Why no child prodigies in biology?

Indeed. It's why there aren't wunderkind medicine Nobel laureates as opposed to wunderkind physics Nobel laureates or Fields medalists. There's just too much that simply can't be derived from first principles and pure thinking and that needs long, hard-earned experience.

— Ash Jogalekar (@curiouswavefn) August 4, 2026

NYTimes Opinion: Don't Stress about AI; Don't Bring Back the Tests; A New Generation of Creatives

Three from The New York Times, June 22, 2026.

Robert J. Shiller, We Have to Stop Freaking Out About A.I.

Like many others, I believe A.I. could lower employment. But unlike most, I don’t necessarily blame the technology itself. Instead, I worry about the potency of the fear it is generating.

Our brains are wired to respond to stories. Narratives floating in a population can affect individuals’ economic decisions about whether to buy a big house, or whether to send their kids to an expensive private school or even whether to have kids at all. When millions of people make millions and millions of decisions based upon negative expectations, there is a risk that fear can actually help birth the reality.

The idea that something like artificial intelligence will replace many human jobs goes back thousands of years. Aristotle envisioned a powered loom and a self-playing lyre someday replacing human servants. In the 19th century, groups of textile workers (the Luddites) destroyed the new machines they believed were replacing them. In the 1920s, the play “R.U.R.” — the letters stand for “Rossum’s Universal Robots” — depicted a war of the robots against humans. [...]

...the British mathematician I.J. Good wrote an essay that imagined a new technology that could continue improving itself until its abilities would surpass those of humans. The idea, which came to be known as the “singularity,” would quietly circulate until 2005. That’s when the futurist Ray Kurzweil wrote “The Singularity Is Near,” a book arguing that human-level A.I. would arrive by 2029. Either we would merge with machines and transcend our biological limits, or the machine would grow so powerful it could end all of humanity.

The theory captured the imaginations of tech titans, and even the top A.I. researchers and executives, who warned of a range of alarming scenarios, from job losses to widening inequality or even the eradication of humanity itself. While the job market has slowed for a host of reasons, there are reports that fear of an A.I. apocalypse is worsening the freeze and contributing to record lows in consumer sentiment.

There’s only so much Washington can do about these narratives. And, suffice to say, Donald Trump is no Franklin Roosevelt.

As such, perhaps the best we can do is to appeal directly to the leaders of Silicon Valley who have been promoting these negative narratives with such vigor. Surely the resulting media attention highlighting how dangerously powerful your A.I. model is may help you sell more wares, but it may be far harder to do so in a period of recession. Try not to forget the critical lessons taught by our past.

Ross Wiener, I Thought ‘No Child Left Behind’ Would Fix Public Schools. I Was Wrong.

The new data is emboldening calls to restore something like the No Child Left Behind Act, the stringent, test-based accountability policy that defined American education from 2002 to 2015 and imposed penalties on schools whose students did not meet proficiency requirements on state standardized tests. The Atlantic captured that impulse in a 2025 podcast episode titled “Bring Back High-Stakes School Testing.” In it, Margaret Spellings, a secretary of education under President George W. Bush and now president of the Bipartisan Policy Center, argues we need to restore “the muscle of accountability, the muscle of assessment.” Rahm Emanuel, exploring a 2028 presidential run, said in April that Democrats have abandoned standards and accountability and must return to them.

It was a mistake in the past to treat test scores as the purpose of public schools rather than as partial proxies for what a good education actually delivers. Reading and math are profoundly important and improving instruction must be part of any serious agenda. But test-based accountability policies were not sufficient decades ago. They are even less adequate now. [...]

Over time, I became convinced that, with the best of intentions, I and many others in the education reform community had transferred our moral commitment to children over to the standardized tests. We had done this earnestly, not cynically, but we still did damage.

In 2023, 40 percent of high school students reported persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. One in five had seriously considered suicide; nearly one in 10 had attempted it. Research from the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins found that 40 percent of Gen Z believes political violence can be justified, compared with 11 percent of baby boomers. Too many students experience school as an obligation with few opportunities for agency or meaning; recent survey data indicates that large shares of students find school boring and irrelevant and are struggling with engagement in the classroom. The academic crisis and the human crisis are not entirely separate phenomena. [...]

Taking their priorities seriously would mean broadening what we expect from the classroom. Schools should put what students can do on equal footing with what they know, embedding real skills in academic learning rather than leaving them to chance or sequencing them to later in life. Schools should reconnect with the communities they serve, so young people learn through and about the places where they live. And they should reanimate the character-forming, developmental mission a pluralistic democracy requires.

Tom Rothman, Hollywood Needs Regular Jolts of Creativity. It Just Got One.

In the last month, “Backrooms,” a horror movie directed by Kane Parsons, a YouTube creator who just turned 21, opened to an astounding $81.5 million in America. A second horror film, “Iron Lung,” made and self-distributed by Mark Fischbach, another online creator, has grossed over $50 million worldwide. Perhaps most significant of all, “Obsession,” a horror film directed by Curry Barker, a 26-year-old YouTube creator, crossed $200 million at the box office this weekend and surpassed the latest “Star Wars” film.

“Backrooms,” “Iron Lung” and “Obsession” each has its own unique origin story. But what they have in common is that they’re all fueled by an avid young audience — exactly the demographic that gloomy industry pundits have repeatedly declared will never return to movie theaters.

Wrong.

Is this YouTube-fueled youthquake simply a coincidental confluence of events? Or does it portend an upending of the Hollywood status quo? Actually, it’s a bit of both. Indeed, for any fear of YouTube barbarians at the gates, this is instead a great opportunity for traditional Hollywood. [...]

Rothman then goes on the list changes in taste following Altman's M*A*S*H in 1970 and Soderberg's Sex, Lies, and Videotape in 1989.

This kind of moment is happening again. Mr. Barker, with a background in short films and YouTube sketch comedy, tells a story in “Obsession” that is so powerfully relatable to Gen Z audiences that the word of mouth has caused the box office to defy gravity.

When Mr. Parsons expanded his YouTube short films into the feature-length “Backrooms,” the aesthetic he’d honed as a teenager on the internet captured an underlying anxiety in his audience, with whom he’d already developed a direct relationship online. These filmmakers are very young, but what matters is not chronological age so much as an iconoclastic spirit, an instinct for what the audience is wanting but not getting and, of course, talent. [...]

“Backrooms” and “Obsession” are also the beneficiaries of expensive and savvy studio marketing campaigns. Reminiscent of how the New Hollywood directors made a lot of money for the old studios in the ’70s — think Francis Ford Coppola and “The Godfather” — and how the indie darlings of the ’90s did the same, these YouTube-born phenomena have ultimately prospered handsomely inside the system.

For perfect symmetry, note that the No. 1 film at the box office when it debuted two weekends ago, one spot ahead of “Obsession,” was “Disclosure Day,” made by Steven Spielberg, the greatest artistic and commercial director in history. “Disclosure Day” is his 37th film. His first was the ’70s New Hollywood anti-authoritarian film “The Sugarland Express,” which he made when he was not much older than Mr. Barker and Mr. Parsons.

