"Young adults are earning college degrees at a record rate. Why?"

Headline at the Christian Science Monitor.

Good question. Why? Doing what you're told? Nothing better to do? Putting off the time when the consequences of your decisions become apparent? High self-esteem leading you to think you're the exception to the trend? Being part of the trend, going where everyone else is going?

"For the first time since he began running for president, Republican Mitt Romney has the support of over 40% of America's youth vote..."

"... a troubling sign for President Obama who built his 2008 victory with the overwhelming support of younger, idealistic voters."

[Pollster John] Zogby speculates that Romney's selection of 42-year-old Rep. Paul Ryan helped turn more younger voters to him. "It could be his youthfulness," said Zogby of Ryan. Plus, he said, more younger voters are becoming libertarian, distrustful of current elected officials and worried that they are going to get stuck with the nation's looming fiscal bill.

"They want change," said Zogby.

Change!

"Social issues are far down the priorities list, and I think that’s the trend."

"That’s where it needs to go if the Republican Party is going to be successful."

So say the young party members.

I'm old, and I'm not a member of any political party, but I agree.

49% of likely voters want "strict legal interpretation" of the Constitution.

And only 21% think that's what we're getting. 60% think the Supreme Court is giving us the so-called "living" version of the document.

Male voters are more inclined to favor strict interpretation of the Constitution, while female voters prefer more legal flexibility and tend to see it as a living document. Most voters under 40 see the Constitution as a living document; most older voters think the Constitution should be strictly interpreted.

Why are women like younger folk and men like older folk? Strict/flexible — what's that about?

What, exactly, makes some people express beliefs in the value of flexibility — or is it "living" — and others in the value of strictness? It would be simplistic to think that women (and young people) are themselves loose and flexible, while men (and old people) are strict and inflexible, because we learn perhaps only what feelings superficially attract them and how they like to think about themselves. I'm tough and neutral/I'm nuanced and merciful. So you say.

Prompted by this forum discussion at Isthmus the other day, I (and Meade) took a quickie Myers-Briggs test. Interestingly, Meade and I got the same result. But I think the test is a bit absurd. The questions test how you think about yourself, not what you really are. Even if we were to accept that there are 4 dimensions of personality and only 2 ways to go within each dimension, you couldn't know where you really are. For example, in the 3d of the 4 dimensions, you can be "thinking" or "feeling." But I suspect the folks who ended up with "thinking" were at least as emotional in response to the relevant questions as those who got pegged as "feeling." What makes a person say yes to "You trust reason rather than feeling"?

"Reason" sounds right... but what drives you to answer the way you think is right? How soberly and clearly have you analyzed where you have put your trust — really, as you live your life? Putting the question that way makes me think the more reason-based person is more likely to answer no to "You trust reason rather than feeling" than the person in the grip of impulsive emotion. Of course, I'm a reason guy! Yeah, and you believe in the strict legal interpretation of the Constitution. So you say. But can I watch you do it? Can I look into your brain, Justice Scalia, and see the reason-gears turn independently of emotion?

"You are embarrassing because, in spite of being ridiculous, you are not content to keep your absurdity decently to yourself..."

"... but insist on parading it around in public, greeting the 13-year-old's friends and teachers as though you were a normal human being and not a kind of ward of the state, on the brink of being permanently committed."

"Why drive? Why own a car? Why ‘go’ anywhere?"

Generation Y doesn't see why.

WaPo highlights a child's delight in discovering 2 males having sex.

It's horseshoe crab mating time in Delaware.

The arthropod orgy was well underway when Breanne Preisen trudged over the low dune onto the narrow beach, where tens of thousands of horseshoe crabs were getting down to the age-old business of reproduction.

“There’s a female,” Preisen said, pointing at one of the peculiar sea-things crawling along an undeveloped stretch of the Delaware Bay shoreline. “She has a male attached to her.”

Preisen inspected the cluster of horseshoe crabs more closely, then corrected herself: “Two males!” She smiled.

Of course, she smiled. The young girl has been properly educated and enlightened, and The Washington Post approves.

Many years ago, I was a young girl in Delaware, and I found 2 horseshoe crabs and was delighted that they were "attached" — the word I used — to each other. I had no idea what sex they were or, in fact, that they were having sex. If I had realized what they were doing, I wouldn't have grabbed the tail of the one in back and dragged the fucking couple along with me.

