"The world owes me a living."

A phrase from an old Disney cartoon song came to mind as we were talking about the pretty face in the previous post. I don't know anything about the real Hunter Park, the unusually handsome young man who was arrested over threats to "shoot every black person I see" at the University of Missouri. I don't even know whether he is the author of the threat. But we got to talking about the psychology of unusually good-looking people who squander their beauty endowment. No sooner do we see the face than we must despise it. What goes on in the mind of a person with such a nice endowment? Does the beauty itself deceive him into thinking that the world owes him a living?

I went looking for the old song, and here it is, in a tremendously enjoyable cartoon of "The Grasshopper and the Ants."



If you watch the whole thing — which you will not regret — you'll probably want to talk about politics. What's left-wing and right-wing here? But maybe you'll be like me if: 1. You observe, early on, that the grasshopper is working, as a musician, and then feel richly rewarded at a later plot point, and 2. You're quite touched by the charity of the ants, and 3. You're cracked up by how happy the insects are when they're happy, and 4. You love the brilliance of the depiction of the seasons changing and think the image of ants' home in the snow looks like a Thomas Kinkade painting.

Hey! I just realized this post gets one of my favorite tags: Insect Politics!

"Change in sense of humour 'a sign of impending dementia.'"

"The University College London study involved patients with frontotemporal dementia, with the results appearing in the Journal of Alzheimer's Disease."

Nearly all of the [friends or relatives of the patients] said, with hindsight, that they had noticed a shift in the nine years before the dementia had been diagnosed. Many of the patients had developed a dark sense of humour — for example, laughing at tragic events in the news or in their personal lives. The dementia patients also tended to prefer slapstick to satirical humour, when compared with 21 healthy people of a similar age.

Dr [Camilla] Clark said: "These were marked changes - completely inappropriate humour well beyond the realms of even distasteful humour. For example, one man laughed when his wife badly scalded herself."

What does this say about people who begin with a "dark" sense of humor and laugh at the pain of others?

Some Yale students are hopping mad at 2 faculty members who didn't see the exquisite importance of repressing Halloween costumery.

The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education explains the multilayered outrage.

This email from Associate Master of Silliman College Erika Christakis is the main source of irritation. She had the nerve to address Yale students as intellectuals, drawing on her expertise — she teaches a class on "The Concept of the Problem Child" — and saying things like:

At the first link there's video of Yale students yelling at Erika Christakis's husband Nicholas:

“As your position as master, it is your job to create a place of comfort and home for the students that live in Silliman,” one student says. “You have not done that. By sending out that email, that goes against your position as master. Do you understand that?”

When Christakis disagreed, the student proceeded to yell at him. “Who the fuck hired you?” she asked, arguing that Christakis should “step down” because being master is “not about creating an intellectual space,” but rather “creating a home.”

To be fair, I'd like to know more about what representations Yale made to the students it lured into matriculating. Was a "safe space" promised? Part of the "marketplace of ideas" that the Christakises champion is the marketplace of colleges where students get their choice. What did the Yale packaging say? I can't really judge the anger and the urgency of these students without knowing what other offers they had and what they were led to think they were buying when they picked Yale. A vibrant "intellectual space" sounds exciting to me, but is that what they were told they'd get if they came to Yale? Maybe some other schools offered a challenging intellectual environment and they passed on it, preferring a caring, nurturing setting. Were they deceived?

There's a lot that could be said here, but I'll just say one more thing. Halloween is childish fun. If you're grimly serious about it, you've aged out. Maybe some of your classmates are still playing around, vacationing from their daily worries, indulging in this annual childishness. If you're too adult to join them, then do the adult thing and stay home and read. Complaining to the authorities is another form of indulgence in childishness — not childish fun but childish whining and tattling.

"Given what we know in 2015, the question is whether anybody is really 'playing' football."

