Belated happy Father’s Day, dads. Hope it was a good one. Here in southeastern Virginia, after an excellent morning service, I hit the trails at the Dismal Swamp (yes, the one Robert Frost almost got lost in) on my trusty, old BMC. It was a great ride until I was attacked by a half-dozen horseflies. When I got home, I caught up on the Critérium du Dauphiné to see how the Tour favorites were shaping up. This year’s race will be one for the climbers if they can make it through the crosswinds, cobles, and team time trial. The route is an interesting one, featuring sections of dirt roads and a short 65km mountain stage that will begin Formula 1-style with the cyclists lining up in order of standing.
Parenting is tough, and do you know what makes it tougher? Your phone. At least that’s what Erika Christakis says in The Atlantic. She recommends parents stop worrying about their kids’ screen time and take a long, hard look at their own: “Yes, parents now have more face time with their children than did almost any parents in history. Despite a dramatic increase in the percentage of women in the workforce, mothers today astoundingly spend more time caring for their children than mothers did in the 1960s. But the engagement between parent and child is increasingly low-quality, even ersatz. Parents are constantly present in their children’s lives physically, but they are less emotionally attuned.”
The late poet Jane Kenyon “encouraged her husband Donald Hall to leave his professorship at the University of Michigan and move to Eagle Pond, his grandparents’ New Hampshire farm where he had spent childhood summers haying, gathering eggs, and tromping through the woods.” She made it home by planting peonies. Steven Knepper takes a look at flowers in her work. They are a symbol of beauty and hope but also of the “ephemerality” of life.
A scholar breaks up with James Joyce: “My son was nine when a professional man in a suit asked: ‘And what does your mother do?’ Without hesitation, he answered: ‘She works for James Joyce.’”
Will the Voynich manuscript mystery ever be solved?
Adam Thorpe moved to the French countryside 25 years ago. He’s never quite felt at home.
Essay of the Day:
In Medium, Ben Blum writes about the famous Stanford Prison Experiment. It was deeply flawed:
“Zimbardo, a young Stanford psychology professor, built a mock jail in the basement of Jordan Hall and stocked it with nine ‘prisoners,’ and nine ‘guards,’ all male, college-age respondents to a newspaper ad who were assigned their roles at random and paid a generous daily wage to participate. The senior prison ‘staff’ consisted of Zimbardo himself and a handful of his students.
“The study was supposed to last for two weeks, but after Zimbardo’s girlfriend stopped by six days in and witnessed the conditions in the ‘Stanford County Jail,’ she convinced him to shut it down. Since then, the tale of guards run amok and terrified prisoners breaking down one by one has become world-famous, a cultural touchstone that’s been the subject of books, documentaries, and feature films — even an episode of Veronica Mars.
“The SPE is often used to teach the lesson that our behavior is profoundly affected by the social roles and situations in which we find ourselves. But its deeper, more disturbing implication is that we all have a wellspring of potential sadism lurking within us, waiting to be tapped by circumstance. It has been invoked to explain the massacre at My Lai during the Vietnam War, the Armenian genocide, and the horrors of the Holocaust. And the ultimate symbol of the agony that man helplessly inflicts on his brother is Korpi’s famous breakdown, set off after only 36 hours by the cruelty of his peers.
“There’s just one problem: Korpi’s breakdown was a sham.”
Photo: Nebraska
Text: Varlam Shalamov, “Forty-Five Things I Learned in the Gulag”
Forthcoming:
Viv Groskop, The Anna Karenina Fix: Life Lessons from Russian Literature (Fig Tree Press, June 26): “Viv Groskop has discovered the meaning of life in Russian literature. As she knows from personal experience, everything that has ever happened in life has already happened in these novels: from not being sure what to do with your life ( Anna Karenina) to being in love with someone who doesn't love you back enough ( A Month in the Country by Turgenev) or being socially anxious about your appearance (all of Chekhov's work). This is a literary self-help memoir, with examples from the author's own life that reflect the lessons of literature, only in a much less poetic way than Tolstoy probably intended, and with an emphasis on being excessively paranoid about having an emerging moustache on your upper lip, just like Natasha in War and Peace.”
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