Tag: Premium

China recently passed a law requiring adult children to visit their elderly parents. Xiaoqing Pi takes note of the first case:

A Chinese woman and her husband have been ordered to visit the woman’s elderly mother at least once every two months, and during at least two public holidays every year, in the first application of a new law that requires Chinese people to “regularly” visit their parents. A local court in Wuxi, a city in eastern China’s Jiangsu province, imposed the requirement on the daughter and son-in-law of a 77-year-old woman identified only by her surname, Chu, the official Xinhua news agency reported on Monday. Ms. Chu’s daughter had not visited her since the two had a falling out in September, according to other state media reports (in Chinese). The court ruled that Ms. Chu could ask authorities to fine or even detain her daughter and son-in-law if they failed to visit, Xinhua said.

Some 33 percent of young Chinese citizens report seeing their parents just once a year, while a further 12 percent haven’t visited their parents “in years.” Bruce Einhorn says the law has roots in China’s one-child policy:

With government-provided assistance very limited, seniors in China largely depend on their families to care for them in their golden years. Hence the risk from the One Child Policy: Without brothers and sisters to pick up the slack, all it takes is one unfilial child for the system to break down.

Adam Minter argues that economic and migratory shifts bear some responsibility:

In China’s traditional agrarian culture, those aging relatives would live with, and be supported by, their children. But the country’s modernizing economy means children are moving far from their parents to work. … According to data gathered by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, in 2011 empty nests accounted for 49.7 percent of urban households and 38.7 percent of rural households. This number will increase as China’s population ages, reaching more than 54 percent of all elderly households in 2050, says [deputy director of China’s National Committee on Aging] Zhu Yong.

Michael Pettis warns that China’s changing demographics pose a long-term threat to its economy:

While China’s overall population will stay roughly constant over the next three decades, its working population will actually drop by 1½ percent a year during this time. The explosion in the number of senior citizens, with no equivalent increase in the number of children becoming adults, means that by the middle of the century China’s working-age population will fall to 56 to 58 percent. China will then have one of the oldest populations in the world, and it will have a relatively small economically productive base on which to support a small number of children and a large number of retirees.

From a collection of book covers with one letter missing:

After the jump is another collection of covers – classic works of literature with a contemporary pulp remake:

Details on the series:

The UK publisher [Oldcastle Books’s Pulp! The Classics] has since released pulped versions of Robinson Crusoe, Wuthering Heights, The Hound of the Baskervilles, The Great Gatsby and The Picture of Dorian Gray, which features the face of actor Ryan Gosling. “I was asked to include him by my handlers for commercial viability reasons, but I’ve no idea who he is,” says Mann. According to marketing manager Alexandra Bolton, Oldcastle’s pulp imprint is designed to appeal to audiences who might perceive texts by Austen and Hardy as stuffy “whilst appealing to existing fans of classic novels and avoid debasing the actual text.”

Create your own taglines for the covers here.

SQUAR, Burma’s first social networking site, was released late last month. Since the government has only recently relaxed censorship policies, the potential of a growing digital user base is substantial:

While only 10 percent of the population is wired, international telecom companies are expected to soon be providing nationwide internet and connections. The Burmese government has said it will issue licenses to two international corporations to provide nationwide wireless coverage. The target is to provide 80 percent coverage by 2015. … Growth in mobile penetration has already soared in the last two years from 10 to 80 percent, and the coming wireless coverage will open up 60 million consumers, who thanks to half a century of isolation, have remained untapped.

SQUAR’s cofounder Rita Nguyen sees a market:

Currently, Burmese people are hungry for consumer stuff. Big brands are entering but the only platform is Facebook. There’s nothing really helping consumers day to day, and digital closes those gaps. I mean, print publishers just got granted licenses to print.

Nguyen explains further:

I came to visit Myanmar early this year after hearing the news that Yangon had the largest BarCamp in the world. After spending a week here, I could see that there was something very special happening. … I knew that the access to Internet connectivity would correct itself with the new foreign carriers coming to the market, but even if Burmese were online, there was really no destination that belonged to them, built for and by them. …

[W]e really took a leap of faith to release [SQUAR] as early as we did. It’s very common in Silicon Valley to develop technology like this. Something very light, called a minimum viable product. The idea is that you have something that is functional so that your customers can use it, feed back and help you refine and build your product.  What I wasn’t sure about is if the Burmese youth would be very forgiving with such a light product since they would not have had a lot of exposure to products built in this manner. We didn’t have photos, profiles and barely even had notifications in. There was a very good chance that people would download it, try it and then abandon it. However, the positive response we have had has been overwhelming! The people of Myanmar have rallied around this, providing hundreds of ideas in thousands of posts in just over a week.