"Are high schoolers risking their lives for a chance out of poverty or a sense of elevated status really 'playing'? Are those who take the field in the NCAA, exploited for billions of dollars in television revenue while working in a state of indentured servitude, 'playing'? Are the NFL athletes who have to treat every single play as a potential threat to their brains, and get an average of three and a half years on the field, 'playing'? The only people 'playing' in this scenario are egomaniacal coaches and parents, craven NCAA thought leaders, and NFL executives, all preaching intensity and sacrifice, but really just playing with the lives of others. They are the sports equivalent of the Bush-era chickenhawks. Note how many big-time basketball coaches have kids who play hoops and note how few football coaches can say the same."

That's Dave Zirin in The Nation: "Why Does Anybody Play Football Anymore?/Football has never been more popular. And it has never felt less like a game."

Yes, that's a bit extreme and over-politicized, but I'm interested in the precedence given to "play," the different meanings of "play," and the work/play distinction.

There seems to be an assumption that if something is a game, it should be play and not work. You should be having fun, not striving and struggling, not using it as a way to get money. But what's bad about having a serious, hard-working mindset in sports? There's no corresponding assumption that those of us who are doing jobs that are not games shouldn't feel that we are at play, having fun, feeling joy that's disconnected from the money we're making.

On really long hikes — the Appalachian Trail and beyond — women may do better than men at setting speed records.

At some point, the female body has an advantage:

Robert Deaner of Grand Valley State University in Allendale, Mich., has spent the past 10 years studying the psychological differences in distance running between the sexes...  Men “begin at a pace that could lead to a superb performance, given their own talent and training, but one that also increases their chance of crashing or hitting the wall. The longer the race, the more crucial it is to be conservative with pacing, since fatigue in longer races reflects slowly cumulating processes, such as glycogen depletion and tissue damage.” Although data on longer distances is lacking, Deaner acknowledges, “since males generally have trouble making conservative decisions, they might be less likely to perform well in an ultrarun or hike.”...

“Women appear to be better suited for walking long distances because it doesn’t seem to take the same physical toll on their bodies,” [said record-setting hiker Heather Anderson]. “The women I see at the end of a long-distance hike look fit and badass, but the guys look emaciated.... I believe that endurance is most likely genderless... As a species we evolved by traveling long distances and carrying what we needed. It’s a human trait.”

Samuel Cheuvront, a research physiologist for the United States Army Research Institute of Environmental Medicine, agreed. “I can’t think of any reason why men would have an advantage over women at these lengths,” he said. “At distances over 2,000 miles, you are negating the benefit that males have due to increased muscle mass and aerobic capacity.”...

When Jeb — giving a sword to Rubio — talked about a made-up Chinese character he called "Chang" — a "mystical warrior" who "has never let me down."

From a WaPo article — by Sean Sullivan, Manuel Roig-Franzia and David A. Fahrenthold — called "The 17-year story behind Marco Rubio’s cut-down of Jeb Bush":

By 2005, the two men were close enough that when Rubio gave an emotional speech after winning the race to be Florida’s House speaker... [Jeb] honored Rubio with a gift: a sword, which he said belonged to a great “conservative warrior” named Chang.

“Chang is somebody who believes in conservative principles, believes in entrepreneurial capitalism, believes in moral values that underpin a free society... Chang, this mystical warrior, has never let me down.”

This gesture was even stranger than it sounds. It appears that “Chang” was not a real person but something from a Bush family in-joke about Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek (“Unleash Chiang!”). Now, Jeb — whose ­father was once the U.S. envoy to Beijing — had garbled the story into something about a mystical warrior with a sword.

The sword “really meant something to Jeb,” a longtime friend and colleague of both men said. “He thought it was Marco who would continue his legacy.”

So Jeb gave Rubio a sword and later Rubio performed a (metaphorical) "cut-down." With 3 writers on that WaPo story, couldn't they at least have figured out where Jeb got the sword?

