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...experiment again. My wife and I figure we'll check out the sushi place Clooney said he's been going to for 15 years. When we walk in, there's only one occupied table, and of course it's Clooney, his girlfriend, his assistant and a friend he met the first day he moved to Los Angeles. He's unprepared for me, out in the open, vulnerable. But he yanks over a table, puts it next to his, tells us what to order, hands us food from his plate, shows us photos of him and the other...
...there all the same. Big lectures lend themselves to anonymity, and no one can hold you accountable for choosing to sidle out at 12:57. But waiting for someone to finish a thought should be understood as common courtesy. You wouldn’t stand up and leave a friend in mid-sentence, nor make a break for the door in response to a TF’s question. Why should Tal Ben-Shahar (or Michael Sandel, or Steven Pinker) have to watch dozens of students decide his final thoughts are worth less than a first look at the lunch...
...polls do not settle the matter. Sampling is often flawed, questions may be sloppily phrased, and results sometimes vary erratically. More important, all the pollsters have to go on is what people say. New York Psychologist Mildred Newman reports that a close friend was interviewed for the Kinsey report on women. The friend, who led a robust and varied sex life, gave chaste and virginal answers because she was not willing to let anyone know how she really behaved. Nowadays many people may offer up attitudes designed to depict themselves as properly liberated. Anthropologist Lionel Tiger, while studying a kibbutz...
Daniel Yankelovich's study New Rules showed how the self-fulfillment ethic, largely confined to the campuses in the late '60s, had pollinated much of America's culture by the late '70s, wafted along by a score of pop-psych books, from How to Be Your Own Best Friend to Passages and Your Erroneous Zones. By the late '70s, according to polls conducted by Yankelovich, Skelly & White, 72% of Americans spent a great deal of time thinking about themselves and their inner needs. "The rage for self-fulfillment," wrote Yankelovich, "... had now spread to virtually the entire U.S. population...
...they are comfortable raising gay and transgender issues in class, and 71% have discussed those issues with a teacher at least once. Perhaps the most encouraging statistic: 57% of all students in public schools now say they know a kid who is gay; 20% have "a close personal friend" who is gay. Those numbers were unimaginable even 20 years ago. As I have pointed out more fully before, research from Cornell's Ritch Savin-Williams has shown that most gay teenagers are thriving and happy most of the time. They are periodically confused and depressed, but what teen...