Half Changed World

I figure that this week, instead of blogging, my free time can be better spent making political phone calls.  And I’d like to encourage all of you (at least those in the US) to spend the time you would have spent reading it doing likewise.

MoveOn has made it incredibly easy to do this from your own home.  Go to www.callforchange.com and sign up, and they’ll tell you exactly what to do — who to call, what to say.  You need to be able to get online and call at the same time.  I’ve been using my cell phone so I don’t have to pay for long-distance calls.  Right now, they’re trying to ID people who are likely to vote for Democratic candidates in targeted races, but who have a history of not always making it out to vote.

The tool is very elegant — you click on different buttons to tell them if you get an answering machine or a bad number (or got hung up on), as well as to provide the responses you get if you reach a real live person.  If you get a bunch of no answers in a row, they give you a little pep talk.  And they track how many calls you’ve made, and how many responses you’ve gotten, so you can feel like you’re making real progress. 

A big thanks to This Mom for pointing this website out to me.  I got overwhelmed by the email, and so got off of the MoveOn list.  I’ve been meaning to volunteer on some of the local campaigns, but only made it out one afternoon.  After working all day, it’s just hard to give up my time with the boys in the evenings or weekends.  And they’re not quite old enough for me to drag them with me when I knock on doors.  But this I can do from home, after the boys are in bed. And if I only have time to do it for 10 minutes, I can do it for 10 minutes.   (They ask you to sign up for specific shifts, but that’s just a way of making you feel committed — you can actually hop on any time you have a few free minutes.)

A couple of people have pointed out to me Abigail Trafford’s column from this week’s Washington Post health section, where she proposes reshuffling the typical worklife so that people could receive government benefits and focus on childrearing (with some education and part-time work) while they were in their 20s and 30s, focus on work from 40 to 75, and then turn to community service at the end of their life.  It’s part of her regular focus on what she calls "my time," the time after midlife (what used to be called old age).

Trafford’s analysis of the problem is on target:

"Our current system is irrational. We concentrate on work at a time in our lives when we are having children and our children need us the most. We tend to leave or be eased out of the workplace when we have completed the child-rearing tasks — about age 50 — and now have time and energy to devote to work. And in our later decades, we are stereotyped as useless."

I’ve often said that it’s nuts that, in a world where many of us are going to live to be 80 or more, taking a few years out of the workforce in order to focus on childrearing can cripple your earning potential for decades to come.

I don’t think Trifford’s actual proposal is serious, although her underlying point is.  It’s certainly not feasible on a literal level.  She says that "Researchers have found that among healthy people with a college education, there is no change in health status between 55 and 75."  But the less educated — which largely means the poor — are far less likely to be in good health at an advanced age.  And they’re also far more likely to have physically demanding jobs.  Professionals who sit behind a computer all day may well be just as productive at 70 as at 40, but the same is far less likely to be true for people who have to stand on their feet, bending and lifting all day.

But the general point — that a system that expects continous work for 30 to 40 years and then continuous leisure for a period that may be almost as long doesn’t make sense — is dead on.  It makes far more sense to let people distribute their free time more evenly throughout their lifetimes, whether that means working part-time for long stretches or moving in and out of the labor force.  Parents asking for that kind of flexibility have made only modest progress, but the oncoming wave of baby boomers may reshape the landscape of work far more dramatically.

Today’s book review is a special two-for-one deal: two books on the crazy world of private elementary school admissions, one non-fiction, one fiction.

The nonfiction book is The Kindergarten Wars: The Battle to Get Into America’s Best Private Schools, by Alan Eisenstock. (Tip of the hat to Jennifer at MamaNoire who recommended it a while back.) Eisenstock was on the board of directors of his kids’ private school, and after years of watching the admissions process, decided to write a book about it. He interviewed a bunch of families across the country, and writes about the experiences of four composite families as they move through the process, from the first tours of the campuses until they receive the admissions letters and decide which schools to attend.