I suspect re-gifting. Somebody gave somebody in the Bush family a sword. H.W. Bush served as an envoy in China. I suppose that over the years, the Bushes have gotten many gifts they don't love or need. Stuck with a sword... until you can stick somebody else with it.

What went into the decision to give the new speaker of the Florida house a sword? Normally, the speaker wields a gavel, a symbol of calling a diverse, noisy group to order, so that the many can proceed with the business of the whole. Why supplant the gavel with a sword, a symbol of violence and divisiveness. You literally divide with a sword. But in Jeb's mind, that seemed like the right message.

Now add to that the invention of a Chinese character. Nothing Chinese was going on. It was about the Florida legislature. And Chinese culture was appropriated for the occasion... why? Some stereotype about warriors? About "mysticism"? Or is it just something internal to the Bush family, within which it's (apparently) a running joke to say "Unleash Chiang!" Did Jeb imagine that the sword ritual was initiating young Marco into the Bush family secret society?

That question made me look up Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society to which George H.W. and George W. Bush belonged. But Jeb Bush didn't go to Yale. He went to the University of Texas, and he didn't even join a fraternity. He'd met his future wife during a trip to Mexico when he was 17, and that affected his approach to college:

When his friends decided to rush fraternities, Bush stayed behind — he wasn’t interested in dates or parties, [best friend Rob] Kerr said. It took him less than three years to graduate magna cum laude with a degree in Latin American studies.

“He had a very good ability to study really intently while other people were goofing off,” Kerr said. “He was probably more studious than the rest of us.”

After a few years of constant phone calls and occasional visits, Jeb, 21, married Columba, 20, at the UT-Austin University Catholic Center in 1974.

Those 3 WaPo writers — Sean Sullivan, Manuel Roig-Franzia and David A. Fahrenthold — offered to explain the 17-year story of Jeb and Marco, but they never say anything deep about the human personality. I just want to make up a coherent story of the man who made up a fake story about the mystical Chinese warrior as he gave a sword to Marco Rubio:

The warrior Chang stands in for the elder Bush who fought in the war and went to China. The younger man, Rubio, stands in for the younger brother, George W. Bush, who, like the father, went to Yale and performed whatever those secret rituals were, while the studious older brother buried himself in books at the state university, earnestly striving to marry the girl he fell in love with when he was 17. The callow brother surged past him and acquired the mystical power over the American soul that is the presidency, and now another man is surging ahead.

The sword was passed.
CORRECTION: This post originally had George as the younger brother and Jeb as the older brother. Jeb may have seemed more mature, but he is, of course, younger.

AND: Reading this post, Meade inferred that the 3 WaPo writers got this story from Rubio, who has a motive to make Jeb sound bad. Did Jeb really "garble" the Bush family story? Was it an "in-joke" or meaningful references to Chiang Kai-shek? Did Bush, handing over the sword, really talk about an invented character named "Chang," or was he saying "Chiang"? Chiang Kai-shek was a warrior, and Chiang Kai-shek could be said to be "conservative" and even "mystical." The Wikipedia article on Chiang Kai-shek identifies him with The New Life Movement, which "was based upon Confucianism, mixed with Christianity, nationalism and authoritarianism":

Chiang Kai-shek used the Confucian and Methodist notion of self-cultivation and correct living for the Movement; to this end it prescribed proper etiquette on every aspect of daily lives. Some of its many measures included: opposition to littering and spitting on the floor; opposition to opium use; opposition to conspicuous consumption; rejection of vice entertainments in favor of artistic and athletic pursuits; promotion of courteous behavior; and promotion of flag salutes. Among its more unusual campaigns was its promotion of bathing with cold water: Chiang Kai-shek pointed out the (supposed) Japanese habit of washing their faces with cold water as a sign of their military strength, and expected the Chinese to be able to do the same if not better.

"My older sister once told me about 'Finals Friends With Benefits,' people you had sex with only during finals week to deal with the stress of exams."

