Weekend Reading - 04/28/2013

'The Growing Pains of Jonathan Krohn'

This piece in the New York Times, about the erstwhile pint-sized pundit, Jonathan Krohn, darling of Fox News, was a real feel-good story. A few years ago, I saw a youtube clip of him talking at CPAC, so self-assured and yet so young, and I remember thinking how desperate conservatives must be if they are turning to brain-washed home-schooled children as their Next Big Thing.

Krohn is now 18 and has just dropped out of NYU to take up a job with a Kurdish news agency. He sounds like he has broken free of his conservative upbringing and started to think for himself. It takes courage to admit your mistakes, even adolescent ones, and even greater courage to move to a foreign country at 18 and start a career with no college education. Fair play to him.

The Atlantic magazine provided much of my weekend reading as my print edition showed up in the mail this week. I am experimenting with some old-school print media options to see if it forces me to read more rather than pissing around on using the internet. There was something calming about sitting down, free of any devices and intrusions, to just read my magazine and focus on it. There was something refreshing about not hopping from one tab in Safari to the next to look up things on Wikipedia and Google and so on. Instead it was just me, The Atlantic magazine and quiet, which makes a change.

The Slacker Culture Among Young Japanese People

This article stood out for me in particular, showing the dangers of allowing unemployment and job insecurity to become embedded in your economy. A whole generation of young Japanese who have never had a proper job and just drift from one non-regular job to the next. This is rapidly becoming reality in much of Europe as well. 

How Not to Die
This was a story about a doctor near Boston who is determined to change end-of-life care in America by re-educating doctors and patients about 'The Conversation', how end-of-life care is discussed with families. Fascinating story of a workaholic with a mission to improve patient care.

'Diagnosing the Wrong Deficit'
A psychiatrist's novel theory on the causes of ADHD - sleep deprivation. He shows how many ADHD sufferers are found to have sleep disorders of some kind and lack delta sleep. As the parent of a toddler, you get to know the hyperactive grouchiness that toddlers exhibit when they don't nap properly, those hellish days when they wake you up in the night and then spend the following day being impossible because they're overtired. It's interesting to think that poor sleep patterns could be something that persists beyond toddler years, into adolescence and even adulthood.

Finally, this random find from pissing about on the internet inspired some debate in our house: a photo essay in TIME magazine from a few years ago, showing families in 16+ different countries, posing with their weekly food intake. The level of food inequality worldwide is disturbing (but not half as disturbing as the fluorescent glow of the some of the packaged food displayed by one American family) with a family of six in Chad surviving on just over a dollar's worth of food while a German family of four spent $500 on their weekly food. A sad story given its implications...