The main message of the book is that the process is nuts. The schools have far fewer slots than applicants. They can rule out some kids who are emotionally or mentally delayed (private schools are not required to accept children with disabilities or other special needs), but that still leaves them with far too many applicants. So, they wind up deciding based on arbitrary factors such as the gender breakdown of the kids who have sibling preference, and the characteristics of the parents. And because the only way to for the parents to justify the high cost of private school and the pain of the applications process is to fall in love with the schools that they’re applying to, they wind up convinced that their kids’ lives (or their own) will be notably diminished if they don’t get in.

Overall, Eisenstock sends a somewhat mixed message about the private schools. On the one hand, he seems to uncritically accept the parents’ claim that they have given their public school options a fair consideration and found them lacking. He even loads the dice by talking about Pastor Sweetie Williams, whose son, Eliezer, was the named plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the state of California for inadequate funding of public schools. (Williams appears for a few pages and then disappears from the book – I’d love to have heard more of his perspective on the applications process.) But then, in the end, Eisenstock suggests that the children who go through this process wind up burnt out and exhausted by the time they finish high school.

As it happened, while I was reading The Kindergarten Wars, I happened to notice The Ivy Chronicles, by Karen Quinn on the book swap shelf in my office. I picked it up, and finished it off in a few days worth of commutes. The heroine of the book, Ivy Ames (like Quinn herself) is a downsized corporate executive who reinvents herself as a private school admissions consultant. The back of the book proudly quotes a review from the New York Post that claims that The Ivy Chronicles "picks up where The Nanny Diaries left off." Well, this book makes the Nanny Chronicles look subtle and deeply characterized. Early in the book, Ivy needs to make herself a crib sheet to keep her clients apart with shorthand tags (the mobster, the lesbian couple with the adopted child in a wheelchair, the wall street mogul) and I found myself flipping back to that page with alarming frequency.

As you’d expect, the Ivy Chronicles ends with everyone getting what they deserve, including Ivy herself finding true love, while her most obnoxious client goes to jail for trying to bribe the FDA to approve a drug in order to influence kindergarten admissions. Over the top? Implausible? Yes. Except that we live in a world where Jack Grubman really did get an analyst at Saloman Smith Barney to change his rating of AT&T to get his kids into preschool. (As a writing teacher once told me, "In a world this strange, who needs fiction?")

In her comment, bj suggested that parents who aren’t going through the process are unlikely to read The Kindergarten Wars. I’m not sure that’s true. One audience for the book is certainly parents of pre-school aged children, who want to learn what to expect. But I also think there’s an audience of people who would never apply to private schools, and read the book so they can shake their heads at those goofy rich people. The scary thing is both audiences will find the Ivy Chronicles fills the purpose almost as well.

As for me, what I took away from the books is that no school is so good as to justify the pressure that some of these parents put on their children. No 5 year old should see that their parents’ happiness and self-esteem depends on how well they perform. I may yet someday apply to private school for my kids, but if I do, it will be knowing that the application process is a crapshoot and largely beyond my control. And that they’ll be just fine whether they get in or not.

So Obama is officially considering running for President.  He says he’ll decide after the election.   As those of you who have been reading this blog for a while know, I’m really hoping he runs. (Even though my dad thinks that it’s the kiss of death for David Brooks to be encouraging him to run.)  It would be great to have a candidate that I was really excited about for a change.  Maybe, as Rebecca Traister argued in Salon last week, it’s not fair that I can’t get enthusiastic about Hillary, but I can’t.

What do all of you think?  Has anyone read his new book?

(Sorry for the light posting lately — I’ve been busy and am just back from a business trip, where I didn’t have internet connection.)

Today’s book is Half of a Yellow Sun, by Chimamanda Adichie.  As I said last week, it’s excellent but depressing.  It’s a novel set during Biafra’s short lived independence from Nigeria, showing how the members of one family are affected as the country is afflicted by war and starvation.

I have to admit that when I picked up the book (after reading the rave review in the Washington Post), I had only the vaguest idea where Biafra was.  I knew it was in Africa, and knew that the name was associated with pictures of starving children.  I had some idea that it was one of the first places where widespread starvation became a media event.  (And I had heard of Jello Biafra.)

