The winner of the Washington metro bee, Ashley doesn't even have a trophy. But the girl herself—dressed in immaculate white—is radiant. "I'm a prayer warrior," she says. "I just can't stop praying. I rise above all my problems." Trying to convince herself as much as Blitz's camera, Ashley makes you want to cry.

After the movie was released, though, Ashley struggled, becoming a mother at age 18 and spending time in a homeless shelter. But the Washington Post now reports that the story has a happy ending.

- A stockbroker quietly provides college scholarships to Latin American students who come to the US for baseball:

A virtually unknown stockbroker from San Jose, Calif., following his Peace Corps instincts, [Don] Odermann has spent 25 years as a silent baseball benefactor. He has arranged and financed scholarships for more than 100 young players from Caribbean countries to attend colleges in the United States....

Odermann’s self-run Latin Athletes Education Fund supplements partial athletic scholarships the players receive from their colleges, filling the financial gaps that otherwise would have kept them from accepting the scholarship offers. Ten graduates of his program have played in the major leagues, including the Mets’ Moises Alou. But a vast majority never do, learning that the education Odermann helped them obtain lasts longer than any playing career.

Some links

For Presidents' Day, Michael Medved pointed out a trait shared by 38 of our 43 presidents--and yours truly. Link via RealClearPolitics.

The latest cover story for the Weekly Standard gave me a little grammar lesson.

Gatsby is still relevant--and kind of like Jay-Z.

Arlington County is using YouTube to catch criminals. Link via Arlington Insider.

And speaking of Arlington County... There are ZERO Bojangles restaurants in Northern Virginia, and FIVE in Honduras. Goshdarn those demand curves--iced tea is meant to be sweet, people!

Who I'll be cheering for tonight

Following my dad's lead, in tonight's Super Bowl, I'll be cheering for the team whose coach was an economics major--and still keeps in touch with one of his professors:

Wesleyan University economics professor Richard Miller received a handwritten note a few years ago from one of his former students.

A shaggy-haired football player named Bill Belichick took classes with Miller in the early 1970's and kept in touch after he chose football coaching over the financial world.

In the note, Belichick, then head coach of the Cleveland Browns, said he used many of the economic principles he learned at Wesleyan to keep the Browns under the N.F.L.'s salary cap.

Coach Belichick reads academic economic papers, and his draft picks conform to economic theory.

Another Super Bowl note, a nice story about the folks in Ohio who make the footballs for the game:

Riegle, a 27-year employee of the factory, said reporters who visited the plant sometimes came looking for a new twist on the story of Ada. There is no twist, Riegle said. Then he enunciated each word clearly and slowly: “We ... just ... make ... footballs.”

Eat PB&J, save the world

I like research saying that stuff I do already is good. So, as a near-daily consumer of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches from kindergarten to 12th grade and now in grad school, I was happy to learn that my PB&J habit is good for me and for the planet:

Compared with a burger, a PB&J sandwich saves as much as 2.5 pounds of carbon dioxide, 280 gallons of water and 50 square feet of land, according to the magazine.

There are also health reasons to eat peanut butter, if you like it. Women who ate peanut butter five days a week had a 20 percent lower risk of developing diabetes compared to those who didn’t eat the spread, according to a 2002 report in The Journal of the American Medical Association. Peanuts also contain resveratrol, the same ingredient in red wine that has been associated with lower cardiovascular risk, according to The Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry. And eating peanuts improves cardiovascular risk factors, according to a study in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition.

Much, much more on peanut butter's environmental friendliness at The PB&J Campaign.

A matter of emphasis

While the Washington Post emphasized President Bush's comments on Iraq and the economy in his State of the Union speech, the New York Sun focused on a different element of the speech. Under the headline "Bush Vows Aid to Private Schools", the article opens:

President Bush is making a final-year push for a program that would allow low-income families to use federal aid to send their children to private or parochial schools.

The proposal for a $300 million "Pell Grants for Kids" program was part of a modest platform of domestic initiatives that the president laid out in his last State of the Union address to Congress last night.

Reaction to the proposal was about what you would expect.

