It can happen in the best of families that there is a bad egg. This seems to be the case with the American high school football star who became one of Mexico’s most feared and savage drug dealers, La Barbie.
Edgar Valdez Villarreal grew up in a middle-class suburb of Laredo where his father owned a shop and his family went to church. “Most of his siblings went to college and started businesses, becoming the sort of law-abiding people who are the mortar of society,” neighbours and friends told the New York Times. Other kids called him Barbie because of his square-jawed Ken look.
None of the clichéd roots of crime could be seen in his youth: no broken home, no abusive father, no poverty.
Younger working class people are drifting further away from middle class America and traditional values because they cannot find work in the changing job market. The social and political implications may be drastic.
That’s the gist of an article in the Wall Street Journal last week by sociologists Andrew J. Cherlin and W Bradford Wilcox. I am a week behind with this but the trends are not going to disappear any time soon.
Wilcox and others have drawn attention to the dilemmas of the working class before, noting for example how the “mancession” could increase the “divorce divide” between middle America and those further down the socio-economic scale.
(BTW, we are using “working class” here as shorthand. Cherlin and Wilcox say that that the real class divisions in society today are based on education.)
Remember the old riddle: Brothers and sisters have I none... But that man's father is my father's son. Who is that man? -- Well, the answer to that is easy compared with learning the names for one’s extended family in some languages.
And what does it all signify? asks The Economist’s language blogger, “Johnson”, after comparing English with Spanish and Russian -- and, in passing, Hebrew and Arabic.
Going, as usual, on the languages I know something of, in English every child of any of your parents' siblings is your cousin. But in European languages there are usually two ways to say cousin—male and female. In Hebrew there are four, since you also have to specify whether it's your aunt's or uncle's child. In Arabic, eight, because you also have to specify whether it's on your father's or mother's side. Russian has a host of terms, some of…
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This post may provide a sort of commentary on the previous one about 20-somethings. German researchers have found that, given a choice, older people prefer to read bad news rather than good news about young adults.
In fact, reading about youths getting drunk and brawling in the streets is likely to give a small boost to their elders’ self esteem. As for young people, they just prefer not to read about the oldies at all.
The point of the study was to test the theory that people use the media to enhance their social identity, said lead author Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick of Ohio State University.
An earlier study using the same data had confirmed that people prefer media messages that portray people like themselves, but it also produced the unexpected result that older people (aged 50 to 65) seemed equally interested in stories about younger people.
More young people are reaching the end of their twenties without settling into careers and marriage. Is this because of passing social mores and economic conditions, or because we now have a new stage of human development called “emerging adulthood”?
I commented on this issue not so long ago when a report by the MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Transitions to Adulthood examined the financial implications for family and society.
Now, a long article (like, 10 pages) by Robin Marantz Henig in the New York Times looks into the psychological aspects of the trend, focusing on the work of Jeffrey Jensen Arnett, a psychology professor at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Arnett is leading the movement to view the 20s as a distinct life stage, “analogous to what happened a century ago, when social and economic changes helped create adolescence”.
A high profile British homosexual activist wants the age of sexual consent lowered to 14, on the basis that currently underage sex “is mostly consenting, safe and fun”.
Peter Tatchell plugged for this change in America in one of a series of articles on “dangerous ideas” on the website Big Think recently.
Dangerous, certainly, but also just a little bit surprising in view of this year of paedophilia scandals and his campaign against Pope Benedict’s visit to the UK -- one of the reasons being the Pope’s alleged “cover up” of clerical sexual abuse of children?
By a tortured logic Tatchell claims that a lower age of consent is “the best way” to protect young people from abuse. His arguments boil down to three:
Contrary to what might have been expected during an economic recession, child abuse declined in the United States in 2008 compared to 2007, official data shows.