Earlier Dish on Burma here and here.

(Hat tip: Global Voices)

A reader writes:

I just read this recent post, and I was rather offended by John Horgan’s insistence that scientists and engineers only learn facts and do not learn skepticism in their classes. Really? I’m a scientist, and I can tell you that as you learn your craft, you learn how there are gaps in knowledge, how uncertain so many things are, and how you have to critically think about all of the problems that you confront. An introductory and mandatory science class might just focus on the facts, but if it is, it’s a bad course. Seriously, if all you want your non-science students to learn is a list of rote facts, then those students are not being taught anything useful, least of all, science.

Another turns the topic around:

My bet is that STEM students get a lot more in the way of humanities education than humanities students get in the way of science and mathematics education.

How much are history majors taught about the importance of the development of the theories of thermodynamics on the industrial revolution (and vice versa)? How many philosophy students have contemplated the connection between the theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, and modern and post-modern thought? Do BAs, MAs or PhDs in the humanities even know who James Clerk Maxwell, Erwin Schrodinger, Paul AM Dirac, Murray Gell-Mann are? If you’re looking for a group in the academy who are cloistered in their own spheres of knowledge and ignorant of the works of others, I don’t think you have to go too far from the English or Art departments at a major university.

How about making sure that pre-law students are well trained in statistics so they can understand how to read and understand a scientific study on the risks of new medications? How about requiring a 14th century German literature major to take a chemistry lecture and lab course for no practical purpose but based on the idea that it’s still good for them to be able to read the periodic table? There is a tremendous amount of scientific illiteracy among people generally. Perhaps the best place to start is among the most educated people in the country, but who probably don’t know the difference between nuclear fusion and frequency modulation.

A few more readers sound off:

I graduated in 1971 with a Bachelors of Engineering from The Cooper Union, a small college with three schools – Art, Architecture and Engineering.  The Schools were distinct, and the Engineering students spent their days in a separate building from the Art and Architecture students, but there was one mandatory course that every sophomore had to take.  It was an interdisciplinary Humanities course that covered the years from 1750 to 1850.  In small classes and in joint lectures we studied art, music, history, exploration, science, medicine, literature, religion, invention – if it occurred in the years from 1750 to 1850, we studied it.

Before our first large lecture I could hear students from each of the schools grumbling that it was a waste of time to learn all this extraneous information – we didn’t have the time for this useless course.  What could Art students learn about science and technology that would help them be better artists?  How could Engineering students use art or music?  But before long we looked forward to each lecture. We were learning that any advance in one area affected society as a whole.  Advances in chemistry led to better paints, advances in building materials changed architectural designs.  Small or large, we learned that life is interconnected.

If I had to list one and only one college course that changed my life, it would be this one.  I’m so very grateful that it was mandatory, and that every sophomore attended the lectures together.    Because artist, architect, engineer,  writer, politician, religious leader, citizen, we each have something to learn from the others.

Another:

I’m a older chemical engineer (I graduated in 1970).  My school (Ohio University) required Humanities credits to graduate.  I found them valuable, but not in the way you’d think.  What I learned from them was that to get a good grade, I needed to listen, and then respond in a way that was “appropriate” for that professor – not what necessarily what I thought.  You can’t do that in a math or chemistry class.  It actually gave me better skills when relating to others in the workplace, as opposed to the Sheldon Cooper (Big Bang Theory) model of interaction.  I can’t remember crap from that Film Appreciation class I took, other than I never did really comprehend why it was so important to appreciate the lighting and camera angles from Dracula.  Got a good grade though …

Dan Colman highlights the above clip from a Cold War-era Armed Forces Information Film, pairing it with his commentary on an Army-produced guide to finding the Communists in our midsts:

Some Communists were out in the open; however, others “worked more silently.” So how to find those hidden communists? Not to worry, the US military had that covered. In 1955, the U.S. First Army Headquarters prepared a manual called How to Spot a Communist. Later published in popular American magazines, the propaganda piece warned readers, “there is no fool-proof system in spotting a Communist.” … And yet the pamphlet adds, letting readers breathe a sigh of relief, “there are, fortunately, indications that may give him away. These indications are often subtle but always present, for the Communist, by reason of his “faith” must act and talk along certain lines.” In short, you’ll know a Communist not by how he walks, but how he talks.

