THE MINDSET LIST OF MOLAR MECHANICS

Or; Why You Should Hug Your Dentist!

There are two common beliefs about dentists: that they grow rich and that they have high suicide rates. The truth is far more tangled. Although studies draw opposite conclusions about dentists’ suicide rates, there is ample evidence that they are more depressed and anxious, and feel more isolated than do members of the general population. Dental school is costly, and the debt incurred to go there, and then to set up one’s own business, can be huge. Dentists often strain their backs and shoulders to get into treatment positions, and the results can pile up to the point of serious orthopedic agony. Dental patients are nervous, and even the most serenely skilled dentist can get worn out trying to reassure them while holding a drill all day. Lots of Americans have no dental insurance, so dentists face tooth and gum problems that have been put off for patients who can’t afford what they really need. Perhaps worst of all, a dental office is not one that most Americans look forward to visiting and that few want to go back to. THE MINDSET LIST OF MOLAR MECHANICS draws two conclusions. First, after you read about tooth treatments before modern dentistry, you should go out and hug with gratitude your current eyetooth engineer. Second, ancient and medieval tooth treatment would seem awful to those of us in 2023, yes, but at times more effective than you might have thought.  Some of it might have worked—sort of. Even so, love your dentist for being modern. (This list is dedicated to Dr. David Foulkes, renowned D.D.S.)  

1 Neanderthals likely tried, somehow, to manipulate decayed or missing teeth over 130,000 years ago: you couldn’t gum roots and berries just all the time!  

2 Evidence of a tooth replacement with a bamboo peg (tapped into the bone) goes back 4,00o years ago in present-day China.

3 An Egyptian cadaver from 2,000 years ago had some sort of precious metal peg to sub for a lost molar.

4 Some mummies have “teeth” made of ivory—hey, it was good enough for the elephants.

5 The first dentists were Etruscans, who, 2500 years ago, carved false teeth from the denticles of dead mammals.

6 A 1600-year-old Mayan woman replaced her lost incisors with sea shells—they likely looked better than they worked.

7 Ancient Chinese wrapped tiny parchments around painful teeth—they contained prayers that the “tooth worm” might somehow go away.

8 A leading cleaner of teeth across the ancient world was the chewing of roots and twigs.

9 The ancient Greeks, in addition to their excellent pursuit of philosophy and drama, also devised pliers for the extraction of teeth.

10 A couple of other ancient treatments: relieving tooth pain by boiling worms in oil and putting the resulting greasy substance into the ears and correcting loose teeth by attaching a frog to the jaw, tightly of course.

11 The more things change, they more they don’t: Wealthy people in ancient Egypt were more likely to suffer from tooth problems because they were the only ones able to buy sweets.

12 The wealthy of the ancient world often had combination ear and tooth pickers made of silver or gold—the poor had to get along with pickers made of bone.

13 A common medieval belief was that dogs’ teeth boiled in wine made for an excellent mouth rinse: this does not mean that you should re-name your dog Scope.

14 The Chinese invented the first toothbrushes—made of coarse hog hair and attached to bones or bamboo sticks—about seven centuries ago.

15 One and one-half millennia ago some poor and toothless souls thought that a tooth obtained from someone else—ideally a hanged criminal—could be implanted if only there were some way to keep it in the mouth long enough.

16 In 1799 the Spanish painter Goya depicted a famously morbid version of this protocol: the insertion of a criminal’s tooth into a respectable man’s painfully dug—and very deep–gum socket.

17 The Middle Ages, known for great cathedrals and angels dancing on pins, also achieved a notable lack of sugar and therefore a low incidence of tooth decay.

18 1200 years ago, denizens of such places as Galway, Oxford, Paris, and Florence were in happy possession of the diet your dentist recommends today: high in calcium via vegetables and milk.

19 Some teeth still didn’t make it, but your local barber could pull it for you with pliers called “pelicans.”

20 Barbers also had “tooth keys,” shaped like house keys, to loosen teeth before extraction: this was as close as anyone got to an anesthetic.

