Search Results for: The Nation
My Family’s Experiment in Extreme Schooling
My three children once were among the coddled offspring of Park Slope, Brooklyn. But when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians. When we told friends in Brooklyn of our plans, they tended to say things like, Wow, you’re so brave. But we knew what they were really thinking: What are you, crazy? It was bad enough that we were abandoning beloved Park Slope, with its brownstones and organic coffee bars, for a country still often seen in the American imagination as callous and forbidding. To throw our kids into a Russian school — that seemed like child abuse.
At Huawei, Matt Bross Tries to Ease U.S. Security Fears
For all its recent success, Huawei’s accession to the global scene has been awkward. Its corporate culture tends to come off somewhere between xenophobic and absurd to local critics. Sample headline published last year in the Times of India: “Huawei Technologies Bans Indians in India.” (Huawei says there’s no discrimination at its Indian facilities.) More pressing, though, is the reputational baggage tied to the company’s founder. Pundits wonder whether China’s premier technology company, a privately held organization run by an ex-deputy director of the army’s engineering corps and former delegate to the Communist Party’s national congress, can overcome suspicions among politicians, security officials, and would-be customers outside China. “Huawei is a large company with state-owned interests involved, and also Chinese military linkages,” says Srikanth Kondapalli, a professor at the Center for East Asian Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University in New Delhi. “So one of the concerns is what these guys are up to.”
The Teenage Brain
These studies help explain why teens behave with such vexing inconsistency: beguiling at breakfast, disgusting at dinner; masterful on Monday, sleepwalking on Saturday. Along with lacking experience generally, they’re still learning to use their brain’s new networks. Stress, fatigue, or challenges can cause a misfire. Abigail Baird, a Vassar psychologist who studies teens, calls this neural gawkiness—an equivalent to the physical awkwardness teens sometimes display while mastering their growing bodies. The slow and uneven developmental arc revealed by these imaging studies offers an alluringly pithy explanation for why teens may do stupid things like drive at 113 miles an hour, aggrieve their ancientry, and get people (or get gotten) with child: They act that way because their brains aren’t done! You can see it right there in the scans!
School ‘Reform’: A Failing Grade
Steven Brill’s book is actually not about education or education research. He seems to know or care little about either subject. His book is about politics and power, about how a small group of extremely wealthy men have captured national education policy and have gained control over education in states such as Colorado and Florida, and, with the help of the Obama administration, are expanding their dominance to many more states. Brill sees this as a wonderful development. Others might see it as a dangerous corruption of the democratic process.
Fukushima Disaster: It’s Not Over Yet
In other countries, people might want to put more distance between themselves and the source of the radiation, but this is difficult on a crowded archipelago with a rigid job market. Thousands have fled nonetheless, but most people in the disaster area will have to stay and adjust. Doing so would be easier if there were clear guidance from scientists and politicians, but here, too, contemporary Japan seems particularly vulnerable. The country has just got its seventh prime minister in five years. Academia and the media have been tainted by the powerful influence of the nuclear industry. As a result, a notoriously conformist nation is suddenly unsure what to conform to. “Individuals are being forced to make decisions about what is safe to eat and where is safe to live, because the government is not telling them – Japanese people are not good at that,” says Satoshi Takahashi, one of Japan’s leading clinical psychologists. He predicts the mental fallout of the Fukushima meltdown will be worse than the physical impact.
An American Drug Lord in Acapulco
On a warm morning in May a few years ago, Edgar Valdez, a drug lord who goes by the nickname La Barbie, woke up in one of the houses he owned in the resort city of Acapulco. In the 1950s, this beautiful beach town was the premier haunt of American celebrities: Frank Sinatra used to prowl the hotel lounges, Elizabeth Taylor had her third of eight weddings here, and John F. Kennedy honeymooned on the coast with Jacqueline. The glamour started to fade in the 1980s, but the city remained a popular vacation destination until a few years ago, when the Mexican cartels transformed Acapulco from a seaside paradise into one of the most violent flash points of the drug war. As chief enforcer for the town’s most powerful cartel, Barbie drove the celebrities away for good and made tourists nervous about straying too far into Acapulco when their cruise ships pulled into port. He felt bad about it, a little, but that is the way of the world, he thought – eat or be eaten.
Jon Huntsman: The Outsider
A few weeks into the race, Huntsman looks like a protest candidate—less a figure of the current Republican Zeitgeist than a canny challenger to his party’s orthodoxy. But his lack of traction thus far doesn’t feel exactly like failure. Running from behind brings a freedom to speak one’s mind, which can affect the political conversation for the better. Like Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Bruce Babbitt in 1988, and John McCain in 2000, Huntsman seems already to have become a media darling—a thinking person’s candidate whose candor shines a light on the evasions of his rivals, even if it fails to change the outcome of the race. If he performs credibly, Huntsman stands to emerge better known, with his national reputation enhanced, and—should Obama be reelected—well positioned to run in 2016.
The Billionaire King of Techtopia
Friedman was soon pitching to Peter Thiel, a staunch libertarian himself, the big, weird idea. It goes like this: Friedman wants to establish new sovereign nations built on oil-rig-type platforms anchored in international waters—free from the regulation, laws, and moral suasion of any landlocked country. They’d be small city-states at first, although the aim is to have tens of millions of seasteading residents by 2050. Architectural plans for a prototype involve a movable, diesel-powered, 12,000-ton structure with room for 270 residents, with the idea that dozens—perhaps even hundreds—of these could be linked together. Friedman hopes to launch a flotilla of offices off the San Francisco coast next year; full-time settlement, he predicts, will follow in about seven years; and full diplomatic recognition by the United Nations, well, that’ll take some lawyers and time.
Karen Wagner’s Life
She grew up listening to her dad talk about his days in the Army. She knew she wanted to be a soldier too. She spent nearly two decades serving her country with a quiet determination. On September 11, 2001, she went to her office at the Pentagon. “Major John Thurman, who had been sitting two desks down from Karen, lay on the floor and called out to see if anyone else was alive. Only Karen and Bill Ruth answered back. Thurman put his head as close to the floor as he could without burning his face, forced in a deep breath, and stood. He moved some file cabinets to make a path to Karen and then another to pull Ruth to them.” #Sept11
Brazil’s Girl Power
That new Brazilian fertility rate is below the level at which a population replaces itself. It is lower than the two-children-per-woman fertility rate in the United States. In the largest nation in Latin America—a 191-million-person country where the Roman Catholic Church dominates, abortion is illegal (except in rare cases), and no official government policy has ever promoted birth control—family size has dropped so sharply and so insistently over the past five decades that the fertility rate graph looks like a playground slide. And it’s not simply wealthy and professional women who have stopped bearing multiple children in Brazil. There’s a common perception that the countryside and favelas, as Brazilians call urban slums, are still crowded with women having one baby after another—but it isn’t true.
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