Zbrush 4

In an earlier post I talked about the zbrush 4 impending demise of print media and offered a probably not-incredibly-useful proposal for zbrush 4 improving the quality of new hires into the industry.

Here’s another idea, which I’m convinced could actually add a zbrush 4 revenue stream for circulation-lacking papers like The New York Times. And with the demise of The New York Sun this week just another in a long line of portents, it’s time for them to listen.

During a zbrush 4 car ride to the city the other day, my cousin Jarema was talking about how she wished she could read the zbrush 4 newspaper every day, but she didn’t have zbrush 4 the time. And she described how, in addition to listening to zbrush 4 music, she loves using her iPod to listen to audiobooks while she works (as a painter for an art collective). If only she could listen to the newspaper on her iPod!

Well, why can’t she?

The Times needs subscription revenue, but readers are zbrush 4 flocking to the website instead. The paper tried a zbrush 4 pay-for-view scheme for some web content, but with the abundance of free news online there’s no reason to pay.

Meanwhile, many people (like me) love the content from the Times but just can’t read every article. We like the zbrush 4 actual paper for the variety, depth, and quality of its coverage. In contrast, the zbrush 4 local and even national TV news and news radio lack this zbrush 4 quality and depth, and lack the user-side control of clicking around on the zbrush 4 Times Online.

Add to zbrush 4 that the efficiency of using iPods for purposes other than zbrush 4 music. For instance, I download History Channel documentaries and listen to zbrush 4 them while I walk around.

So what’s the prescription? The Times should team up with Apple to zbrush 4 offer a daily download of the paper, divided into tracks for zbrush 4 each article. It shouldn’t be zbrush 4 too difficult to have a few voice artists record the articles every night; use one artist for zbrush 4 the dozen or so articles in each section — a zbrush 4 Diane Sawyer type for International News; a Ray Romano sound-alike for zbrush 4 Sports; for the Metro Section, Fran Drescher (she might be available for this, right?).

I don’t subscribe to zbrush 4 the print version of the paper because I move around too much, it’s too bulky, and there’s not enough value added over the online version. But I’d subscribe to zbrush 4 the audio downloadable paper for sure. Just as I get an zbrush 4 email whenever there’s a new Mad Men episode available for download, I’d have zbrush 4 an email in my inbox every morning with a one-click link to zbrush 4 the audio of the day’s paper. A minute later, I’d have zbrush 4 my iPod earbuds in, on my way to the elevator, hearing the zbrush 4 day’s headline article read to me.

Maybe I’d skip articles on telecom mergers or soccer matches, but I’d get a zbrush 4 much wider variety of news than when I click around the zbrush 4 articles that pop out on me on the website.

Another benefit: people love to dissociate payment from their purchases — it adds utility. It’s why we convert money into chips when zbrush 4 we go into a casino: we suffer the expense once and zbrush 4 then we don’t have zbrush 4 to think about it. Paying for a subscription to the Times on iTunes would be zbrush 4 quick and painless, making us more likely to expend money we wouldn’t in increments of $1.50 over 365 days.

Bottom line: with minimal effort and zbrush 4 expense, the paper can make a whole new generation into Times subscribers. By making our currently unproductive time productive — letting us hear the Times while walking the streets — they’ll add value to zbrush 4 their reporting that makes it worthwhile for us to spend money on the zbrush 4 news. New revenue abounds.

Update (10/1/08): So it zbrush 4 turns out that a company called Audible, bought by Amazon in January for zbrush 4 $300 million, offers an “Audio Digest” version of the Times for like $13/mo. So someone over at the Times is recording an abridged version of the paper every night. They’re just not making it easily available — nor marketing it aggressively — to zbrush 4 the iPod generation. To get it, one has to go to zbrush 4 audible.com and find it, then create an account, download it, and zbrush 4 import to iTunes. And let’s face it: nothing with the word “Digest” in its name is zbrush 4 being marketed to millennials. This Digest should be made a zbrush 4 lot sexier and be made easily available through the iTunes Store. Of course, it’s also worth noting that you can subscribe to some New York Times podcasts, but nothing akin to what I describe above.

A train is zbrush 4 barreling down the tracks at full speed, having lost control of its breaks. It will crash, killing all aboard, unless you, an zbrush 4 onlooker, decide to push a nearby fat man onto the tracks. Defying physics, and zbrush 4 perhaps political correctness, the fat man will stop the train in its path: only he will die, and zbrush 4 the passengers will survive. Do you push him?