The integration of independent creativity with industry influence is a good thing all around. It offers exposure for, and help to, new voices, giving them more visibility and opportunity, and it promotes the kind of originality that Hollywood desperately needs.

Needless to say, there's more at the links.

A toy to think with: The Erector Set

What Happened to the Erector Set? | The Toy That Taught Every Boy in America to Build

From the YouTube page:

For generations, the Erector Set wasn’t just a toy — it was a hands-on introduction to engineering, creativity, and real-world building.

Long before modern STEM kits and digital learning tools, children across America learned how to think, design, and construct using metal beams, bolts, and gears. Created by A. C. Gilbert in the early 1900s, the Erector Set became a symbol of innovation and imagination, inspiring future engineers and inventors.

In this video, we explore the complete story of the Erector Set — from its invention and rise during the golden age of American toys, to its cultural impact and eventual decline in a rapidly changing world of plastic toys and digital entertainment.

Discover how it competed with brands like LEGO, why its popularity began to fade, and what ultimately happened to one of the most educational toys ever created.

From steel structures to childhood dreams, this is the story of the toy that taught a generation how to build.

If you’ve ever wondered what happened to the legendary Erector Set… this nostalgic deep dive reveals it all.

Friday Fotos: Cosmic Ray Gun

When I was six or seven I had the idea that the world was a movie that God created to entertain the Baby Jesus. I guess I’d found those stories they told in Sunday school so entertaining that I figure the Baby Jesus enjoyed them as well. A year or three later I had an idea which I described this way in a rather long and complicated article about the Self:

When I was seven or eight I was given a toy which we can call the COSMIC RAY GUN – I forget the real name. It had the shape of a pistol, but it didn't shoot toy bullets or even make toy noises. Rather, it was a device for projecting short film-loops on the wall. Each time you pulled the trigger it would advance the film one frame. This toy came in a box and the box cover had some lettering which proclaimed the toy's name, COSMIC RAY GUN, a picture of the toy itself, and a picture of a boy holding a box. The boy's box had some (somewhat smaller) lettering, COSMIC RAY GUN, a (somewhat smaller) picture of the toy itself, and a (somewhat smaller) picture of a boy holding the box. This regress went as far as the resolution of the image would allow, but I was just clever enough to be able to imagine it going on and on and on without discernible end. That is to say, my brain was somehow able to imagine that each representation could itself become the object of a representation.

Last night I presented that paragraph to ChatGPT along with a request for it to draw a picture of the box. I then spent the next 45 minutes or so having it draw the same image in various styles. Here’s some of my favorites.

Christianity and children

I’ve been working on a new post for 3 Quarks Daily, which will be out next week some time. Working title: “Is The World A Movie God Created to Entertain the Baby Jesus?” That got me wondering: Does Christianity place a special emphasis on children? I put the question to Claude 4.6 Sonata. Our conversation is below the asterisks.

* * * * *

I have the impression that Christianity places a great deal of emphasis on children. Is that true, or just a reflection of the fact that my most sustained contact with explicit Christian ideation came in Sunday school?

Both things are probably true simultaneously — Sunday school did shape your sense of it, and Christianity does have a genuine and deep emphasis on children, though it's more complicated and multifaceted than the Sunday school version suggests.

The textual basis is real and striking. The Synoptic Gospels all contain the moment where Jesus rebukes his disciples for turning children away — "Let the little children come to me" — and then makes the extraordinary claim that one must become like a child to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. That's not just sentiment about children's innocence; it's a theological inversion. The child is the model for the adult, not the other way around. Spiritual maturity means recovering something prior to socialization, prior to worldliness.

There's also the Incarnation itself — God entering the world specifically as a baby, helpless, in a manger. The Baby Jesus isn't incidental to Christian theology; the vulnerability and particularity of infancy is theologically loaded. God chose that.

But — and this is worth noting — the heavy institutional emphasis on children's religious education, Sunday schools, confirmation classes, is actually a relatively modern development, largely 19th century Protestant. The Sunday school movement was partly a response to industrialization and child labor, as much a social reform project as a theological one.

So your childhood cosmology — the universe as a movie for the Baby Jesus — was formed in that particular modern institutional context, but it reached back and touched something genuinely ancient and theologically serious. Which is perhaps another instance of the process you're describing: becoming what you were always going to become.

Is this more the case with Christianity than with other world religions, such as Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism?

It's a genuinely interesting comparative question, and the short answer is: yes, Christianity is somewhat unusual in making a child — and specifically an infant — theologically central in a way the others don't.

Judaism centers children in practice and transmission — the Passover Seder is explicitly structured around children asking questions, and circumcision marks male children at eight days old. Children are crucial as the carriers of the covenant forward in time. But no child figure is theologically central the way the Baby Jesus is. The emphasis is on children as the future of the people, not as a spiritual model or divine incarnation.

Islam similarly emphasizes children as trust from God, and there are strong ethical obligations around their care and education. But again, no child is theologically central. Muhammad was a prophet who matters as an adult. The religion's founding moment is a grown man receiving revelation.

Hinduism is interesting because Krishna is worshipped as a child — the infant Krishna, the mischievous boy Krishna stealing butter — and there's genuine theological weight to that child figure, not entirely unlike the Baby Jesus. This may be the closest parallel. But Hinduism's theological diversity is so vast that it's hard to generalize.

Buddhism places essentially no theological emphasis on children or childhood. The Buddha's story begins with his renunciation of family life. Children appear ethically — as beings deserving compassion — but not theologically.

So Christianity's specific move — God becoming a helpless infant as the central salvific act — is fairly distinctive. The vulnerability of the Baby Jesus, his need for Mary's care, his arrival among the poor and marginal, carries theological freight that the other traditions don't quite replicate. Which makes your childhood cosmology — the universe staged for that specific infant — a more theologically precise intuition than it might first appear.

Christianity and linear history

And then there’s the idea that Christianity places a unique emphasis on linear history, from the birth of Christ in the past to his return in the future. To be sure, that’s derived from the Jewish concept of the messiah, but Judaism never had an historical messiah, nor did Islam, though I believe it accepts Jesus as a prophet.

Yes, that's right on all counts. Islam does accept Jesus — Isa — as a prophet, one of the greatest, but not divine and not the final prophet, that being Muhammad. Islam also has its own eschatology, including the return of Jesus at the end of times, which is interesting — he returns in the Islamic framework too, but as a sign of the Last Day rather than as the returning Lord.

But your larger point about linear history is important and well-taken. Christianity inherits the Jewish sense of history as purposive — moving somewhere, meaning something — but then anchors it with an actual historical event at the center. The Incarnation is the hinge of history. Everything before points toward it, everything after flows from it. That's what gave Western civilization its peculiarly intense relationship with historical time, with progress, with the idea that things are going somewhere.