"I never thought I would be the type until I asked Kam over on the last day of winter classes, and soon 'Want to take a study break?' became the sexiest of booty calls. Kam asked me if I wanted to watch a TED talk he had been assigned as homework...."

The ellipsis marks the place in a NYT "Modern Love" column where I had to stop and laugh. Something about the combination of "sexiest" and watching a TED talk. And it gets even unsexier. The TED talk is Malcolm Gladwell on the topic of marketing. If you do continue reading, you'll find that the author Sophie Dillon — "a junior at Yale" — uses Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk on marketing to explain different labels for sexual relationships. There's a "wide spectrum" that goes from "single, talking, friends with benefits, hookup buddies (all physical, no friendship), cuff (a temporary, reliable cuddle buddy for wintertime, when it’s too cold to go out and meet people, a special favorite of Northeasterners), exclusively hooking up (all physical with the same partner), dating, and then the finish line: 'in a relationship.'"

In the end, the young woman wants "a relationship" with Kam (a male), and after a drunk friend calls Kam "a coward" for not being willing to call what they have "a relationship" and she realizes she's "scared" to confront him about it, she finally confronts him with "Are we going to do this thing? Or does he want to chicken out?" Notice all the fear words.

Anyway, they end up at the so-called "finish line," "in a relationship."

Now, why doesn't this NYT column have a comments section? Young Sophie must be protected from the mean things people might say. Speaking of fear. But what is there to say about this? I have 6 things:
Click for more »

James Taylor explains that he wasn't using heroin "seeking ecstasy or oblivion. I was looking to get normal."

"The way I've come to feel about it is that I was probably, you know, like, rowing of some Viking boat across the seas in a former life, and, you know, when you sit me down in a sort of suburban context, I just, you know, my nervous system and my body and my entire wiring is just not ready for it. You know, I'm ready for something else. I'm ready for crisis. I'm ready for war. I'm ready for, you know, to battle the elements, but I, or to, you know, raid villages or something or defend villages, but I'm not comfortable, you know, on the couch watching baseball, no."

James Taylor — who's been off heroin for 32 years — talking to Marc Maron, who's been off alcohol for 15+ years.

I took the time to transcribe that quote — not easy, with all the disfluencies — because I think human beings have no end of troubles because our nervous system evolved under conditions entirely different from the world where we must live. We want our conveniences and comforts — the couch and the television and the absence of marauders — but we are organisms designed for a much rougher existence.

This is the second post of the day where I wrote something that cued a John Lennon song in my head. (Here's the first.) Now, what's playing — from "Instant Karma" — is "Why in the world are we here? Surely not to live in pain and fear." That's a beautiful, important insight, but from an evolutionary standpoint we are here to live in pain and fear. James Taylor is here because his ancestors rowed the Viking boat across the seas, raided and defended villages, and battled the elements, and the nervous system he inherited makes him feel ready for tasks that are not presented in his suburban home with the couch and the television.

He used heroin to blunt that useless, out-of-context readiness for things that are never going to happen. He wasn't, he said, "seeking ecstasy or oblivion." He was "looking to get normal," to medicate his nervous system into what would belong on a couch in front of a television showing the play-battles of other men, men who are using their out-of-context readiness in a more sensible way.

When he got off heroin, he threw himself into physical exercise, working out aggressively to produce the natural endorphins — "endogenous morphine" — that made him feel normal.

(I know some of you may think I'm getting this wrong, because he said "rowing of some Viking boat across the seas in a former life," and that seems to mean he thinks he's a reincarnated Viking, not that he's thought about evolution. But elsewhere in the podcast, he talks about evolution, and that's the basis for my assumption that "a former life" is used by the poet poetically, as a metaphor indicating evolution.)

"Why sex that’s consensual can still be bad. And why we’re not talking about it."

I know: newsflash. But the fact that consent is not enough to make sex good is received as news by anybody is what's interesting. It's also valuable to understand how some people got stuck on the consent/nonconsent distinction when there are so many other issues to examine.