21 Medieval halitosis was a problem, but pastes and mouthwash concocted from such substances as wine and vinegar, rosemary and sage, often came to the rescue, and sweet-smelling breath was a young lover’s erotic advantage.

22 Dentures were more common among the poor rich (who could afford sugar) and generally consisted of animal bones and the teeth of the freshly deceased.

23 Some folks became a little too zealous, and rubbed their teeth with a powdered pumice stone, brick, or coral: cleaned the teeth at the expense of the enamel.

24 The Mona Lisa has a celebrated sight smile, but it is toothless, perhaps for a good reason.  

25 When she was 64, Queen Elizabeth I had to cancel an appointment with the French ambassador due to a “swollen face,” and when he finally got in to see her, he said he could barely understand her because there were so many more yellowed teeth on one side of her mouth than on the other.

26 In Shakespeare’s day the wealthy made their teeth black with coal as both a cosmetic and a status symbol.

27 In one of Shakespeare’s most famous speeches—The Seven Ages of Man—the last stage is marked by being “sans teeth, sans everything.”  (By the way, in that speech “we rot from hour to hour” is a pun on “we rot from whore to whore.,” as Shakespeare might have had dirty teeth but surely had a dirty mind.)

28 We know nothing of Shakespeare’s teeth, but he was born just in time for sugar to become widely available in Europe and had one of his characters compliment another for using “eglantine and eucalyptus” to freshen her breath.

29 George Washington suffered the agonies of the damned with his aching teeth and inflamed gums and poorly-fitting dentures, and attributed his misery to cracking too many walnuts in his boyhood—but his mercury-based treatment for smallpox probably didn’t help.

30 “Operators for the Teeth” was the first dental textbook published in English (1685), but it no more studied in contemporary dental schools than leeches are used in modern medical ones.

31 Pierre Frauchard, a French surgeon, forged the first specially-dental instruments and founded the first dental society yet he is rarely thanked by history or patients alike.

32 The first explicitly dental “practice” opened in America before the Revolutionary War.

33 While Napoleon was losing the battle of Waterloo, an American dentist started recommending waxen silk thread to use as something called “floss” between human tusks.

34 The 1800s saw the birth of Colgate and anesthetic (laughing gas, sometimes called by its much less sexy name of nitrous oxide).

35 American soldiers during World War II were required to brush their teeth twice a day—couldn’t have tank officers or bomber pilots with toothaches.

36 As early as 1945 an American city (Grand Rapids) introduced fluoride into the water supply, and other cities followed suit, despite some public fears that such additions were Communist plots.

37 By the 1950s kids had stopped boasting about riding their bikes with no hands and started bragging to their mothers that they had no cavities.

38 Today DMFT scores (D for decayed teeth, M for missing ones, F for filled ones) are reported by every nation, with Danish teeth the best of all—those Danish breakfast treats notwithstanding.

39 These days your Molar Mechanic (for a price) can find your cavities with lasers, put invisible braces on your fangs, design your bridges using digital technology, and implant brand new incisors and wisdom teeth.

40 The bad news: you are not a world-historical figure like Queen Elizabeth and George Washington; the good news: your fillings won’t fall out.

“They who lose all teeth have no chairs left in the dining room.” –Anonymous

THE MINDSET LIST OF MILLENNIAL MATURITY”

Respect Is Overdue! 

Perhaps you’ve been watching TV lately and heard a recent college graduate say that he will not take any job with any organization that does not “value” him, and maybe you thought to yourself, “those selfish Millennials are at it again.” But you’d be wrong. Even the youngest Millennial has been out of college for several years now, and the oldest are turning 40. The Millennials were the first generation of digital natives. They grew up with the World Wide Web and social media and selfies. They were almost instantly branded as a discontinuous generation, the first gang of disrupters, with self-centered entitlement and an inordinate love of avocado toast. But what gives when (even) Millennials start to grow up? The following list will tell you. The generation that older Americans loved to dislike is very different now. 

