Culture

[IrishSteelhead]

Tasteless is a weird way to spell hilarious. Still one of the funniest videos I've ever seen on youtube.

Enforcing anti-Nazi speech laws is one of the most cognitively dissonant feats Western countries are capable of.

BINGO

 

[wizards8507]

The Sexual Revolution was simply the logic of capitalism applied to human relationships.

Liberalism, not even once.

Applying capitalism to human relationships is akin to bunting for a first down in a basketball game. It's nonsensical. That doesn't mean bunting is an illegitimate strategy in its own domain.

 

[connor_in]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Not The Onion. <a href="https://t.co/dV3zd1ab8P">pic.twitter.com/dV3zd1ab8P</a></p>— neontaster &#55357;&#56991; (@neontaster) <a href="https://twitter.com/neontaster/status/976198911185571840?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">March 20, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[zelezo vlk]

American teenagers' quiet despair

Walther hitting the nail on the head, as per usual

Most statistics are meaningless. But once in a while one comes across a figure that cannot be summarily dismissed.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, between 2006 and 2016 there was a 70 percent increase in the number of white children aged 10 to 17 who committed suicide in this country. For black teenagers, the increase was even higher, at 77 percent. Only 48 American teenagers in 100,000 die each year; at present some 4,600 Americans between the ages of 10 and 24 take their own lives every year, which makes it the third leading cause of death.

The death of even a single child is something that's almost impossible to discuss without finding language inadequate. How can one even begin to come to terms with the fact that in the wealthiest, most powerful country in the world, a growing number of young people, of all races and classes, are taking their own lives? Why is this happening?

A recent report in USA Today offers us a glimpse at the lives of three such young people, all boys.

One evening while his mother was attending a Bible study, J.C. Ruf, a 16-year-old high-school baseball pitcher, took his grandmother out to dinner. When Karen Ruf returned home later that night, she found the house unusually quiet and called her son's name. Receiving no answer she went to the laundry room, where her son often watched movies or played video games with his friends, sometimes setting up an air mattress on the floor. When she opened the door she found his body. There was also a message on his unlocked cellphone: "Everything has a time. I decided not to wait for mine. They say we regret the things we do not do. I regret it a lot."

Tayler Schmid, a 17-year-old who enjoyed hiking in his native upstate New York, was always melancholy in autumn, according to his mother. Once Laurie Schmid suggested that he seek the help of a mental health professional, but he refused. After her son was found dead by his own hand in the family garage, she found herself asking "what if" endlessly. Tayler left behind a video for his family. Laurie has never seen it.

Joshua Anderson, also aged 17, played football in Vienna, Virginia. He took his own life the day before he was scheduled to attend a disciplinary hearing at his high school.

With the best possible intentions suicide awareness groups are blaming these and hundreds of other deaths on a lack of access to mental health care, the reluctance of teenagers, especially boys, to pursue counseling or other treatment, and the high price of antidepressant medications. It is certainly the case that no one who requires help should be afraid or ashamed to seek it, much less deterred from doing so because it is expensive. But mental health care has never been more widely available at any point in the history of civilization. The remaining obstacles to it cannot be solely or even largely responsible for the fact that young people are killing themselves in greater numbers than they were a decade and a half ago. There must be some less facile explanation.

Here things become impossibly murky. To offer, however tentatively, any general hypothesis risks rendering judgment on the conduct of dead children. But I do think that a few general points can be made about young people today and why their experiences differ from those of us born three or more decades ago.

The first is that we have not thought carefully enough about what it means to allow children to spend nearly their entire lives inhabiting a digital world in which there is no adult supervision or even interaction. Joe Parks of the National Council for Behavioral Health calls social media "a race to the bottom."

Children are not stupid. They are extraordinarily clever and sensitive to things that adults, busy with the ordinary tasks of life and immersed in the monotony of routine, have been trained to ignore. There is a quiet despair in this country, one that has manifested itself in the lives of children and adults alike, in the increase in drug taking (death by heroin overdose among teenagers increased by 20 percent last year). Its causes are wide ranging, but surely it has something to do with the subsumption of countless facets of what used to be ordinary life into technology and the disappearance of meaningful work; it is somehow, one thinks, bound up in the social and economic anxieties of generations quietly realizing that they will be less comfortable than their parents and grandparents, with the pressures of conformity and the feeling that every mistake, from a bad score on a quiz to an ill-advised tweet or Facebook post, is inexorable.