The article, at New York Magazine, is by Rebecca Traister.

It may feel as though contemporary feminists are always talking about the power imbalances related to sex, thanks to the recently robust and radical campus campaigns against rape and sexual assault. But contemporary feminism’s shortcomings may lie in not its over­radicalization but rather its under­radicalization. Because, outside of sexual assault, there is little critique of sex. Young feminists have adopted an exuberant, raunchy, confident, righteously unapologetic, slut-walking ideology that sees sex — as long as it’s consensual — as an expression of feminist liberation. The result is a neatly halved sexual universe, in which there is either assault or there is sex positivity. Which means a vast expanse of bad sex — joyless, exploitative encounters that reflect a persistently sexist culture and can be hard to acknowledge without sounding prudish — has gone largely uninterrogated, leaving some young women wondering why they feel so fucked by fucking.

"Or maybe your soul is telling you that sex is supposed to mean something, that, in fact, sex is supposed to be the accompaniment of love — the type of love that commits for a lifetime."

"Could be that your soul is sane in a culture that is not."

That's the top-rated comment at a NYT "Modern Love" column by a young woman named Ali Rachel Pearl who's trying to understand why she hasn't had sex in 2 years:

Maybe my secondary abstinence...

Secondary abstinence is abstinence by someone who has been sexually active in the past.

...  isn’t in allegiance to God but to my own broken heart and the fear that seems to produce a kind of magnetic repellant [sic] whenever I come close to someone I desire.

My friends don’t seem to understand my secondary abstinence. They ask if I’ve had sex yet. “How can you go so long?” they ask. “I can’t imagine.” They say: “You have to lower your standards.” “Go to the bar more.” “Join a dating website.” “Make really good eye contact.” “Get rid of your hang-ups.” “Be more open.” “Stop being afraid.” “It’s just sex,” they say. “You have to stop refusing to sleep with people just because you don’t immediately want to marry them.”...

Every night that I go to a concert or a party, every day that I walk around the neighborhood, I find my secondary abstinence trailing me like a sad ghost or an unwanted dog.

"I identify as grey-asexual (can't bring myself to call it greysexual) and for me it's a useful term."

"I experience sexual attraction vanishingly rarely and when I do it's often not strong enough to even act on, more of an intellectual curiosity. Some folks in the asexual community can be absolutists about the identity, so that a person with my history, for instance, wouldn't be considered asexual, even though my lived experience is more in line with asexuality than not. Grey-asexual identifies those who fall between asexual and non-asexual and can help those of us who fall on that part of the spectrum understand ourselves. It's not a term with an exact definition and people who identify with it often have their own interpretations, but it's functioning in an area where the language is evolving rapidly as people work to more accurately express their feelings, hence the host of identities in the article."

From the Metafilter comments on a post about a HuffPo article collecting a bunch of words that purportedly identify various sexual conditions. The HuffPo article is not good. It seems like it could be a joke, but if so it would be: 1. not particularly funny, and 2. disrespectful toward some people you'd expect HuffPo to swath in dignity. The HuffPo article can be experienced as funny, as Metafilter commenters point out, if you concentrate on why the various stock photos were chosen to illustrate the particular sexual conditions. Why is the "graysexual" a man in a hat walking down the middle of a country road?

The serious question — the one that made me choose the quote above — is whether having more specific words for feelings helps people understand who they are and what they are doing with their lives? Off hand, I say it depends on what you do with that word once you learn it.

"Does this article say anything I couldn't just easily guess?"

I ask Meade after he sends me a link to a MarketWatch article titled "Why men are threatened by smart women/A new study suggests men might not want to date women who are smarter than them."

