In "What is Conservative Culture?" (July 3, 2006 issue of The New Republic), Rick Perlstein reports that a new kind of prom has spung up in some fundamentalist communities. It's not for high school seniors but for prepubescent girls. They dress up in party dresses and take their fathers as…
I've been watching to see what the Bush Administration will do for its "October surprise" to give Republicans a boost in the polls just before the November mid-term elections. According to this article (http://news.yahoo.com/fc/world/iraq), the Whitehouse appears to be planning sharp troop withdrawals starting in September. After more than two…
Next month, it will be 467.
How do I know? I consulted one of the many life expectancy calculators available on the Internet. The MSN calculator I used takes into account personal behavior, family and personal health, lifestyles (including alcohol and cigarette use), diet and exercise and driving habits. Based on my lifestyle habits, I have just determined that I’m scheduled to die at age 89, 39 years from now.
I have no grounds to complain about the small-seeming number of months I have yet to live. I’m certainly not looking for pity. Compared to many other people, I’m doing well. People in the Stone Age (ca. 8000 BC) lived only about 20 years. At the beginning of the 20th century, the average person lived only until my current age, 50. In African countries hit hard by AIDS, the average person lives a total of only 30 years, significantly less than my remaining life expectancy at age 50. This is a phenomenal and disturbing statistic: at age 50, I am expected to live longer than a child born today in Zambia.
The reason I wrote this post, though, is that calculating my remaining life expectancy is much more than mathematics. I’ll try to explain. Perhaps this experiment won’t have the same effect on you, but it might.
First of all, why calculate my remaining time in months rather than the years? Because as an adult, the month turns out to be the most basic unit of time. Years …
Once regarded as a Generation-X anomaly, social scientists and news publications around the world now observe a frightening trend in young adults: a marked failure to leave home, find a career, attain what most regard as “adulthood”. The reported lack of maturity manifests itself not just in observation, but in real-world statistics: the percentage of 26-year-olds that live with their parents has nearly doubled since 1970, from 11% to 20% according to a University of Michigan study. The average college experience now takes five years, not four. This new agegroup of immature adults has a variety of names around the world- boomerang kids(Canada), nest-squatter(Germany), adultescents (a few US social scientists), and so on. Japan’s parliament even staged a debate on the disturbing reliance of today’s 20-somethings on their parents. But in some ways, this trend follows historical example.
Before the Renaissance, children did not exist. Of course, the age group did not fail to appear, but pre-Renaissance peoples thought of children as miniature adults more than their own stage in human development. Accordingly, children of the pre-Renaissance had to undertake much higher responsibilities, and enjoyed less education and emotional feedback than their modern equivalents.
Then, some time around the Renaissance, childhood came into existence. Society began to see its younger members as less than fully molded, emotionally delicate and needy. At the same time they receive more coddling, longer educational lives, and more parental patience with less physical punishment. In time it became psychologically clear that children did not posses …
The Federal Communications Commission and industry lobbyists are once again trying to let huge media companies get even bigger by resurrecting the same rule changes that millions of Americans rejected in 2003. It's hard to believe that anyone at the FCC could actually be considering the welfare of the American people…