Word: popular
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...event that the Me generation does remember is the crackdown on student activists in Tiananmen Square in 1989. But to young Chinese like Maria and Vicky, the Tiananmen protests are less a source of inspiration than an admonishment. Were popular uprisings like Tiananmen allowed to continue, Vicky believes, they would have provoked a counterreaction by conservative forces and led to a return to fortress China: no more iPods, overseas shopping trips or snowboarding weekends. "I think that the students meant well," says Vicky, who was 11 at the time and has only vague memories of what happened. But the crackdown...
Observers of the boy crisis contend that families, schools and popular culture are failing our boys, leaving them restless bundles of anxiety--misfits in the classroom and video-game junkies at home. They suffer from an epidemic of "anomie," as Harvard psychologist William Pollack told me, adrift in a world of change without the help they need to find their way. Even in the youngest grades, test-oriented teachers focus energy on conventional exercises in reading, writing and other seatwork, areas in which girls tend to excel. At the same time, schools are cutting science labs, physical education and recess...
Unfortunately, it's one thing to observe human behavior--count the crime reports and the teen births and the diplomas awarded and so on--but quite another to explain it. Popular science and the best-seller lists skip eagerly from one theory to the next, lingering with delight on the most provocative if not always the most plausible. A recent paper suggested that falling crime rates can be explained almost entirely by reduced lead exposure in childhood. Which was odd, because last year economist Steven Levitt's best seller Freakonomics chalked up the improvement to legalized abortion, which, he theorized...
...Boys in North Carolina--a rustic paradise complete with a rifle range, nearby mountains to climb and a lake complete with swimming dock and rope swing. The choice of activities at the camp is dizzying, from soccer to blacksmithing, from kayaking to watercolors, but no pastime is more popular than building forts of fallen tree limbs and poking at turtles in the creek. Leave your cell phones, laptops and iPods at home...
...says. "I'm now more famous than I'm comfortable with." In a genre like fantasy, the relationship between artist and fan is a fragile, intimate thing, and in some sense Gaiman is still that nerdy public school kid. He's leery of selling out to the popular crowd. "I have really mixed feelings about the coming Watchmen movie," he says, "because I keep hearing that it's going to be really good. And part of me is going, I don't want a really good Watchmen movie! I want my graphic novel...