One thing that is certain is that the private sorrows faced by children, in 2018 or any other year, are responses to a world created by adults. We can never afford to forget this.

 

[Legacy]

A record 64 million Americans live in multigenerational households (Pew)

The number and share of Americans living in multigenerational family households have continued to rise, despite improvements in the U.S. economy since the Great Recession. In 2016, a record 64 million people, or 20% of the U.S. population, lived with multiple generations under one roof, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of census data.

Multigenerational family living is growing among nearly all U.S. racial groups, Hispanics, most age groups and both men and women. The share of the population living in this type of household – defined as including two or more adult generations, or including grandparents and grandchildren younger than 25 – declined from 21% in 1950 to a low of 12% in 1980. Since then, multigenerational living has rebounded. The number and share of Americans living in these households increased sharply during and immediately after the Great Recession of 2007-2009. Since then, growth has slowed a little but has remained much more rapid than the growth before the recession.

America's Homeless Population Rises for First Time in Years (U.S. News)
The annual national count of homeless people in the U.S. has risen for first time since 2010, and officials say the booming West Coast economy is a main factor.

LOS ANGELES (AP) — The nation's homeless population increased this year for the first time since 2010, driven by a surge in the number of people living on the streets in Los Angeles and other West Coast cities.

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development released its annual Point in Time count Wednesday, a report that showed nearly 554,000 homeless people across the country during local tallies conducted in January. That figure is up nearly 1 percent from 2016.

Of that total, 193,000 people had no access to nightly shelter and instead were staying in vehicles, tents, the streets and other places considered uninhabitable. The unsheltered figure is up by more than 9 percent compared to two years ago.

Increases are higher in several West Coast cities, where the explosion in homelessness has prompted at least 10 city and county governments to declare states of emergency since 2015.

City officials, homeless advocates and those living on the streets point to a main culprit: the region's booming economy.

Rents have soared beyond affordability for many lower-wage workers who until just a just few years ago could typically find a place to stay. Now, even a temporary setback can be enough to leave them out on the streets.

 

[Legacy]

This has been reported for years. A couple of articles:

Children cross Mexican border to receive a U.S. education (Wash Post, 2013)

AT THE U.S. BORDER, Columbus, N.M. — The mothers, holding the small hands of their children, can go only as far as the glass door, where Mexico ends and America begins. They lean down and send off their little ones with a kiss and a silent prayer.

The children file into the U.S. port of entry, chatting in Spanish as they pull U.S. birth certificates covered in protective plastic from Barbie and SpongeBob backpacks. Armed U.S. border officers wave them onto American soil and the yellow buses waiting to take them to school in Luna County, N.M.

This is the daily ritual of the American schoolchildren of Palomas, Mexico, a phenomenon that dates back six decades and has helped blur the international border here.

The tide of students washing over the border has drawn muted complaints from some local residents over the cost to U.S. taxpayers. But most accept the arrangement as a simple fact of life on the border, which feels like an artificial divide between communities laced together by bloodlines, marriage and commerce.

They live in Mexico and go to school in the US (CNN, 2017)

Columbus, New Mexico - Fifth grader JoAnna Rodriguez is on her way to the school bus when she realizes she's forgotten something important. It's not homework or lunch. She pulls out a cell phone and calls home while rummaging through her horse-themed backpack.

"Mom, I forgot my passport," she says.
JoAnna, 11, needs proof that she is a US citizen to get to school. The self-proclaimed future nurse with the long braid draped down one shoulder is one of nearly 800 American students who live in Palomas, Mexico, and cross the US border each morning to attend public school in nearby Columbus.
For more than four decades, New Mexico's state constitution has guaranteed American citizens a free education, no matter where they live. It gives families dealing with deportation an opportunity to live together in Mexico, without sacrificing their children's education in the US. And it's created scenes like this one at a border-crossing checkpoint.