As I said to Phantom Scribbler, the book is sad, even horrifying, but not at all graphic in showing the violence.  Terrible things happen to many people, but almost entirely "off-stage" (as in a classic tragedy).  Adichie focuses in on the details of life, especially food — in the good years, she portrays the servant who won’t eat his family’s plain boiled yams after getting used to eating them with butter; in the bad years, she shows lizards and crickets becoming delicacies.  In describing a child suffering from malnutrition, she shows her dark hair becoming rust colored and falling out in clumps, rather than the standard images of ribs sticking out or bellies protruding.

With the reviews that Adichie is getting, she doesn’t need my recommendation.  But she’s got it.  I’m going to look for her first book — which is supposedly less dark — in the library.

I regularly get offers of books and videos sent to the email address on this blog.  At first, I was so thrilled by the prospect that I said yes to almost everything, but then I felt compelled to actually read them.  So I’ve gotten more picky.  But I was sufficiently intrigued by the email I got a few weeks ago for a book called "Pick Me Up" that I requested a review copy.  The email promised:

Are you ready to pursue knowledge through the coolest graphics and pop culture references around? Then you and your site’s are ready for the reference-book revolution!  From Beethoven to dinosaurs to Bangali facts, PICK ME UP explains the world around us through smart, witty writing and a fun and modern design. This captivating reference book serves more as an unencyclopedia for the internet generation, and teems with fascinating information about history, science, nature, geography, and culture. These cool facts, inspired by pop culture, serve as a serious boredom eliminator, and their arrangement is inspired both by video games and the internet. PICK ME UP appeals speicifically to modern kids and teens, and mirrors the multimedia world in which we live.

The book is certainly visually impressive.  It’s got a 3-D effect cover that creates an amazing illusion of depth, and the individual page layouts are well-designed and convey a significant amount of information, combining graphics and text.  D is well younger than the target age range for the book, but immediately asked me what it was and could he have it.  I think it’s the perfect book to leave in the bathroom, since you can pick it up at any page and read for a few minutes.

But, as a reference book, it’s got some huge holes.  The topics are clearly chosen based on what they had interesting graphics for, with no attempt at comprehensive coverage.  I have no idea how the pages are ordered.  (There will be an index in the published version, although it wasn’t in the uncorrected proof they sent me.)  And the attempt at creating hyperlinks (by listing keywords and the corresponding page numbers in bold) mostly made me wonder why this information should be in a book, rather than online.  For reference and graphics, the internet has a strong comparative advantage over print books.  (For proof, see Phantom Scribbler’s contest of yesterday.)  I have a feeling that this book will be mostly bought by parents and other older relatives for preteens who don’t read very much, and it won’t change that pattern.

By contrast, books are far superior to computers for portability and for ease of reading for long periods.  T is fascinated by the "e-ink" technology in the new Sony Readers, but so far I’ve seen absolutely nothing that makes me inclined to give up my wood pulp books for them.  The only applications I can think of that have any appeal are if I were in school (and all of my textbooks came in etext versions) or for long trips where I don’t want to schlepp a lot of books.

Update: Does anyone reading this own a kindle?

I’d love a review from a real person who has one.

We had N’s birthday party today.  For D, we had gotten away with having only family parties until last year, but since that put the idea of a "party" into N’s head, he would have been disappointed without one.  We had the sort of small-scale at-home party that everyone I knew had when I was growing up, and that is becoming less and less common in these parts.  Hullaballo, Pass the Parcel, pizza, cake, playdoh.  We invited the two other boys from his preschool class, of whom only one could come, and a family friend.  It was lovely.

And, even with such a small scale party, I’m exhausted.  I feel like I spent most of the weekend cleaning.  I don’t know the parents of N’s preschool classmates well, and was not willing to let their first impression be our usual level of benign chaos. (And even after the cleaning, I still worry that they think we’re slobs.)  At least three times today, D got overwhelmed by his frustration that N was getting all sorts of cool presents and he wasn’t and burst into tears.  It’s hard; I understand.