1 Over 1 in 5 Americans are Millennials. 

2 Depending on the demographic, Millennial births range from 1978 to 2000 or 1982 to 1996. 

3 Some Millennials were in college on 9/11 while others were in kindergarten. 

4 Some Millennials were looking for a job during the Great Recession while others were starting to learn algebra. 

5 Millennials were the first generation to be examined under a social media microscope, and they emerged as self-centered, multi-tasking, and in love with avocado toast and lattes that took longer than a milkshake to make.

6 Now that some Millennials are early middle-aged, they take more selfies of their babies and long ago left their parents’ basements.

7 Because they have married late, many Millennials are now squeezed between challenging jobs, aging parents, and demanding young children.  

8 Millennial self-absorption has yielded to the reality of aging and kids. 

9 Tough starting later, Millennials appear to be having about as many children as other generational cohorts of the late 20^th century have had. 

10 They are now entering for the first time the zone of starting to worry about cholesterol and hypertension. 

11 An alarming and mysterious rise in the incidence of colorectal cancer has started to bedevil late Millennials. 

12 Some demographers think the difference between older and younger Millennials is so great that the latter should get their own category—perhaps the Geriatric Millennials. 

13 Older Millennials can remember walking into a computer lab with rows of Apple 2Ls, complete with starter screens of the Oregon Trail—hence the label “Oregon Trail Generation.” 

14 They can recall when household computers were enigmatic and rare. 

15 The term “Millennials” is now 32 years old. 

16 They used to be called Gen Y, until “Millennial” became the dominant meme.

17 They wish they’d bought a house earlier; now they have children and daunting prices and/or mortgage rates. 

18 Once renting for “flexibility,” they are now the largest percentage of those in the housing market and have been for the past eight years. 

19 A Millennial version of the Monopoly board game has turned a house into the “new” New York Central Railroad. 

20 No generation in history has been this old without owning a house. 

21 Older Millennials find that their parents die the same year when they themselves become parents. 

22 To be complete and fair, many Millennials DO like avocado toast., 

23 Geriatric Millennials can vividly remember the sweet sounds of dial-up computer connections, 

24 Millennials in general span lifetimes between Reagan’s first term and Clinton’s second. 

25 Older Millennials are discovering that it’s really, really hard to buy a house if you haven’t previously owned one. 

26 They may well be the first generation to be worse off than their parents., 

27 Once famed for job-hopping, they are increasingly staying put, though it’s too soon to predict gold retirement watches. 

28 Once thought of as revolutionary new workers who wanted flex time, multi-tasking, and working from home, their work habits have become increasingly normal. 

29 They tend to vote Democratic; that doesn’t mean they’re Democrats. 

30 Younger Millennials go to loud bars; older ones go to quiet restaurants. 

31 Once disruptors, they now might become grandparents for the first time when they are near 80. 

32 Famous Geriatric Millennials include Dwayne Wade, Kristen Durst, LeeAnn Rimes, Ray J, and Carrie Underwood. 

33 When the oldest Millennials were born, Charles and Diana were still getting along, Margaret Thatcher was plotting to invade Argentina, and President Reagan was still recovering from a gunshot wound. 

34 When the youngest Millennials were born, Bill Clinton had just met an aide named Monica, the Unabomber was arrested in his Montana shack, and Barack Obama was a senator—in Illinois. 

35 The Oregon Trail Millennials are so old they even remember, albeit dimly, the Cold War.  

The Mindset List of America’s

Greece and Rome

Recently the Mindset List presented its list of “American Biblical Illiteracy.” But the Bible isn’t the only great American frame of reference: language we still use but origins we’ve forgotten. The other great pervasive influence—on our vocabulary, our phrases, our buildings, and our customs—is the ancient world of Greek and Rome. This is the realm of Socrates and Julius Caesar, of Plato and Nero and multiple others. It’s myth and history and architecture and literature. Without the background of classical Greek and Rome, America as it is now would never have existed, Our Founding Fathers knew the classics very well, and we ordinary Americans know a lot more about ancient
Greece and Rome than we think we do. Hence follows this List of how amazingly embedded are these cultures, going back over two thousand years, in American life.