Kids don't care about movie stars.

They don't recognize them in the trailers.

What's wrong with these kids today?

Todd G. Buchholz and Victoria Buchholz complain about "The Go-Nowhere Generation":

The likelihood of 20-somethings moving to another state has dropped well over 40 percent since the 1980s... The stuck-at-home mentality hits college-educated Americans as well as those without high school degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, the proportion of young adults living at home nearly doubled between 1980 and 2008, before the Great Recession hit. Even bicycle sales are lower now than they were in 2000.

Why don't people pick up and move to the places where the jobs are? Everyone's heard of North Dakota. Why don't they go there?

In the most startling behavioral change among young people... an increasing number of teenagers are not even bothering to get their driver’s licenses. Back in the early 1980s, 80 percent of 18-year-olds proudly strutted out of the D.M.V. with newly minted licenses, according to a study by researchers at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute. By 2008 — even before the Great Recession — that number had dropped to 65 percent.

Isn't that what the Boomer generation told them to do? Cars are bad. They are destroying the planet. Then, when they avoid driving, we scold them for being — what? — sedentary? unambitious? incurious?!

Perhaps young people are too happy at home checking Facebook. In a study of 15 countries, Michael Sivak, a professor at the University of Michigan’s Transportation Research Institute (who also contributed to the D.M.V. research), found that when young people spent more time on the Internet, they delayed getting their driver’s licenses....

If they were supposed to believe that movie — "An Inconvenient Truth" — that was showed to them by one public school teacher after another, why aren't we celebrating them now for their teeny tiny carbon footprint? Just give them a tiny room and a computer with high-speed internet, and they'll be perfectly happy.

But Generation Y has become Generation Why Bother....

Etc. etc. These kids today! Speaking of "Why Bother," why did we boomers bother to teach them to sneer at aggressive capitalism, consumeristic acquisitiveness, and driving powerful cars if we were going to turn around and whine about their not competing vigorously enough?

Notice how popular the word “random” has become among young people. A Disney TV show called “So Random!” has ranked first in the ratings among tweens. The word has morphed from a precise statistical term to an all-purpose phrase that stresses the illogic and coincidence of life. Unfortunately, societies that emphasize luck over logic are not likely to thrive.

I blame the Baby Boomers, my generation. We propagated doubt that you could work hard and get ahead. Random? That sounds like hippie talk to me.

In the mid-’70s, back when every high school kid longed for his driver’s license and a chance to hit the road and find freedom, Bruce Springsteen wrote his brilliant, exciting album “Born to Run.”

Hello? Have you ever listened to the lyrics on "Born to Run"?! Yes, movement is involved in running, but it was scarcely an optimistic attitude. Springsteen had us running from the "death trap," the "suicide rap" that was the "runaway American Dream." That home town of yours supposedly "rips the bones from your back." Yeah, that's exciting. Hell is exciting. Springsteen wanted to go for a ride on his motorcycle — his "suicide machine" — and then "die with you Wendy on the streets tonight." Yeah, those were the days!

What emotion does your youth culture valorize and what social form does it envision?

William Deresiewicz takes inventory.

For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

And what of these kids today? Are we going to call them the "hipsters?" Deresiewicz prefers "millennials." He diagnoses the emotion as niceness, which doesn't seem hip at all. (Not that hippies were hip.) Is niceness an emotion? Deresiewicz toys with "post-emotional," then comes up with "the affect of the salesman." And that's not very nice at all. What "social form" do these little jerks get? Deresiewicz assigns them: small business. 

Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

See how that goes with "the affect of the salesman"?

Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

This is not meant as a compliment. Deresiewicz is not a fan of "the bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today."

ADDED: I like Deresiewicz's writing style and he has a lot of nice observations, but something's obviously missing — something expressed by the "these kids today" tag I just added. In every generation, there's a mix of conventional and rebellious type individuals. The millennials he describes sound very similar to the people beatniks, hippies, and slackers rebelled against. There are rebels among the millennial generation too. Look at all the protests these days! Look at all the young people who are looking to the government to deal with the joblessness. How cheerfully entrepreneurial are they?

