Friday Faves: Articles of the Week

I’m thinking Friday Faves might be a regular installment, so if there is any topic you think might be fun to include, suggest it as a possible Friday Fave post. It doesn’t have to be reading or education related. It can include any number of things that go on in the life between the reading.

Here are a few of the posts I’ve read over the past week that have stuck with me in one way or another. Most are about reading and educaton issues, but not all, and that’s a requirement for the list. For this week, they’re among my faves.

• Thinkspot and the Rise of Long-Tail Social Media: When Cal Newport first wrote about long-tail social media, I had to look it up. It was something I’d never heard before, although I realize that I have been a part of things like it before. The brain-child of Jordan Peterson, Thinkspot is offering a different way. It sounds a lot better as an option for discussing common interests than Twitter. I really dislike Twitter. Anything that can be used to destroy someone’s life because of what they believe needs to be usurped and tossed for a better alternative. Let’s hope long-tail social media catches on if we’re going to have social media at all.
• The Mis-Education at Garvey’s Ghost: As usual, Sondjata cuts through the bull surrounding the achievement gap and asks the hard questions. I’m not always 100% in agreement with him about things, but I always appreciate his intellectual honesty, and I do agree with him on a great many issues.
• Is Classical Education Just a Fad? Joshua Gibbs asks what we are to make of the recent surge in schools dedicated to the classical education model. I for one don’t think it’s a fad because it stands in stark contrast to current educational dogma and norms, but we’ll see. Gibbs offers his take in this piece.
• This is Why Your Library Doesn’t Own the E-book You Want: Krysta at Pages Unbound discussses the tug of war between local libraries and major publishing companies which are steadily increasing the prices of electronic book offerings. It’s an interesting conversation; at least to those of us who are invested in the library system.
• Impure Motives of Purity Culture Critics: Rod Dreher examines the harshness with which many Christians condemn so-called purity culture, and reaches a conclusion that I agree with. There are legitimate issues to be had with formulaic approaches to the faith which ignore the fact that a good many people in the current culture have no framework in which to put chastity to begin with. But a lot of Christians condemn all attempts to encourage modesty and chastity on order to excuse their own behavior.

Those are a few of the interesting links I’ve read over the past week. I’ll be moving all of these posts over to the links worth a look page where there are other interesting linked articles.

Have a great weekend!

Rabbit Trail: Talkin’ bout My Generation.

In general, I am not a big fan of the New York Times. As news outlets go, they are subpar despite their legacy. Nevertheless, they caught and held my attention with this recent style piece on my generation, GenX.  In This Gen X Mess, they described us this way:

Like many things considered “cool,” Gen X is pretty exclusive. You had to be born between 1965 and 1980 to get in to this gloomy, goofy club of forgotten middle children, and only about 65 million of us were. (Both boomers, at 75 million, and millennials, at 83 million, far outnumber us.)

The idea behind that “X” was about coming between. Gen X supposedly didn’t know what they were, or what they wanted. All they knew, they were told, was what they didn’t want — marriage, money, success — and then they shrugged and popped a Prozac.

As “Reality Bites” celebrates its 25th anniversary; as groups like Bikini Kill, Wu-Tang Clan and Hootie & the Blowfish reunite for tours; as generational idols like Ani DiFranco and Liz Phair publish memoirs; and as the first real Gen X candidates make a run for president, Gen X is in the air.

And you know what else Gen X is? Getting older. Its oldest members are 54; its youngest are preparing for 40. As we try to make sense of that fact, here’s a look at the stuff we loved and hated, as well as a re-evaluation of things like “The Rules,” grunge, CK One and 1994; an appreciation of John Singleton; a quiz to figure out which generation you actually are; and a visit with Evan Dando, plus some dynamite for the myths that have always dogged Gen X. So plug in your headphones, click on that Walkman and let’s travel through this time machine together.

I was born almost smack dab in the middle of the Gen X years, and am at exactly the halfway mark between the oldest GenXers (54) and the youngest (40). I remember many of the things they included in their retrospective. The youth culture which took place from the mid-80s until 1993, I remember quite well: Sony Walkman, the Challenger explosion, United Colors of Benetton, and the off-beat, quirky style of Lisa Bonet smudging the then squeaky clean image of Bill Cosby’s hit family sitcom.

picture credit

 

The items outlined from 1993 onward, I can hardly remember. While most of my contemporaries were plugged into popular youth culture in 1994, I was marrying and giving birth to our first child. The only thing I remember about the 1990s with any clarity is the music. There was always the music, but we had twins in 1995, so I spent the next three years in something of a sleep deprived fog. Somehow though, the music was always playing.

Our generation was also the first to be treated to parental advisory warning stickers on our music labels, courtesy of Tipper Gore. For some reason, I find that uproariously funny. I don’t recall the brouhaha, but I do remember the appearance of the stickers. My generation spent an obscene amount of money CDs that almost always got scratched and damaged, rendering them unusable. Then we spent even more money on those solutions and contraptions which claimed to repair scratched CDs; with mixed success.

The entire section discussing 1994 struck me as a bunch of things I have vaguely heard -more likely read about- in passing, but have no tangible memories of. I was, quite simply, not doing the typical 22-year-old thing. I do remember the Motorola pagers because my young husband -two years younger than I- had to carry one for work. Somehow, he remembers a lot more of the things that happened back then than I do. He must have been getting more sleep.