This is actually Karl Löwith's argument in Meaning in History — that modern secular ideologies like Marxism and liberalism are essentially secularized versions of Christian eschatology. The proletarian revolution or the end of history replace the Second Coming, but the narrative structure — fallen past, redemptive event, fulfilled future — is the same skeleton.

Which brings your cosmology full circle in an interesting way. Your secular mysticism, coupled with Prigogine and Tyson, preserves the directionality of Christian historical consciousness — the universe moving toward complexity, toward mind, toward something — while dissolving the supernatural scaffolding.

The movie has a plot. It just doesn't need a projectionist.

Centuries of Childhood

Oh, and I just remembered what got me thinking about Christianity and children. One book that influenced me a great deal as an undergraduate was Philippe Aries’s Centuries of Childhood. The idea that childhood is conceived of as a specific stage in human maturation, that children aren’t conceived of as little adults but with reduced capacities, that was invented in early modern Europe. That’s one of the books that got me thinking about the ranks idea. In roughly the same two centuries or so we had, 1) a revolution in art, 2) the scientific revolution, 3) the invention of childhood, and 4) the emergence of the novel.

That's a remarkable constellation, and the fact that they cluster in the same two or three centuries is itself a datum that demands explanation. It's not obvious that they're connected, but once you see them together you can't unsee it.

Ariès's argument is that before early modern Europe, children were treated as small adults — integrated into adult life, adult work, adult space — as soon as they were physically capable. The emergence of childhood as a protected, distinct developmental stage, with its own spaces, its own literature, its own pedagogy, required a new conception of the human person as something that unfolds through time, that passes through qualitatively distinct stages, that requires cultivation rather than just initiation.

Stand by Me and the demise of free-range childhood [like I had] [Media Notes 176]

Sarah Wildman, The End of the Free-Range, Device-Free ‘Stand By Me’ Childhood, NYTimes, Mar. 22, 2026.

Wildman took her 12-year old daughter to see Stand by Me. Much to her surprise her daughter was fascinated:

After first seeing the film, my daughter asked my father, who spent his childhood in a small city in the Berkshires, if the freedom the film depicts was the freedom he had, if childhood once looked and sounded like that. She wondered if this sort of unobserved life was as he remembered it, if he might, just as these boys did, have set off for days without parental concern. He told her, with amusement, that he was, in fact, expected to be home for dinner, but beyond that, yes, he could roam, without surveillance. (He quibbled with the 12-year-olds’ smoking.)

The central premise of the film is, essentially, a postwar, middle grade “Odyssey.” The boys of “Stand by Me” — played by Wil Wheaton, Jerry O’Connell, Corey Feldman and River Phoenix — encounter obstacles: brutal or absent parents, a purportedly terrifying dog, bloodsucking leeches and a set of drag-racing teenage hoodlums who wield as weapons pocketknives and lit cigarettes. News arrives via overheard gossip (one boy learns the location of the dead body from his brother) or hand-held transistor radio. They live almost entirely outdoors. Along the way, they come to realize their friendships far outrank the prize of their discovery.

I, too, was struck by the sheer wildness once permitted children. The autonomy of the boys in “Stand by Me” is vastly different from the freedoms allowed a child living in 2026, when each is practically AirTagged, when we can track a car or a person’s phone across a map on a device in our palms, when we can know each moment of every day where each and every person in our home can be found. A gathering of children is more likely to be in front of a screen than with a rucksack and a deck of cards, as in the movie. Children are all too often found languishing alone in their bedrooms, direct messaging their friends, which not only reduces the likelihood of them being covered in leeches but also vastly decreases their chances of discovering anything at all.

There's much more at the link.

Wuthering Heights as initiation

Ross Douthat, Whatever Happened to Grown-Up Movies for Kids? NYTimes, Feb. 24, 2026.

What Douthat has in mind is “telling grown-up stories in a fashion suited to the ages between, say, 10 and 16.” He goes on:

What I want is emphatically not more Y.A. culture or “tween” books or Marvel sequels. Rather I want more adult culture that’s accessible to early teenagers, that presents grown-up themes without being explicit about everything, that feels like a bridge connecting childhood and adulthood rather than a young-adult detour or a jarringly coarse acceleration.

For example:

What I want is emphatically not more Y.A. culture or “tween” books or Marvel sequels. Rather I want more adult culture that’s accessible to early teenagers, that presents grown-up themes without being explicit about everything, that feels like a bridge connecting childhood and adulthood rather than a young-adult detour or a jarringly coarse acceleration.

He then goes on to contrast the novel, Wuthering Heights, with the current movie version:

which has been framed by its director, Emerald Fennell, as an attempt to channel her own experience encountering the Emily Brontë novel as a teenager. For Fennell that means not just giving us masturbation on the moors but also sexualizing every inch of the story, every cracked egg and kneaded loaf of dough, just as a hormonal teenage mind might do.

But that’s not what the Brontë novel offered to her teenage-reader self. It told a story in which sexuality is a potent force but not a pornographic one, in which extremity is everywhere but obscenity is not, and there are undercurrents and implications that the younger reader can grasp in part and the adult reader more completely.

“Wuthering Heights” the novel initiates, in other words, where “Wuthering Heights” the movie browbeats. And that feeling of initiation is what neither explicit R-rated entertainments nor the Y.A. fiction/superhero complex can really offer: a sense of encountering a world that’s fully adult but that makes allowances for innocence and inexperience, and that can be grasped provisionally with the promise of a greater understanding later on.

Sutan's First Day of American School!

Why many (most, all?) of us are afflicted with some degree of sexual shame

I thought this discussion was excellent, and useful. It’s hosted by Marni Kinrys and Kristen Carney; each of them has her own YouTube channel and both have businesses coaching men about women and about dating. I’m somewhat familiar with Marni Kinrys’ channel (she brands herself as Your Persona Wing Girl), but not Kristen Carney’s.

Marni’s advice seems reasonable and useful. But, like much self-help advice, it’s not usable right “out of the box,” as it were. It’s the sort of advice that must be internalized to be useful; that takes practice. She offers courses, which may take one closer to internalization, and one-on-one coaching, which may be even better. But I don’t know, as I’ve not done either; I’ve only listed to some videos.

In any event, while this video is presented as yet more advice for (hapless) men, it makes more sense to think of it as a conversation between women that is interesting in and of itself. I would think it interesting to other women as well as to men. Marni and Krystin have Dr. Tina Schermer Sellers as their guest. She’s an educator and sex therapist, and seems quite sensible to me.

Their topic is shame, which interests me a great deal. A couple of months ago I had a conversation with Claude about it. For what it’s worth, Schermer’s remarks are consistent with a number of things in that conversation. She’s interested in and advocates a practice of childhood sexual education that starts in toddler-hood and continues into the teens. What she says in the podcast strikes me as being quite sensible, and, alas, utterly foreign to my own experience growing up and,  I’m sure, to many others as well. Her remarks give me hope for the future, that there really is a better way. But we’ve got lots of harmful cultural practices to jettison.