1. A political leader indifferent to America’s fate might as well be fiddling while Rome burns.

• We could build big stadia and call them a funny word like “coliseums.”

• Could months like March, June, and July be named for ancient gods and emperors?

• Not as many schoolchildren these days know how much Gaul Julius Caesar had.

• Most Americans still know that “Et tu Brute,” refers to political betrayal and not to men’s after shave or to the Incredible Hulk.

• Fewer Americans may know that their Founding Fathers knew and admired the ancient Romans, thought voting was an elite privilege, and weren’t upset that only about four percent of citizens were eligible to vote.

• Nuclear energy is powerful and cheap until you have to dispose of the waste—but enough about an Achilles heel.

• We abhor Greek and Roman slavery but don’t ask too many questions about who makes our smart phones.

• Are the Kardashians “sirens,” and where did that word come from?

1. The old Romans had trouble with the question of whether they were a republic or an empire—thank goodness we’ve settled that in America.

1. We’ll always be grateful to Russell Crowe for going from general to slave to gladiator in just a couple of hours.

1. Our sports arenas have a lot of Christians, and on circus days they include lions, but they are generally kept apart.

1. Antony has always gone bust courting Cleopatra, and so did the movie production company that tried to film it.

1. Socrates was a troublemaker forced to drink hemlock, but nowadays they are just murdered in embassies.

1. There’s always been an Aristotle who taught rhetoric and politics and another one who married an American presidential widow.

1. Popular contemporary authors claim that Stoicism can cure your road rage.

1. As two-thirds of us are either obese or overweight, one might say, however erroneously, that Americans are “Epicureans.”

1. As an average of 11 Americans drown every day, Heraclitus was surely right to say that you never step into the same stream twice.

1. Pythagoras’ theorem continues to be one of the few truly beautiful things taught in high school.

• In America, it seems the score is Golden Arches umpteen billion; Golden Mean, zero.

• They’ve always presented Rock of Ages in New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns but never Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.

• Thomas Jefferson might have been our only Platonic philosopher king, but he’d just overthrown a king two decades earlier.

• You can buy a toga via Amazon for $29.99 plus shipping.

• Jupiter, Venus, Mercury, Saturn, and Mars were great Roman gods, and, come to think of it, they might also be good names for planets—Pluto, not so much.

• “I came, I saw, I conquered” might be the sort of thing Elon Musk would say.

• Pig Latin has never died out in America, and it’s easy to learn.

• Every now and then, someone will refer to their car as their chariot.

• Baby Boomer Masterpiece Theater addicts have still not quite gotten over “I, Claudius.”

• A Princeton classics progressor says that the only way to get rid of white supremacy is to stop teaching about ancient Greece and Rome

• Jesus’ demarcation between Caesar and God remains a powerful motive for keeping the American church separate from the American state.

• Once upon a time in America, only gentlemen knew Latin; now only scholars do.

• Eighteen US towns or cities are named Athens; 13 are named Rome.

• An American male who has never gotten over his mother, such as Norman Bates in “Psycho,” is still said to be suffering from the same problem that bedeviled the ancient King Oedipus.

• Overweening American pride remains self-destructive, rather like a young man who is so proud of his waxen wings that he flies too near the melting sun.

• In protesting against 1960s hippies, Merle Haggard sang that among real Americans, “beards and Roman sandals won’t be seen” (“Okie from Muskogee”).

• “August” and “august” (syllable on either the first or second syllable) comes from one of the most famous Caesars (though few American leaders have ever been in august in August or in any other month).

• Resting on one’s laurels is hard for American athletes, who have trouble knowing when to retire, but the old Roman runners did it all the time, or so it is said.