New Mexico is a minority-majority state.
Race and Ethnicity in New Mexico (Statistical Atlas)

The lack of a comprehensive immigration policy that addresses farm workers from Mexico harvesting crops in the U.S. is affecting agriculture production. An example:

Immigration issues threaten agriculture's profitability (Southwest Farmer, 2017)

The majority of voters, however, statistically support a long-standing policy that allows for legal immigration that leads, eventually, to a path for U.S. citizenship through a planned program of naturalization. In addition, most Americans favor a well-managed immigrant worker program, especially voters who are either involved in or understand the need for such workers across the agricultural and food production industries.

In reality, however, most immigrant farm workers, especially those involved in field crop farming, are in the U.S. illegally, according to a recent CNN Money report. In that report, about 52 percent of field crop farm workers are undocumented, representing the largest share of all farm laborers in the U.S. responsible for producing the domestic food we consume. This is especially true when it comes to the production of specialty crops like fruits and vegetables.

 

[Irishize]

Sexual revolution begot promiscuity begot fatherlessness begot societal decay.

Yet the fatherless epidemic in America continues to be completely ignored in the publis discourse. Why?

 

[GowerND11]

Yet the fatherless epidemic in America continues to be completely ignored in the publis discourse. Why?

Just my observations here...
1, the belief in our culture and society right now amongst young people that marriage is an antiquated institution.
2, due to this, many children are being born out of wedlock
3, there is this movement amongst mothers that they don't need a man there to help raise these children. Granted, the fathers of these children are doing less than minimal to help raise their offspring, and these women are doing an admirable job as single mothers filling both roles. However, that doesn't mean that a void still exists. The problem here, is that these women have this weird "exclusive" club where they support each other and talk each other up about being super moms.
4, Stimulation. We live in a society today where I believe we all need this constant satisfaction and stimulation. Being a parent doesn't reward these peoples' needs for instant gratification.

 

[Irishize]

Just my observations here...
1, the belief in our culture and society right now amongst young people that marriage is an antiquated institution.
2, due to this, many children are being born out of wedlock
3, there is this movement amongst mothers that they don't need a man there to help raise these children. Granted, the fathers of these children are doing less than minimal to help raise their offspring, and these women are doing an admirable job as single mothers filling both roles. However, that doesn't mean that a void still exists. The problem here, is that these women have this weird "exclusive" club where they support each other and talk each other up about being super moms.
4, Stimulation. We live in a society today where I believe we all need this constant satisfaction and stimulation. Being a parent doesn't reward these peoples' needs for instant gratification.

This has been upwardly trending for decades.

It’s more than children being born out of wedlock. Just b/c a child’s parents never got married or got divorced, the father can still raise the child.

The “absent father wound” is seen in its extreme in the penal institutions around the country. As you correctly stated, it is admirable what single moms do but there is no debate that every child needs a father or father figure to raise & educate sons about true manhood & to educate daughters what to demand & expect from their male suitors when it comes to character & respect.

Instead, a lot of men raised by single moms tend to become overly bonded with mom as boys. This can lead to passivity when it’s time for these boys to interact with the opposite sex. No one can ever measure up to mom and that gets taken to its extreme with how some boys/men treat girls/women. Moms are essential, wonderful and the hardest working parent in America but they can’t truly teach a boy how true manhood is defined. Young boys crave male role models so when they have an absent father, the hope is that a coach or teacher can temporarily fill that void but they have their own children and can’t be a true full time father figure. This is what makes gangs so attractive to young impressionable boys with an absent father.

There is no end in site for the inreasing fatherless rate in America. And it looks like it will never be addressed.

 

[Legacy]

The complexity of single moms' challenges is doubled when they are challenged with the responsibility of caring for one or both aging parents. One income, arranging for a caregiver during the day, parental health issues with costs, sometimes living in separate cities. Then caregiving is further impacted by proposed policy changes in healthcare, immigration, even a robust economy leading to caregiver and nursing home shortages, increaing costs, parents living longer - all while raising children.. If a single Mom is a professional, that's some relief in managing costs. Most may be younger Moms without higher education. Who wouldn't want a spouse to share in those decisions, costs and duties?

If Immigrants Are Pushed Out, Who Will Care for the Elderly? (NY Times)

 

[Irish#1]

Yet the fatherless epidemic in America continues to be completely ignored in the publis discourse. Why?

It's due to the social mentality that males for decades have maintained and controlled everything (right to vote, equal pay for equal work, etc.). Given this, many believe they have no right or voice anymore.