He excerpts the following passage from the pamphlet on deciphering Communist writing, which he describes as asking citizens “to become literary critics for the sake of national security”:

While a preference for long sentences is common to most Communist writing, a distinct vocabulary provides the more easily recognized feature of the “Communist Language.” Even a superficial reading of an article written by a Communist or a conversation with one will probably reveal the use of some of the following expressions: integrative thinking, vanguard, comrade, hootenanny, chauvinism, book-burning, syncretistic faith, bourgeois-nationalism, jingoism, colonialism, hooliganism, ruling class, progressive, demagogy, dialectical, witch-hunt, reactionary, exploitation, oppressive, materialist.

This list, selected at random, could be extended almost indefinitely. While all of the above expressions are part of the English language, their use by Communists is infinitely more frequent than by the general public…

David Sessions rants against a literary trend:

If you’re an American man of letters of the sort that currently gets called upon by places like The New Republic and The New York Review of Books to diagnose European philosophers, you have a fairly easy job laid out for you. Step one: Read the book, preferably with no prior familiarity with the philosopher’s work, influences, or academic milieu. Step two: search the text, as well as any biographical resources you can find, for any indication that the philosopher has/had radical political commitments or might have ever made comments about Hitler or communist regimes that are difficult to understand at first glance. If so, you’ve already got the main theme for your review. Step three: do your best to come up with a few paragraphs of summary of the philosopher’s biography and general outlook before transitioning into your main disquisition about whether or not they have apologized for ever having radical ideas and, if not, cluck disappointedly about their lack of intellectual responsibility. If you’re feeling a little bold, insinuate that they are anti-Semitic. For good measure, throw in a few concluding bromides about the temptations and risks of being an intellectual.

Why it matters:

While I understand the entertainment value of a withering takedown, I will never understand the desire to finger-wag ideas off the stage before the fight can even begin. One doesn’t have to be at all radical to respect and welcome a good-faith conflict between ideas, and to believe that engaging even the ones that creep you out can’t help but improve your own. (As Stephen Metcalf put it responding to the Romano travesty, “I never thought the answer to illiberalism was more illiberalism.”)

The notion that “responsible politics” have to be protected from dangerous intellectuals is itself an ideological danger, one that risks excusing the enormous, ongoing, and entirely preventable crimes of our political system. It’s precisely this unquestionable ideology of inevitability and givenness that people like Badiou and Žižek are attempting to unsettle, and the reason I suspect they inspire such anti-intellectual reaction.

David Masciotra evokes the complex politics of John Mellencamp, a man of the left shaped by small-town life in Indiana:

John Mellencamp is not a Republican. He is a self-avowed liberal—but his is a community-based leftism that distrusts bureaucracy and hates paternalism, yet believes in social assistance for the poor, sick, and hungry, the widows and orphans that the Bible identifies. Mellencamp inhabits common ground with libertarians on social issues, and he is a consistent opponent of war and foreign intervention, but he does not believe that an unfettered free market will solve every social problem.

He has watched the corporate conquest of family farms and sings about it on the angry lament, “Rain on the Scarecrow.” He has witnessed how after decades of politicians relegating poverty relief to an inefficient welfare state or indifferent corporate state, poor men, women, and children have become collateral damage, and he sings about it on the heartbreaking “Jackie Brown,” the story of a desperately impoverished man who commits suicide.

He has seen the wreckage that a market-driven, money-obsessed, and materially measured culture has piled up in place of the small communities he cherishes, and he measures the damage in “Ghost Towns Along the Highway.” The mode of American life that prioritizes mobility above all and instructs the young to conduct themselves in a constant search for the next big thing has created generations whose “love keeps on moving to the nearest faraway place.” In “The West End,” he sings of a dying neighborhood and in a powerful turn of phrase manages to capture and condemn decades of destructive policies from big government and big business: “It sure has changed here since I was a kid / It’s worse now / Look what progress did.”