Workers, not thinkers, that's the goal of our Pre-K to 12 educational system

Kidz these days seem stripped of agency, don't know how to build

Akim Reinhardt, Fly, Be Free, 3 Quarks Daily, April 23, 2025.

Reinhardt starts by complaining about over-parenting in the contemporary world, something I've been reading about for at least a decade if not two. He's concerned about the consequences:

The point here is not to criticize modern middle class parents or make them feel bad. That would be hypocritical as I have no children of my own. But as someone who has been teaching college students for a quarter-century, it seems to me that the overprotective parenting style along with other factors, such as modern K-12 education and near constant attention to screens, have had a profound effect. Ask any long time college instructor. They will tell you. Things have changed.

Today’s 18–22 year olds are nowhere nearly as competent as their predecessors. Note: I did not write “smart.” Today’s students are plenty smart. But they are less competent. And they know it. Their ability to do has been crippled. Denied a childhood of self- and peer-directed discovery, problem solving, dispute resolution, and genuine play, many young adults no longer know how to make their way through the world in basic ways.

They’re well aware of this and it causes many of them great anxiety. It has also engendered many of them with very unrealistic expectations about what others will do for them. Because the parents and other adults in their lives constantly directed them in nearly all endeavors, they expect that direction to continue as they themselves become adults.

In the classroom, they now require detailed instructions for every assignment. When I began teaching, I didn’t even bother giving them an assignment sheet, and they were fine with that. They knew what to do when I said “write a paper.” Now my assignment sheets can run as long as a double-sided, single spaced page, and some of them still complain that it’s not enough direction.

Alas, it’s not just in college.

I know dozens of people in management positions in industries as varied as entertainment, software, and auto repair. Absolutely all of them, when I ask, complain about how their new, young workers can’t seem to figure out basic tasks by themselves, or even think it reasonable that they should, instead expecting their superiors to explain everything for them.

Here's my response:

Color me sympathetic, Akim, deeply sympathetic. I grew in Western PA in the 1950s and 60s in a neighborhood that was suburban on the edge of rural. One good friend lived on a one acre lot. As I recall there was a small cornfield in the middle of the lot and plots for various vegetable. At the rear of the lot, away from the street, and next to a small wooded area there was a place where we tunneled into the ground a bit and built a small underground chamber which was central to many of the games we played. I can almost remember shoveling some dirt out of the hole and putting it elsewhere.

There was another spot in the wood where we cleared a small area and carpeted the ground with moss. We would find patches of moss, lift them from the ground very carefully so they didn't break and them move these "tiles" to where we wanted them. In another place we piled rocks across a small stream to dam the water. We then saw the water build up behind our small dam and become a small pool. In middle school we had shop class where we learned to build things with hand tools. We also had mechanical drawing, where we learned how to make precise engineering drawings that could be used in building things.

Johnstown was a steel town. My friends had fathers who worked in the steel mills. When they became old enough, some of them went into the mills as well. The mills themselves were large physical structures that I saw often.

Now, I've spent most of my life thinking about very abstract things, and exploring abstract worlds. But that intellectual activity rests on a childhood of experience where I moved freely about the physical world, worked on it and with it, changed it.

I can't help but think that a lot of the hype and craziness that surrounds AI – something I know a thing or two about because that's a world in which I think – is the result of not having a strong enough grasp of the physical world. I don't know how often I've heard a complaint that we're not a nation of builders. Some of that complaint is directed at the plethora of regulations which makes is much easier to NOT-BUILD than to build. But I fear some of it is the result that too many adults never learned how to build during childhood and so they can't do it as adults. Rather, they want the machines to do it for them.

This is not a formula for a propitious future.

My mother and her sewing

This tweet by Miriam Posner reminded me of my mother’s sewing skills, which were considerable:

One thing my mom used to do every year is sew me an outfit for the first day of school. Bless her, but I won't subject my daughter to that.

— Miriam Posner (@miriamkp) August 31, 2016

My mom may well have made my sister a first-day-of-school dress, I don’t remember and I wouldn’t have been paying attention to that. But she certainly made dresses for my sister. She made pajamas for both of us. And my parents collaborated on Halloween costumes.

When I was quite young I was fascinated mom’s sewing. When I heard the rhythmic sound of the sewing machine I’d go and watch her sew, the needle moving up and down, up and down, the motion of the foot (I believe that’s what it’d called) as she advanced the cloth through the machine, the “snip!” of the scissors when she cut the thread, all of it fascinated me. How she set the machine up, but, alas, I can’t describe it because I don’t remember it very well. I think there were two threads the interlinked during the sewing. Something called a bobbin. The foot-pedal she used to regulate the speed.

Later on, in my late teens, before I went off to college, she taught me how to sew buttons on and how to darn socks. I went off to college with a little sewing kit, a bunch of needles and small spools of thread in various colors, a darning egg, an ugly red and white plastic one, not like her elegant wooden one, and several spools of darning cotton. And I actually did sew on buttons for many years, still have needles and thread, though it’s been several years since I’ve sewn a button on a shirt. I darned my socks for years as well, but gave it up, two, possibly three decades ago. It was just easier to buy new socks. A couple three four new pairs a year seemed to do it.

But, late in my teens, one thing bothered me. Mother never sewed anything without a pattern – she had lots of those. Why did she always need a pattern? Is making up your own that difficult? For some things, maybe, a fitted shirt or blouse would be tricky (shoulders). But for a basic dress or pajamas? It seemed to me that anyone who had the skill mother had should also have been able to do some original work.

That never made sense to me. Do liberated women make up their own patterns? Or have they given up sewing altogether, not that there’s anything wrong with that. But someone has to know how to sew. We can’t leave it all to machines and professional tailers and seamstresses, can we?

Model trains!

When I was quite young, perhaps five or six, I got a model train for Christmas. An O-gauge freight train with a steam engine and a few cars, made by Lionel. I found it Christmas morning when my sister and I went downstairs to open our presents. There it was, circling around the tree. It was magical!

Keep in mind, however, that I don’t actually remember that. But it must have happened and it must have been something like that because I really did have that train and that’s just how things went.

In later years I’d get some accessory to go with it, a new car, perhaps some building. I remember kits for buildings that my father would assemble. Later on I got another train, a diesel passanger train with Santa Fe colors and sleek aluminum passanger cars. So my father built a platform in the basement where I could play with the trains all year around. Me and my friends would go down in the basement and play with the trains. My friend Billy Cover had a train layout as well. His was an American Flyer S-gauge, smaller than the Lionel O-gauge, but not as small as the HO gauge in the video.

I would spend hours designing model train layouts, the track patterns, buildings here and there, roads, and landscape. The fact is, I probably had more fun designing layouts than I did actually building them and then playing with the trains. My father had a well-equipped wood shop and he had woodworking skills, after all, he built the train platform. If I’d really wanted to build an elaborate layout, he would have helped me. No, in the end, it was the plans that I had fun with.

Neural maturation, cerebral plasticity, and the adaptive value of vacations

I’ve had another session with Claude (3.5 Sonnet) in connection with the article I’m writing. Tentative title: “Melancholy and Growth: Toward a Mindcraft for an Emerging World.” The post title carries the topics under discussion.