 

[wizards8507]

Check out @CNBC’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/984449814631825408?s=09

 

[connor_in]

Check out @CNBC’s Tweet: https://twitter.com/CNBC/status/984449814631825408?s=09

tomagotchi 2.0?

 

[wizards8507]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Chick-fil-A’s arrival in New York City feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism. <a href="https://t.co/wnhMrMBN6z">https://t.co/wnhMrMBN6z</a></p>— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) <a href="https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/984842437641240583?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 13, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Tfw you take a bite of a chicken sandwich <a href="https://t.co/BRrK2S70Yu">pic.twitter.com/BRrK2S70Yu</a></p>— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) <a href="https://twitter.com/ComfortablySmug/status/984871418428055553?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 13, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">When they let you have two Polynesian sauces <br><br> <a href="https://t.co/BiqnPJ022f">pic.twitter.com/BiqnPJ022f</a></p>— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) <a href="https://twitter.com/ComfortablySmug/status/984872302478315520?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 13, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">When you see that Chick-Fil-A coming soon sign where Arby’s used to be... <a href="https://t.co/2WoKHpDPoM">pic.twitter.com/2WoKHpDPoM</a></p>— Arthur Kirkland (@FatSerpico) <a href="https://twitter.com/FatSerpico/status/984872765357477889?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 13, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

 

[Irish YJ]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Chick-fil-A’s arrival in New York City feels like an infiltration, in no small part because of its pervasive Christian traditionalism. <a href="https://t.co/wnhMrMBN6z">https://t.co/wnhMrMBN6z</a></p>— The New Yorker (@NewYorker) <a href="https://twitter.com/NewYorker/status/984842437641240583?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 13, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Tfw you take a bite of a chicken sandwich <a href="https://t.co/BRrK2S70Yu">pic.twitter.com/BRrK2S70Yu</a></p>— Comfortably Smug (@ComfortablySmug) <a href="https://twitter.com/ComfortablySmug/status/984871418428055553?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 13, 2018</a></blockquote>
<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>

spreading Christianity one chicken sandwich at a time.
holy cow journalism sucks.

NYers.... SMH. Would they prefer a Muslim owned franchise to serve them fast food?
They love a good anti Christian Hulu flick. Wonder how they would react to a similar take on a world under Sharia Law. That would be prejudice though, right....

 

[zelezo vlk]

That girl's leg skin is exposed. Prepare the fire and stake

 

[ACamp1900]

lol...

 

[IrishLax]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...976a82b05a2_story.html?utm_term=.9a59de12dc98

Thought this was interesting, mainly because it acknowledges in frank terms how things were stacked against certain groups of people when he started... but then gets mad when an equally qualified person gets the nod over him? As if that one "injustice" didn't pale in comparison to the countless before that which probably got him a position he (or others) maybe didn't deserve over an equally competent minority or woman?

It also implicitly raises the question of how can you actually enforce diversity initiatives without active discrimination in the other direction? Like when MCAT thresholds are lowered for black people to get into medical school, that effectively means they're taking the spot of a more qualified Asian person by default. Even if that Asian man with better GPA and MCAT scores doesn't explicitly read in his rejection letter that they let in a black woman with much worse marks it still happened.

 

[IrishLax]

<iframe src="https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FUpworthy%2Fvideos%2F347542105768909%2F&show_text=0&width=560" width="560" height="315" style="border:none;overflow:hidden" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowTransparency="true" allowFullScreen="true"></iframe>

Need more of this in our culture.

 

[zelezo vlk]

Troof. We need a whole lot more people living their lives for others and not just treating them as objects to toss away. Thanks for sharing, Lax

 

[Bishop2b5]

Good stuff. I like this type of voluntary, do something good for your fellow man attitude.

 

[ACamp1900]

agreed... good stuff... I like the pay for someone behind you in the drive thru thing too... my wifehas done it a couple times now... someone got a free meal.

 

[zelezo vlk]

agreed... good stuff... I like the pay for someone behind you in the drive thru thing too... my wifehas done it a couple times now... someone got a free meal.

How does that even work? Just put it all on a card or pay for $5 or something?

 

[greyhammer90]

How does that even work? Just put it all on a card or pay for $5 or something?

Usually the person behind you has ordered by the time you pull up.

 

[zelezo vlk]

Usually the person behind you has ordered by the time you pull up.