After reading the recently released report from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences about the sorry state of the humanities in higher education, Paula Marantz Cohen sighs:

[T]he commission’s report, with the somewhat arch title, The Heart of the Matter, is itself indicative of the problem. It is not badly written—its grammar and syntax are dutifully correct, and in places it tries to be eloquent. But it was written by a committee. It turns the ineffable into a clear-cut “knowledge base” (a horrid phrase). Consider the goals listed in the report’s introduction: “1) to educate Americans in the knowledge, skills, and understanding they will need to thrive in a twenty-first-century democracy; 2) to foster a society that is innovative, competitive, and strong; and 3) to equip the nation for leadership in an interconnected world. These goals cannot be achieved by science alone.”

You may already be drowsing and can probably foresee the padding and platitudes to come—the stating of principles and ideas obvious to any person with common sense.

Peter Laarman likewise finds the report’s emphasis on the practical dismaying, quipping, “God help us if we think the only way to save humanities education is to corrupt it utterly by stressing the cash value—or the national security value—of brushing up our Shakespeare.” Instead, he finds the humanities’ true value to elude such calculations, and connects their study to religion:

The report fails to say anything of significance about the inexpressible joy that a traditional liberal education can ignite, the sense of belonging to the worldwide communion of persons living and dead who can/could think and ponder, the wonderment of consciousness that poets and sages of all epochs have celebrated. The report dwells instead, in a very American way, on the practical applications of a thorough grounding in the humanities and/or the social sciences.

Religion has a stake in this discussion. Religion is about the higher consciousness, after all. Second-century theological heavyweight St. Irenaeus is at least alleged to have said that God’s glory is the fully alive human being (there is a dispute about the translation). Rudimentary human consciousness makes us aware of our finitude; more advanced consciousness, usually the outcome of higher learning, makes the idea of that finitude bearable, even sublime.

Wilfred McClay finds America’s collective self-understanding as the “redeemer nation” in more than just our foreign policy crusades:

What would American political culture look like without its pervasive moral dramas of sin and redemption, sometimes expressed in forms lofty and noble, but at other times resembling nothing so much as the smarminess and vulgarity of soap opera? One thing can be said for certain: We are not only intensely fascinated by these episodes of political theater, but fully in the grip of them, as far more than mere onlookers. For an allegedly secular society, the United States seems to be curiously in thrall to ideas, gestures, emotional patterns, nervous tics, and deep premises that belong to the supposedly banished world of religion. These habits of heart and mind are evident everywhere we look, and they possess a compulsive and unquestioned power in contemporary American life. It is as if the disappearance of religion’s metaphysical dimension has occasioned a tightening hold of certain of its moral dimensions, particularly so far as these relate to guilt and absolution.

Among other examples, he finds this dynamic at the heart of Jimmy Carter’s post-presidential career:

[R]edemption clearly has been on the mind of ex-president Jimmy Carter for the past 33 years. Carter has never gotten over the stern rebuke administered by voters in 1980, and the harsh judgment of many observers that his was a failed administration. In his case, a craving for redemption has animated an energetic, sometimes admirable, but often clumsy and self-seeking post-presidential career. In group photographs of president-elect Barack Obama and his four living predecessors at the White House, it was noticeable that Carter stood apart from the others, seemingly weighed down by a lingering sense of failure. One might think that his Christian beliefs would make him more at peace about how he is regarded in this world, given the priority his faith accords to the next one. But very few of us, and least of all the kind of man who wants to be president, can be genuinely indifferent to how we are regarded by others, and by history. And Carter is a proud man, in all the best and worst senses of that word. Redemption in the here and now, in the eyes of others, would be too sweet a vindication for him not to seek it; but it will likely elude him, because of the conspicuous pride that has motivated his quest for it. Who would be exalted must first be humbled.

(Photo: New York City mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner marches in the New York Gay Pride Parade on June 30, 2013 in New York City. Weiner has been polling neck-and-neck with long-time frontrunner Christine Quinn. By Andrew Burton/Getty Images.)