Meanderings, 28 October 2023
Good morning!
Photo by Jennifer Kim on Unsplash
St. Louis — The students come together at the crack of dawn from all directions, converging on this tiny house in St. Louis, Missouri, for their weekly, Wednesday visit with 66-year-old Peggy Winckowski.
"Grandma Peggy brings everyone together," Aaron Venneman, one of those students, told CBS News.
The students who visit Grandma Peggy attend Bishop DuBourg High School and are part of what they call the Wednesday Breakfast Club.
Seeing the extraordinary spread, it's understandable why kids come here. But what isn't so clear is how Winckowski got roped into hosting.
The club used to meet at a diner until one day in 2021 when a student named Sam Crowe said, "You know, my grandma could cook better than this."
So the next Wednesday, they all showed up at Winckowski's doorstep.
"I'm like, OK, and they came all school year — every Wednesday," Winckowski said.
The breakfasts continued merrily until July 2022 when all joy was lost.
Peggy's grandson, Sam Crowe, a sophomore at Bishop DuBourg, was killed in a hit-and-run. The boy was beloved, so of course, breakfast was the last thing on anyone's mind.
And yet, the very next Wednesday, and virtually every Wednesday since, the kids have returned to Grandma Peggy's, and in numbers far greater than before.
"Sam would be so proud," Winckowski said. "Look at what he started."
Everyone has come together for a heaping helping of healing.
"It melts my heart," Winckowski said.
One might find some parabolic illustrations here:
CNN —
California’s Death Valley is the hottest place in the world and the driest place in North America. But two months after Hurricane Hilary’s epic rainfall, parts of the national park look more oasis than desert.
Parched ground turned to ponds, wildflowers are in bloom in remote areas and a salt flat is now a massive lake. The salt flat-turned-lake is an exceptional but fleeting sight to behold.
“It is definitely a rare and special event,” Death Valley park spokesperson Abby Wines told CNN, only happening roughly once a decade.
It’s all because Hilary unloaded a year’s worth of rain, 2.2 inches, on Death Valley in just 24 hours on August 20 – the wettest day in the park’s history. Until then, the park had never recorded more than 2 inches of rainfall in a single day, according to records that date to 1911.
The parched desert soil couldn’t absorb the excessive rainfall fast enough, which triggered flash flooding. The torrent of water washed away trails and much of everything else in its path.’
New research has delved into what friendship in the U.S. looks like, including just how many friends the average American has….
According to Pew, 61% of adults in the U.S. say that having close friends is essential to living a fulfilling life — that's more than those who cited marriage, children or money.
A slim majority of adults surveyed (53%) said they have between one and four close friends. 38% said they had about five or more.
About 8% said they had no close friends. That adds up with what some experts are describing as an epidemic of loneliness for some Americans.
Of those friend-having adults, 72% expressed high levels of satisfaction with their friendships. Turns out comradery with your favorite people can leave you feeling content!
The survey respondents that reported larger groups of friends also felt more satisfied with the quality of their friendships compared to those with fewer close friends. Maybe those fellas from that famous '90s sitcom about friendship were onto something.
Generally, people talk most about work (shocker!), family and current events. But that frequency can also change depending on gender.
Women surveyed reported discussing family life, as well as mental and physical health, at higher rates than men. Men are more likely than women to talk to their close friends about sports and current events.
Anne Helen, always worth reading:
In hindsight, I was enormously lucky the pressure-cooker of college admissions wasn’t something I could opt into — because I absolutely would have. I know myself well enough to know that. Instead, I got to spend my pre-college years figuring out what I liked, being bored, working shit jobs, being even more bored, figuring out friendship, and listening to music and staring at the ceiling. Oh, and taking a few classes that really and truly challenged me — and being able to focus on those challenges, and figure out how to do hard things. I had space to do the hazy work of becoming myself. I was successful not because of my GPA or my SAT scores or my college admissions letters, but because I had begun that hard and essential work of figuring out who I was and what mattered.