I am dumb.

 

[Whiskeyjack]

Brandon McGinley just published an article at Mere Orthodoxy titled "Stop Making Hospitality Complicated":

If you’ve ever watched any real estate programs on television, you’ve heard eager soon-to-be-homeowners lean toward the boom mic and say, “Oh, this space will be great for entertaining!”

Everyone wants to be seen as the type of posh and popular person who “entertains”—slicing cheeses and popping corks and carving tenderloins and so forth. But the truth is that there aren’t as many dinner parties as there are people talking about dinner parties: According to Robert Putnam, Americans have friends over for dinner only about once every other month these days.

Yes, the decline in friendship and the rise of busyness account for some of the retreat from hospitality, but much of the problem is embedded in how we think about sharing meals in our homes. You can see it right there in the language we use: “entertaining.” Having guests, we feel, means putting on a show; we set up the stage and put on costumes and are the stars of the production. It sounds intimidating and exhausting—because it is.

But here’s the thing: Real hospitality—the sharing of everyday life with friends, current and soon-to-be—is even more frightening. Putting up the façade of perfection may take an overwhelming amount of time and energy, but allowing others to see and experience the everyday imperfection of our lives is simply unacceptable.

Until, one day, it isn’t.

I remember the moment I realized I had my first real friends since college. One of the best parts of residential college life is proximity: Everyone is nearby, so gatherings can and do happen randomly and spontaneously. And so you get used to being in other people’s living spaces and to having people in your own.

One night a couple years ago, shortly after we had moved into our new house, I came home from an evening meeting expecting to find my wife and (then) two children quietly going about their business. Instead, as I opened the front door, I was greeted by a wall of sound—uninhibited laughter and disjointed greetings and children’s screams. My wife had invited several friends and their children over, just to hang out.

As I integrated myself into the crowd, I took note of how I felt: completely at ease. While I was surprised they were all in my house right now, there was nothing unnatural or unsettling or uncomfortable about any of these people making an unplanned visit to my home. Within seconds we were swapping the kind of good-natured barbs friends who are secure in their friendship can trade, and it felt like college again in the best of ways, and I knew something blessed was happening in my life.

Since that day, three other families with whom we are close have moved within walking distance and we share dinner—at our house or someone else’s—at least once a week or so. These get-togethers are rarely planned more than 24 hours in advance: Sometimes a family has had a difficult day and could use company and a break from cooking; sometimes we realize it’s an interesting liturgical feast day; sometimes we just want to hang out.

There are rarely cheeses to slice or tenderloins to carve, though there are often corks to pop. The floors aren’t mopped; the toys aren’t organized; the couches aren’t vacuumed. Means of ingress and egress are cleared and some basic pick-up takes place so people can walk around and sit down without fear of injury. Other than that, the house appears to others basically as it does to its occupants.

What’s on the menu, if not recipes straight from the New York Times cooking module? Tacos are a perennial favorite among kids and grown-ups alike. Aldi frozen pizzas are cheap and hearty. If we’re feeling gourmet, a mess of pasta, maybe with chicken and Italian herbs, will feed a crowd. For larger open-house-style gatherings, an informal potluck makes sure no one goes home hungry.

Hospitality is a virtue—one, to be clear, that we have by no means mastered. Like any virtue, it is essentially a habit. And the key to forming a habit is making that first step—that first act of the will—that breaks the inertia of apprehension and discomfort. Go ahead: Invite a friend or two over on a whim. Make the place comfortable, but not a pristine museum. Cook up something tasty and practical.

I’ve found that very little helps to develop and to cement a friendship quite as effectively as casual hospitality. And this only makes sense: Hospitality is, in a sense, the material analogue to the spiritual good of friendship. Authentic, life-giving friendship is a kind of love, and growing in love requires growing in emotional and spiritual intimacy—an intimacy different from that proper to romantic love, but a kind of intimacy nevertheless. And because intimacy requires the exposure of the self to the other, it requires both self-giving and vulnerability.

This is exactly what hospitality does in the material world: It habituates us to giving of our time and resources and it habituates us to exposing our inner sanctum, in all its messiness and imperfection, to our friends. In so doing, we prime ourselves for the more intense intimacy and vulnerability and self-giving of the spirit, where friendship’s supernatural character blooms.

