It's All One Thing

Which is actually the title of Will Shetterly's blog. (Shetterly is a marvelous writer who needs to write more stories.)

However, this is about something different.

First, from Marshall Jon Fisher in The Atlantic, an essay on bike messengers from 1997:

Although couriers spend their days delivering the packages that keep corporate America running, they share a distrust of authority and a disdain for the pallid indoor worker. Ford, who is twenty-six, graduated from Wesleyan University with a dual degree in studio arts and premed. Like a number of messengers I have talked to, he was thoughtful and articulate, despite the Dudes and "like"s peppering his speech. His goatee twitched and his tongue studs flashed as he spoke in a machine-gun rhythm. "I was thinking about medical school, but this is just so much more entertaining. Why would I want to forfeit my youth to go to medical school?"

Next, what may be the next breakthrough in physics:

Lisi knows that by even addressing the Einstein comparison he risks coming off as a lunatic, but too many people have reached for the E-word for him to ignore it totally. "Yeah, I am a guy working on physics outside of academia," he says, shuffling his bear paws on the Pergo floor. "But I'm nowhere near Einstein's caliber. Certainly in terms of what I've accomplished, and also because this theory might be wrong. It's not a justified comparison."

There's nothing unusual about Lisi suggesting that he might be off target. Only one grand theoretical picture of reality can be correct, after all—both mathematically consistent and experimentally validated against the real world. All the rest are just scribblings on paper. What is truly peculiar is that this scientist hobo, a man who abandoned the security of academia to take his chances as a physics nomad, has any shot at all at being right.

What's the connection? you say.

According to Joshua Goldstein, a demographer at Princeton, adolescence will in the future evolve into a period of experimentation and education that will last from the teenage years into the mid-thirties. In a kind of wanderjahr prolonged for decades, young people will try out jobs on a temporary basis, float in and out of their parents' homes, hit the Europass-and-hostel circuit, pick up extra courses and degrees, and live with different people in different places. In the past the transition from youth to adulthood usually followed an orderly sequence: education, entry into the labor force, marriage, and parenthood. For tomorrow's thirtysomethings, suspended in what Goldstein calls "quasi-adulthood," these steps may occur in any order.

From our short-life-expectancy point of view, quasi-adulthood may seem like a period of socially mandated fecklessness—what Leon Kass, the chair of the President's Council on Bioethics, has decried as the coming culture of "protracted youthfulness, hedonism, and sexual license."

Actually, I tend to think youthfulness, hedonism and sexual license are good things, which is probably why I'm not a Republican. Aside from that, though, I find the idea of social drop-outs as a defining element of culture a fascinating one.

Just think about the possibilities.

(All via Patrick Appel at Daily Dish.)