I’ve read widely in neuroscience over the years, and continue to dip into the technical literature now and then. Some years ago David Hays and I published on “Principles and Development of Natural Intelligence” in which we reviewed a wide range of material: neural processes and organization, behavioral correlates, the phylogeny of the nervous system, and growth in human development. That’s my basic framework. On that basis Claude’s remarks make sense to me. Still, I’d advise caution in making use of those remarks.

I’ve appended its remarks below. I’m using my standard convention, setting my words in bold Courier and Claude’s reply in plain Courier.

Version: Claude 3.5 Sonnet

* * * * *

What can you tell me about the development of the nervous system in humans? I know something about the course of myelination, which I believe is mostly complete by the early 20s, when the sutures of the skull finally set. I also know about the proliferation and pruning of dendrites early. Give me some more information.

I see you already have some knowledge about neural development! Let me add to that while gently correcting a small misconception - the cranial sutures actually begin fusing in early childhood and are typically mostly fused by age 6, though some continue fusing into adulthood. This is separate from the process of myelination you mentioned.

Neural development is a fascinating process that begins very early in embryonic development. Here are some key aspects and timeline points:

During embryonic development, the nervous system starts forming from the neural tube around week 3 post-conception. This process, called neurulation, creates the foundation for the entire central nervous system.

The early stages involve rapid neurogenesis (creation of new neurons), with neurons being produced at a rate of about 250,000 per minute during peak periods of fetal development. Most of our neurons are actually produced before we're born!

You mentioned dendritic pruning - this is indeed a crucial process. After birth, there's massive synaptic proliferation (synaptogenesis) creating many more connections than we'll ultimately keep. This peaks in different regions at different times:

• Visual cortex peaks around 6 months
• Prefrontal cortex peaks around age 1-2

The subsequent pruning you referenced continues through adolescence, following a "use it or lose it" principle where frequently used connections are strengthened and unused ones are eliminated.

Regarding myelination, it proceeds in a predictable pattern:

• Begins in the spinal cord during fetal development
• Progresses from back to front in the brain
• Sensory pathways myelinate before motor pathways
• Higher-order association areas myelinate last
• The prefrontal cortex indeed continues myelinating into the early 20s

One fascinating aspect is how this development correlates with function. For instance, the areas controlling basic functions like breathing and temperature regulation are well-developed at birth, while areas involved in executive function continue developing into early adulthood.

Would you like me to elaborate on any particular aspect of neural development? I find the relationship between developmental timing and functional capabilities particularly interesting.

Tell me more about this, “though some continue fusing into adulthood,” and this “The prefrontal cortex indeed continues myelinating into the early 20s.”

Let me address both of those ongoing developmental processes.

Regarding cranial sutures, while most fusion occurs early, the sagittal suture (running along the top of the skull from front to back) can continue its fusion process into the 30s. The sphenofrontal and frontoethmoidal sutures typically complete fusion between ages 20-40. Some parts of the lambdoid sutures (at the back of the skull) may not fully fuse until around age 60, though this varies considerably between individuals.

As for prefrontal cortex myelination, this prolonged development has significant implications. The extended myelination period correlates with ongoing refinement of executive functions including:

• Complex decision-making
• Impulse control
• Planning ability
• Social cognition
• Risk assessment

Recent research has shown that myelination isn't simply a linear process of adding more myelin. Instead, it involves active remodeling where myelin sheaths can be modified based on neural activity and learning. This process is particularly active in the prefrontal cortex through adolescence and early adulthood.

This extended development period helps explain certain patterns of adolescent behavior and why capabilities like judgment and impulse control continue to mature into the early-to-mid 20s. It's also relevant to understanding vulnerability to certain psychiatric conditions that often emerge during this period.

Would you like me to expand on the functional implications of either of these developmental processes?

Using a kiddie-cam to train an Ai through the eyes and ears of a child

2/ First, we are incredibly grateful for the authors of the SAYCam paper and dataset (@mcxfrank, @andyperfors, and others not on twitter), which made our work possible and we were not involved in collecting. SAYCam provides an unprecedented look at a child's egocentric,…

— Wai Keen Vong (@wkvong) February 1, 2024

4/ To test this, what better than to train a neural network, not on enormous amounts of data from the web, but only on the input that a single child receives? What would it learn then, if anything? pic.twitter.com/bQ9aVbXUlB

— Wai Keen Vong (@wkvong) February 1, 2024

6/ Results: Even with limited data, we found that the model can acquire word-referent mappings from merely tens to hundreds of examples, generalize zero-shot to new visual datasets, and achieve multi-modal alignment. Again, genuine language learning is possible from a child's… pic.twitter.com/FCHfZCqftr

— Wai Keen Vong (@wkvong) February 1, 2024

8/ Limitations: A typical 2-year-old's vocabulary and word learning skills are still out of reach for the current version of CVCL. What else is missing? Note that the modeling, and the data, are inherently limited compared to children’s actual experiences and capabilities.
- CVCL…

— Wai Keen Vong (@wkvong) February 1, 2024

Childhood deaths are down

One thing about the much-lamented rise of more intensively supervised childhood activities is that kids have in fact become a lot less likely to die. pic.twitter.com/MTjR7spLM8

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) October 16, 2023

The Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Adults' Subjective Wellbeing

Blanchflower, David G. and Bryson, Alex, The Effects of Adverse Childhood Experiences on Adults' Subjective Wellbeing. IZA Discussion Paper No. 16479, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4587415 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4587415

Abstract: Using four cross-sectional data files for the United States and Europe we show that Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) have a significant impact on subjective wellbeing (SWB) in adulthood. Death of a parent, parental separation or divorce, financial difficulties, the prolonged absence of a parent, quarreling between parents, parental unemployment, sexual assault, experiencing long-term health problems, being bullied at school and being beaten or punched as a child all have long-term impacts on wellbeing. These experiences impact a wide range of wellbeing measures in adulthood including satisfaction with many aspects of everyday life, happiness and life satisfaction, self-assessed health, and are positively linked to measures of negative affect including the GHQ6. The evidence linking ACEs to lower SWB in adulthood is consistent across fifty different measures including sixteen positive affect and twenty-six negative affect measures relating to assessments of one's one life, and eight variables capturing how the individual feels about the area she lives in, including unemployment, drugs, violence and vandalism plus democracy in their country. Trauma in childhood is long lasting.

H/t Tyler Cowen

I'm reminded of the literature on childhood attachment,  a subject I studied as an undergraduate at Johns Hopkins where I took an independent study with Mary Ainsworth (and in Wikipedia), one of the founders of attachment theory. That has been central to my thinking every since.

Let kids run free; it's better for their mental health.

Peter Gray, David F. Lancy, David F. Bjorklund, Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Well-being: Summary of the Evidence, The Journal of Pediatrics, Volume 260, 113352, September 2023, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jpeds.2023.02.004

The opening paragraphs:

It is no secret that rates of anxiety and depression among school-aged children and teens in the US are at an all- time high. Recognizing this, the American Academy of Pediatrics, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, and Children’s Hospital Association issued, in 2021, a joint statement to the Biden administration that child and adolescent mental health be declared a “national emergency.”

