Year: 2013

Tressie McMillan Cottom asks herself, “Why do poor people make stupid, illogical decisions to buy status symbols?”

For the same reason all but only the most wealthy buy status symbols, I suppose. We want to belong. And, not just for the psychic rewards, but belonging to one group at the right time can mean the difference between unemployment and employment, a good job as opposed to a bad job, housing or a shelter, and so on. …

I do not know how much my mother spent on her camel colored cape or knee-high boots but I know that whatever she paid it returned in hard-to-measure dividends. How do you put a price on the double-take of a clerk at the welfare office who decides you might not be like those other trifling women in the waiting room and provides an extra bit of information about completing a form that you would not have known to ask about? What is the retail value of a school principal who defers a bit more to your child because your mother’s presentation of self signals that she might unleash the bureaucratic savvy of middle class parents to advocate for her child? I don’t know the price of these critical engagements with organizations and gatekeepers relative to our poverty when I was growing up. But, I am living proof of its investment yield.

Geoffrey O’Brien is impressed by millennial composer Nico Muhly’s new opera, Two Boys, a whodunnit set in early 2001 and centered around the intrigue of IMs:

It is hard to imagine anything less songlike than the terse and truncated utterances of an anonymous Internet chat room, or indeed of an environment less suggestive of music than the Internet itself. The Net’s openness to an infinity of destinations seems to encourage a mood of disembodiment and isolation, at least as rendered in this opera. … Two Boys challenges itself to find music in that multiconnected zone of disconnection.

The premise here—the inexplicable stabbing of a young boy by a slightly older boy he met online—is altogether grim, an anecdote (apparently, as they say in movies, “based on a true story”) that could almost serve as a cautionary tale for parents wary of their children’s computer use. The parents here are as clueless as they can be, unsurprisingly since we are at the turn of the twenty-first century, that remote period, in an implicitly drab and emotionally worn-out English urban milieu.

Anne Midgette came away less impressed:

[Muhly’s] most ambitious and innovative goal, in “Two Boys,” was to create a musical portrait of the Internet, and his best ideas came in the scenes, largely choral ensembles, where he set out to realize this, notably the chorus when Brian first enters the chat room, singing the same brief repeated phrases (“Are u there? Are u there?”) over and over, in overlapping driving patterns. Spotlights penetrated the black mesh facades of [designer Michael] Yeargan’s sets, revealing people sitting alone at keyboards, while around them the projections whirled in geometric patterns offering images of connectedness and fragmentation, images evoking helixes and atomic models and the lights of night cities seen from space, all glowing and changing and presenting the enormity and fear and exhileration of the unknown.

But the idea didn’t develop significantly, musically or dramatically or visually, beyond the first chorus, apart from the addition of elements illustrating the treacherous terrain online: Brian stumbles across a gay sex scene, adding to his mounting sense of dread and titillation and uncertainty. I don’t think Muhly quite meant to signal “Internet bad!” in such broad terms, but for all of the inventiveness of his initial idea, the opera is oddly straitlaced and old-fashioned in its depiction of online life.

Robinson Myer has more on Muhly’s ability to represent the digital world:

Here is how Two Boys represents instant messaging: Brian sits at the right side of the stage, in his room, behind his computer, and the character he’s chatting with stands at the left. Towers loom behind both of them; on the towers are the simulacra of chat windows. The words he types, and the words his companion types, appear on the towers behind both of them simultaneously. … The effect is this: We see what Brian imagines. We see the words appear on his screen, the person he imagines typing them, and the screen he imagines, too.

[Mark] Grimmer and [Leo] Warner, the designers, very much intended this. “It’s very important that the seeming reality of the situation is shown physically onstage. Brian genuinely believes he’s having these interactions with these characters,” says Grimmer. “We wanted to keep reminding people that there is something really banal about the experience of having a conversation online. It’s about letters appearing on a screen, but yet from out of that, it’s as much about imagination as it is about anything else.”

Prospero’s R.L.G. surveys research on children raised as bilingual or multilingual:

Many parents once believed that a second language was a bad idea, as it would interfere with developing the first and more important one. But such beliefs are woefully out of date today. Some studies (such as this one) seem to show that bilinguals have smaller vocabularies in each language (at early stages) than monolinguals do. But other studies (such as this one) find no vocabulary shortfall in either language. In any case, the influence of mono- or bilingualism on vocabulary size is later overtaken by the importance of education, socio-economic status, reading and writing habits. In short, there is little evidence that raising a child bilingual will hurt their primary language.

The benefits, by contrast, are both strong and long-lasting. Bilingual children as young as seven months outperform monolinguals at tasks requiring “executive function”: prioritising and planning complex tasks and switching mental gears. This is probably because monitoring the use of two languages is itself an exercise in executive function. Such studies control for socio-economic status, and in fact the same beneficial effects have been shown in bilingual children of poor families. Finally, the effects appear to be lifelong: bilinguals have later onset of Alzheimer’s disease, on average, than do monolinguals.

Previous Dish on Tim Doner, the 17-year-old boy who can speak 20 languages, here. A video profile of 12-year-old Wendy Vo, who can speak 11 languages, is seen above.