Taking that first step very often encourages friends to respond in kind. Your implicit admission of imperfection gives them permission to admit the same, and so they invite you over not to be “entertained,” but simply to break bread together, to talk together, to be together. Over time, these habits of hospitality expand to others, becoming webs of habits of hospitality—in other words, a community.

While more formal gatherings have their place, to reduce hospitality to “entertaining” is in fact deeply anti-social. By design, it puts up barriers to intimacy, keeping friends (and even family) at arm’s length from one’s real life and real self. It expresses distrust that others could possibly love me as I am, thus smothering true friendship before it can even take root.

Habits of hospitality, on the other hand, are downright subversive in our culture of independence and calculation. They demonstrate that it is not only possible but fruitful and beautiful to share life in a substantive way outside the confines of the nuclear family. And, in so doing, they point to the reality of the common good, not just as a theoretical concept but as a practical one that can animate an authentic Christian community.

 

[Old Man Mike]

I have been lucky with my retirement plan from WMU and having very little that I've ever spent remotely serious cash upon (ex. I have no car), the plan grew nicely. Now I can give those unspent dollars to others.

I'm no millionaire, but you don't have to be to live joyfully and happy. I'd like to suggest something for anyone who finds themselves in a neighborhood which is not wealthy and could use a little help. My house hosted the small neighborhood group this last Sunday. We talked about "projects" for the year. There is our condemned lot community garden, and there are several lots with pretty bad looking fences and upkeep. The group gets $700 per year from our fine little city for improvements. It unfortunately goes almost nowhere (but God love the politicians for at least trying.) I just write checks to make up the shortfall, and we beautify the neighborhood two or three locations per year with community get-togethers and building or painting projects.

There are LOTS of nice people out there, who'd like to do something. Most have no money. Money stops even creative thinking about the way you'd like to dream. Until I offered to give back money from my past work, the neighborhood group was utterly stymied as to inspirations. Now it's a group of 12-15 neighbors who know and smile at each other and dream of a pretty street with clean yards and white picket fences.



....and the piece about the pizza guy was emotional for me. God Bless that fellow and the initial one who bought the first "forward" slice.

 

[zelezo vlk]

I have a group of guys from my parish over every Sunday afternoon. We're just 5 or 6 young single men so once I figured out everyone was just going to their respective apartments, having beer, and watching Netflix, I decided we should just do that together. It ain't hard. David brings mead or wine, Warren brings beer, and I cook for us if necessary.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G900A using Tapatalk

 

[connor_in]

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">I’m a lesbian. My fiancée is a trans woman. We’re trying to have a baby the old-fashioned way. It’s complicated, writes <a href="https://twitter.com/LookitsJoanne?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">@lookitsjoanne</a>. <a href="https://t.co/mofnIIfZly">https://t.co/mofnIIfZly</a></p>— NYT Opinion (@nytopinion) <a href="https://twitter.com/nytopinion/status/988891126605275137?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 24, 2018</a></blockquote>
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When you work out the math, is this really all that complicated?

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">You are a biological woman. Your fiancee is a biological man. You're trying to have a baby the same way humans have had babies for all of time. <a href="https://t.co/Rq1m2vIRK8">https://t.co/Rq1m2vIRK8</a></p>— Ben Shapiro (@benshapiro) <a href="https://twitter.com/benshapiro/status/988894660444667904?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 24, 2018</a></blockquote>
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[zelezo vlk]

I was led to this article by a tweet from Pater Edmund.

<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">The culprits here are ballpoint pens: <a href="https://t.co/NMhUqiv6yp">https://t.co/NMhUqiv6yp</a> In Germany and Austria, schoolchildren are required to use fountain pens.</p>— Pater Edmund (@sancrucensis) <a href="https://twitter.com/sancrucensis/status/990909822244671489?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw">April 30, 2018</a></blockquote>
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An interesting article, as I've been fascinated by fountain pens for a decade or so.

"How the Ballpoint Pen Killed Cursive".

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/08/ballpoint-pens-object-lesson-history-handwriting/402205/

Recently, Bic launched a campaign to “save handwriting.” Named “Fight for Your Write,” it includes a pledge to “encourage the act of handwriting” in the pledge-taker’s home and community, and emphasizes putting more of the company’s ballpoints into classrooms.