Although most current discussions of the decline in youth mental health emphasize that which has occurred over the past 10-15 years, research indicates that the decline has been continuous over at least the last 5 or 6 decades. Although a variety of causes of this decline have been proposed by researchers and practitioners (some discussed near the end of this Commentary), our focus herein is on a possible cause that we believe has been insufficiently researched, discussed, and taken into account by health practitioners and policy makers.

Our thesis is that a primary cause of the rise in mental disorders is a decline over decades in opportunities for children and teens to play, roam, and engage in other activities independent of direct oversight and control by adults. Such independent activities may promote mental well-being through both immediate effects, as a direct source of satisfaction, and long-term effects, by building mental characteristics that provide a foundation for dealing effectively with the stresses of life.

The Next Level: Universal Children and a New Humanity

I'm bumping this post from Feb. 2014 to the top because it seems like a very Kimono Mom kind of post. For one thing it opens with a line from Wordsworth that I used to close my 3QD Kimono Mom piece. It ends with a short segment on one aspect of Japanese culture, "Robots, Cyborgs, and Kawaii," and the two sections before that are about kids. Perhaps I should do a Kimono Mom post about their visit to Studio Ghibli and Sutan's Totoro birthday cake. Anyhow, here it is, a  post about a New Humanity, which is what Kimono Mom philosophy is all about.

* * * * *

The child is father to the man.

–Wordsworth

In countless conversations–on the phone, through email, above all, in person–David Hays and I cobbled together a theory of long-term cultural evolution in which ever-more sophisticated cultural forms would bootstrap themselves out of the remainders, ragged edges, and random sallies of extant regimes. We looked around for a suitable word, but “stages” had been taken by Piaget, and “levels” had been taken by William Powers. So we settled on “ranks” as our term: The first humans had Rank 1 culture; Rank 2 culture emerged through agriculture and literacy; the European Renaissance–art, the scientific revolution, capitalism, the whole ball of wax as they say–nurtured Rank 3 ideas, attitudes, and practices; and Rank 4 started emerging here and there around the world at the beginning of the 20th Century.

One facet of this process has to do with personality structure. We’ve all got the same basic biology, but different societies organize it into different ways of being human. Different languages, different technology, different architecture, different forms of governance, and so forth, all that’s obvious. But, when you think about it, really think about it, all of that implies and requires different personality structure. That’s more difficult to conceptualize and talk about, and it inevitably attracts the attention of intellectual police of various kinds. It’s also part of the practical tradecraft of diplomacy.

Hays and I come closest to this in our articles The Evolution of Expressive Culture (Hays 1991) and The Evolution of Narrative and the Self (Benzon 1993). What most concerned us, however, is: What’s happening now and what’s next? Those are very difficult questions to answer. Since we’re in the middle (muddle?) of the NOW it’s next to impossible to get the kind of critical distance that allows you to see what’s going on. It’s the old problem of not being able to see the forest because you’re lost in the trees and there’s no helicopter in sight. As for the future, seeing THAT is even worse.

And yet we’ve got to try, if only as a gesture toward steering our way in the now. So I’ve cobbled together some passages from here and there. First, two long ones, the final sections from those two essays Hays and I wrote. Then I’ve got three shorter passages. The first is from A. O. Scott’s NYTimes piece on the end of American adulthood. Then some old notes of mine on “universal kid space,” where you find, among other things, “family” movies that appeal to children from six to sixty and, as Buzz Lightyear would note, beyond. Finally, a short passage from Takahashi Murakami’s essay “Earth in my Window,” where he gives his take on managa, anime, and contemporary Japanese popular culture.

 

Hays 1992 – Coda: Toward a Fourth Rank

The preceding section makes obvious that many perversions conceal themselves behind the rubrics of politics, art, business, and romance. An object or event presented as art should be coherent, even if its coherence is obscure to any but the initiated. Its coherence should tend to elicit a sense of the coherence of the self in recipients, if only in the healthy initiated recipients. An object or event that broadcasts incoherence is a manifestation of perversion; it is not art. A theater of the absurd is, on its face, itself absurd, although it may be that the facade is meant to confuse only the uninitiated. The sense of coherence and meaningfulness is not paralleled by some sense of incoherence and meaninglessness. The first promotes health and effectiveness, fulfillment and inner well being; the latter promotes breakdown, not integration of a higher order.

Yet the twentieth century has been a time of transition, and transitions are not easy. Three ranks of cognitive capacity and cultural evolution are complete; a fourth rank may be taking shape. If not, then a time of darkness is likely to come next. In times of transition, children are not raised in a way that makes adult integration on the new level as easy as it will later become. They come to maturity with a congeries of incompatible materials in their heads, and no generally accepted cultural pattern to adopt. With luck, some make it; at first, perhaps, only in narrow technical domains, but later larger and larger fractions of the population arrive at the new way of understanding the whole of life. The most fortunate among us may just now be achieving such integrity.

In this context, let me turn once more to ballet. Around the beginning of the century, thinking about time began to change. Motion pictures were conceived and made real. Time-and-motion studies began, and used photographs exposed long enough to record the path of a small light during the course of a complete action. Painters began to try to capture temporal phases in a single canvas. Just at this time, Balanchine began to study ballet. His perception and conception of movement was perhaps in the new vein, different from his predecessors'.

On this interpretation, Balanchine's "art" is quintessentially of the twentieth century. But is it art? We still use the word "science" to identify the study of nature with instruments and mathematics, but serious work in our time is deeply different from the science that prevailed from the time of Copernicus, say, to 1895. Has art, which belongs to Rank 3, been superseded? Did structure, goals, and audience change when the representational manner gave place to impression and abstraction? When harmony gave place to the atonal?

Balanchine's pieces are variously called abstract, pure, or plotless. They are certainly not emotionless, although some pieces seem to present no emotion other than reverence (or awe)--the emotion that Denby could give no name to. If they are of a new kind, not art but something unnamed as yet, then it is all the more remarkable that little children watch them in fascination. As a new rank forms, early work is often cold; to achieve a result of a new kind, the worker gives up what was commonplace in the old kind. Older ballet told stories; Balanchine does not exactly tell stories, but he sometimes suggests them. In Scotch Symphony, the leading ballerina wears a tutu and all the other dancers wear kilts. Man and woman dance together and are separated by a group of men. Without narration or mime, a generic plot comes across.

With better trained dancers, Balanchine could make tighter sequences, and he knew how to form sequences effectively. He could make new combinations of movements over the parts of a dancer's body, and across the whole company. He used these new capacities to arouse more powerfully the modal action patterns of the audience; and once the audience acquired the skill of watching, and the courage to be so moved, he obtained the response and the recognition that he had earned--but development of an audience began in the 1920s and did not cross a threshold until 1947.