Allison Schrager wants the US to simplify its time zones:

This year, Americans on Eastern Standard Time should set their clocks back one hour (like normal), Americans on Central and Rocky Mountain time do nothing, and Americans on Pacific time should set their clocks forward one hour. After that we won’t change our clocks again—no more daylight saving. This will result in just two time zones for the continental United States. The east and west coasts will only be one hour apart. Anyone who lives on one coast and does business with the other can imagine the uncountable benefits of living in a two-time-zone nation (excluding Alaska and Hawaii).

She notes that our time zone system dates back to 1883 and was originally intended to make business easier for the telegraph and railroad industries:

Why stick with a system designed for commerce in 1883? In reality, America already functions on fewer than four time zones. I spent the last three years commuting between New York and Austin, living on both Eastern and Central time. I found that in Austin, everyone did things at the same times they do them in New York, despite the difference in time zone. People got to work at 8 am instead of 9 am, restaurants were packed at 6 pm instead of 7 pm, and even the TV schedule was an hour earlier. But for the last three years I lived in a state of constant confusion, I rarely knew the time and was perpetually an hour late or early. And for what purpose? If everyone functions an hour earlier anyway, in part to coordinate with other parts of the country, the different time zones lose meaning and are reduced to an arbitrary inconvenience. Research based on time use surveys found American’s schedules are determined by television more than daylight.  That suggests in effect, Americans already live on two time zones.

Arguing that “unpaid internships provide access only to students from wealthy families,” economist Edward Glaeser suggests making new loans available to low-income interns:

[I]t’s unrealistic to think individual private businesses will provide new skills to temporary, not-yet-qualified workers simply out of public benevolence. Throughout much of Western history, young apprentices paid to learn – either explicitly with cash or implicitly by working for little pay. … One solution might be to expand federal student loan programs to cover students taking unpaid internships, whether or not they receive college credit for them, or even recent graduates. I would set a high bar for making internships eligible for such loans, by requiring official certification of their educational quality. With a loan program in place, more widespread unpaid internships could help move young Americans toward permanent employment. Internships provide a pathway towards employment that should be encouraged – not penalized.

Jordan Weissman counters, “If you’re a broke 23-year-old, the concept of taking out debt for an unpaid internship probably sounds something like the two-headed hell-hound of your financial nightmares”:

I can sort of see how this line of thinking would develop. If you really, truly believe a dearth of skills, rather than a slow economy, is the problem hampering college graduates in today’s job market, you might see internships as a tonic. After all, Germany and other European countries run very successful apprenticeship programs that prepare young adults for careers (though those apprenticeships are paid). And if you believe the only downside to unpaid internships are the class issues, then student loans might sound like an elegant solution. We are just talking about more education. What’s so wrong with financing it?  Plenty.

To start, I’m not sure how someone can look at the state of student debt, all $1 trillion of it and change, then decide the government needs to make a whole new class of loans. Nor is it really apparent that skills are the great problem holding back BA’s, given the cyclical nature of their employment woes. Glaeser also glosses over the lack of evidence that unpaid internships regularly lead to work. … In the end, Glaeser is essentially asking government to subsidize entry level employment at for-profit companies who have realized that many young people don’t have to be paid for their work. Because that’s what internships are: work.

Which is why Dish Publishing LLC provides both pay and health insurance to our interns; good work deserves compensation. And we don’t want to cut off working-class candidates who couldn’t afford the internship otherwise. Why close ourselves off from a large segment of talent?

Update from a reader:

I wanted to write and let you know that a fairly common form of student loans for internships already exists, albeit only while you are still enrolled. I know because I had to take out a loan to afford clerking unpaid for the Orleans Public Defenders a few years ago. It’s a very desirable internship for those that are interested in public interest law (and highly recommended), an opportunity I immediately accepted.

In law school, even at a public university, I already had a lot of debt, including some from under-grad (also at a public school, in-state), so I had very little disposable income, certainly not enough to pay for rent on my lease where I went to school and also for a place in New Orleans, not to mention moving, living expenses, etc. So I took my law school’s internship class for credit over the summer while working at the clerkship. This allowed me to qualify for several thousand dollars in cost-of-living student loans to work unpaid at the public defenders office.

The loans on their own didn’t bother me so much because unlike a lot of unpaid corporate internships this was a really desirable cause, at least to me (no, I don’t mean advancing my resume), and they genuinely did not have resources to pay us. However, the class I took, like most internship credit classes, was not really educational in any meaningful way. It consisted of keeping a journal of my activities and writing a few essays about what I was learning, time I felt could have been better spent serving indigent clients/ working. In addition to the thousands in loans I took out for living expenses, I also paid several thousand dollars for this “class.” In other words, I pretty much paid the university to work for free, but I wouldn’t have qualified for the loans I needed to live unless I took the lightweight class. I would have much rather spent that money on a substantive class, not paying for an unpaid internship.

By the way, you paying your interns, and the reasons why, definitely pushed me over the edge into [tinypass_offer text=”subscribing”] very early on. I’m an avid reader of news, almost exclusively online, and this is the first and only content I’ve paid for to date (should I feel bad…?).