• In the 1960s, a Texas Baptist preacher of great renown said that just as Paul needed to go to Rome to convert Caesar to Christianity, American presidents needed to go to Moscow to convert Soviet leaders to capitalism.  

• A popular translation of “The Bacchae,” an ancient Greek play about the dangers of excess revelry, has a cover photograph of young Elvis Presley, on the verge of being mobbed by his female fans.

• The Parthenon is actually sort of in Nashville.

• The Gettysburg Address is the American version of Pericles’ Funeral Oration, or perhaps Pericles’ Funeral Oration is the ancient Greek version of the Gettysburg Address.

• Socrates called out the Sophists for using misleading and slippery rhetoric—but enough about the American tradition of carnival barkers and demagogues.

• Is NASCAR the American version of chariot races or were chariot races the Roman NASCAR?

• The original Olympics were hot on TV and neither Nike nor Coke sponsored them.

• Americans used to keep pictures of Washington, Lincoln, Jesus, and John F. Kennedy in their homes in the US version of Roman household gods.

• There were no filibusters in the Roman Senate, but its members were unelected aristocrats.

• American readers might get why the medieval poet Dante shows Satan chewing on Judas’ head but can’t quite grasp why he would also be chewing on the heads of Brutus and Cassius, assassins of Julius Caesar, as well.

• The most classically-columned city in the United States is Washington, D.C., and it’s a testament to the appeal and influence of the ancient world on the American project.

• One of the greatest Roman orators was Demosthenes, and the late Senator Evert Dirksen called himself “the Demosthenes of Pekin, Illinois.”

• A Civil War general who wrote a novel about a Roman charioteer (and who later chased Billy the Kid) never lived to see his book turned into two hit movies and lend its name (Ben-Hur) to a tiny village in central Texas.

The Mindset List of Naked America 2.0

In 1964 Vance Packard wrote a book about the loss of American privacy—which he called THE NAKED SOCIETY. He was worried about Americans’ vanishing right to be let alone in the face of photography and newspaper stories. Sixty years later few things are more important than the issue of privacy. Is Facebook a social media company or a surveillance company that sells our personal data to the highest bidder? How pervasive is government snooping on its own citizens? Is privacy a Constitutional right guaranteeing the choice to get an abortion, or is it something dreamed up by hippie liberal judges? What are we to make of a society where you can get as much extra cash selling your individual data as you can for selling your plasma? Are we pitching away our privacy just to get our own website page and a few hundred “friends”? Welcome to THE MINDSET LIST OF NAKED AMERICA 2.0. Here’s a quick and informative look at a society where we might all, in a sense, be living in a nudist colony.

1 The founder of privacy is Aristotle, who declared that a distinction between public and private lives is essential for a healthy human existence.

2 In 1896 two distinguished American jurists, in the face of sensational newspaper stories about ordinary people, argued that there should be a legal right to privacy—or the right to be “let alone.”

3 One hundred years later, the distinguished American jurist Antonin Scalia said there is no constitutional right whatever to privacy.

4 In the People’s Republic of China, face-recognition is so precise that one can be fined for jaywalking weeks after a camera has recorded the offense.                                              

5 In the 1960s and 70s the Supreme Court said the right to privacy is a “penumbra” of the American Constitution—implicit in a document that limits government intrusion.

6 In 2022 Justice Clarence Thomas said the Court needs to revisit the “penumbra” doctrine and throw it out.

7 In 1912 the Republican Party met in Chicago partly because they were offered dial telephone, which by bypassing operators, could ensure privacy.

8 About five thousand party phone lines still existed in the United States as late as the 1990s.

9 Before rotary dial phones became common for nearly everywhere (in the 1960s), operators would commonly listen in on conversations and become an excellent source of gossip—a wonderful side benefit.

10 The number of consumer identity thefts in the United States rose from 4.7  to 5.7 million over the past year, with over half of the victims losing more than 500 dollars.

11 Bullying—physical or cyber or emotional—has increasingly become linked to violations of privacy.

12 The great actress, Greta Garbo, is famously supposed to have said she wanted to be alone, when in fact she said she wanted to be left alone.

