I was up until 2 last night feverishly catching upon e-mails and getting my fill of the Internet before we go off the grid for a week. My brain has left the building. We’re leaving in a few hours and there’s still much to do, so I’m signing off for the week.
Open thread to tell me about what I should read when I get back. I do hate to miss out on gossip.
Apt. 11d 
Laura, have a nice vacation.
Everybody else: Now that the moderator is gone, does anybody want to learn my secrets to real estate investing?
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Real estate, schmeal estate. I want to talk about John Edwards!
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Anybody got a multi-level marketing scheme that they’d like to let us all in on?
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My real estate scheme isn’t really multi-level. It’s pretty much me at one level and everybody else at another.
As for John Edwards, I just don’t get it. If he’s not the father, why admit the affair since there is no proof? And why visit a woman who just had a baby with another man? If he is the father, why not just say so? I don’t think it is really any worse than admitting to the affair. And, if you do want to deny paternity, why not find a fall guy who doesn’t have the same name as the former mayor of Atlanta? That one had me confused for days.
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Ace of Spades (ace.mu.nu) is all over the Edwards story. (Not that you want to give that URL to your mom.)
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Former Edwards employee Amanda Marcotte says:
“I’ve been skeptical about the Edwards story from the beginning, not because I think that any random politician is better than that. To be a successful politician, you have to have the cocky optimism and self-confidence that leads you to think that you can have affairs and get away with it. And probably the flattery-drawn ego that drives you to want that validation. But I was skeptical because the details being touted—the “love child”, the hidden names, the wife with cancer, etc.—were too tawdry for real life, like a soap opera plot. Turns out that I was wrong, though Edwards denies that the baby is his.
“My official stance is that unless it’s a matter of hypocrisy, it’s none of your damn business. So, if someone has a history of dogging gay people, prostitutes, people who have sex outside of marriage, etc., their business is now public property because they treat your business like it’s public property. Edwards, as far as I know, has never been a “sanctity of marriage” wanker, and so this is officially None Of Our Business, and anyone who dogged him on this story should be fired on the principle that they don’t know journalism from rooting around in the trash. Hypocrisy is a story; human weakness is not.
“I’m not going to get on a high horse about his judgment, because he didn’t get on a high horse with me about mine. That’s all I’m going to say about that.”
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I’d add that the odds are against a politician being a devoted husband and a good family man. For a good man, the political life (and especially high political office) would be torture–days and weeks and months on the road away from wife and children, no normal hours, no privacy, no peace, etc. I don’t know anyone (male or female) who’d put up with it.
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I don’t know if it is politics that sets the odds against staying faithful. It may just be having a boatload of money. I wouldn’t know as I haven’t gotten that much money yet. (On a related note, I’m still waiting for investors who want to give me money to learn my real estate secrets.)
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Speaking of money, that’s going to be one of the more interesting angles of the Edwards case.
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Megan McArdle now has a third post on lawns, and the usual urban-suburban war is raging in the comment threads.
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In Megan McArdle’s thread “What’s Good for Peter is Good for Paul” various mothers (including me) are taking turns whacking the former urban kids who have golden memories of mom carrying all food home from the grocery store on foot.
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Aw crap, I hate agreeing with Megan. But I do.
I’ve spent the last 10 days in the Pacific NW (loving the free wifi here in the Super 8) and I have to say that Portland in particular has some very very nice public spaces that attract middle class families. My friend (who has a 5 year old daughter) practically lives in her neighborhood’s community center.
The only thing I don’t like about Portland is the way they name their streets. Is it SW 43rd St or NE 51st Ave or SSE 110th Road West or what?
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How about S.A. Oduni’s new ideas in “Deep Thinking the Human Condition” on failure of education in the third world. There are some wonderful excerpts at humanrethink.net
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By the way, the past week I’ve repeatedly seen people on the internet claiming to have had conversations with others who were under the impression that Russia had attacked Georgia the US state, rather than the former Soviet Republic of Georgia.
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I looked at those quotes over at humanrethink.net and they were suggestive but not very meaty. Maybe the whole text is better?