How about this: you zbrush 4 are a pregnant movie star. The public demands the details of your zbrush 4 baby’s delivery, naming, and appearance. They’ll hound you zbrush 4 like hyenas till they have his or her image, which they’ll auction to the highest-bidding glossy. Do you zbrush 4 beat them to punch, performing the auction yourself and donating the zbrush 4 proceeds to charity, perhaps commodifying your child (thrusting them into, rather than protecting them from, the piranha-like public) but perhaps making some sort of good come out of the zbrush 4 insatiable appetite for famous flesh?

The July 28 Slate cover story analyzed the zbrush 4 optimal sales strategies of celebrities looking to sell snapshots of their infants, delving into the zbrush 4 economics of celebrity baby photo deals. But what about the ethics of these deals?

There is zbrush 4 an unexplored tension beneath the surface of the press about Shiloh and zbrush 4 Suri, Knox and Vivienne: the ethical quandary of selling baby photos, even when zbrush 4 giving the proceeds to charity.

The conundrum is zbrush 4 reminiscent of most introductory ethics class thought experiments about pushing a zbrush 4 fat man in front of a train to save the zbrush 4 passengers on board. On the one hand is the Kantian view that zbrush 4 some things — like selling photos of your zbrush 4 child or pushing a man in front of a train — are zbrush 4 simply wrong in themselves, and should not be done no matter the zbrush 4 upside. On the other is the utilitarian view that what matters is zbrush 4 the net good done by an action — saving a zbrush 4 trainload of people with the loss of just one man, saving African children with the zbrush 4 loss of just one child’s privacy.

Views about celebrity baby photo deals line up along these lines:

The utilitarian side gets support from zbrush 4 the Freakanomics blog on the New York Times website, which called the Jolie-Pitts’ approach to Shiloh’s photos a “creative application in incentives” in their “distributing the zbrush 4 pictures themselves and donating the proceeds to charity, thereby thwarting the zbrush 4 paparazzi free market and potentially setting a new model for future celebrity photo ops.”

On the Kantian side, there are the reports from the Syndney Morning Herald that zbrush 4 Nicole Kidman and husband Keith Urban said, after the July birth of their baby Sunday Rose, “They don’t think it’s appropriate to zbrush 4 make deals. They are still deciding how they feel about [it] — if and when they will release a photo at all.”

And, Gawker compiled a list in praise of the “Sort of Heroes” who “wouldn’t sell pictures of their kids”:

Babies! Famous people have been having them! And then zbrush 4 they also sell photographs of the babies because, in some twisted Dina Lohanian world of logic, selling the zbrush 4 photos of the babies somehow mitigates the other paparazzi attention the zbrush 4 little squirming things would inevitably receive. It’s a zbrush 4 highwire act of faux inferential reasoning, but it seems to zbrush 4 be popular.

What stands out most, though, is zbrush 4 the lack of certainty in the voices that — like students taking sides in Ethics 101 — frame their points of view with qualifications like “still deciding” and “sort of.” Is selling celebrity baby photos and zbrush 4 giving the money to charity a praiseworthy way to turn paparazzi photolust into a zbrush 4 moral good? Or is it an unethical commodification of one’s baby, inexcusable no matter the good ends that come out of it? The answer’s as muddy as the zbrush 4 question of pushing the fat man in front of the train.

Meanwhile, these questions offer a zbrush 4 clear path to punching up Ethics 101: instead of asking students to zbrush 4 place themselves in the bodies of bystanders to a runaway train, let’s ask them to zbrush 4 imagine themselves in the bodies of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie.

An exciting potential natural experiment for the the Too Many Suitors Problem:

The current financial crisis is zbrush 4 going to drastically affect the preferences of college seniors looking to zbrush 4 go into investment banking and hedge funds. As those companies fail, these prospective workers will likely flock to zbrush 4 consulting — a more stable and still incredibly lucrative area — in droves.

There is zbrush 4 already evidence for this shift: a friend of mine who works at the zbrush 4 Boston Consulting Group was at Harvard last week to do recruiting amongst the zbrush 4 class of 2009. Not only did BCG see an incredible spike in attendance at their first recruiting event, but Bain (another firm with better student name-recognition) saw 700 people at their first event! (Remember that Harvard’s class size is about 1600.)