And so we continue. Perversity, incoherence, and constriction cover most of the world. The minority that can free itself, maintain dignity, and find fulfillment in work, play, adventure, and love is still small but seems to be growing The creative, productive, and organizational powers of those whose emotions are under control but not repressed is great enough to give them the future. Unless the barbarians once more overrun civilization, the world is moving toward a new stage.

Benzon 1993 – Rank 4: Civilization and Its Discontents

For all its sophistication, however, the coherence of the Rank 3 self has been bought at the price of considerable emotional repression. This coherence makes it possible for us to create large complex social organizations affording a high degree of security for large numbers of people. But emotional dissatisfaction runs high. And so Rank 3 expressive culture began to break down at the turn of the twentieth century, yielding modernism in all sectors.

Some twentieth century narratives, like twentieth some century music, are so dense and complex that only a specialist could love them and then, one fears, primarily because they are fertile territory for scholarly exegesis—James Joyce's Finnigan's Wake and John Barth's Letters are the first examples which come to mind... Many narratives abandon the realism which dominated the nineteenth century novel... Donald Barthleme has blended anything with everything in an astonishing range of short pieces; Thomas Pynchon has done the equivalent in a few long narratives of spectacular depth and breadth. Other writers— e.g. Timothy Mo, Frank Chin, Amy Tan, V.S. Naipaul, Wole Soyinka—articulate their concerns from a limbo between Western and non-Western culture.

It is not obvious to me that any of this is fully Rank 4 narrative, though much of it is profound and moving. Rather, as I have argued in the case of music ... we have a rich and roiling evolutionary soup from which new expressive devices can, in time, emerge...

I do not really know where serious literature is going. Some friends, however, have made comments I find suggestive. One friend, Janet Hays, has suggested that adults, men and women, need to learn how to enact a female role in some situations, a male role in others. I believe her suggestion is aiming beyond recognizing and acknowledging characterological androgyny—that individuals of either sex have both male and female tendencies—to asserting the need for psychological and social mechanisms regulating and supporting switching back and forth from one type of role to the other. When a woman dons a business suit she would thereby undergo a transformation similar to that which occurs in phone booths for Clark Kent. A man would undergo a similar transformation upon donning a housedress or, at least, a Mr. Rogers cardigan.

Another friend, Druis Knowles, asserts that African-Americans are bicultural, acting according to one set of norms among themselves and according to different norms when among European-Americans. Sidestepping the question of just what “culture” means in “bicultural,” Knowles's assertion seems similar in kind to Hays's suggestion. Both are alluding to a fairly high-level organization of personal resources, allowing one to function efficiently in diverse contexts which differ from one another in deep and extensive ways...

Another observation from my own experience seems germane. Back in my days as a university faculty member, I noticed that I was not in a really good research frame of mind until three or four weeks after the Spring semester had ended—my brain had to have one set of modes to handle the academic routine of teaching and committee work and another set for intense thinking. Transition from one set of modes to the other took time.

Extended vacations may well afford a similar change in modal organization. One takes a month off from work and spends two weeks on safari in Africa; then boards a small sailing boat and island-hops in the Caribbean for a week, and concludes with a climb up El Capitan. With all that time away from work, the mind changes and we enter different modes of experience. Reading travel books, or novels, even the best, is quite different from going there. Physically restructuring the mind requires time and a steady regime of different sensations, desires, and acts. That “willing suspension of disbelief for the moment” (Coleridge, 1817, p. 6) through which the Rank 3 reader transports him/herself to another world is but a transition between currently available modes. What happens after days and weeks of exploration has a different quality.

What has to happen so that it doesn't take weeks to get there?—rather, you step through the door and, in a manner of seconds, or minutes at the most, you are in a different world. Back in the 1960s, many of the best and brightest of a generation of Rank 3 Americans sought to make this quick leap with hallucinogenic drugs. Now a new generation projects the same desires into a polysensory and hyperkinetic cyberspace conjured up through virtual reality technology (Porush, 1993). Neither the chemical nor the electronic technology is directly to the point. The chemical technology carries grave risk. The electronic technology has yet to display long-term dangers, but we do not know what to do with it. If we knew what to do, we could realize suitable expressions in any available medium, electronic or otherwise.

In this situation we can only explore, as our ancestors before us, and theirs before them, have done. With passion, trust, attention to craft, and an intellect nourished and strengthened by love, we may emerge in a twenty-first century both brave and new. Avanti!

A. O. Scott: Adulthood’s End?

“The Death of Adulthood in American Culture,” published in The New York Times Magazine, Sept. 11, 2014:

A little over a week after the conclusion of the first half of the last “Mad Men” season, the journalist and critic Ruth Graham published a polemical essay in Slate lamenting the popularity of young-adult fiction among fully adult readers. Noting that nearly a third of Y.A. books were purchased by readers ages 30 to 44 (most of them presumably without teenage children of their own), Graham insisted that such grown-ups “should feel embarrassed about reading literature for children.” Instead, these readers were furious. The sentiment on Twitter could be summarized as “Don’t tell me what to do!” as if Graham were a bossy, uncomprehending parent warning the kids away from sugary snacks toward more nutritious, chewier stuff.

It was not an argument she was in a position to win, however persuasive her points. To oppose the juvenile pleasures of empowered cultural consumers is to assume, wittingly or not, the role of scold, snob or curmudgeon. Full disclosure: The shoe fits. I will admit to feeling a twinge of disapproval when I see one of my peers clutching a volume of “Harry Potter” or “The Hunger Games.” I’m not necessarily proud of this reaction. As cultural critique, it belongs in the same category as the sneer I can’t quite suppress when I see guys my age (pushing 50) riding skateboards or wearing shorts and flip-flops, or the reflexive arching of my eyebrows when I notice that a woman at the office has plastic butterfly barrettes in her hair...

Fiedler [Love and Death in the American Novel] saw American literature as sophomoric. He lamented the absence of books that tackled marriage and courtship — for him the great grown-up themes of the novel in its mature, canonical form. Instead, notwithstanding a few outliers like Henry James and Edith Wharton, we have a literature of boys’ adventures and female sentimentality. Or, to put it another way, all American fiction is young-adult fiction.

The elevation of the wild, uncivilized boy into a hero [Huck Finn] of the age remained a constant even as American society itself evolved, convulsed and transformed. While Fiedler was sitting at his desk in Missoula, Mont., writing his monomaniacal tome, a youthful rebellion was asserting itself in every corner of the culture. The bad boys of rock ‘n’ roll and the pouting screen rebels played by James Dean and Marlon Brando proved Fiedler’s point even as he was making it. So did Holden Caulfield, Dean Moriarty, Augie March and Rabbit Angstrom — a new crop of semi-antiheroes in flight from convention, propriety, authority and what Huck would call the whole “sivilized” world...