I have heard that in some poor countries (for instance Egypt, I think?), university graduates’ highest ambition is to work for the government upon graduation, but unfortunately, there are never enough government jobs to soak up all the college graduates. And those underemployed college graduates are a major source of discontentment, instability, and radicalism.
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In the spirit of thread hijacking, I’d like to say that I am totally loving all the beautiful architecture on display during the Beijing Olympics. The water cube, the Bird’s Nest, the frequent shots of that freaky state TV building. Is anyone else geeking out on it?
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This is a little slow with Laura gone. I’m going to get back to writing my Barney Miller fanfic until she gets back.
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How about an epic historical novel focusing on the Steelers?
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Possible reading (I’ve sent Laura the story separately): the pervy University of Iowa professor attempting quid pro quo.
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Ugh. My sister just graduated from there.
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Laura,
Are you familiar with cakewrecks.blogspot.com?
You won’t regret going over there. Or maybe you will. Who knows?
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I’ll link to something for Laura:
http://www.americanscientist.org/bookshelf/pub/changing-assumptions
(a book review from American Scientist)
a quote
“It is significant that the two books under review here—Why Aren’t More Women in Science? and Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory—do not ask these questions, just as national granting agencies do not fund research into male ability to perceive body temperature within a half degree by touch alone, nor do universities hire faculty who meta-analyze male cognitive abilities in caregiving. Yet we as a society do support endless studies of sex differences in spatial perception—the ability to determine whether a two-dimensional piece of paper can be folded into a three-dimensional shape, and the like. The crucial question is, Why?”
(I had spotty access until today, when we got hte wifi set up. Did a lot of surfing on my iPhone until then).
bj
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I was going to get an iPhone, but I decided to join a regular cult. It was cheaper.
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Speaking of…. Would anyone like a stress test?
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I, uh, volunteer? Is it anything like a cootie shot? Will it cure my jet-lag-induced insomnia?
Here’s my contribution to Laura’s reading list:
http://www.newsweek.com/id/151758
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Wendy, thanks for the Begley article, interesting. Interesting also that she managed to get through the whole subject – genetic makeup as setting a template for a lot of children, parenting having only moderate effect on many behaviors, without talking about Stephen Pinker or Judith Rich Harris. Here is a quote from a take-down on Pinker by Louis Menand from New Yorker 2002: “Here Pinker relies on a 1998 book called “The Nurture Assumption,” by Judith Rich Harris, which has been the object of some controversy in the field of developmental psychology. Harris claimed that “shared family environments”—that is, parents—have little or no effect on a child’s personality. (Strictly speaking, she claimed that parenting does not account for the variation in differences in personality, which is what genetic science measures.) Biological siblings reared together are no more alike, or less different, than biological siblings reared in separate families. Half of personality, Harris argued, is the product of genes, and half is the product of what she called the “unique environment”—that is, the particular experiences of the individual child. Harris suggested that children’s peers might be the principal source of this environmental input. This is distinctly not Clinton-era thinking. It was Hillary Clinton, after all, who sent parents of older children into a depression by announcing that personality is shaped in the first three years of life. If you missed those bedtime stories, there was apparently no way to make it up. Harris’s theory makes nonsense of this anxiety, as it does of virtually all expert child-rearing advice, which Pinker calls “flapdoodle.”
What is personality, though? The answer turns out to be quite specific. The new sciences of human nature have discovered that personality has exactly five dimensions: people are, in varying degrees, either open to experience or incurious, conscientious or undirected, extroverted or introverted, agreeable or antagonistic, and neurotic or stable. (This is known in the literature as the Five-Factor Model, or FFM. The five dimensions are referred to by the acronym OCEAN.) All five attributes are partly heritable, and they are what behavioral geneticists look to for a definition of personality. It seems that there is no need for finer tuning, because OCEAN accounts for everything. “Most of the 18,000 adjectives for personality traits in an unabridged dictionary can be tied to one of these five dimensions,” as Pinker explains.” (http://www.hereinstead.com/sys-tmpl/bmenadonpinker/)
An old girlfriend of mine who had two children used to say, “You have them, you feed them and water them, and you see what you have”. Some current writers are using phrases like, “The space for free will is getting smaller and smaller”.
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I don’t know, dave s. Obviously the material is resistant and won’t take absolutely any shape you desire, but middle class parents are able to choose a huge share of environment. (For about five years, my parents had us living across the street from “the projects”, and backing to a motorcycle gang. Then when I was almost 9 and a third child joined our family, we moved 30 minutes into the country, with the closest neighbor half a mile away. Boy howdy, did they change the environment.) Homeschoolers, for instance, would have near total control over the peer environment.
Aside from the fact that parents do have a lot of choice over where they bring up children, I think it’s clearly true that parents can affect outcomes. I think you’re misled by the fact that there is a limited spectrum of acceptable middle class parenting techniques, and within that spectrum, the differences aren’t going to be large. However, I think once we depart from that spectrum, we will start to see differences. Examples:
1. smacking kids whenever they annoy you. If it doesn’t seem to help, hit harder until it does.
2. giving up on bedtime and just letting them fall asleep where they are
3. periodically missing a week of school and not making an effort to catch kids up on work
4. neglecting to bathe kids (a quick route to social success) and allowing them to acquire that “poor kid” smell
5. express disrespect toward the child’s teacher and toward education in general
6. leave younger kids in the care of much older siblings early and often
The list could go a lot longer, but my point is, if you set out to wreck your kids, you could do it.
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Wendy, that’s not jetlag. It’s enegrams. Quick, take this copy of Dyanetics.
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“The new sciences of human nature have discovered that personality has exactly five dimensions”
Seriously? — I always thought people came in two dimensions (you know the people who saw glasses as half/full half empty, the people who think everyone fits in two categories/the people who don’t . . . ).
No, really, you have to try an iPhone. It will be a life changing experience. After you get one, your life will be perfect. You won’t even have to hawk real estate tips anymore (and you’ll see the light and really that “Yes We Can”)
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Amy:
I also thought the flaw with the Harris book was the ability of parents to choose environments, and the fact that that’s one of the important roles that they play. It’s one of the reasons we have such big battles over what schools should be like.
(and, also, I agree that an another important variable is the limited variability of parenting practices in her anlaysis)
Oh, and a big reason for the controversy is that the book is badly put together as a scientific diatribe (in terms of cites, and what the cites actually say, and the details of the arguments and how well they rule out alternative explanations). I can’t say that i think much other developmental psychology is much better — it’s awfully difficult to do those studies rigorously and most of our conclusions end up half-baked, but it’s certainly no better than the rest. And Harris makes a big point of somehow being better than the best.
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How much variation was there in the parenting styles Harris studied? Was it really just standard middle class stuff?
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Choosing environments is a major parental contribution- and the staggeringly better outcomes for black kids who go to rigorous-discipline Catholic school than for those who go to chaotic public inner city schools is certainly one of the most spectacular examples. But it’s no refutation of the Judith Rich Harris notion that kids’ peer groups have more influence on them than their parents’ direct interaction, more of a support.
Begley’s article – worth reading, I think – suggests that some kids are far more susceptible to parental influence than others.
Popular-press reviews of scientific literature are always chancy. Harris has herself based a lot of her stuff on the notion that she can read the literature to get conclusions out of it which the authors miss. It’s a good fight, and I like to watch.
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If I ever do figure out how to make money in real estate, I’m not telling anybody, especially the people who buy my system. I don’t want the competition.
As for the iPhone, I’m generally not an early adopter. I’m sure it’s nice, but why spend hundreds on something that can break if you drop it when you can get pretty much the same thing for free? That way, I have more money to purchase a better environment for my child. Which, brings us back to real estate.
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There’s more grist for the nature vs. nurture mill over at joannejacobs.com in her post “Born to be wild (or mild).” Apparently fussy, sensitive kids are more likely to learn from their parents than are mellow children. Likewise, some kids are apparently genetically wired so that they don’t learn from negative experiences, so they are likely to continue self-destructive behavior.