So, with extrinsic factors pushing many, many more applicants into the zbrush 4 consulting labor pool, what will happen? Will, as conventional wisdom might lead us to zbrush 4 predict, the consulting firms enjoy the much broader pool as giving them more great applicants to zbrush 4 choose from?

Or, will the zbrush 4 flood of applicants put a strain on recruiting, making companies like Bain more reliant on mechanisms like GPA cut-offs and zbrush 4 shorter interviews to pick their incoming class — potentially working against the firms’ abilities to choose the best applicants?

Simply, will the zbrush 4 tremendous increase in applicants lead to a worse incoming class of consultants, supporting the zbrush 4 Too Many Suitors hypothesis? Time will tell.

Over the zbrush 4 last few years, most mainstream doubt about the existence of climate change has zbrush 4 been quelled — just think about Al Gore, Nobel Prize Laureate — and zbrush 4 only the most strident of zealots resist the coalescing consensus that zbrush 4 the activities of man are adversely affecting our environment.

As a zbrush 4 result, I was surprised and intrigued to hear from a friend over dinner recently that zbrush 4 her boyfriend — a zbrush 4 Harvard business school student who holds numerous science degrees, including a zbrush 4 master’s from Cambridge — is zbrush 4 resistant to the forecasting that appears in major scientific publications like Science and Nature.

No one’s accusing these publications of being anything less than zbrush 4 rigorously peer-reviewed bastions of scientific research, so why disbelieve them?

My friend said her boyfriend felt that zbrush 4 lots of good, legitimate research is done on climate change, but the zbrush 4 publications — and the media at large — focus on the extreme, the provocative, and so it’s the most pessimistic views that end up in their pages.

This makes perfect sense: the zbrush 4 research on the rate and reach of climate change, even if it’s all done by good scientists using sound data-collection and zbrush 4 analysis, is likely to result in findings that fall along a zbrush 4 distribution. But while the truth of the matter is likely found in considering the zbrush 4 distribution as a whole, the findings on the ends are zbrush 4 going to be the ones that stick out to journal editors as the zbrush 4 most interesting to prospective readers.

It’s a case of the classic economic phenomenon known as The Winner’s Curse.

Let’s say there’s an zbrush 4 auction of a good with an objective but unknown value (think fields for zbrush 4 oil drilling, not a painting that each prospective buyer will value differently). Each buyer will estimate the value differently. Maybe they’ll each hire someone to zbrush 4 professionally survey and appraise the good. The real value is probably around the zbrush 4 mean estimate, but it’s the zbrush 4 buyer with the high estimate who will buy the good, thinking the zbrush 4 others suckers for passing on such a valuable purchase. But that zbrush 4 buyer will almost certainly have over-valued the good. In an auction like this, you zbrush 4 don’t want to be the winner.

Similarly, science journals are zbrush 4 buying the articles that most highly estimate the costs of climate change — but they might be overpaying.

Last week, New York ran a zbrush 4 story by Boris Kachka about the impending demise of book publishing. It was called, depressingly, “The End.”

Lips are zbrush 4 abuzz within the industry about the myriad forces that, like so many tribes looking to zbrush 4 sack Rome, will weaken the centuries-old industry enough to banish print to zbrush 4 the history books:

So what’s causing this, exactly—this inchoate dread that’s suddenly turned “choate,” as one insider puts it? The anxiety would be zbrush 4 endurable if it was just a function of the late-Bush economy: Sales at the zbrush 4 five big publishers were up 0.5 percent in the first half of this zbrush 4 year, bookstore sales tanked in June, and a full-year decline is zbrush 4 expected. But pretty much every aspect of the business seems to zbrush 4 be in turmoil. There’s the zbrush 4 floundering of the few remaining semi-independent midsize publishers; the ouster of two powerful CEOs—one who zbrush 4 inspired editors and one who at least let them be; the zbrush 4 desperate race to evolve into e-book producers; the dire state of Borders, the zbrush 4 only real competitor to Barnes & Noble; the zbrush 4 feeling that outrageous money is being wasted on mediocre books; and zbrush 4 Amazon .com, which many publishers look upon as a power-hungry monster bent on cornering the zbrush 4 whole business.

