also omg forgot to share that one of the Baylor influencer twins (currently finishing up their senior year) got engaged yesterday
reminds me of the Christian university where many of my friends went where one of the women's dorms had sweatshirts depicting the three thing residents should do before graduating and one of them was get an engagement ring?????
if I'm remembering correctly, the other two things were....accidentally drop your tray in the dining hall and have a pinecone fall on your head?
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This nut allergy / kid coddling essay is so bizarre; do we not recall what became of the last over-coddled generation (answer: after being shamed for moving back into our parents' basements if those basements existed in the first place, we turned into work robots)
Also there's a great section in Barbara Ehrenreich's FEAR OF FALLING where she quotes a bunch of different conservative writers bemoaning the state of coddled and lazy boomers (in their 20s) in the 1970s
Midge Decter's LIBERAL PARENTS, RADICAL CHILDREN (1975): the boomer who "languishes now in a hospital where the therapists feel that in another few months he might attempt a few tasks & even...hold down a job"
I am enduringly fascinated by the US vaccine rollout map because it resists any attempt at straightforward narrative/explanation
You can make some immediate extrapolations here looking at some of these clusters but then they fall apart
Montana, however, is a pretty straightforward narrative: tribal nations getting it done (Glacier County has fully vaccinated 99+% of the population 65 and older)
Childcare is incredibly expensive for parents — and yet the people doing the work are paid very little, w/15-25% below the poverty line nationwide. No one's getting rich.
It's a classic market failure — and has been for decades:
You know what we've historically done with other services, like K-12 education, road construction, sewage treatment, public park maintenance, that would also be massive market failures? We decide to fund them publicly!
This would've happened YEARS ago if not for regressive baggage about affordable care "incentivizing" women to work out of the home — and also the enduring expectation that women, and women of color in particular, should essentially do this work for free
I started out reporting this piece by focusing on the high cost of childcare & how to lessen the burden; turns out there's one weird fix, but I was thinking about the entire problem the wrong way
What if we think of childcare not as a personal responsibility, something to endure and forget about when you get through it, but a public good, deserving of public funding — and, like other public school jobs, treat it as a "good job" & pathway to the middle class?
The percentage of early childhood educators living below the poverty line is *astonishing.* So is the pay gap between ECE workers w/degrees and K-8 teachers. The turnover rate is so expensive — plus you're driving so many people who love the work out of the profession
Wrote about how the future of remote, hybrid work is.....working with friends, working in co-working spaces, working in coffee shops, working, periodically, in the office, aka, the opposite of lonely
All of these arguments about "how will we cultivate friendship or fight loneliness if we don't have the office" are built on the very broken pre-pandemic supposition of the office as the center of our lives
And we should be very wary of conflating the desire to get out of our houses and be in the same space as other people with the desire to be back in the office: