While American children had once commonly enjoyed the freedom to run around outside with minimal adult interference, they began to spend more time indoors where their parents could watch them. When they did go outside, they were more often accompanied by a grown-up; unstructured roughhousing and roleplaying were replaced by supervised play dates or carefully shepherded trips to the park. Kids began to spend more time in organized activities, like dance or sports, and less time in the kind of disorganized milling-about familiar to generations past.
The reasons for this shift were many: fears of kidnapping, stoked by a series of highly publicized cases; an increase in the length of the school year; parental anxieties about children’s futures in a time of growing income inequality and economic insecurity. The result was a 25 percent drop in children’s unstructured playtime between 1981 and 1997, setting in motion a pattern of less freedom and more adult surveillance that historians and child psychologists believe continues to this day. “All kinds of independent activities that used to be part of normal childhood have gradually been diminishing,” said Peter Gray, a psychology professor at Boston College who studies play.
What is the most uninformative statement that people are inclined to make? My nominee would be “I love to travel.” This tells you very little about a person, because nearly everyone likes to travel; and yet people say it, because, for some reason, they pride themselves both on having travelled and on the fact that they look forward to doing so.
The opposition team is small but articulate. G. K. Chesterton wrote that “travel narrows the mind.” Ralph Waldo Emerson called travel “a fool’s paradise.” Socrates and Immanuel Kant—arguably the two greatest philosophers of all time—voted with their feet, rarely leaving their respective home towns of Athens and Königsberg. But the greatest hater of travel, ever, was the Portuguese writer Fernando Pessoa, whose wonderful “Book of Disquiet” crackles with outrage.
Hype springs eternal in medicine, but lately the horizon of new possibility seems almost blindingly bright. “I’ve been running my research lab for almost 30 years,” says Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley. “And I can say that throughout that period of time, I’ve just never experienced what we’re seeing over just the last five years.”
A Nobel laureate, Doudna is known primarily for Crispr, the gene-editing Swiss Army knife that has been called “a word processor” for the human genome and that she herself describes as “a technology that literally enables the rewriting of the code of life.” The work for which Doudna shared the Nobel Prize was published more than a decade ago, in 2012, opening up what seemed like an almost limitless horizon for Crispr-powered therapies and cures. But surveying the recent landscape of scientific breakthroughs, she says the last half-decade has been more remarkable still: “I think we’re at an extraordinary time of accelerating discoveries.”
At its best, Bellies is as deep as it is chic, propelled by the good intentions dropped between different wavelengths, a sensitive study of the challenge of moving past judgment towards perception.
The story’s maneuvering through time and space provides a roundness to the Tran women, allowing readers to see aspects of, and similarities between, each character that they keep from one another. Each woman withholds truths from the rest of her family in an effort to protect them, but that impulse is also what prevents them from being there for one another.
In “Planta Sapiens,” Paco Calvo, a philosopher of plant behavior, and his co-author, Natalie Lawrence, present the idea that flora are intelligent — that is, capable of cognition. In Calvo’s opinion, people pay more attention to animals than plants and this may explain why some of plants’ remarkable abilities have been overlooked. Our evolutionary history may also shape our reduced attention to the subject; plants are, after all, unlikely to attack people.