As a teacher, I couldn’t help but wonder how anyone could think there’s a shortage. I find ballpoint pens all over the place: on classroom floors, behind desks. Dozens of castaways collect in cups on every teacher’s desk. They’re so ubiquitous that the word “ballpoint” is rarely used; they’re just “pens.” But despite its popularity, the ballpoint pen is relatively new in the history of handwriting, and its influence on popular handwriting is more complicated than the Bic campaign would imply.

The creation story of the ballpoint pen tends to highlight a few key individuals, most notably the Hungarian journalist László Bíró, who is credited with inventing it. But as with most stories of individual genius, this take obscures a much longer history of iterative engineering and marketing successes. In fact, Bíró wasn’t the first to develop the idea: The ballpoint pen was originally patented in 1888 by an American leather tanner named John Loud, but his idea never went any further. Over the next few decades, dozens of other patents were issued for pens that used a ballpoint tip of some kind, but none of them made it to market.


These early pens failed not in their mechanical design, but in their choice of ink. The ink used in a fountain pen, the ballpoint’s predecessor, is thinner to facilitate better flow through the nib—but put that thinner ink inside a ballpoint pen, and you’ll end up with a leaky mess. Ink is where László Bíró, working with his chemist brother György, made the crucial changes: They experimented with thicker, quick-drying inks, starting with the ink used in newsprint presses. Eventually, they refined both the ink and the ball-tip design to create a pen that didn’t leak badly. (This was an era in which a pen could be a huge hit because it only leaked ink sometimes.)

The Bírós lived in a troubled time, however. The Hungarian author Gyoergy Moldova writes in his book Ballpoint about László’s flight from Europe to Argentina to avoid Nazi persecution. While his business deals in Europe were in disarray, he patented the design in Argentina in 1943 and began production. His big break came later that year, when the British Air Force, in search of a pen that would work at high altitudes, purchased 30,000 of them. Soon, patents were filed and sold to various companies in Europe and North America, and the ballpoint pen began to spread across the world.

The ballpoint’s universal success has changed how most people experience ink.
Businessmen made significant fortunes by purchasing the rights to manufacture the ballpoint pen in their country, but one is especially noteworthy: Marcel Bich, the man who bought the patent rights in France. Bich didn’t just profit from the ballpoint; he won the race to make it cheap. When it first hit the market in 1946, a ballpoint pen sold for around $10, roughly equivalent to $100 today. Competition brought that price steadily down, but Bich’s design drove it into the ground. When the Bic Cristal hit American markets in 1959, the price was down to 19 cents a pen. Today the Cristal sells for about the same amount, despite inflation.


The ballpoint’s universal success has changed how most people experience ink. Its thicker ink was less likely to leak than that of its predecessors. For most purposes, this was a win—no more ink-stained shirts, no need for those stereotypically geeky pocket protectors. However, thicker ink also changes the physical experience of writing, not necessarily all for the better.

I wouldn’t have noticed the difference if it weren’t for my affection for unusual pens, which brought me to my first good fountain pen. A lifetime writing with the ballpoint and minor variations on the concept (gel pens, rollerballs) left me unprepared for how completely different a fountain pen would feel. Its thin ink immediately leaves a mark on paper with even the slightest, pressure-free touch to the surface. My writing suddenly grew extra lines, appearing between what used to be separate pen strokes. My hand, trained by the ballpoint, expected that lessening the pressure from the pen was enough to stop writing, but I found I had to lift it clear off the paper entirely. Once I started to adjust to this change, however, it felt like a godsend; a less-firm press on the page also meant less strain on my hand.

My fountain pen is a modern one, and probably not a great representation of the typical pens of the 1940s—but it still has some of the troubles that plagued the fountain pens and quills of old. I have to be careful where I rest my hand on the paper, or risk smudging my last still-wet line into an illegible blur. And since the thin ink flows more quickly, I have to refill the pen frequently. The ballpoint solved these problems, giving writers a long-lasting pen and a smudge-free paper for the low cost of some extra hand pressure.