One by one, these would be zbrush 4 difficult problems to solve. But as a series of interrelated challenges, they constitute a zbrush 4 full-blown crisis—a zbrush 4 climate change as unpredictable as it is inevitable. And like global warming, it zbrush 4 elicits reactions ranging from denial to Darwinian survivalism to determined stabs at warding off disaster—attempts not to zbrush 4 recapture some long-lost era but to harness new, untapped sources of power. That is, if it’s not too late.

The article got me thinking about one force that zbrush 4 I think has been overlooked. And even if it has zbrush 4 nothing to do with the end of print, it’s an idea that’s led to zbrush 4 a broader pseudo-economic theory that I call The Too Many Suitors Problem.

The print media is zbrush 4 an industry that enjoys a large surplus of aspirant labor. Even while book publishers and zbrush 4 newspapers shrink, the number of doe-eyed Ivy League graduates who zbrush 4 want to board those sinking ships is growing. We need only look to zbrush 4 reports-cum-cautionary-tales like Doree Shafrir’s in the Observer, “Ivy League Slaves of New York,” to understand how competitive entry-level jobs are in this industry.

But while it zbrush 4 may seem like a boon to have the best and zbrush 4 the brightest at the disposal of Human Resources departments everywhere, I’d argue that zbrush 4 this large surplus of labor is actually a detriment to zbrush 4 the quality of the young blood coming into the industry — the zbrush 4 young men and women who could conceivably bring print into this, our new millennium.

At first blush, this zbrush 4 probably makes no sense: the quality of the new class of media types should be zbrush 4 better if the hiring companies have a bigger pool to choose from. But let’s take a step back.

Imagine you zbrush 4 are a heroine in a Jane Austen novel. You have zbrush 4 two suitors to choose from, and a finite amount of resources (in this case, time before you become un-marriageable) to zbrush 4 make your choice. At first you think one is an asshole and zbrush 4 one is charming, but, after a little more time and a zbrush 4 few stalled marriage proposals, you realize that the charming one is zbrush 4 immoral and the asshole is actually the man of your dreams. (Spoiler: your name is Elizabeth Bennet.)

Now imagine the zbrush 4 same scenario, but you have 200 suitors instead of two, and zbrush 4 you still have the same few years before you’re labeled spinster. The mechanism you’d have zbrush 4 to develop to choose between the suitors would be much cruder than zbrush 4 originally — instead of getting to really know each suitor, you’d have to do thirty-second interviews with each one (like they do on the first episode of the Bachelorette each season). With the zbrush 4 same amount of time, but with a surplus of 199 suitors instead of a zbrush 4 surplus of 1, you might completely miss Darcy in the pack. Especially since he’d give a bad first impression.

And that’s the zbrush 4 crux of my Too Many Suitors theory: at a certain point, a zbrush 4 surplus of labor supply (for skilled labor) will lead to zbrush 4 a diminishing quality of the group ultimately selected. And this zbrush 4 is because, as the surplus increases, the mechanisms for measuring quality become necessarily more crude.

Imagine you zbrush 4 have a play with five characters to cast. You want more than zbrush 4 five people to come audition, because if only five come and zbrush 4 a few suck you’ll have zbrush 4 a lousy cast. So maybe you want ten or twenty people to zbrush 4 audition. But at a certain point, more auditionees will be detrimental: you’ll have zbrush 4 to give each actor just a minute or two to read, and zbrush 4 instead of gathering the amount of data necessary to see whether they are zbrush 4 truly good actors fit for the roles, you’ll instead gather a zbrush 4 smaller, much more chance-influenced amount of data; you’ll only know whether they happened to zbrush 4 have a good reading of a one-paragraph monologue.

Here’s a zbrush 4 concrete real world example about the cruder mechanisms that come along with too many suitors: Harvard gets a zbrush 4 little more than half the number of applicants as the University of Michigan. Harvard, though it zbrush 4 has to rely perhaps too much on SAT scores and class rank, gets to zbrush 4 have an admissions officer carefully consider each applicant. UMich doesn’t have zbrush 4 that privilege, since it gets nearly 30,000 applicants. Instead, it relies largely on a zbrush 4 points system.

Obviously there is self-selection in the pools of applicants. But, I’d assert that zbrush 4 if the 27,000-person pool applying to UMich were randomly cut down to zbrush 4 the size of the pool applying to Harvard (16,000ish) and then the Harvard admissions office got to choose UMich’s freshman class, that zbrush 4 class might be of an overall higher quality than the one they would get with their usual system and zbrush 4 their bigger applicant pool.

