Blog Archives
Farewell to the Dorm MINDSET LIST® Remarks Delivered to the Interface Student Housing Conference, Austin, Texas, April 6, 2018 The Mindset List® thanks Mr. Bruce Sanders of Elauwit for inviting us to speak today. Over half a century ago I began my college life in what was called a dormitory, at a university about ninety miles northwest of Austin. Though we did not appreciate it at the time, we were herded like the proverbial cattle into a four-story building with the same-sized rooms, sparsely furnished with standard issue university desks, tables, and beds. We ate the same food, prepared in advance for us, all in the same place. We had communal bathrooms—none of us even had our own stall, Read on »
Beloit College Releases the Mindset List for This Year’s Entering Class of First-Year College Students, The Class of 2021 Beloit, Wis. —This year’s entering college class of 2021 can’t remember when a “phone” wasn’t a video game and research library. Mostly born in 1999, they’ve always been searching for Pokemon. They’ve never read a Peanuts strip that wasn’t a repeat and they never had the privilege of a Montgomery Ward catalogue as a booster seat. They have persevered in a world without Joe Dimaggio and brightened by emojis. If you ask them about the whine of a dial-up modem, expect a blank stare. These are among the items in this year’s Beloit College Mindset List, the 20th such release since Read on »
THE MINDSET LIST® OF GENERATION X Tom McBride Most Gen Xers are now between 37 and 53. Partly because they have been deemed, by demographers, to have had only a sixteen-year run, their numbers are small. But they were also born during a time of low birth rates compared to those of the later 40s and the 1950s. The reasons are many: the Pill, divorce, more women working out of the home, and perhaps access to abortion. One commentator has called Gen Xers America’s neglected middle child. Thanks to the death rate, Millennials have now taken over Boomers as the largest generational cohort. There are about 75 million Millennials and more than ten million fewer Gen Xers. But by 2028 Read on »
A significant other who is a bit “too Yoko Ono” has always created tension. A partner too hard to handle…hard for your friends to compete with perfection Comment: The Anti-Mindset poster is a project in a course on “Critical Identity Studies,” the aim of which is to “explore mass media’s relationships to structures of power that…police ideologies.” An earlier part of the course description identifies these ideologies as the usual ones about class, gender, and race, and students are given an assignment to find manifestations of local “colonialisms” (sic) in the local community. Given this course description and assignment, what are we to make of the Anti-Mindset Poster? Here is an educated guess. The poster features three smiling (self-satisfied?) white Read on »
THE BABY BOOMER MINDSET LIST Baby Boomers: the cohort of babies born between the mid-1940s and early 1960s in the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Members of various generations have been asking us to prepare “generational Mindset Lists.” This one is the first. Look in the future for Mindset Lists on both the Silent Generation (born in the 30s and early 40s) and Generation X (born in the 60s and 70s). If you like this one, forward the link to your children, grandchildren, friends—and fellow geezers! 1. Fellow Boomers Patrick Swayze, Mary Travers, Whitney Houston, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, and Ted Bundy are dead. 2. But fellow Boomers Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, George W. Bush, Glenn Close, and Sissy Spacek Read on »
MAKE CHARLIE MANSON YOUR PEN PAL & 49 Other Ways To Survive the Age of Trump Tom McBride This website will be out in book form soon. If you want to go first to the Charles Manson step you will find it in Step 21. But please take all these steps seriously–if you’ve not yet misplaced your sense of fun in this bad time in which we find ourselves! Step 1. Enter your closet and get out of town. Vladimir Putin, that great democrat and lover of individual liberty, has opined that any allegations about Donald Trump’s link to his (Vlad’s) regime of towering decency is simply a vile attempt to cast “illegitimacy” on Trump’s victory. President Putin is an Read on »
This is the official Mindset List® Blog: Accept no substitutions! IF YOU DON’T LIKE TRUMP, DON’T BLAME BOOMERS! Every now and then I hear complaints that Baby Boomers have sold out because they support Donald J. Trump. How can the generation of peace and love (and sex and drugs and rock n’ roll) be in favor of such an authoritarian figure, an American Mussolini? Well, one answer is that not all Boomers were into sex and drugs back then. Another is that people grow more crusty when they get older. But here’s another answer: Among the elderly, Trump’s core support doesn’t come from Boomers but from the generation just before them: THE SILENT GENERATION. “Silents” were born from the 30s to Read on »
THE ECONOMIC VIRTUES OF MILLENNIALS Tom McBride (Delivered on September 15 at the De Meo/Schneider Investment Conference in Chicago) Deidre McCloskey is a renowned economic historian at the University of Illinois right here in Chicago. One of her more striking ideas is that the virtues of different social groups are strongly determined by their economic status. For instance, the peasant class, having no prospects for financial gain, glommed onto the virtue of humility, linked to the idea that God would reward them for their humility someday in Heaven. For the aristocratic class, whose financial prosperity was assured, courage became a dominant virtue. They who have everything only lack the military adventure of becoming warriors, on battlefields where their bravery will Read on »