As a teacher whose kids are usually working with numbers and computers, handwriting isn’t as immediate a concern to me as it is to many of my colleagues. But every so often I come across another story about the decline of handwriting. Inevitably, these articles focus on how writing has been supplanted by newer, digital forms of communication—typing, texting, Facebook, Snapchat. They discuss the loss of class time for handwriting practice that is instead devoted to typing lessons. Last year, a New York Times article—one that’s since been highlighted by the Bic’s “Fight for your Write” campaign—brought up an fMRI study suggesting that writing by hand may be better for kids’ learning than using a computer.

I can’t recall the last time I saw students passing actual paper notes in class, but I clearly remember students checking their phones (recently and often). In his history of handwriting, The Missing Ink, the author Philip Hensher recalls the moment he realized that he had no idea what his good friend’s handwriting looked like. “It never struck me as strange before… We could have gone on like this forever, hardly noticing that we had no need of handwriting anymore.”

No need of handwriting? Surely there must be some reason I keep finding pens everywhere.

Of course, the meaning of “handwriting” can vary. Handwriting romantics aren’t usually referring to any crude letterform created from pen and ink. They’re picturing the fluid, joined-up letters of the Palmer method, which dominated first- and second-grade pedagogy for much of the 20th century. (Or perhaps they’re longing for a past they never actually experienced, envisioning the sharply angled Spencerian script of the 1800s.) Despite the proliferation of handwriting eulogies, it seems that no one is really arguing against the fact that everyone still writes—we just tend to use unjoined print rather than a fluid Palmerian style, and we use it less often.

Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write.
I have mixed feelings about this state of affairs. It pained me when I came across a student who was unable to read script handwriting at all. But my own writing morphed from Palmerian script into mostly print shortly after starting college. Like most gradual changes of habit, I can’t recall exactly why this happened, although I remember the change occurred at a time when I regularly had to copy down reams of notes for mathematics and engineering lectures.


In her book Teach Yourself Better Handwriting, the handwriting expert and type designer Rosemary Sassoon notes that “most of us need a flexible way of writing—fast, almost a scribble for ourselves to read, and progressively slower and more legible for other purposes.” Comparing unjoined print to joined writing, she points out that “separate letters can seldom be as fast as joined ones.” So if joined handwriting is supposed to be faster, why would I switch away from it at a time when I most needed to write quickly? Given the amount of time I spend on computers, it would be easy for an opinionated observer to count my handwriting as another victim of computer technology. But I knew script, I used it throughout high school, and I shifted away from it during the time when I was writing most.

My experience with fountain pens suggests a new answer. Perhaps it’s not digital technology that hindered my handwriting, but the technology that I was holding as I put pen to paper. Fountain pens want to connect letters. Ballpoint pens need to be convinced to write, need to be pushed into the paper rather than merely touch it. The No.2 pencils I used for math notes weren’t much of a break either, requiring pressure similar to that of a ballpoint pen.

Moreover, digital technology didn’t really take off until the fountain pen had already begin its decline, and the ballpoint its rise. The ballpoint became popular at roughly the same time as mainframe computers. Articles about the decline of handwriting date back to at least the 1960s—long after the typewriter, but a full decade before the rise of the home computer.


Sassoon’s analysis of how we’re taught to hold pens makes a much stronger case for the role of the ballpoint in the decline of cursive. She explains that the type of pen grip taught in contemporary grade school is the same grip that’s been used for generations, long before everyone wrote with ballpoints. However, writing with ballpoints and other modern pens requires that they be placed at a greater, more upright angle to the paper—a position that’s generally uncomfortable with a traditional pen hold. Even before computer keyboards turned so many people into carpal-tunnel sufferers, the ballpoint pen was already straining hands and wrists. Here’s Sassoon:

We must find ways of holding modern pens that will enable us to write without pain. …We also need to encourage efficient letters suited to modern pens. Unless we begin to do something sensible about both letters and penholds we will contribute more to the demise of handwriting than the coming of the computer has done.

I wonder how many other mundane skills, shaped to accommodate outmoded objects, persist beyond their utility. It’s not news to anyone that students used to write with fountain pens, but knowing this isn’t the same as the tactile experience of writing with one. Without that experience, it’s easy to continue past practice without stopping to notice that the action no longer fits the tool. Perhaps “saving handwriting” is less a matter of invoking blind nostalgia and more a process of examining the historical use of ordinary technologies as a way to understand contemporary ones. Otherwise we may not realize which habits are worth passing on, and which are vestiges of circumstances long since past.