He says "no," but then explains that it connects to the themes that have been raised on the blog recently. He perceives the article as advice aimed at men, advice that resembles the kind of advice that's been aimed at women over the years. He's read the article. I haven't. So I was skeptical: "Is this really aimed at men?" At the headline level, it looks like more massage for the female mind, and I'm tempted to translate the title uncharitably to: Why men avoid you: You're smart! A new study suggests that the men who don't want you are not good enough for you.

Okay, now I've read the article. In the study, men were prepped for an encounter with a woman by being told that the woman scored higher than he did on an intelligence test. The men then met the woman and judged her to be relatively unattractive.

MarketWatch asked psychologists about how men can overcome bias (if they have it) against smart women.

This supports Meade's perception that it's advice for men. (It is, at least, if you get all the way to the last 3 paragraphs of a 13 paragraph article.) One psychologist tells men to focus on "appreciating" the woman and to "realize that this is an issue with your own self-esteem." Another psychologist says men could try to become more intelligent and to concentrate on other "areas of your self-concept."

This article was really aimed at...

Men, and it worked rather well.

Men, but men aren't going to listen to this.

Women, of course. Seeming to talk to men is an effective angle in talking to women.

Women, but it may lose them by failing to be all about them.

Both! Men who want to work on their flaws and women who want to help them.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"I live knowing that whatever my blackness means to me can be at odds with what it means to certain white observers, at any moment."

"So I live with two identities: mine and others’ perceptions of it. So much of blackness evolving has been limited to whiteness allowing it to evolve, without white people accepting that they are in the position of granting permission. Allowing. If that symbiotic dynamic is going to change, white people will need to become more conscious that they, too, can be perceived."

So writes Wesley Morris in a long New York Times Magazine article "The Year We ObsessedOver Identity" with the long subtle: "2015's headlines and cultural events have confronted us with the malleability of racial, gender, sexual and reputational lines. Who do we think we are?" The article has some topics that I've covered on this blog over the year — Rachel Dolezal, Atticus Finch — but the reason I wanted to blog this is that it ends talking about a book that I happened to notice for the first time yesterday, "Far From the Tree," by Andrew Solomon. Here's how Wesley Morris uses that book:

It could be that... it’s... in our natures to keep trying to change, to discover ourselves. In ‘‘Far From the Tree,’’ Andrew Solomon’s landmark 2012 book about parenting and how children differentiate themselves, he makes a distinction between vertical and horizontal identity. The former is defined by traits you share with your parents, through genes and norms; the latter is defined by traits and values you don’t share with them, sometimes because of genetic mutation, sometimes through the choice of a different social world. The emotional tension in the book’s scores of stories arises from the absence of love for or empathy toward someone with a pronounced or extreme horizontal identity — homosexuality or autism or severe disability. Solomon is writing about the struggle to overcome intolerance and estrangement, and to better understand disgust; about our comfort with fixed, established identity and our distress over its unfixed or unstable counterpart.

"The wish to hurt others is tied not to autism but to psychopathy, which manifests in a deficiency or absence of empathy and remorse."

"Some autistic people may not recognize why they cause distress; psychopaths don’t care that they cause distress. Autistic people may see the world from a singular, personal perspective; psychopaths are often cunning manipulators who act according to perceived self-interest without regard for the destruction they cause. Psychopathy seems to have coincided with autism in the cases of Mr. Harper-Mercer at Umpqua and Adam Lanza at Newtown, Conn. Psychopathy apparently coincided with depression and grandiosity in the cases of Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold at Columbine and Elliot O. Rodger at Isla Vista, Calif. Psychopathy almost certainly coincided with schizophrenia in the cases of James Holmes in Aurora, Colo., and Jared Loughner in Tucson. You can categorize such people as having a common madness only if your criterion for madness is their behavior itself...."

From a NYT op-ed, "The Myth of the 'Autistic Shooter,'" by Andrew Solomon. Solomon is identified only as "the author, most recently, of 'Far From the Tree,'" so I looked up "Far From the Tree." Subtitled "Parents, Children and the Search for Identity," it's a very long book about the "startling proposition... that being exceptional is at the core of the human condition—that difference is what unites us."