48% "of 7th to 12th graders experienced sexual harassment in the last school year..."

According to a survey by the American Association of University Women, a nonprofit research organization, which used a broad (and confusing) definition of sexual harassment — "unwelcome sexual behavior that takes place in person or electronically."

Forty-four percent of students said they were harassed “in person” — being subjected to unwelcome comments or jokes, inappropriate touching or sexual intimidation — and 30 percent reported online harassment, like receiving unwelcome comments, jokes or pictures through texts, e-mail, Facebook and other tools, or having sexual rumors, information or pictures spread about them.

I'm guessing that the difference between 44% and 100% is the measure of unwelcomeness. The question included mere comments and jokes. Wouldn't nearly all middle school kids hear such things? The definition does not seem to be limited to comments and jokes that target the individual who answers yes or that persist after the individual has voiced her lack of receptiveness.

“I was called a whore because I have many friends that are boys,” one ninth-grade girl was quoted as saying. An eighth-grade boy, meanwhile, reported, “They spread rumors I was gay because I played on the basketball team.”

These are the comments selected for quoting, so presumably much of the reported harassment is less compelling than that. And yet this sounds like run-of-the-mill teasing. It's not very nice, but isn't it normal childish? I think it's a little funny that both those quotes include points of pride. The girl has a lot of boyfriends. The boy is on the basketball team. It sounds like their "harassers" are jealous and they know it.

The report documents many forms of harassment. The most common was unwelcome sexual comments, gestures or jokes, which was experienced by 46 percent of girls and 22 percent of boys. Separately, 13 percent of girls reported being touched in an unwelcome way, compared with 3 percent of boys; 3.5 percent of girls said they were forced to do something sexual, as did 0.2 percent of boys. About 18 percent of both boys and girls reported being called gay or lesbian in a negative way.

It's important to break down the subcategories of harassment. The touching and, obviously, the forcing are important, but even that information needs to be more fine-grained. You might object to someone touching you on the shoulder. You might feel forced by social norms to hug people you don't particularly want to hug. What counts as "something sexual"? I'm not suggesting bad things don't happen, just looking critically at survey questions that inflate the numbers by grouping things together that don't belong together if we're deciding how outraged we're going to be and what steps we ought to take to intervene.

As for being called gay, that is a special problem. It's not just that it has a sexual aspect, but that it involves perpetuating hostility toward a particular group and it also attacks a central part of a young person's identity (whether the individual is actually gay or not). But, again, let's be careful. Out of 100 instances of a kid getting called "gay," how many are the casual, meaningless proliferation of a bad word and how many truly channel hatefulness?

What is the point of this survey? To get adults exciting about solving a big problem? If so, I want a much more accurate count of genuinely problematic instances.

Why is Perry but not Romney or Cain beating Obama in the Rasmussen poll of Wisconsin voters?

Perry beats Obama, 46%/54%, but Obama beats Romney, 45%/41%, and Cain, 47%/42%.

I just don't get it. What's getting Perry those extra 4 or 5 percentage points here? Something about the empathy toward immigrants? The HPV vaccine? Is Wisconsin harboring some anti-Mormon or anti-black folks?

I genuinely don't know, and I also wonder what it might say about the recall effort against Scott Walker.

ADDED: Rasmussen has a new poll about Walker:

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of Likely Wisconsin Voters shows that 38% Strongly Approve of the job Walker is doing, while the same number (38%) Strongly Disapproves. Overall, the Republican governor earns positive reviews from 49% and negative grades from 49%....

Walker’s overall ratings have improved since March, when 43% approved of his performance and 57% disapproved.  At that time, 34% Strongly Approved of the job he was doing and 48% Strongly Disapproved....

While 55% of male voters in the state like the job the governor's doing, 55% of female voters disapprove of his performance. 

What's with the sex divide? Well, that's not special to Wisconsin, is it? The Perry thing... that's what's puzzling.

Most voters under 40 disapprove of Walker, while the majority of their elders approve. Married voters and those with children in the home are more likely to approve of the governor's performance than are unmarrieds and those without children. 

These kids today!

Now, here is the most interesting statistic:

Just four percent (4%) of Wisconsin voters rate the U.S. economy as good or excellent, while 60% describe it as poor. Fifty-seven percent (57%) of those who think the economy is poor give Walker favorable marks.

