Salon.com > Alice Karekezi

Get used to living with Mom and Dad

Mon, 16 Jan 2012 17:00:00 +0000

It’s a growing trend: More and more adults are living with their parents. According to the Census Bureau, the number of 25- to 34-year-old adults in the U.S. living at home rose from 14 percent in 2005 to 19 percent in 2011. The trend is present in other developed countries across the globe too: In Italy, 37 percent of men 30 years of age and older have never left home; in Japan, men living under their parents’ care are pushing their 40s. Such individuals are easily disparaged as lazy, overgrown babies, content to mooch off their aging parents rather than strike it out on their own. (Remember all those biting jokes Archie Bunker would throw to his “meathead” of a son-in-law.) But are they really?

Why kids need solitude

Wed, 28 Dec 2011 21:00:00 +0000

Demand for remedial instruction in colleges is on the rise. About 75 percent of New York City freshmen attending community college last year needed remedial math, reading or writing courses. The organization that administers the ACT found that only one in four of 2010 high school graduates who took the ACT exam were college-ready in four key subjects areas: English, math, reading and science. Statistics like these are startling, as they not only reveal serious flaws in our educational system, but also raise questions as to how these students will fare in the future if they are lacking the knowledge and critical skills needed to succeed in college and beyond.

The science of warp

Sun, 11 Dec 2011 20:00:00 +0000

“Back to the Future,” “A Christmas Carol,” the “Terminator” series, “Star Trek,” “Rip Van Winkle,” “Hot Tub Time Machine,” "Terra Nova" — the list goes on. We, as a culture, have been mesmerized by the idea of traveling in time: going back to fix life-changing mistakes we regret; going forward to get a sneak preview at what we’ll become. Equally transfixing is the notion of traveling through space, exploring galaxies and unknown universes far beyond our sight’s reach.

In their new book, “Time Travel and Warp Drives,” Tufts physics professor Allen Everett and University of Central Connecticut math professor Thomas Roman explain the science behind the fiction of time travel, and tackle the question: Is it even possible? The authors delve into the lore of sci-fi shows and books to explain how wormholes, warp drives, and parallel universes work; and what Einstein’s theory of relativity is and its relevance to time travel. They also parse through all those pesky paradoxes that arise when one tries to go back in time.

How PTSD took over America

Tue, 15 Nov 2011 22:25:00 +0000

In the past 30 years, post-traumatic stress disorder has gone from exotic rarity to omnipresent. Once chiefly applied to wartime veterans returning from combat, it is now a much more common diagnosis, still linked to traumatic events but now including those occurring outside the battle zone: the death of a loved one on a hospital bed, a car crash on the highway, an assault in the neighborhood park. Many would argue that this is a good thing: greater recognition of psychologically distressing events will lead to more people seeking treatment and a decrease in the preponderance of PTSD – a win-win.

Stephen Joseph disagrees. In his new book, “What Doesn’t Kill Us,” the professor of psychology, health and social care at the University of Nottingham (in the U.K.) warns that our culture’s acceptance of PTSD has become excessive and has led to an over-medicalization of experiences that should be considered part of ordinary, normal, human experience. This has kept us from proactively working through our grief and anxiety: We’ve become too quick to go to the shrink expecting him to fix us, rather than allowing ourselves the opportunity to grow and find new meaning in our lives as a result of painful, but common, events. Joseph advocates for a push toward post-traumatic growth as therapy to treat the stress of trauma, which he distinguishes as being different from the hokey, blue skies and rainbows, pop psychology that he claims has exploded in our culture in the past decade.

What happened to irony?

Fri, 04 Nov 2011 00:00:00 +0000

Remember the scene in “Reality Bites” where Wynona Ryder is asked to define irony? “Irony. Uh ... Irony. It's a noun. It's when something is ... ironic. It's, uh ... Well, I can't really define irony but I know it when I see it!” Irony is one of those terms that can be hard to define, particularly since it is often used interchangeably with other related (but distinct) terms like satire, sarcasm, cynicism and snark. Why is irony such a difficult concept to grasp?

Philosophy professor Jonathan Lear sets out to answer this question in his new book, “A Case for Irony,” attempting to redefine and flesh out this term from the pat and the vague. In Lear’s view, irony is not just about humor: It's meant to serve as a sobering mirror to our lives and actions, revealing and reaffirming to us our passions and beliefs. It shows how exactly we measure up to our professed ideals, all in an effort to strive for excellence – to become better at whatever it is we devote our lives to. Irony asks us, in a fundamental way, “Am I really who I say I am?”

What caused the wealth gap?

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 15:40:00 +0000

If you are still scratching your head trying to figure out Occupy Wall Street’s aim, you are not alone; the three-week-old movement has remained stubbornly resistant to stating clear demands. But one thing has become increasingly clear: It has managed to tap into a growing national frustration with the state of the American economy. And protesters are especially angry about our country's increasing, outrageous income disparity. The numbers are astounding: As 2.6 million Americans fell under the poverty line last year, the top 1 percent continued to control more than 40 percent of the country’s wealth.

For anybody interested in understanding the reasons behind this economic travesty, economist Jeffrey Sachs’ new book, "The Price of Civilization," is required reading. In the book, Sachs, who has focused much of his career on the developing world and eradicating global poverty, turns his eye homeward to examine the current economic crisis, tracing its roots not to the housing or financial bubbles of the '00s, but to a shift in Washington toward smaller government that began in the early '80s and has yet to be reversed.

Forget about peak oil

Thu, 29 Sep 2011 17:45:00 +0000

Remember summer 2008? OK, maybe you'd rather not. It was a rough time for American drivers. An oil crisis had shot gas prices up to a wincing all-time high of $4.11 per gallon, squeezing our wallets and causing widespread panic. For many people, it was a troubling sign that America's oil addiction was becoming harder and harder to sustain. And although prices have scooted down (and up, and back down) since, for many of us, it was a wake-up call that gas prices are not only hard to predict -- but that the world's oil supply seems to be rapidly dwindling away.

In "The Quest: Energy, Security, and the Remaking of the World," Daniel Yergin, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Prize," tackles both this anxiety and its root causes. The book is an enlightening and detailed historical survey of how man has discovered and harnessed various energy sources, from oil to wind, electricity to shale gas. Although Yergin focuses on the people behind these discoveries -- we learn, for example, how a 19th-century mountaineer's obsession with understanding why the sky is blue led to the discovery of the greenhouse effect -- he adeptly explains the often-complicated political and economical backdrop to these revolutionary feats.