 

Alicia Silverstone Clueless (picture credit)

Tiny backpacks were apparently a trend, courtesy of Alicia Silverstone in the 1995 film movie Clueless. I missed that one, but like all fashion trends, I get to witness it a second time around as our youngest daughters each carry a tiny backpack as a purse. I also didn’t see Clueless the year it debuted (busy chasing toddlers), but it turns out that I really enjoyed the very modern spin on Jane Austen’s Emma.

 

The NYT piece concludes, and I agree, that my generation was a mess:

Generation X, who came of age eating microwaved burritos and watching “Gomer Pyle” reruns while Mom and Dad were at the office, were depressed.

Enter Eli Lilly’s magical green-and-white pill, which was introduced in 1986, but became almost as defining to the gloomy 1990s as that other pill — “the pill” — was to the sexually liberated 1960s. Elizabeth Wurtzel and loads of other 20-somethings became citizens of Prozac Nation. Eventually, people started to murmur about the drug’s potentially dark complications, including sexual dysfunction and suicide. At the time, though, the biggest crisis this chemical-smiley-face equivalent posed was one of generational identity: If we children of the 1990s could no longer brand ourselves as sullen, nihilistic Kurt Cobain clones, what in the heck were we?

I was not depressed, another fortunate side effect of being too overrun with life stuff to really think about who I was and what I didn’t accomplish, but I do recall the number of women in the early 2000s who had few qualms about openly admitting they were on anti-depressants.

The most interesting part of the entire retrospective was the list of books that were published during those years (1984-1995), supposedly shaping a generation.

I haven’t read a single one.

 

 

El’s rabbit trails: On rooms without walls

Throughout this month, I have been reading, and only reading, books related to Florida history. Nothing else. While I find the subject endlessly fascinating and educational, I don’t expect that my readership is interested in endless reviews of books recounting various aspects of the native peoples, discovery and trajectory of all things Florida. There are exceptions of course, such as the story of Joseph Clark, which is well worth sharing regardless of geography.

Rather than allow this little spot to languish for another week or more, by which time I hope to have completed a non-Florida education book, I thought I’d share some thoughts on a recent article from the links worth a look page.

Citylab.com makes the case for rooms. Specifically, they delve into the trend of open floor plans which tend to be designed with the entry, kitchen and living room connected without walls. Because our home has an open floor plan  (and vaulted ceilings which I fell for before I considered having to paint them), this article piqued my curiosity.

If someone asked me five years ago whether or not I thought the open floor plan would still be popular, I would have said no. Domestic architecture seemed to be taking a turn toward the rustic. Today, “Farmhouse” and “Craftsman” modern designs, hearkening back to the American vernacular tradition (complete with shiplap walls), are a tour-de-force.

But I would have been wrong. Although these houses bring all the exterior trappings of beloved vernacular houses of the past, they do not extend that to the interior plans. In fact, the open concepts from the oversized houses of the pre-recession era have only gotten more open.

Much has been written about the open floor plan: how it came to be, why it is bad (or good), whether it should or shouldn’t be applied to existing housing. The open floor plan as we currently understand it—an entry-kitchen-dining-living combination that avoids any kind of structural separation between uses—is only a few decades old. Prior to the last 25 years, an “open floor plan” meant a living configuration without doors; now the term has come to mean a living configuration without walls. I will refer to the latter from now on as an “open concept,” in order to differentiate it from a traditional open floor plan.

There are times when I really enjoy our open floor plan. We entertain four to five times a year (birthday parties, holidays, and the occasional small dinner party). On those occasions, when every part of the house is tidy and spotless, and engaging with several guests and family members in different places from the central hub of the kitchen is easier, I thoroughly enjoy the open concept. It’s utilitarian for the purposes of entertaining.

There are other times, however, when having walls separating one or more of those rooms from another would be convenient. Our home is lived in all day, every day. There are meals prepared in the kitchen three times a day and kids educated at the kitchen table. Books, paper, pencils, experiments, and the paraphernalia of life dots the landscape of our home on a regular basis. No amount of anal obsession with keeping things clean is going to lead me to the nirvana of a perpetually company ready house. There are days when a mess kitchen might come in handy:

In a recent essay in The Atlantic, Ian Bogost described a new luxury concept called the “mess kitchen”—a second kitchen out of sight from the main kitchen and the rest of the open plan. He cited it to demonstrate why the open floor plan and its rhetoric around “entertaining” have reached new levels of absurdity. However, to me, the mess kitchen offers hope for a transitional period where open spaces may become closed again.

On normal days if someone drops by, the open concept feels inconvenient. It also means that I have to embrace the reality that very few people are judging my home as harshly as I am. In fact quite recently someone came over for an appointment I’d forgotten about and while I was having an internal crisis about the state of my house, they said, “You guys have a great house. Your family room looks like a great place to hang out and watch a movie.” Failing homemaker fire extinguished.

Our house is our home, for better or worse, and I do love it. If we ever decide to leave it, perhaps I can revisit the decision to choose an open floor plan. I do wonder however, if this trend will hold or if sometime in the near future, walls will make a comeback. After all, our house was built 25 years ago.

 

Rabbit Trail: July’s links worth a look.

There is a page on this blog dedicated to links I’ve found here and there which I think are worth sharing, but are not related to books, reading, and education. They are categorized by month and I update them as I run across them, adding to the list as I go.

As a general rule, I have no desire to use this blog as a discussion point for things that people tend to get overly animated about, but since I made the links a part of the blog, I decided that at the end of every month I’d open a reminder thread so that my readers know the links are there.

So consider this El’s PSA that there are a lot of interesting, informative, and educational items on the Links Worth a Look page.