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Home-made pinball-baseball stadium from the 1950s |
The New York Times on Dec. 28 had a magazine-sized op-ed, “Let’s Start Over”.
The rag is in four sections.
One is Politics, Education, Feminism, and Work (Bruni,
Mehta, Brooks, and Petersen).
Bruni says that Biden will test if we can bounce back
from our floor of collective common decency.
Mehta pretty much echoes John Fish’s video “The Mundanity
of Online School”, and notes that the point of education, getting beyond the
obsession with SOL’s when I was subbing and regarding grades as a kind of cryptocurrency,
has been in flux for decades. But
minority kids are doing poorly in online school. You get the impression that school systems could
hire a (YouTuber) John Fish or Tyler Mowery,
themselves not much older than high school students, to do all their online AP
English for starters.
Feminism has been blown apart by the disruptions, as
moms carry the heaviest loads of all.
The future of work will be flexibility, desk sharing,
people renting their own little local offices, a certain decentralization away
from the cities, and even more melding of entrepreneur, gig worker, and
employee.
Part Two is Friendship, Conversation, and Sex (compare
to the age of AIDS)
Part Three is Sports, Travel (Mzezewa), and Food. I am particularly concerned about the crimp on
personal mobility, so individualized as it was for my own life, as something that
the virus evolved on top of. (We just
couldn’t keep it out of China.) You might need a good “reason” to fly
personally in the future.
Part Four is Literature, Fashion, and Cities (Manjoo),
which in western countries are going to seem even more challenged. But that’s what I thought when I left New York
City for Dallas at the end of 1978.
The end result of all these essays seems to be, not as
radical as I would expect.