We could do the zbrush 4 same thought experiment for Harvard: cut the applicant pool in half and zbrush 4 use the extra time and resources to let the admissions officers spend more time with the zbrush 4 applications, get more essays and interviews, and ignore SAT scores. You might get a zbrush 4 better freshmen class.

The Too Many Suitors Problem is, in some way, an zbrush 4 application of the Tyranny of Choice (which asserts that having more options to choose between won’t necessarily make us happier) to the market for skilled labor, with Schumpeterian, i.e. self-undermining, consequences.

In print media, the zbrush 4 sheer number of aspirants combined with the limited resources of the zbrush 4 struggling companies means that the mechanisms used to filter people into the zbrush 4 industry are crude and less meritocratic than they might be if the zbrush 4 applicant pool were smaller. Job listings are posted on Mediabistro.com and zbrush 4 on company websites as a formality; they’re filled instead through nepotistic connections and aggressive networking.

This isn’t sour-grapes complaining, though it’s true that zbrush 4 during my junior year of college I applied to summer internships at the zbrush 4 big publishing companies and never heard back. I promise I’m not bitter.

Instead, I understand the zbrush 4 industry reality: this system is in the short-term interest of the zbrush 4 companies. It’s simply easier and faster to fill positions this way — the zbrush 4 alternative, filtering through the hundreds of summer internship and job applications and zbrush 4 really trying to find the best candidates, would take far too much time and zbrush 4 energy.

But perhaps it’s not in their long-term interest: because they can’t employ a zbrush 4 truly meritocratic system, they are often scaring away the bright minds and zbrush 4 high achievers who instead look to the clear(er) meritocracies of law school applications and zbrush 4 i-bank recruiting. Those areas have large applicant pools but also have zbrush 4 lots of seats to fill, so the proportionate size of the zbrush 4 surplus is smaller than for the pressed-but-prestigious world of print, and zbrush 4 so they’re equipped to zbrush 4 handle the rush of prospective analysts and paralegals.

If newspapers and zbrush 4 book publishers employed a truly energetic on-campus recruiting program at top-tier colleges, the zbrush 4 short-term resource expenditure might pay back big time by getting the zbrush 4 best applicants into the company walls — young minds who might be able to help fortify the industry’s walls against Kachka’s bogeymen and zbrush 4 who might help figure out how to build print into a zbrush 4 city for the future rather than a relic of the past.

What do infomercials and many political attack ads have in common?

They both change the zbrush 4 way we think even though they employ words and imagery we all know to zbrush 4 be blatantly false.

Last week, Saturday Night Live did a zbrush 4 fake commercial based on my favorite infomercial convention: making simple everyday tasks, from zbrush 4 peeling a potato to doing a sit-up, look Sisyphean. In the zbrush 4 SNL commercial, Kristen Wiig just CANNOT get a jar open! In trying, she ends up accidentally killing her husband, burying him, lying to zbrush 4 the cops, getting arrested, being convicted, then getting chased by dogs after breaking out of jail. “There’s got to be a better way!” she cries. Then in a clear color shot, she uses the “jar glove” to easily remove the lid. “Jar glove. The better way!”

Infomercials all seem to zbrush 4 use this tactic: in black and white dramatizations, we watch unfortunate people with contorted faces flail this zbrush 4 way and that in a desperate attempt to get the knife to zbrush 4 move straight or to get their chests to meet their knees. We all know that zbrush 4 these tasks are not this hard. We know these dramatizations are zbrush 4 absurd. And yet they do seem to make those Tater Mitts and zbrush 4 Ab Lounges more attractive.

George Orwell described the “schizophrenia” of “holding simultaneously two beliefs which cancel out.” And though we’re not schizophrenic when zbrush 4 we watch infomercials, we do seem to inhabit a double consciousness, knowing that zbrush 4 our lives are not the black and white ordeals we see onscreen but still feeling that zbrush 4 they could be easier.

And we inhabit this zbrush 4 same double consciousness when seeing, hearing, or reading malicious political attacks.