13 Research has shown that users of social media want more privacy but do little to achieve it.

14 The Terms of Privacy for most organizations are above the reading level of most users.

15 Long before social media and digital communication, secrecy, eavesdropping, and encryption were obsessions of national spy agencies.

16 Organizations increasingly require more complex passwords in order to promote digital protections

17 A challenge to personal privacy: the richest people on earth now control not land or industries but information—and they want to get richer.

18 You can sell your plasma—or our personal data—to earn extra cash.

19 Another challenge to personal privacy: The American First Amendment protecting freedom of speech.

20 If you break up with your partner on social media, don’t be surprised to get ads on your devices about post-relationship self-help books.

21 If you’re on social media and have agreed to divulge your location data, don’t be surprised to get ads on your devices about My Little Pony Mini-Collections (if you live in Idaho) or pressed makeup powder (if you live in Nebraska).

22 Warrantless GPS trackers on cars have been deemed illegal, not as invasions of privacy but as violations of the 4^th Amendment, which forbids unreasonable search and seizure.

23 To some, Edward Snowden, who revealed vast Federal tracking of citizen data, is the greatest pro-privacy agent since the invention of the password or anti-viral software.

24 Job candidates have had their social media sites checked and sometimes miss being hired as a result.

25 The distinguished jurist Richard Posner has said that the relationship between personal information and economic efficiency is complex but that partial surrender of the former is necessary in order to achieve the latter.

26 The Library of Congress has archived every Twitter post since 2007.

27 Women are more concerned about their digital privacy than men are.

28 Denizens of the Selfie Culture underestimate the dangers to their privacy and their bodies.

29 Every American state has laws against online bullying.

30 Social media bots, of which there are millions, have become more and more human-like and harder to detect.

31 Apple won’t divulge your cookies to others if you forbid it to.

32 AccuWeather got into legal trouble by selling the location data of users.

33 A few of our fellow human beings have sued to get certain things about them expunged from the web forever—this is called “the right to be forgotten.”

34 Long before the internet, there was a presumption of privacy about the interactions of doctors, lawyers, and ministers with their patients, clients, and flock.

35 The four pillars of privacy rest on the right to solitude, intimacy, anonymity, and reserve.

36. The doctrine of privacy has also been extended to personal control of one’s own body—most controversially, abortion as a right to privacy and not an act of infanticide.

37. Vivid examples of places where privacy is non-existent: prisons and hospitals—what the sociologist Erwin Goffman called “total institutions.”

38. It is alleged that non-human animals in zoos suffer from lack of privacy and harm themselves and others.

39. The idea of privacy is varied in its applications, ranging from the right of a shy person not to be called upon in class to the windows of cathedrals being semi-opaque to protect worshipers from eavesdroppers.

40 Top Secret has long been the stock and trade of governments; Trade Secrets the stock and trade of commerce.

41 If you want more privacy on social media, you must attend to Default Settings with care.

42 The paradox of you and me on social media: our profile pages are expressions of our inner selves—but also utterly public.

THE MINDSET LIST OF SEXUAL REVOLUTION 2.0

In retrospect Sexual Revolution 1.0 seems to have been a pretty simple affair. A revolt against Victorian standards, in alliance with the birth control pill, made increased sex, in or out of wedlock, more and more acceptable and less and less risky. People, especially he young, took their clothes off, and pretty soon “sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll” were the reigning triad in Europe and North America. In time, however, the bill came due. Sexually transmitted diseases weren’t all curable by any means, and sexual aggression was out of sync with gender equality. Thus, SR 1.0 came to a somewhat whimpering end. Now we are in SR 2.0 but unlike SR 1.0 it seems harder to define. It has something to do with a so-called “sexual recession,” but no one seems sure how much less frequent sex is, or why—is it a vote for quality over quantity, a sign of social immaturity and mild mental illness, a result of greater female equality or of virtual reality taking over our lives at the expense of intimacy? SR 2.0 is here, but no one quite knows what to do with it—or about it. Here, then, is THE MINDSET LIST OF SEXUAL REVOLUTION 2.0: forty items that capture a puzzling but fascinating time: ours!