Assorted things

Five movies that were better than the books they were based on. I definitely agree with the choice of Bridget Jones's Diary. Controversial choices: Harry Potter and, in the comments, Lord of the Rings.

A vaccine against cocaine addiction.

Not your stereotypical middlemen: homeless folks help keep NYC's Strand Bookstore stocked with used books.

Apparently I'm not the only one who reads economist Steven Landsburg and also watches the teen soapy frivolity "Gossip Girl" (strictly for roommate camaraderie purposes, of course): Matt Zeitlin applies Landsburg's "more sex is safer sex" principle to the season finale. (Link via Phoebe via Rita.)

School buses with Internet access.

How a Nobel Prize-winning economist would put auction theory to use in reforming our presidential primary system.

The absurdity of college admissions

In her review of two books that offer advice on how to get into college, Naomi Schaeffer Riley highlights how, for some people, the college application process has degenerated into ridiculously absurd tactical maneuvering that must begin very early. The fact that applying to college has become a "process" is only the very tip of the iceberg:

Starting no later than middle school, a kid should have "dazzling" and "very ambitious" long-term goals. Ms. Wissner-Gross offers a list of possibilities: "I would like to conduct research for NASA"; "I would like to speak at an important political rally"; "I would like to become known as the nation's top math student"; "I would like to host a fund-raiser ball for cancer research." Students should then structure their time accordingly--with the emphasis on "structure."

Ms. Wissner-Gross wants students to adopt a four-summer plan "crammed with multiple enrichment activities" but all focused on that key long-term goal. Each summer--working in a local research lab, attending a math camp or trying to write the great American novel--should take a would-be college applicant one step closer to his dream. But aren't summers supposed to be, well, fun? Ms. Wissner-Gross has two bits of advice: "Contrary to pop psychology, down time need not be unstructured to be relaxing and to help a student decompress." And "children who insist on hanging out with already known friends during the summer often miss out on wonderful opportunities." Yes, buddies can be an obstacle if you care about getting into college.

Nerd power!

The Washington Post reviews a book by David Anderegg, who argues that our society's negative stereotype of nerds is detrimental to our success:

Indeed, nerds are just about the last group of people it's safe to mock in polite company, which infuriates Anderegg, a professor of psychology at Bennington College in Vermont and a practicing psychotherapist: "We act like it's all in good fun to communicate to our kids that people who are smart and do well in school and like science fiction and computers are also people who smell bad and look ugly and are so repulsive that they are not allowed to have girlfriends. And then we wonder why it's so hard to motivate kids to do well in school." In his breezy book, Anderegg deconstructs the stereotype, traces its history and makes the case that it undermines individual kids and the country as whole.

Anderegg traces the roots of the nerd stereotype to... Ralph Waldo Emerson and Washington Irving:

Emerson, in the seminal 1837 speech titled "The American Scholar," gave "voice in the loftiest academic diction to a repeated theme in American history: that Americans are, first and foremost, men of action, not men of reflection." Irving had already put imaginary flesh on those bones, in the person of Ichabod Crane, the awkward scholarly schoolteacher scared out of town by his romantic rival, the pretend pumpkin-head Brom Bones, "a new American type: the anti-intellectual hero." Anderegg very seriously advises that "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" should not be taught until college for the damage it could cause to young psyches.

Stressed by parents

Evidence from Germany suggests that a leading factor in teacher burnout is parents:

Although perfectionism is often linked with job stress, teachers with perfectionist tendencies in this survey weren’t more likely to have burnout. But teachers who felt pressure to be perfect or experienced criticism for being imperfect were more likely to have burnout. Notably, the highest pressure to be perfect didn’t come from students or colleagues but from parents.

In defense of Starbucks

Just because Starbucks is on every corner doesn't mean that they're destroying "mom-and-pop" independent coffee shops:

Strange as it sounds, the best way to boost sales at your independently owned coffeehouse may just be to have Starbucks move in next-door....In its predatory store placement strategy, Starbucks has been about as lethal a killer as a fluffy bunny rabbit.

That's from Taylor Clark, the author of Starbucked--reviewed here by P. J. O'Rourke.