Via Shawn Fremsted at Inclusionist, I ran across this article by Theda Skocpol reviewing two books about the GI bill (free but annoying registration required).   Skocpol notes how unusual the GI bill was in providing assistance to young families:

"But unlike most other U.S. social programs, the G.I. Bill focused its largesse on young adults at just the moment when they were building lives for their families. Usually, we spend money on the elderly, who have earned the nation’s support after a lifetime of work."

The article made me think about Strapped, by Tamara Draut, which I reviewed earlier this year.  Draut talks about how the changes in the economy — the increased cost of education, housing, and child care — particularly pinch young adults right when they’re trying to start families.

The key point, I think, is that it was the 50s and 60s that were the anomaly, not today.  One of the reasons that, in most of history, men have married younger women is that men were strongly discouraged from marrying until they were able to support a family, and there was no expectation that they’d be able to do at a young age.  Older teens and young adults were expected to work, but they typically contributed their labor or earnings to their families of origin.  And when times were bad, as in the Great Depression, people married later.

So we’ve got this perverse combination of an economy that all but requires higher education for success (even though a college degree doesn’t guarantee a good job, as Lauren will attest), an educational system that is dependent on student loans, and an expectation that young adults should be able to make it on their own.  There’s no historical precedent.

Tired.  Cranky.  Maybe getting sick.

Too little sunlight.

Bad memories.

Reading excellent but depressing book.

Going to bed.

When you read the headlines each day from Iraq, of bombings, elections, and daily life, do you think about what the reporters went through in order to file their stories?  In today’s book, Tell Them I Didn’t Cry: A Young Journalist’s Story of Joy, Loss and Survival in Iraq, Jackie Spinner of the Washington Post attempts to describe what it is like to be a reporter in Iraq.

This is war reporting without any bravado.  Where Michael Weisskopf writes in his Time cover story that Iraq was "a dream assignment, a chance to escape Washington and work in exotic environs on a big story," Spinner cheerfully admits that she was terrified almost every minute, even as she argued with her editors to send her to Iraq and let her escape "career death" in the financial section of the Post.  Spinner writes about the constant fear of kidnapping or assault, the frustrations of reporting through a security cordon, the vitriolic emails she got from readers, and her attempts to establish something resembling a normal life under totally abnormal conditions (she cooked dinner for the Post’s Iraq bureau every Friday night, rotating through a variety of world cuisines).

I heard Spinner talk at an event earlier this year, and she spoke about how common it is for war reporters to get post-traumatic stress disorder.  Reading the book, I got the impression that writing it was therapeutic for her, giving her the chance to tell all the stories she couldn’t tell her family while she was overseas, because they would have been too freaked out.  Unfortunately, this doesn’t always make for good writing — Spinner buries the reader in a sea of details, without providing much in the way of perspective or context.

Spinner writes with passion about the role of the Iraqi reporters, translators, drivers and other support staff who make the American reporters’ work possible.  She notes that they were in far more danger than the Americans, risking their life every day they came to work.  She points out that the Iraqi journalists valued their work enough to ask for, and receive, bylines in the Post, even though they made themselves targets in the process.  But in spite of Spinner’s obvious affection for her Iraqi colleagues, she doesn’t make them stand out as individuals, except for one young woman who Spinner is particularly close with.

Until I sat down to write this review, I hadn’t noticed that the subtitle emphasizes that Spinner is a "young" journalist, but not that she is a woman.  In spite of that absence, it’s clearly a big issue in the book. Being a woman in Iraq obviously affected some of the stories that Spinner could report — she was less able to interview Iraqi men than her male colleagues, but more able to interact with women.  But beyond that, it’s hard to imagine a male journalist writing this book, with its free admission of fear and focus on interpersonal relationships.  Even the title — which comes from an episode when Spinner is nearly abducted — is something only a woman, who is stereotypically expected to cry, would feel a need to say.