Living at home with your parents is a very powerful contraception.
- British politician David Willetts quoted in the NYTimes’ very interesting story on the declining birthrate of Europe.
I had some major problems with the article, because author Russell Shorto asserts that the U.S. birthrate is higher than Europe’s due to more equality in home tasks (Daddy Day Care), but ignores the fact that we’re really not having that many kids when exempting the Hispanic birth rate. He also really doesn’t take issue with the true economics of childbirth or related changes in family structure (i.e., the death of the extended family and the consumerist push for self-sufficiency). One of my friends is an Albanian who is expecting to have many children. Her family is more like a tribe in which her myriad relatives help each other out, meaning she’ll more or less — as I understand it — never have to pay for daycare. She and her husband aren’t facing a new mortgage, she’s moving in with his family. I wonder if we’ll head back to big clans now that the nuclear family has proven wasteful and decadent.
Shorto also doesn’t really explore intellect/education as a predictor (or non predictor) of average childbirth rates. I’d bet that more highly educated individuals tend to have fewer children so that they can pay for them all (especially when paying means paying for their higher education costs as well). Meanwhile, developed countries have lost manufacturing and the good jobs that go with it, affecting the other side of the educational gamut.
This wonderfully blasphemous Newsweek piece about how parenthood makes people miserable, has some decent stats on the rising cost of “you looked so damned sexy, I couldn’t hold back”: Read more »
Oh crap. The integration has begun.
This is kind of a sad one (2).
The remains of Hedviga Golik were found last month in her apartment in Croatia. According to reports she had made herself a cup of tea, sat down in her armchair to watch some tv, and must have passed away.
Having been born in 1924, there is nothign too surprising about all of this. In fact it isn’t much of a story until you start to get into the details. Golik was reported missing and was last seen by a neighbor… back in 1966. Although officially reported missing, apparently either no one ever did anything to try and locate her, or in their search for her the police did not enter her apartment.
Fast forward 42 years to May 2008 and the police and some bailiffs are busting down her door to try and help figure out who owns the apartment only to find Golik in her armchair dead now for as long as she had lived.
Besides a few cobwebs, her apartment appeared just as it had been in 1966, a virtual time capsule, with her cup of tea still on the table in front of her.
According to the authorities: “So far, we have no idea how it is possible that someone officially reported missing so long ago was not found before in the same apartment she used to live in.”
Okay, I thought I was done with this, until I did a search for a picture and found the CNN article, which isn’t exactly the same story.
Read more »
Well, I guess it is technically for Thursday.
Starting tomorrow and running through October 13th, the city is getting 4 waterfalls. Olafur Eliasson’s “The New York City Waterfalls” has been installed around the city. Although organized by the City and the Public Art Fund, the project is totally funded from private supporters, corporations and other foundations, with no city funds being put towards it. Now on to the project itself
“The New York City Waterfalls” are 4 waterfalls that have been installed in various locations along the river. You’ll find them at at the foot of the Brooklyn Bridge (in Brooklyn), Pier 35 (by the Manhattan Bridge), near the Brooklyn Heights Promenade (between Piers 4 & 5) and by Governors Island.
The waterfalls will be active between 7am and 10pm so if you travel along the bridges you may get a chance to see them during your daily commute. Otherwise you can venture out to see them in your free time.
the pictures from the ‘pre-dawn’ test look pretty stunning and it looks like this could be something incredible to check-out around the city this summer right around sunset.
The project is similar to one that Eliasson did in Austria in 2000 and Madrid in 2003, but on a much grander scale. You can learn more about him and his work here.
Well, I have given up on trying to make this a weekly column, so it is becoming an occasional column.
I’ve come across 2 sets of photos in the last two days. One set is pretty interesting and the other set is pretty incredible, both are definitely worth checking out.
The first set of pictures makes it to us all the way from Chili where the Chaitan Volcano has been pretty active recently. During some recent activity there also happened to be a lighting storm that added some incredible effects to the erupting volcano. The Daily Mail has a whole set of the images here.
Our second set of pictures comes from an exhibition titled “The Other Night Sky” currently showing at the UC Berkeley Art Museum. The exhibition shows Trevor Paglen’s photographs of 189 spy satellites that officially do not exist. The title of the exhibition is a play on Galileo’s The Night Sky and offers commentary on how these ‘unofficial’ satellites would paint the sky to astronomers of yesterday. Paglen is also responsible for a book about patches from military black-ops groups that has some great images of the official patches for these groups.