Ana Homayoun is trying to help students in this current admissions environment do the same. She’s an academic advisor, but not that kind of academic advisor, and her new book, Erasing the Finish Line, shifts the paradigm of how we might think of “success” — for the students in our lives, sure, but also for ourselves. In our interview below, we talk about how college acceptance became so overdetermined, her work with neurodivergent students, shifting parents’ understanding of achievement, and why you can’t just hack the system for kids who can afford a consultant. Even if you don’t have a student in your life right now, I think you’ll find it thought-provoking.
“Nones” now comprise 28 percent of the American adult population, according to survey data that the Pew Research Center released this month. Sixteen years ago, in 2007, only 16 percent of Americans in 2007 said they had no religion.
But if secularization (that is, a shift away from religious affiliation among a substantial percentage of the population) is happening in the United States, it hasn’t proceeded along the lines that secularization theory predicted. According to this frequently recited theory, which was first proposed more than a century ago, educated industrial societies will inevitably become less religious, because as people adopt scientific explanations for natural phenomena, they will become less receptive to religious explanations.
This explanation was given new currency this year in Beyond Doubt: The Secularization of Society, which was written by three sociologists (Isabella Kasselstrand, Phil Zuckerman, and Ryant T. Cragun) who are veterans of secularization studies. Beyond Doubt presented a comprehensive study of several dozen countries from across the globe and demonstrated that in almost all of those that have religious freedom and are becoming increasingly educated, religious beliefs, practices, and affiliation are declining, just as they are in the United States. If religion is gaining adherents anywhere, the authors of Beyond Doubt argue, it’s only among the less educated or the members of a repressive society where few options for religious choice exist. In a free marketplace of ideas, with plenty of opportunities for education, religion will lose nearly every time.
But regardless of whether this theory might explain secularization in other parts of the world, it doesn’t adequately account for the experience of the United States. After World War II, in the midst of a massive surge in college education, the United States experienced a rapid rise in religious affiliation, church attendance, and the percentage of people who said that religion was important in their lives. Even though the United States led most other nations in economic growth, industrial development, access to higher education, and religious liberty and religious diversity – the ingredients that advocates of secularization theory, such as the authors of Beyond Doubt, suggest will inevitably lead to a decline in religiosity – Americans flocked to churches and expressed strong identification with religion.
The issue here is what the evidence says, and I admit I like reading contrarian viewpoints.
The economist Melissa Kearney has been both vilified and praised for her new book, The Two-Parent Privilege: How Americans Stopped Getting Married and Started Falling Behind.
In the book, released last month, Kearney points out a rather obvious fact: Children raised by two parents have a much higher chance of success than those raised by one. Yet she goes even further to argue that whether parents are married or not impacts their children's success.
Her argument goes against the trend in the U.S.; American children are increasingly being born and raised by single mothers. The U.S. has the world's highest rate of children living in single-parent households, according to a 2019 Pew Research Center study. Almost a quarter, or 23% of U.S. children under age 18, live with one parent and no other adults.
Kearney finds that this arrangement hurts children, widens inequality and ultimately damages society. She is ringing the alarm bells, and she wants people to hear them and start thinking of solutions. Judging by the book's reception, she has managed to achieve at least the first part of that.
"I've done exactly what I wanted, which was to start a conversation," Kearney tells NPR. "But I get frustrated that a lot of the initial reaction is an initial knee jerk reaction."
Kearney's argument that children who grow up in unmarried households are fighting the odds has progressives miffed and accusing Kearney of stigmatizing single mothers. Conservatives are celebrating her findings as validating their support of marriage.
"There are a lot of folks who are uncomfortable with the idea of prioritizing one family type over another," says Kearney, whose research and work as an economist at the University of Maryland focuses on issues that most would consider progressive: poverty, inequality, family and children.
"I'm not prioritizing one. I'm just recognizing the data and the evidence and the reality."
Thank you , I always appreciate your meanderings