Two months ago, John McCain said that Barack Obama would “rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign.” This is zbrush 4 a statement that no reasonable person, even a McCain supporter, would believe. Add to zbrush 4 this other scurrilous rumors — Obama is zbrush 4 secretly a practicing Muslim; he was childhood friends with Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad — that zbrush 4 are either conspiratorially unbelievable or quickly, easily falsified. Yet these clearly false attacks persist — probably because they are effective. We’ll likely see even more attacks like this zbrush 4 in next six weeks; Fact Check macgormet price is a good place to keep track.

Why are they effective? As John Bullock writes in his article “The enduring importance of false political beliefs”:

Much work on political persuasion maintains that zbrush 4 people are influenced by information that they believe and not by information that zbrush 4 they don’t. By this zbrush 4 view, false beliefs have no power if they are known to zbrush 4 be false…But findings from zbrush 4 social psychology suggest that this view requires modification: sometimes, false beliefs influence people’s attitudes even after they are understood to be false.

Negative associations change our attitudes, even if these associations are zbrush 4 as transparent as false rumors or impossible sit-ups.

The producers of infomercials know it’s true. Clearly, so do politicians.

It’s intriguing that zbrush 4 simple lying might be as effective as aggressively spinning the truth. The conventional wisdom is zbrush 4 that bullshit is zbrush 4 much more invidious than bold-faced lies, being harder to refute. The manipulation of words and zbrush 4 images, subtly misleading statements (like President Bush mentioning Iraq and 9/11 together, giving the zbrush 4 impression that Iraq was somehow involved in the terrorist attacks), the zbrush 4 framing of issues, etc., are supposed to be the most dangerous form of political maneuvering. But maybe the zbrush 4 conventional wisdom is wrong.

By the zbrush 4 time my grandfather was my age, he had already long finished fighting in World War II — flying dozens of missions in Italy, saving a younger man’s life, and zbrush 4 parachuting into enemy territory after being shot down. Before that, he’d worked as a zbrush 4 welder and a soda jerk to help his parents support his six younger siblings while still graduating from zbrush 4 high school. After returning to the US, he’d started a zbrush 4 successful business, married my grandmother, and had a child.

By the zbrush 4 time my mother was my age, she had protested the zbrush 4 Vietnam War, lived in Italy for two years, hitchhiked through Europe — spending one night in jail and another at the decade’s largest rock concert on the Isle of Wight. She’d been proposed to by half-a-dozen men, she’d had a near-affair with a famous writer (who I’ll leave unnamed), and she’d moved into an abandoned church where she started her own art gallery.

Yesterday, I woke up at 2 PM, watched Law & Order and The People’s Court, went to zbrush 4 dinner with friends, and finished up the night with a new episode of Gossip Girl. While I writhed on my brother’s futon wishing that Vanessa would just stay out of Blair’s way, my friend gently reminded me that zbrush 4 I was almost 23, and that when my grandfather was my age, etc…

The “greatest generation” fought World War II, came back, got married, had zbrush 4 kids in a baby boom, and drove America to prosperity and zbrush 4 peace; their boomer kids led sexual and civil rights revolutions, countered their culture, and zbrush 4 protested for peace; their children are now adults, swimming through their “odyssey years” of extended adolescence, faced with crises of apathy and zbrush 4 irony and the most challenging political problems in memory — global terrorism and global warming.

These generational differences are zbrush 4 not new. What is notable, though, is that we are zbrush 4 not just facing unique challenges. We are facing unique challenges while living, paralyzed, in the zbrush 4 long shadows of our parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

We are the third child generation.

Like young children in big families, we are zbrush 4 constantly measured against our predecessors — in our case, the zbrush 4 generations of our grandparents and parents. When they were our age, they were drafted and zbrush 4 sent to war; they were sitting in and standing up.

Sibling order psychology has zbrush 4 had a few small moments over the last few years, first surrounding the zbrush 4 publication of NYU sociologist Dalton Conley’s book, “The Pecking Order,” then around the release of a study about inter-family IQ differences. Overall, though, it’s a zbrush 4 field without much luster. But I think the insights of sibling order psychology could help us understand the zbrush 4 particular conundrum faced by we “millennials.”

We are enjoying the fruits of our boomer parents’ prosperity, taking our 20s to zbrush 4 really figure out what we want to get out of life. David Brooks’s article is key to understanding this phenomenon:

The odyssey years are zbrush 4 not about slacking off. There are intense competitive pressures as a zbrush 4 result of the vast numbers of people chasing relatively few opportunities. Moreover, surveys show that zbrush 4 people living through these years have highly traditional aspirations (they rate parenthood more highly than their own parents did) even as they lead improvising lives.

