"The Trouble with Boys" by Peg Tyre (review)

Author: Peg Tyre

Title: "The Trouble with Boys: A Surprising Report Card on Our Sons, Their Problems at School, and What Parents and Educators Must Do"

Publication: Three Rivers Press, 2008, ISBN 978-0-307-38129-3, 311 pages, paper, indexed, 20 chapters


I could have fun with the title of the book, because it reminds me of “The Trouble with Harry”. An reviewing a book on these blogs is a bit like watching a really independent film, and the subject matter of this book would make great material for a PBS Frontline show, I think.

I worked as a substitute teacher in northern Virginia for a while, doing about 240 assignments, and I can certainly say that some boys do succeed spectacularly, at everything: sports, academics, arts. I think back over my own piano lessons in the 50s, and more girls took piano than boys, but as I look at what goes on today, it seems there are more male composers than female, still, and some music and acting, in different ways, seem to make demands on “real men” – they always seem fit and strong (as long as they stay away from the bottle or drugs). A few weeks ago, Taylor Lautner, still 17, hosted Saturday Night Live. Yes, it’s quite remarkable that a young man, not yet a legal adult, is talented and mature enough to host a show like that. So some boys do very well. They always have.

In my senior year of high school, I joined the Science Honor Society (that was 1960-1961), and there was only one girl. In tournament chess, men have dominated, but in recent years women’s chess has grown and women write many columns in the USCF publications.

All of this loops back to a basic point: men and women are different, and the educational system of the 50s really did take that into account. Boys were allowed to be boys long enough to be ready for school, by and large, in middle class America. Through a series of changes related to gender equality and abstract educational theories, as well as some changes in the family itself (fewer stay-at-home moms, fewer and later kids) the early years of the educational system became harder on some boys, particularly some minorities and those whose parents have lower incomes.

Kindergarten, she pointed out, became the new first grade, and pre-schools and grade school alike placed unreasonable expectations on some boys, setting up a vicious cycle that sets them up for lifetime failure (after attempts at special education). The harder we try, it seems, the worse it gets.

Boys do play differently. Apart from competitive roughhousing, they like to set up domains in which there are places to go and things to happen. (Model railroading is still popular with many boys, and the attraction of many talented boys to computers is explained partly by the fact that computing gives them a world that they can manipulate. Yes, kids learn to code java in middle school; once, when I was subbing, an eleven year old sixth grader got me past a “blue screen” error with a complete safe mode reboot.)

The author does provide discussion of the biological differences between boys and girls (p. 182 is particularly interesting), even in starting in utero. She covers controversies like boys-only classes and the lack of male teachers in lower grades (because of income and "fear" of cultural stereotypes, about which she doesn't mince words). What I noticed is that participation in performing arts, whether music or standard drama (very different experiences in some ways) really seems to help boys develop cognitively. I don’t know what the scientific explanation is, but it seems very real to me.

Sometimes boys fall behind for other reasons; being behind physically can make some boys over-cautious and fearful of risks, leading to paradoxes. On p 252 she discusses the "double standards" we have for boys: we want them to be in charge and be independent, but we expect them to sacrifice themselves in war or serve the interests of the community. All of this was all too real to me.

Tory Johnson's "Hired to Fired"

Author: Tory Johnson
Title: "Fired to Hired: Bouncing Back from Job Loss to Get to Work Right Now"
Publication: Berkley, 2009, ISBN 978-0-425-23055-8, 300 pages, paper, 11 chapters.

Tory Johnson is the founder and owner of “Women for Hire” (link) and often appears on ABC “Good Morning America” to give career and job seeking advice. Much of it is like a practical handbook and pep talk, with familiar tips.

Several aspects of her presentation are interesting, however. First is her own personal story, of how she got fired summarily from NBC news in the 1990s after “journalism scandal” involving reporting on GM, with which she was at most tangentially involved. (I worked for NBC myself as a computer programmer in the financial area in the 1970s.) Could she have been tainted by association? She moved on, to Paramount’s Nickelodeon, staying in public relations. Nickelodeon is interesting to me in that in 2006 I heard its pitch for screenwriting interenships.

She encourages using the Web and social media tools to augment your search, but warns that employers are using them too to check out candidates. But she suggests getting a following on Twitter and Facebook, and with blogs. She suggests that content should be limited to professional areas. That can present a challenge, however. If you blog about your past job, a future employer might fear that you would be inclined to talk about a future job negatively or even disclose trade secrets after quitting some day, a concern that San Diego columnist Michael Hemmingson has led to a practice called “pre-doocing”. Before social media became popular around 2005, I had expressed concerns about the complciations that could occur if people in management or in a position to make decisions about others self-broadcast their views at all in public. But a lot of times it is relatively easy for younger professionals to write about their professional areas in ways that encourages further employer interest. I know a pianist whose blog in interesting and provides an excellent example of personal “professionalism” (look here); another friend has worked mostly in copyright and in the DMCA area since college and can easily present a “coherent” presence online.

Back in 2006, various sources started talking about “online reputation defense” (such as with Michael Fertik’s “Reputation Defender”) and Tory Johnson then wrote a column on ABC News, “cleaning up your digital dirt”.

