Personal anecdote time, which enough time has passed that it can finally be told.
About 30 years ago, a family came down from the mountains near San Luis Obispo to ask whether my mother could teach them piano. They were an unusual family -- a mother and a number of children; apparently their father wouldn't leave his homestead up in the mountains. The children were all homeschoooled. They were perhaps a bit raggedy, but all quite brilliant and free-thinking, and quickly became excellent piano players. Our family became friends with theirs, and eventually we were invited to visit their homestead up in the mountains.
The homestead was an off-grid hand-built house and working organic dairy farm, lovingly stuffed to the rafters with various arts and crafts, including a large collection of medieval-style musical instruments which the patriarch of the family, Hal, had built by hand. Hal was an enigma within an enigma: he refused to talk about his past, looked like a Santa-clause mountain man, wouldn't engage with the outside world in person, but was relentlessly curious about it -- able to keep up with conversations about the latest in politics and technology. He also had a keen interest in the archaeology of the upper Colorado plateau, and soon we were making trips to the Cal Poly library to check out the latest archaeology books on his behalf. One day, on a whim, we looked for his name in the index of one of those books, and that's when we found out that we already knew who he was.
Haldon Chase[1] had been at the absolute epicenter of the Beat movement. He was the one who introduced Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, and most of the other Beats to each other. He'd gone by pseudonym "Chad King" in "On the Road". At the time he didn't have a Wikipedia entry, and at the time all anybody knew is that he had vanished at some point. Of course my family felt privileged to know the rest of the story.
Thinking now about Hal's life, in the few retrospectives I've seen of it, he's framed as having rejected the whole Beat lifestyle. I'm not sure that's accurate. In many ways the life he managed to carve out for himself was the apotheosis of much of the beat philosophy: genuinely free-thinking, self-reliant, non-conformist, creative, and in his way, spiritual. All very Beat. What he certainly rejected was the the limelight. The publicity, the drama, the ego. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that. So he managed to get away and just live a good (if unconventional) life. His kids have all gone on to live really good, non-messed-up lives as well.
So when reading stories about messed-up Beats and their messed-up kids, it's worth considering that there's a kind of anti-survivor-bias at play: where everything worked out, where the trauma didn't explode dramatically or get passed down the generations, you're probably not going to hear about it.
That's great story and a wonderful counterexample to what I wrote above. Thank you!
Edit: you got me thinking about one other counterexample, which is the part of the "Children of the Beats" interview with the daughter of Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones). She doesn't go into much detail but it definitely doesn't sound tragic.
Not explicitly arguing against the thesis of the website, but showing trend lines which allegedly started in 2007 with data that starts in 2006 is... Not convincing.
Also worth noting that a lot of the graphs (the ACT scores in particular) are constructed to show a downward trend but really seem to be measuring the COVID pandemic more directly.
That is exactly the bad analysis I was calling out.
If you take a data set and point out (while squinting) that it appears maybe to be turning down in the last two data points, any reasonable analyst should point out that those look like routine outliers and that if you want to project a trend you need more data.
Instead, you'd taking a very large (and well understood) signal in the next 5-ish data points and saying that it's proof of the trend. Which is silly.
No, that chart shows covid, period. If someone wants to show an uncorrelated effect across a signal that big, they need to come to the table with a lot more sophistication than a "WTF Happened?" blog post.
Fine, the dips 2018-2019 could very well be noise and we don't dont know if that trend would have borne out after 2020. However, the ACT and SAT composites gradually declined following peaks in 07 and 12, respectively, given the available data.
Come on. Extremely mildly down-sloping if at all, and without anything like an inflection point that would justify "WTF Happened in 2007?"
You can't do this like this. I mean, you sort of can if the effect is big enough (c.f. the 1971 site which inspired this one, and which makes a much better case). But if you can't eyeball a very clear angle in the chart without argument, you need to come to the table with some kind of fitted curve and real research.
Exactly, I've been net-addicted since .. uh, BBS culture in the late 80s, and I almost never use my smartphone but have my laptop or computer screen in front of me most of the day. I don't feel much better held together than my teens with their phones.
You are absolutely not the typical person. The vast majority of people, and 100% of the people born after 2007, are deeply affected by smartphones. I know I am!
Yes, it would be absolutely irrational and indefensible to block people from building solar farms where there is a straightforward commercial case for doing so. Unfortunately, "irrational and indefensible" is exactly what this administration is: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/oct/10/trump-offici...