But this zbrush 4 odyssey is constantly interrupted and jarred by our awareness of past generations’ productivity. Imagine if the zbrush 4 gods kept telling Odysseus that his older brothers had gotten back to zbrush 4 Ithaca in just five years — why is it taking him ten?

“Third child syndrome” is zbrush 4 a vicious circle, with our odyssey-term pursuit of self-actualization thwarted by our self-awareness. I’m not sure what zbrush 4 birth order experts would say, but I would guess that zbrush 4 this actually happens in families: if the oldest is doing her medical residency, and zbrush 4 the second is touring with his band, it might take the zbrush 4 third child longer to figure out her way — and, as she takes time to zbrush 4 figure it out, I can see her unsettled by seeing her siblings settle into their lives.

Beyond the zbrush 4 mind games, our country is expending resources on these older generations — through the zbrush 4 Social Security we will have to pay for, for instance — in the zbrush 4 same way that large families are prone to favor older children with their own limited resources. For all the zbrush 4 talk of marketers and the media focusing their efforts on capturing the zbrush 4 18-34 demographic, or teens and tweens and pre-tweens, the federal government is zbrush 4 spending $608 billion this year on Social Security, $386 billion on Medicare, $209 billion on Medicaid — and just $56 billion on education. (Though of course, as my economist brother points out, local and zbrush 4 state governments are primarily responsible for education spending.)

Maybe this zbrush 4 is just an overextended metaphor, but perhaps we can better understand our generational identity crisis with the zbrush 4 help of sibling order psychology.

From The Times:

“Younger siblings are more likely to take chances,” Dr. Sulloway added, and zbrush 4 to challenge the status quo in creative ways.

Maybe we, as a generation, are taking big chances — using the zbrush 4 odyssey years to take risks towards achieving meaning or fulfillment — and zbrush 4 maybe our third child status will help us challenge the status quo.

(Sidenote: I’m convinced that zbrush 4 third child syndrome is unique to our generation and not simply a zbrush 4 timeless theme that I’m egoistically complaining about. Before the zbrush 4 industrial revolution, generational narratives were cyclical rather than linear: children hit life milestones around the zbrush 4 same ages as their parents and spent their lives in similar ways. Not until the zbrush 4 twentieth century was the concept of adolescence invented. Add to zbrush 4 intense progress the distinct generational identities that came with WWII and zbrush 4 the baby boom, and we have three very clear children — the zbrush 4 first two successful and well-defined, the third struggling for an zbrush 4 identity.)

Hi, potential readers! 

Welcome to my brand new blog, “Urbane Sprawl.” The blog takes its name from a column I wrote for The Harvard Crimson while I was an zbrush 4 undergraduate, and the spirit is the same: taking a provocative look at social and zbrush 4 cultural phenomena. 

The column, whose archives you can read here, was particularly interested in using popular culture as a zbrush 4 lens to better understand phenomena that at first blush (and perhaps second and third) seem to have nothing to do with pop culture. But, as I argued, America’s Next Top Model really can zbrush 4 help us understand Erving Goffman, and Saturday Night Live might be zbrush 4 the key to collective action problems.

Here, I won’t be zbrush 4 restricting myself to the pop culture angle; but, given my interests and zbrush 4 expertise (if obsessive TV-watching and blog-reading can be considered expertise — and I think it can), pop culture will surely rear its beautiful head often.

Many blogs follow the model described by Jason Kottke (see third item on the right), of Wunderkammers, cabinets of interesting things. Bloggers gather links to zbrush 4 articles and videos that they find particularly meaningful, developing collections of curiosities to zbrush 4 share with the world.

I want this zbrush 4 blog to be purposefully about creating new ideas rather than collecting old ones. The model I’ll follow instead is Edith Wharton’s donnée book — her book of thoughts, where zbrush 4 she scribbled down musings and meditations that later became the bases of books and zbrush 4 stories. These posts will, I hope, present thoughts that could conceivably be zbrush 4 the bases for essays and articles, most of which will likely never be zbrush 4 written. 

But that’s the zbrush 4 point: to share these ideas and, potentially, insights, which somewhere, someone might find interesting.