"You're carrying a gun to class? Yeah well I'm carrying a HUGE DILDO."

University of Texas student begins what she calls #CocksNotGlocks, a protest against the new Texas law permitting the licensed concealed carrying of guns on campus. The protest is accomplished by "strapping gigantic swinging dildos to our backpacks."

Unlike the guns, the dildos are not concealed. They are out there in your face, including the faces of those who — in other contexts — urge us to become sensitized to sexual aggression. How is a rape survivor supposed to feel sitting next to students with "gigantic swinging dildos" hanging from their backpacks? And what of the men who have cared about the critique of the "rape culture"? What are they to think seeing their private parts likened to weaponry and bandied about in disembodied form detached from the feeling, caring body of a human being? And why the specification that the dildos be "gigantic"? Is this not body-shaming the vast majority of men, taunting them with a thoroughly unattainable standard?

"She talks about not knowing who she is anymore because she’s just Mom . . . and then she goes and buys a 12-passenger van so she can do more carpooling for her kids’ activities."

"It’s kinda heartbreaking. Her complaints aren’t incessant, but when they do happen, it’s very clear that I’m watching stuffed-away feelings leak out — like she just can’t keep up appearances anymore."

From a question for the WaPo advice columnist Carolyn Hax, who gives what I think is an excellent answer (which includes something close to that rule of thumb of mine: the best test of what people really want to do is what they are actually doing).

"I am icy, certainly, but I am not uptight."

Writes Alana Massey, complaining about "the troubling ease with which men dismiss women as prudish if they are not immediately open and enthusiastic about sex."

It is cruel tool in a culture that was infiltrated by a certain brand of blasé sex positivity long before achieving true gender equality and, by extension, before we’ve decentralized men’s orgasms as the ultimate purpose of sex between a man and a woman.

We pathologize women’s entirely rational reactions of “nah” and “meh” to sex as the result of antiquated values. Often, these reactions are because sex might be perilous to a woman’s well-being – and often, if we’re honest, a physically substandard experience. This attitude wants sex to be a fundamental good so badly that it puts it in a vacuum, and ignores the snares that still surround it....

Why is it so hard to understand and say that bad sex is bad? 

"Kids are like rookie literary critics, always on the hunt for sentimentality. The camera becomes a worrying signifier to them..."

"... that tells them that they are engaged in something that is good for them or Meaningful. They don’t want to be engaged in any activity that is worthy of being photographed."

John Dickerson applies himself assiduously to the task of analyzing why his children, once so unselfconsciously vulnerable to the camera's inspection, became impossible to photograph as they turned adolescent.

Interesting quote — isn't it? — the way he takes himself out of the vignette. The "worrying signifier" — the camera— is in the hand of a human being, the father. And the meaning of the camera isn't merely that they are doing something "Meaningful," but that the father sees meaning in what they are doing. When they were younger, they lacked the ability to think about the father's mind, and now that they have acquired the great power to imagine things from the perspective of another, they object. Is it that "they don’t want to be engaged in any activity that is worthy of being photographed" or that they demand control over what their now-conscious selves mean?

"The three most destructive words that every man receives when he’s a boy is when he’s told to ‘be a man.'"

"Whether it’s homicidal violence or suicidal violence, people resort to such desperate behavior only when they are feeling shamed and humiliated, or feel that they would be if they didn’t prove they were real men."

2 quotes extracted from the depths of a College Fix piece titled "Students warned: Bulging biceps, big guns advance unhealthy masculinity," which contains other quotes (to which it is more sympathetic), like the sarcastic professor who reacted to the presentation with: "I should have hung myself or jumped out a window from my involvement in athletics."

Meanwhile: "Republicans want to talk about mental illness rather than guns. Let’s do it."

Guns... guns... I know. I'm not trying to create confusion or be cute. That alignment just happened.