Transport planner here. Haven't played either game, but it sounds like Motorways has an accurate model behind it. That's how the real world works, too.
c'mon man just build us one more lane, we can get you additional traffic flow next year, you know we're good for it just one more lane will fix all our the problems
The dinosaurs are concrete, and date from 1852. That's 7 years before Darwin published On the Origin of Species, and 55 years before the invention of plastic. So they're a kind of amazing window into the pre-history of paleontology. Really great artefacts, well worth seeing.
Anyhow,hope you eventually got a better girlfriend.
The standard joke is that English isn't actually a language: it's three languages stacked on top of each other wearing a trench coat, which go around beating up other languages and rifling through their pockets for loose vocabulary and spare grammar. This is funny because it's true.
Modern Italian, on the other hand, makes a modicum of sense because it was explicitly constructed during the 19th-century unification of Italy, when somebody had the bright idea that if you wanted to have a nation called "Italy", you should also have a language called "Italian" and it should make a modicum of sense. This is a memo which English has somehow never gotten.
The monkey's paw curls a finger: "Today Donald Trump announced a new initiative to teach all children a new AI-normalized language known as Americish. All English signage will be replaced with Americish."
So if you want to remember how to spell "phone", you first have to remember "puh-hon-eh"? I'm not sure that'd be an improvement. How do you even make a phonetic word out of something like "rough"?
The problem will always be that that English has a lot more phonemes than it does letters, so a 1:1 mapping will never be possible. That said, I do think it would be a good idea to have a 1:1 correlation. Which is why everybody should just learn Esperanto instead.[1]
Not that hard. Not perfect either (hs are difficult to pronounce) but still helpful. It could easily become a game for children to talk to each other in this "secret language". And by doing so, they would be memorising the correct spelling of the words.
See my later reply to the parent comment, but basically, first there's the creation of the whole world and all the peoples in it, then there's the creation of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Even and so forth. The first is ascribed to "God", or "Elohim" in Hebrew -- a plural word which has recently been awkwardly recontextualized through a monotheistic lens, but probably originally meant "the gods" -- while the second is ascribed to the "LORD God", or "YHVH" in Hebrew -- a definitely specific God.
About 30 years ago, a family came down from the mountains near San Luis Obispo to ask whether my mother could teach them piano. They were an unusual family -- a mother and a number of children; apparently their father wouldn't leave his homestead up in the mountains. The children were all homeschoooled. They were perhaps a bit raggedy, but all quite brilliant and free-thinking, and quickly became excellent piano players. Our family became friends with theirs, and eventually we were invited to visit their homestead up in the mountains.
The homestead was an off-grid hand-built house and working organic dairy farm, lovingly stuffed to the rafters with various arts and crafts, including a large collection of medieval-style musical instruments which the patriarch of the family, Hal, had built by hand. Hal was an enigma within an enigma: he refused to talk about his past, looked like a Santa-clause mountain man, wouldn't engage with the outside world in person, but was relentlessly curious about it -- able to keep up with conversations about the latest in politics and technology. He also had a keen interest in the archaeology of the upper Colorado plateau, and soon we were making trips to the Cal Poly library to check out the latest archaeology books on his behalf. One day, on a whim, we looked for his name in the index of one of those books, and that's when we found out that we already knew who he was.
Haldon Chase[1] had been at the absolute epicenter of the Beat movement. He was the one who introduced Allen Ginsberg to Jack Kerouac, and most of the other Beats to each other. He'd gone by pseudonym "Chad King" in "On the Road". At the time he didn't have a Wikipedia entry, and at the time all anybody knew is that he had vanished at some point. Of course my family felt privileged to know the rest of the story.
Thinking now about Hal's life, in the few retrospectives I've seen of it, he's framed as having rejected the whole Beat lifestyle. I'm not sure that's accurate. In many ways the life he managed to carve out for himself was the apotheosis of much of the beat philosophy: genuinely free-thinking, self-reliant, non-conformist, creative, and in his way, spiritual. All very Beat. What he certainly rejected was the the limelight. The publicity, the drama, the ego. He wanted absolutely nothing to do with any of that. So he managed to get away and just live a good (if unconventional) life. His kids have all gone on to live really good, non-messed-up lives as well.
So when reading stories about messed-up Beats and their messed-up kids, it's worth considering that there's a kind of anti-survivor-bias at play: where everything worked out, where the trauma didn't explode dramatically or get passed down the generations, you're probably not going to hear about it.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haldon_Chase -- mostly but not entirely accurate.
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