The Gadfly is up. Checker wrote a nice essay this week rebutting Charles Murray's claim, in The New Criterion, that??to believe "that just about all children who are not doing well in school have the potential to do much better" is merely romantic.
Also in The Gadfly, Checker reviews Mark Bauerlein's new book, The Dumbest Generation, the title of which refers to my generation. Checker notes a misspelling of Bauerlein's last name on the publisher's website, and fingers the perp:
One pictures the culprit as a 23-year-old staffer with iPod and ear-buds who illustrates the point of this Emory University English professor's terrific new book: today's young people don't know squat in large part because the trappings of the "digital age" have addled their brains, distorted their priorities, and occupied all their time.
Well.??Earlier this week, I also??learned from a very respected journalist at a very respected publication, that "nobody cares if a 25-year-old reads something, thinks really hard, and then writes his opinion about it."
Perhaps that attitude is one reason why lots of journalists are these days taking jobs as bartenders; history shows that 25-year-olds who think really hard should not be ignored. Just last night I read in Malcolm Gladwell's article in the newest New Yorker ("The Innovators Issue") that Alexander Graham Bell "knew the answer to the puzzle of the harmonic telegraph" after taking a walk in the woods and sitting by a swiftly flowing river. He invented the telegraph at 27-years-old--he was a 20-something guy who took a walk and thought really hard and voila.
In fact, lightning is far more likely to strike in the 20s than in later decades. A bevy of scientific and technological breakthroughs (not to mention artistic revolutions) were started by young people. The chef/owner of New York's hottest new restaurants, one of which just garnered 3 stars from the Times, started his empire when he was 27. Modern conservatism was ignited by a 25-year-old. And three major companies in the news a lot these days--Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo--were all founded by 20-somethings....