No-one is sure why, but the small declines (sexual abuse 6 per cent, physical abuse 3 per cent and neglect 2 per cent) continue a trend that goes back more than 15 years -- in the areas of sexual and other physical abuse, both of which have more than halved since 1992.
The figures are tracked by the Crimes against Children Research Center at the University of New Hampshire. Director, sociology professor David Finkelhor, advises caution in reaching conclusions about the recent decline as the effects of financial strain may not have shown themselves yet. However, he suggests reasons for the long-term trend:
France, that bastion -- if not Bastille -- of egalité, has its own debate on single-sex versus co-ed schooling, to judge by a recent opinion piece in Le Monde.
The writer notes that the subject is currently much dicussed in France. He points out that number of British schools have reverted to education organised on single-sex lines, and that a recent report in a French journal (l’Observatoire Français des Conjonctures Économiques) concluded that mixed-gender classes were having no discernable effect on recognition of male-female equality.
On the contrary, Marie Duru-Bellat, a researcher at Sciences Po, has called co-ed classrooms a daily “theatre for reproducing, or even erecting, stereotypical images of the social roles of males and females,” where the “ingrained learning, pre-established by the parents’ well before and during the years of schooling, finds itself reinforced in the co-education school.”
It is always gratifying when research coincides with common sense and everyday experience, as in the case of a new study showing that a relationship in which sexual intimacy is delayed is more likely to endure.
Researchers questioned 642 adults and 56 per cent of them said they had “waited until they got serious before they had sex” (quoting the Toronto Sun here). Most of them also reported that they had “a high quality relationship”.
The number was higher than for the 27% of people who had sex while dating casually and the 17% who were intimate while in a non-romantic relationship.
Professor Anthony Paik of the University of Iowa who reported the study suggested that the courtship process acts as a screening mechanism.
The contraceptive pill could make women better gossips but no better at reading maps, if research carried out in Austria is anything to go by.
The first ever study of the effect of the pill on women’s brains found that it increased areas linked with memory and conversation skills -- parts of the brain already better developed in women than in men, the Daily Mail reports. However, the contraceptive appeared to have little effect on areas more dominant in men, including those associated with spatial skills such as map reading.
Dr Belinda Pletzer, of Salzburg University, said the sex hormones in the Pill were clearly having a 'tremendous effect' on the female brain. She added: 'Larger volumes of a brain area could lead to an improvement of the functions this area is responsible for.
Bombs across the border
10 Feb 2012
The US makes a strong case that its military interventions in Pakistan are just and legal. Whether they’re good is…
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It can happen in the best of families that there is a bad egg. This seems to be the case with the American high school football star who became one of Mexico’s most feared and savage drug dealers, La Barbie. 
Younger working class people are drifting further away from middle class America and traditional values because they cannot find work in the changing job market. The social and political implications may be drastic. 
Remember the old riddle: Brothers and sisters have I none... But that man's father is my father's son. Who is that man? -- Well, the answer to that is easy compared with learning the names for one’s extended family in some languages. 
This post may provide a sort of commentary on the previous one about 20-somethings. German researchers have found that, given a choice, older people prefer to read bad news rather than good news about young adults. 
More young people are reaching the end of their twenties without settling into careers and marriage. Is this because of passing social mores and economic conditions, or because we now have a new stage of human development called “emerging adulthood”? 
A high profile British homosexual activist wants the age of sexual consent lowered to 14, on the basis that currently underage sex “is mostly consenting, safe and fun”. 
Contrary to what might have been expected during an economic recession, child abuse declined in the United States in 2008 compared to 2007, official data shows. 
France, that bastion -- if not Bastille -- of egalité, has its own debate on single-sex versus co-ed schooling, to judge by a recent opinion piece in Le Monde. 
It is always gratifying when research coincides with common sense and everyday experience, as in the case of a new study showing that a relationship in which sexual intimacy is delayed is more likely to endure. 
The contraceptive pill could make women better gossips but no better at reading maps, if research carried out in Austria is anything to go by.