Generations, the News, and California: The Best Articles of the Week
To help you decide what to read this weekend, here are the best articles I read in the last week:
5. How the news became omnipresent – and how one writer has responded.
4. A review of the Biden administration’s immigration policy.
3. My interest in how generations differ from one another was one reason I enjoyed this review of a new book on differences between the Silent, Baby Boom, X, Millennial, and Z generations.
2. In recent years, cold-calling on my classes often revealed a irksome reality: Hardly anyone had done the reading. This article by Rose Horowitch helps to explain what was going on.
She writes: “Failing to complete a 14-line poem without succumbing to distraction suggests one familiar explanation for the decline in reading aptitude: smartphones. Teenagers are constantly tempted by their devices, which inhibits their preparation for the rigors of college coursework – then they get to college, and the distractions keep flowing. ‘It's changed expectations about what’s worthy of attention,’ Daniel Willingham, a psychologist at UVA, told me. ‘Being bored has become unnatural.’ Reading books, even for pleasure, can't compete with TikTok, Instagram, YouTube. In 1976, about 40 percent of high-school seniors said they had read at least six books for fun in the previous year, compared with 11.5 percent who hadn't read any. By 2022, those percentages had flipped.”
And now, the best article of the week: a historical explanation for California’s odd mixture of political cultures.