A couple of scientists at the University of British Columbia have come up with some interesting [findings] about what kids find cool thesedays.

Apparently nice is the new snark. As described by surprisingly studly study director [Ilan Dar-Nimrod], “Just being nice and friendly and having talent — all the things your mom would love you to be — is the main part of how people perceive coolness now.” Dar-Nimrod sees the origins of the stereotypical cool rebel as arising from disempowered outgroups of the 1950s — blacks and youth — who wanted to resist the culture through personal expression. According to Dar-Nimrod’s colleague Ian Hansen, “open rebellion could get you killed, so a safer way to rebel would be ironic mockery of the dominant culture. Original coolness was a way of feeling like you were resisting oppression without actually doing what was necessary to throw it off.” Kids today are, apparently, not feeling very disgruntled about things and are more than happy to just get along. Exemplars of this trait are “cool”.

Of course, we can chalk a lot of this up to the general conservative vibe in the world and this study was, after all, conducted in Canada (sweet people, those Canadians), but it makes you wonder about who is consuming all the snarky too-ironic-by-half sludge that gets pumped from media outlets. Maybe not the next generation of media consumers. If I was Nick Denton I’d start wondering if I was really on the cutting edge of the next wave in publishing — or just pandering to the aging cynical wheezebags of the last generation.

The BBC and others are [reporting] on a breakthrough in the development of male hormonal contraceptives — the Male Pill. Chalk this up to politically correct wishful thinking. Do they honestly think men are going to turn the tables on thousands of years of behavior and suddenly start shooting themselves up with God-knows-what to prevent their women from getting knocked up? Someone forgot to tell them that men already have an effective method of avoiding the repurcussions of unplanned pregnancy: it’s called walking.

Of course some men may very well try this — risks and all. But the ones most likely to adopt it are exactly the ones — well-educated upper middle class liberals — who already enjoy a close to zero fertility rate. If they really wanted this stuff to have a positive effect on society they’d slip it into the beer at Rangers games, cock fights, wrestling matches and Nascar races.

Last week a lot of news sites carried stories about [a guy] who’s trying to barter his way to a new house, starting from having practically nothing of value to trade. It’s a brilliant scheme and, so far, he’s traded his way up from a paper clip to a year of free rent in Phoenix. Read the rest of this entry »

Frank Bruni in the NYT offers some [rare wisdom] about the plethora of contradictory findings from the lab on how to live to be old. Really old. He makes perfectly intelligent comments that hinge on the how of “how to live” — namely, that quality of life is more important that quantity — but his cogent comments will count for naught with his Baby Boomer readership because he overlooks the why of all these studies: people today are panicked about getting old and infirm.

Science, like any other human endeavor, is subject to market forces, and what people are in the market for thesedays is a guarantee that they won’t decline and whither into a miserable existence. It’s not hard to understand what’s going on — this is what happens when the idea of extended family becomes a quaint artifact of a culture based on mobility and consumption. Back in the day there were time-honored roles for people at every stage of life from cradle to grave and they centered around the mini-society of relatives. Not so much anymore.

Call it a failure of imagination. The rapidly aging Boomers have no models for successful aging. Facing a future warehoused in retirement communities or, worse, assisted-care facilities who wouldn’t be battering down the doors of the lab looking for a preventive. But they won’t find it there. All the white coats can do is provide more time. They can’t fill that time with meaning or happiness. Rats are social animals. And the society is sick.