By您好, yangyang Geng   Memory heals the scars of time. Photography documents the wounds. — Michael Ignatieff[1] It requires constant vigilance to see people as they are. — Olive Pierce    The Portraits of the Jefferson Park Housing Project in Cambridge and No Easy Roses Olive Pierce was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1925 and […]

Five mysteries hold the keys to the unseen: the act of love, and the birth of a baby, and the contemplation of great art, and being in the presence of death or disaster, and hearing the human voice lifted in song.                                                                              […]

This post was largely finished before the Paris terror attacks. I criticized costumes that mock and mimic violence, writing, that these outfits “cut too close to the bone.” Those words of mid-week cut even deeper now. ♦ Halloween is over, but Fall Football isn’t. In his magisterial A Secular Age (45-6), Charles Taylor writes that […]

In Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy (Holt Paperbacks, 2007), Barbara Ehrenreich writes about the evolution of carnivals; from tribal societies masking and dancing to manufacture group solidarity (Intro, Ch. 1); to feudal festivals that challenged oppressive gender and class relations (Ch. 4). Writes Ehrenreich: Whatever social category you had been boxed into–male or female, rich […]

After having read countless authors who cite Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of Great American Cities, and having intuitively come to many Jane Jacobs-esque conclusions on my own over the years, I finally decided it was time to read the original work. Many of the conclusions Jacobs comes to resonate with my personal experience. Critiquing the notion […]

Narcissistic individuals feel superior to others, fantasize about personal successes, and believe they deserve special treatment. When they feel humiliated, they often lash out aggressively or even violently. “Origins of narcissism in children,” PANS 2015    Most people associate narcissism with adults, but today’s headlines suggest it is now children who are being pointed at […]

Last December, here at Zeteo, I questioned the naturalistic theory that stress induces African-American parents to abuse their children at greater rates than do European-Americans (even when accounting for income disparity). Citing Jared Diamond‘s observation that communities residing in more dangerous environments tend to engage in harsher and more frequent physical punishment of children, I posed the rationalist theory that […]

Earlier this year, New York’s iconic Scholastic store in SoHo permanently closed. I never visited the store while it was open, but I got a glimpse of its history while visiting the small exhibit that was put in its place. The larger piece in the exhibit (displayed in an entrance window) is a scroll-shaped canvas with an […]

Perceptions about childhood and innocence tend to go hand in hand. People generally believe that young children are innocent and deserving of a worry-free childhood. Unfortunately, children in racialized groups might stop benefitting from such convenient assumptions way earlier in life than children in more racially advantaged groups. Dr. Goff from the University of California in Los […]

Pauline Hunt and Ronald Frankenberg wrote an academic analysis about Disneyland titled “It’s a Small World” several decades ago, before Disneyland became the multibillion dollar company it is now. Today, their analysis is still on target. The authors’ reflections on their own experience visiting Disneyland (as a couple) in the nineties illustrate a sense of “infinite nostalgia” that today’s visitors might […]

Every now and then I read an interesting article about parenting. While this is not a blog on parenting, I like to comment on articles that address these issues because they reflect a big part of how we think about children. On “Seven Reasons We Hate Free-Range Parents,” Meghan McArdle wonders why America has “gone lunatic” on […]