She also talks about the tension in the workplace between those with families and “singletons” (she uses the word). She maintains that “no group should be rewarded at the expense of another” but provides discussion that this is a most sensitive problem in practice. This reminds me of Elinor Burkett’s 2000 book “The Baby Boon: How Family-Friendly America Cheats the Childless".

Nat Geo Mag demonstrates terraforming of Mars; also, article on FLDS polygamy

The February 2010 National Geographic is particularly interesting.

On p. 30 there is a brief presentation of “The Big Idea” showing in pictures how terraforming of Mars could take place over at least a millennium. Carbon dioxide from soil and the polar ice caps of dry ice could, if released, create “global warming” and raise temperatures while settlers like in habitation modules. Eventually photosynthetic plants could develop, maybe forests. Daytime temperatures on some of the planet would be 40-50 degrees F, about like the Northwest Territories in Canada in June. But the atmosphere would remain oxygen poor; people would have to wear “scuba gear” to go outside of their insulated homes.

Over thousands of years, people would change biologically under less gravity, maybe becoming a distinct species with the same intelligence, resulting in political issues.

Mars would eventually lose its terraformed atmosphere over many more millions of years because of evaporation, low gravity, and lack of a magnetic field. So the habitability of Mars will not outlast that of Earth when the Sun expands into a red giant in 4 billion years.

The issue also has an important article “The Polygamists: An Exclusive Look Inside the FLDS, by Scott Anderson. “If you have men marrying 20, 30, up to 80 or more women, it’s simple math that there will be a lot of men who aren’t going to get wives.” They become the castoffs, in a system that rejects western civilization’s rule of “one per customer” (as George Gilder put it in his 1986 book “Men and Marriage”) in monogamous marriage, so everyone has a chance.

The link for the issue is here.

I visited Colorado City, AZ in October 1987, and visited the Reformed LDS and Temple Mount in the Kansas City/Independence areas in 1982.

Ben Mezrich's "Accidental Billionaires": a short history of Facebook

Author: Ben Mezrich
Title: "The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook: A Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal"
Publication: Doubleday, 2009, ISBN 978-0-385-52937-2, 260 pages, hardcover, 34 chapters and Epilogue.

The author, himself a Harvard graduate, has ten other books to his credit, and it’s not immediately apparent how close he was to the “real story” of the founding of Facebook (aka Facemash, etc.) at Harvard.

The white cover of the book gives away its flavor: there is a champagne cordial and red accoutrements, and the back cover reads “they just wanted to meet some girls.”

The book does give a clear picture of how the site evolved from a campus “experiment” (of sorts) to a billionaire’s Silicone Valley company quickly, with personalities evolving quickly.

Before getting into the legal controversies at all, let me point out one critical fact. Mark Zuckerberg, as did others, envisioned the site as that would help people who already knew each other stay connected online. Originally, each campus was to have its own Facebook. At the same time, Myspace (by late 2004) was already seen as a vehicle for self-promotion, just as Blogger and Wordpress as well as shared hosting sites came to be viewed as vehicles for self-publication.

Even so, by mid 2006 Facebook had become a centerpoint in the discussion of “online reputation”, a development that Zuckerberg and others never intended. By way of comparison, Myspace still looks much more like a “self-broadcasting” platform to me, but all the career counselors say that Facebook has wound up in the center of how many job candidates look. Indeed, some people have not gotten jobs or internships because of “inappropriate” pictures specifically on Facebook.

Mezrick paints Zuckerberg as the geek who slid into fame in flipflops and cargo shorts, the brilliant but socially reclined kid to whom other turned in schemes to help them meet girls – it’s using your brain to get a biological reproductive advantage. First were the Winklevoss twins, rowing team athletes who had asked Mark to help them develop a “ConnectU”, then Eduardo Saverin, the business man and investor point person of sorts, Sean Parker (a partner of Shawn Fanning and Napster at one time), Peter Thiel, and Aaron Greenspan (whose book I reviewed here July 5, 2008) . The legal conflict with the Winklevoss brothers is interesting, whether it could fall within an academic honor code (at Harvard) or whether it involves real intellectual property infringement. Generally, you can’t copyright ideas, but you can protect trade secrets; this case seems to be in a gray never-never land. The book depicts the ultimate treatment of Saverun and then Parker as relentless and as a betrayal. But "It's not personal, it's just business," as Trump would have said on "The Apprentice."

Mezrick's narrative is lively enough to suggest that the story of Facebook would make an interesting indie film. If so, I'd be game to take part in making it.

eBooks present digital piracy problems for established authors

Here’s an important story on CNN by Matt Frisch, “Digital Piracy hits the e-book industry,” link here.

Some publishers , such as Scribner for Stephen King’s “Under the Dome” (link to author’s video (link) wait for several weeks before releasing an e-book. (Does the book remind one of “The Truman Show?”) Scholastic, publisher of J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series (franchise -- kids like them!) has avoided e-book release altogether so far.

But Dan Brown’s “The Lost Symbol” (Doubleday) was release in Kindle at the same time as in print, and wound up quickly in BitTorrent. There is a derivative work by Stephen Cox, “Decoding The Lost Symbol”.