The return of hot pants.

I remember the first time this happened. The people who succumbed to the trend were very embarrassed later, to the point that they couldn't even understand how they could have made such an egregious fashion blunder. But I'm old, and these kids today don't remember. They will have to go through their own cycle of enthusiasm and shame. Have fun!

Fighting the revolution in Iran with squirt guns.

Innocent fun or serious political threat?

After heeding a call on Facebook, a group of nearly 800 young men and women were among those who showed up at the park....

They chased strangers around a giant water fountain, screaming and laughing as they splashed each other with water from toy guns, bottles and plastic bags.

"We had a blast. It was a rare chance for boys and girls to hang out in a public place and have fun," said Shaghayegh...

Facebook... flash mobs... is it just fun and games? Look at London. In Iran, perhaps the regime is threatened by something that is only fun and games. But now that the authorities have cracked down, it's become political... and politicizing to the young people — the under-30s — who make up 35% of the population.

Farzan, a 22-year-old university student who was one of the organizers of the Tehran water war, says police tracked him down through Facebook and raided his house in the middle of the night. He was arrested, held for three days and beaten up, he says.

Young Iranians say although the event started out as innocent fun, it has now turned political. They are vowing to challenge them with more events.

A nationwide water war is scheduled for Friday, after the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

Didn't the American revolution begin with a snowball fight?

Erica Jong, who's nearly 70, would like you all to know that she's so much sexier than her daughter, who is 32.

Molly Jong-Fast will be 33 on August 19th, and Erica Jong, writing in the NYT, says that her daughter is "in her mid-30s." Ouch. Mom! That hurt. Let's take a closer look at that mother-daughter relationship. Jong prattles on, purportedly revealing what young people think about sex but really revealing how she, an aging woman, looks at young women:

Daughters always want to be different from their mothers. If their mothers discovered free sex, then they want to rediscover monogamy. My daughter, Molly Jong-Fast, who is in her mid-30s, wrote an essay called “They Had Sex So I Didn’t Have To.” Her friend Julie Klam wrote “Let’s Not Talk About Sex.” 

Klam! What a great name — an aptonym — for a woman who doesn't want to talk and specifically wants to close off the topic of sex!

The novelist Elisa Albert said: “Sex is overexposed. It needs to take a vacation, turn off its phone, get off the grid.” Meg Wolitzer, author of “The Uncoupling,” a fictional retelling of “Lysistrata,” described “a kind of background chatter about women losing interest in sex.” Min Jin Lee, a contributor to [Jong's] anthology, suggested that “for cosmopolitan singles, sex with intimacy appears to be neither the norm nor the objective.”

Generalizing about cultural trends is tricky, but everywhere there are signs that sex has lost its frisson of freedom....

Not only did we fail to corrupt our daughters, but we gave them a sterile way to have sex, electronically....

Jong thinks young women use the internet for "simulated sex without intimacy."  Jong was famous in her youth for seeking actual in-person sex without intimacy . Or... no, she wasn't! She was famous for writing about seeking actual in-person sex without intimacy. Writing... reading... hello? That's a simulation. On the internet, women find actual real partners and then meet them in person. How many women are just hanging out on porn sites? Men, maybe, but Jong purports to tell us about young women. And Jong's evidence is what other women writers are writing. These are the writers, the simulators. What are other young women doing, the one's who aren't cogitating and regurgitating cogitations?

Just as the watchword of my generation was freedom, that of my daughter’s generation seems to be control....

In this intergenerational battle, who is the real control freak?

The backlash against sex has lasted longer than the sexual revolution itself. Both birth control and abortion are under attack in many states...

Lust for control fuels our current obsession with the deficit, our rejection of passion, our undoing of women’s rights....

Now, she's all over the place. I think it's funny that she made "control" a big theme, then mentioned "birth control" and didn't notice the irony. Birth control... why not say the feminists who wanted to control birth were the ones obsessed with control?

The ultimate in control is determining the things that will be controlled and the things that will be kept uncontrolled. Can we talk honestly about that? After you've finished preening over how free you are about the things that you like to be free about?