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Amy, you didn’t click on my link. *sob*
I would love an iPhone, but really, having a laptop is about as portable as I should ever get with the internet. As it is, the thing is pretty much attached to me. People wonder why I don’t have a Blackberry or iPhone, and I tell them, you don’t give a heroin addict a walking IV line.
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OK, I have a question for you all. What is reasonable for a school district to ask of parents in order to prove residency in the district?
What does your school district require of you to prove residency? Is it enough? Too much? Are people trying to sneak their kids into your school district?
(Yes, I have an ulterior motive in asking. The district refuses to enroll my son because I haven’t fulfilled their proof of residency requirement. What are they asking for that I refuse to do? Give me your answer and I’ll explain. If you don’t want to reply here, go to my blog and answer.)
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Wendy,
Sorry!
Do tell about the residency thing. As far as I can remember, for DC we had some college administrator write up a letter saying that we were living in the dorm at such-and-such a location. We didn’t have a proper street address (being on campus) and were picking up our mail at a commercial mailbox place. To this day, I’m not totally sure that we were in boundary (although it was certainly the easiest school to get to). In any case, the public school took all in-boundary kids, and then there was some sort of system to decide which out-of-boundary kids would get in.
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Around here, you hear a fair bit of talk about residency requirements and cheating on residency requirements. City employees are required to live in the city and there are periodic news stories about who isn’t. (Teachers have a stronger union and got their residency requirement removed.)
As for schools, there are a great number of districts of very variable quality in a small area, so you get pretty much what you would expect to get. I’m sure that the better districts do some investigating, but it only shows up on the news when it touches on something important (football).
As for what is reasonable, assuming we aren’t talking about someone who is expected to lead a team to state, the county should know who owns everything. If you are the owner or have a lease signed by the owner, that should be enough. I don’t know what to say about people who don’t have valid addresses (e.g. they live in an illegally subdivided apartment) or kids who aren’t living with their parents but who have not been adopted (as happened to one football player locally).
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Heh, you guys are going to love my story.
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Wendy,
We’re dying here. Tell us the story already.
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The Begley article is getting ink (pixels) at the Joanne Jacobs site: http://joannejacobs.com/2008/08/17/born-to-be-wild-or-mild/#comments
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Amy, story is up at my bloooooog.
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So, does anyone else take their kids “Back to School CLOTHES Shopping”? I mean, we take a big trip to Target for new school supplies, notebooks, pencils, the never-used protractor, etc., but it never occurred to me that people go buy new all-new clothes for September. That stuff from May and June still fits, and heck — they could have a growth spurt next month and the new stuff won’t fit any more.
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I ordered exactly one khaki skort and one pair of khaki pants from Mills for my first grader, and she was set. I went to the used uniform sale at our school, but it was disappointing. By the time uniforms get to the used uniform sale, they’ve had a pretty rough life–rips, paint stains, irredeemable grubbiness around the collars, etc.
Ever since we moved to Texas and got on an austerity kick, I’ve barely bought any non-uniform clothes for the kids. When we lived in DC, we didn’t have an in-unity washer/dryer for four years, and we wound up with probably 3-5 times as much kids’ clothing as we need now. I’m still coasting on the kids’ DC clothes, mostly.
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I do, somewhat. Over the summer the kids tend to stain up or rip up their clothes. About this time of year I just look through the piles and throw out anything that’s too small, too stained, or shredded. If the piles that remain are too small I will head out to the mall. Our clothes shopping is generally more driven by seasonal changes, and August is still too warm to go for fall clothes.
The one thing I’m a bear about is getting everyone new snow boots before their sizes are all sold out. I learned this the hard way — if you wait, the only things left are the million-dollar Timberlands.
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Jen, my husband buys snow boots in all sizes, usually used. The kids outgrow them so quickly anyway. When they totally outgrow the boots, we pass them on to other children or the local thrift store.
Yesterday we went hiking for the first time this summer, and he pulled out his Box O’ Boots for our son. It was kind of frightening, actually.
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