The piracy problem is confounded by the fact that sometimes new authors may “give work away” on line in order to develop an audience, especially for novel nonfiction material.

Another problem is that old books, except for the top bestsellers (usually fiction) tend to drop off in popularity quickly as residuals become available from resellers. I got a call from iUniverse Dec. 23 about my own “Do Ask Do Tell” books regarding advertising campaigns, and indicated that I did not think they could be effective for old non-fiction (dating to 1997). I am working on a new book, a novel, now, but so far relatively secretly (a few preview comments on my blogs). It has to be “as good as it gets” to break the market. It was to be called “Brothers” but Lionsgate used that for an unrelated movie so I am also considering “Tribunal and Rapture”.

Cory Doctorow: "How to Destroy the Book": Hint: DRM

“The Varsity” has an edition of a speech by Cory Doctorow, as transcribed by Jade Colbert, made Nov. 13 at the National Reading Summit (link) called “How to Destroy the Book”, with link here.

The speaker goes back to the concept of owning a copy of a book (or an “instance” of a book in Object Oriented Programming Jargon – I once got an email from a coworker about my 1997 book titled “my book” when he meant “my instance of your book”).

Yes, in the physical world, once you own the “instance”, you can lend the instance to others (as libraries do) or make physical copies for your own use, probably (although not with library books, it copying meant you would never buy a book you would normally have to pay for). (You couldn’t easily copy whole books at Kinkos, or employees wouldn’t do it). But digital rights management (DRM) has so complicated the picture, making the “purchaser” of an e-book a “licensee” in some cases (it gets complicated, as the essay explains).

I remember back in the 1960s a friend and I would tape each other’s records, sometimes: we thought that we both bought so many classical record original copies (usually at deeply discounted sale prices) that we were fair to the music industry. Taping onto a cassette for private use made some sense, because in the old days records would wear out. CD’s changed that (although CD’s might not store forever, after all).

Doctorow also talks about the international treaty negotiations in South Korea and concerns over expanding downstream liability. YouTube and Blogger, for example, could never possibly preclear every posting or video posted by amateurs. Many people don’t get this (or maybe they do).

Bruce Bartlett's "The New American Economy": the end of Reaganomics?

Author: Bruce Bartlett
Title: "The New American Economy: The Failure of Reaganomics and a New Way Forward"
Publication: Palgrave/MacMillan, 2009, ISBN 978-0-61587-8, 266 pages, hardcover

In his Introduction, Bartlett relates how he got fired from his job in a conservative think tank for writing a book, published by Doubleday in 2006, “Imposter: How George W. Bush Bankrupted America and Betrayed the Reagan Legacy”.

Bartlett gives a lot of historical technical explanations of both Keynesian economics, where government spending is sometimes necessary to dig an economy of the rut (as with TARP and all the Obama economic stimulus), supply side economics (Reagan), and various systems around the world, such as progressive consumption taxes, and VAT’s (value added taxes), popular in Europe, which he thinks the US needs to consider seriously now as a way of filling in its fiscal hole. He gives a lot of detailed explanations as to what happened in the Great Depression, Laffer Curve, the New Deal, the 50s and 60s, both deflation and inflation, the stagflation of the 70s, Reagan’s “morning” with the deficits (and Reagan actually increased some taxes!), Clinton’s fiscal conservatism, and George W. Bush’s general recklessness. Yes, to me, Bartlett sounds like a Democrat now, maybe even a liberal. He discounts the idea of “starving the beast”.

Particularly disturbing is his analysis of Social Security and Medicare, near the end of the book. Although Social Security is structured to look like an annuity (based largely on what a worker and/or his or her legal spouse earned while working), it really is much more of a “welfare program” for the elderly (regardless of need) than many people realize, partly because of the way it started during the FDR years. Libertarians (or libertarian conservatives) like to propose solving these problems with totally privatized pre-tax retirement and health savings accounts, with the idea that people should take care of themselves and not depend on either government or their adult kids. Of course, it’s difficult to switch to this system partly because of the welfare component and because, (to greatly oversimplify here), at an individual level “life is not fair.”

From a societal viewpoint, social conservatives have a point when they say that entitlement programs help break up families and when they say that social contracts need to be redesigned so that they give families more authority in mandating responsibility among their own adult members, especially those who do not have their own children (the “demographic winter” argument, which Bartlett does not get into in this book, but which seems to follow logically from the concerns that he does raise – he does mention a proposal that consumption taxes could help fund not only Medicare but even long term care insurance, as is being tried in some countries like Germany and Japan). The only way out of this (and the authoritarianism that it could invite) is to carefully analyze what it takes for adults to really be able to take care of themselves. Along these aims, it is not necessarily wrong to believe that some public goods (even health care and some aspects of public transportation, as in Europe) can be funded efficiently with consumption taxes, and it is possible to design consumption taxes so they are not regressive.

Bartlett also raises some red-flag warnings about how much of our debt is held overseas by investors in countries like China, and admits that by normal standards of creditworthiness, the U.S. seems to rank very low now, having squandered the savings built up in the Clinton years.