"The problem is with adults... If they say we’re becoming more stupid, it’s perhaps because we’re in a school system they invented."

"We need better teachers and talk about more relevant stuff in class... Maybe they should ask us for some advice."

Hey, that's what we Boomers used to say. Then we grew up and put our ideals into practice. How do you like it? Are you going to grow up an put your dreams into practice? Good luck making the Boomers' grandkids stupid.

ADDED: "Relevant" was a 60s buzzword. I remember that well, and Wikipedia backs me up in its crazyWikipedian way:

Relevance
Relevance describes how pertinent, connected, or applicable something is to a given matter....

Politics

During the 1960s, relevance became a fashionable buzzword, meaning roughly 'relevance to social concerns', such as racial equality, poverty, social justice, world hunger, world economic development, and so on. The implication was that some subjects, e.g., the study of medieval poetry and the practice of corporate law, were not worthwhile because they did not address pressing social issues.^{[ citation needed ]}

"There were only 12 playboys - not more - in the world."

"They were charming and spoke languages and behaved well with women. I think that today most of the fun has gone. To go with a girl to Tahiti was incredible. Now everybody goes to Tahiti. This generation can do anything, but it's less fun."

Kids who eschewed TV to overachieve in school are crying over the SAT essay question about reality TV shows.

Oh! Cruel irony! It vexes!

“This is one of those moments when I wish I actually watched TV,” one test-taker wrote on Saturday on the Web site College Confidential, under the user name “littlepenguin.”

“I ended up talking about Jacob Riis and how any form of media cannot capture reality objectively,” he wrote, invoking the 19th-century social reformer. “I kinda want to cry right now.”

Less than a minute later, a fellow test-taker identified as “krndandaman” responded: “I don’t watch tv at all so it was hard for me. I have no interest in reality tv shows...”

Quit crying. All you need is test-taking skills:

Peter Kauffmann, vice president of communications for the College Board, said that “everything you need to write the essay is in the essay prompt.”

Don't you just know that some of these test-takers will go the rest of their lives fretting about what might have been if only they'd been asked about one of the more elite things they'd studied and not this lesser topic that the inferior teenagers knew so much about precisely because they hadn't worked so hard and with such virtuous self-denial? But some of these hardcore grinds might get a clue: Maybe life will work out just as well if I give myself a break, relax, and have some fun.

"The Internet is now the main national and international news source for people ages 18 to 29..."

"In 2010, 65% of people younger than 30 cited the Internet as their go-to source for news, nearly doubling from 34% in 2007. The number who consider television as their main news source dropped from 68% to 52% during that time."

Good lord, I can't believe the switch over to the internet is going so slowly. Who on earth is watching TV news? I'm checking out the internet all day long, and I never watch TV news. And I'm nearly 60 (I say on the 7th day of my countdown to age 60).

"What are your thoughts on feminism today?"

Fran Lebowitz is asked:

Well, now they’ve done it, and I believe that women have gotten pretty much as far as they’re going to get. Which is better, but not great. I mean, it’s immensely better. There’s no comparison. It’s against the law to say, “This job is just for boys.” But that doesn’t mean there aren’t all kinds of jobs you can’t have [as a woman]. And there are all kinds of things you won’t get. It’s just much more subtle now. And that’s progress.

But there are still girls who make it bad for girls. Young girls are always showing me their diamond engagement rings. “Look, Fran!” It’s so old-fashioned. I think that I am too old to feel that people who are kids remind me of my parents. Someone my age is supposed to be angered by kids. You’re supposed to say, “These crazy kids—what will they think of next?” You’re not supposed to say, “These kids are so boring. These kids are so regressive.” It’s like the 1950s. The 1950s weren’t just about great suits. That time was really suffocating.

So it seems to me that people, especially women, especially women who have all these choices, are now looking for things that aren’t oppressive exactly but are pretty suffocating. What used to be called middle-class respectability looked like it was going to disappear, but it didn’t. It’s returned. It just returned in a different costume. If you do it in a loft instead of a split-level in the suburbs, it’s still the same. I’m not saying you shouldn’t be allowed to do it; I’m saying it’s suburban. This is why New York today seems suburban to me—all kids and babies in strollers. It’s 1950s domestic life. The sidewalks are the same size, but now you have twins and dogs.