The story of your life

Tell it often, and tell it to yourself and to people:

Organizing the past into a narrative isn’t just a way to understand the self, but also to attempt to predict the future. Which is interesting, because the storytelling device that seems most incompatible with the realities of actual life is foreshadowing. Metaphors, sure. As college literature class discussion sections taught me, you can see anything as a metaphor if you try hard enough. Motifs, definitely. Even if you’re living your life as randomly as possible, enough things will happen that, like monkeys with typewriters, patterns will start to emerge.

Remembering Wes Craven

A lovely remembrance of Wes Craven from Fresh Air. My favorite Craven quote from the segment:

Too much of American cinema dealt with reaffirming fantasies. It was a Disney-like approach to the entire spectrum of our reality. And at the same time, in the “real world,” quote-quote – whatever the hell that is – we were seeing more and more of the veils stripped away, you know? The myth of American supremacy and infallibility. The myth of, you know, bombs dropped to win wars and you don’t see the people that they hit. The reality that the American soldier was heroic in all cases and never did anything that was terribly disturbing. All those were being stripped away in the public forum, but in cinema it was still desperately trying to reaffirm the myths. And my feeling was, it’s time to stop dreaming. And I guess that’s become the theme of my entire work – it’s time to wake up.

The dating crisis in two religions

Jon Birger establishes that it’s religious demographics, not values, that are upending assumptions about marriage:

Multiple studies show that college-educated Americans are increasingly reluctant to marry those lacking a college degree. This bias is having a devastating impact on the dating market for college-educated women. Why? According to 2012 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are 5.5 million college-educated women in the U.S. between the ages of 22 and 29 versus 4.1 million such men. That’s four women for every three men. Among college grads age 30 to 39, there are 7.4 million women versus 6.0 million men—five women for every four men.

The Decline of Car Culture

An interesting examination of why car culture is going away for millenials:

Americans drive fewer miles per year — down about 9 percent over the past two decades. The percentage of 19-year-olds with driver’s licenses has dropped from 87 percent two decades ago to 70 percent last year. Most teens now do not get licensed within a year of becoming eligible, according to a study by the AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety.

One of the more interesting insights to me: How parenting has changed from an authoritarian institution into how “parents just want to be your friends,” mitigating the need for rebellion.

The Migrant Crisis

A powerful sequence of words and images that will open your eyes to the migrant crisis going on right now.

By far the most perilous route is the Libya-Italy sea crossing, where more than 2,500 people have perished since March. In the worst incident, in late April, a grotesquely overladen fishing trawler capsized and sank within sight of a rescue ship; of the estimated 800 migrants aboard, only 28 were saved.

The Life I Chose

Some lovely reminiscing by Tim Kreider for The New York Times:

I suspect that the way I feel now, at summer’s end, is about how I’ll feel at the end of my life, assuming I have time and mind enough to reflect: bewildered by how unexpectedly everything turned out, regretful about all the things I didn’t get around to, clutching the handful of friends and funny stories I’ve amassed, and wondering where it all went. And I’ll probably still be evading the same truth I’m evading now: that the life I ended up with, much as I complain about it, was pretty much the one I chose. And my dissatisfactions with it are really with my own character, with my hesitation and timidity.