Y.A. fiction is the least of it. It is now possible to conceive of adulthood as the state of being forever young. Childhood, once a condition of limited autonomy and deferred pleasure (“wait until you’re older”), is now a zone of perpetual freedom and delight. Grown people feel no compulsion to put away childish things: We can live with our parents, go to summer camp, play dodge ball, collect dolls and action figures and watch cartoons to our hearts’ content. These symptoms of arrested development will also be signs that we are freer, more honest and happier than the uptight fools who let go of such pastimes.

Cartoons and Universal Kid Space

I devoted a post to various notes about “universal kid space” back in 2010. My earliest notes on the subject date back to September of 2003:

What I find so interesting an peculiar about those films [the early Disney features and similar films] is that they are intelligible and entertaining both to fairly young children and to their parents and grandparents. That is to say, Grandpa’s grandchildren can enjoy these films on their own terms, but so can Grandpa. Grandpa might take special pleasure in viewing these films with his grandchildren, but he doesn’t need to be with them in order to take pleasure in the films; he doesn’t need to borrow his pleasure from theirs.

I think such films, and the cultural space they inhabit, are a remarkable creation. When and where did it come into existence? What are its characteristics?

On the first question, the narrowest possible answer is that Disney created that space in the later 1930s. I do think that is too narrow an answer. We can, for example, look to such 19th century texts as “A Christmas Carol,” “Tom Sawyer” (but perhaps not “Huckleberry Finn”) and the “Alice” books. Most broadly we might think of Neolithic campsites where the band gathers in the evening to chat and to tell stories. Everyone in the band is there and so everyone hears the stories – as such bands do have specifically children’s music, they may also have specifically children’s tales, but I don’t really know. This answer, I feel, is perhaps too broad, as Neolithic cultures are, in general, rather undifferentiated.

As for the characteristics of such a cultural play space, the question arises because of the very different psychologies of children and adults. Here I’m thinking both in cognitive terms and affective-motivational terms. I assume that children and adults construe the objects in this space in very different ways – each according to her needs and capacities. What interests me is that objects can be created which answer to such very different psychologies. How is that possible? What specific characteristics must those objects have?

Robots, Cyborgs, and Kawaii

Takashi Murakami seems to be suggesting all of this and more in “Earth in my Window,” his long essay in Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture (2005, p. 148):

Robots are refined to a level at which they compensate for the inadequacy of human communication, expand human capabilities, and even possess self-consciousness. With the aid of such robots, humans can evolve into superhuman New Types. People themselves become a black hole: life in death, transformation, repeated mutation. Thought stops and the child never grows up. Sucked in by kawaii, you lose initiative, or laugh at your own lethargy and take a robot for a real-world partner. And yet, amidst it all, people awaken and evolve toward a new humanity.

Thriving and Jiving with Music @3QD [+ Liszt & Roma music]

I’ve got another post up at 3 Quarks Daily:

Thriving and Jiving Among Friends and Family: The Place of Music in Everyday Life

It’s a lightly revised version of my introduction for a book Charlie Keil and I have just published:

Check out this blurb from Steve Feld:

Who says a peace manifesto can’t be deep fun? The wisdom of collaborative practice rings bells on each page here, inviting us to dance in the streets of a world still within reach. Get with the beat of this drum!

As I note at the end of the article, Playing for Peace: Reclaiming our Human Nature, is the third book in a series: Local Paths to Peace Today. The first book, We Need a Department of Peace: Everybody's Business, Nobody's Job, is about a simple concrete step the United States can take in the direction of peace, to create a Department of Peace in the Federal Government, which was originally proposed by Benjamin Rush in 1793 – and is currently proposed in H.R. 1111 proposed by Rep. Barbara Lee of California. Breaking up large nations and corporations would create a bit more free-play in the world, allowing for greater cultural variety and local autonomy. We lay that out in the second book in the series: Thomas Naylor’s Paths to Peace: Small is Necessary. The goal of Playing for Peace is to sketch out a basic educational regime, a paideia, to use some Ancient Greek terms, that can provide a framework, an ethos or 'moral character' in which we can create a new world that is both more just and more joyful.

You can find a table of contents and a description of each of the articles in the book at this post from July 29, 2022.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, I’ve been re-thinking music. It started when Charlie Keil asked me to see what I could find about Beethoven’s capabilities as an improvisor. I quickly found quite a bit, some of which I’ve blogged here, Beethoven was a supremely gifted improvisor – From the testimony of his contemporaries [the past isn't what you thought it was]. I’ve known that Beethoven was an improvisor for some time, as were other classical composers. But I didn’t quite realize how central it was to their musical practice. Something I learned from reading around in Dana Gooley’s Fantasies of Improvisation: Free Playing in Nineteenth-Century Music (2018), which I’ve not yet finished. Thus Carl Czerny, perhaps Beethoven’s best-known student, wrote an instruction manual on improvisation, Systematische Anleitung zum Fantasieren auf dem Pianoforte (1829).

Leaving liturgical organ music aside, improvisation didn’t all-but disappear from classical music until roughly the middle of the 19th century, and even then the idea of improvisation remained as a kind superior and purer form of music. This led to romantic ideas about Roma (Gypsy) music, which Golley notes (p. 266):

Grellmann’s pioneering Versuch über die Zigeuner, for example, from which many nineteenth-century writers borrowed, described music is the one “fine art” the Roma people cultivated, but said nothing about improvisation in connection with music. Nor was improvisation a dominant marker of gypsy character in the novels of Walter Scott, which played a disproportionate role in disseminating ideas and images throughout Europe. Liszt’s Des Bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (1859), a book probably ghost-written to a considerable extent, was thus a pioneer in giving great emphasis to the improvised character of the music. It set out to challenge prevailing comical and fantastical stereotypes and celebrate the musical gypsy as a kind of unsullied, primitive artistic genius, and to this end it used improvisation is a key literary motif: “Gypsy art [l’art bohémien], more than any other, belongs to the domain of improvisation, and cannot subsist without it.”

Improvisation here is not only a metaphor for the wandering, day-to-day existence of the gypsies, but also for an intensity of expression and direct transmission of feeling absent from music produced through mediation and reflection. The music is strong and vital because it is “so eminently inspired, so little dominated by the laws of reflection or constraint, so spontaneous, and until recently so inseparable from improvisation.” In gypsy performances there is furthermore no conflict between the player’s authenticity of expression and the formation of communal bonds.

This reads remarkably like ideas that developed about jazz in 20th century America.

This idealization and etherealization of improvisation seemed to parallel the solidification of the idea of a musical work as a kind of fixed Platonic ideal. Here I must confess that I didn’t realize that that conception stood in need of solidification. For I had implicitly assumed that it had always been there. And for me, of course, that is the case. That’s what I learned, just as I had learned that improvisation was this exotic and mysterious practice. These two conceptions go hand-in-hand: the fixed and eternal work, exotic improvisation. Those conceptions were worked out in the middle of the 19th century.

It seems that the existence of a written score is not itself sufficient to support the idea of the fixed work. That idea is projected onto the score, but does not arise from it, perhaps because even the most carefully notated score must still be interpreted.

There’s more, about music and childhood. I’ve made some notes about that here, Liszt, childhood, and improvisation.

More later.