1 Three years ago the prestigious Atlantic Monthly declared a Sexual Recession among young people.

2 Some observers think the “recession” is really an opting for quality over quantity.

3 One American survey found that from 1991 to 2017 sexual intercourse among high school students dropped from 5 in 10 to 4 in 10.  

4 For some this is a regrettable “retreat from intimacy;” for others, a welcome move to celibacy.

5 An Australian survey concluded that Gen Z is having sex as often as Australians 75 or older—about once a month.

6 A different study from Down Under: there’s been no appreciable decline in Gen Z sex and a small uptick in oral sex. 

7 An Australian psychologist has stated that there is “probably” a slight increase in anal sex.

8 Gen Z is more likely than any other cohort to report non-heterosexual identities and attractions.

9 A measurable decline in sexual activity seems to be an international trend in the general population—from 1.8 to 1.4 times a week in a survey that includes Japan and Finland.

10 Various explanations for this decline range from a greater willingness to tell untrustworthy partners “no” to an increased masturbation aroused by virtual internet images.

11 For Gen Z, it appears, sex is less sacred and more negotiable.

12 With greater tolerance for sexual diversity among Gen Z, slut-shaming may become extinct.

13 YouTube and Netflix are frequent resources for sexual information.

14 Young folks spend mammoth chunks of time on social media—more scrolling, less sex?

15 They are drinking less—more sobriety, less sex?

16 They are living at home longer—more mom and dad, less sex?

17 Rutgers reports a nearly 15 percent drop in casual sex among teens between 2007 and 2017—an index of delayed maturity?

18 One survey inn 2018 reported that one in four Americans had had no sex at all in the past year, with Millennials and Gen Z starring for the Celibacy Team.

19 Young people who live in cities and have advanced education are prone to marrying later in life, or not at all—a trend that may well promote less sexual activity.

20 Even those coupled up may spend their free time on Instagram and Netflix and less on what one of Shakespeare’s characters called “making the beast with two backs.”

21 For successful young women, no means no, and they have the economic power to make it real.

22 Digital matchmaking thrives but does not seem to be creating more fun between the covers.

23 Sex has never been less stigmatized; is that because sex itself, no longer the occasion for youthful rebellion, occurs less often?

24 An Australian study attributes the decline in sexual activity to the decline in long-term relationships.

25 The digital world of sex is a powerful source of information, images, and match-ups but has yet to find a way to supply intimacy.

26 Young women with economic power may well prefer no sex at all in the absence of deeper human connections.

27 Picture perfect images on social media may create deep body insecurity among the young—also a bummer for erotic pursuit and frequency,

28 Some experts think that the problematizing of sex can’t be separated from the problematizing of mental well-being.

29 Others think the real problem with sex among young people is that we keep obsessing about it.

30 Still others believe that frequency of sex is a poor predictor of overall happiness.

31. Economists all agree: a “sexual recession” is hardly comparable to a far more serious downturn in jobs.

32 During the period of the so-called sexual recession, divorce rates have fallen—go figure.

33. Outside of human reports, sexual frequency and quality are impossible to measure.

35 In another “go figure,” one study found that married couples who are professionally busy had more sex than couples who are less so.

36 Couples more equal in married division of home labor report greater sexual pleasure,  

37 The smart phone clever enough to improve our sex lives has presumably yet to be invented.

38 There is apparently no “normal” for frequency of either sex or bowel movements.

39 A best seller in 1929, IS SEX NECESSARY, was a spoof on Freudian theories of sex as the real driver of human affairs.

40 The increased vividness of virtual reality, combined with the genetic manufacture of sperm and egg, WILL make sex unnecessary—and, given overpopulation, unwise.  

The Mindset List of Queen Elizabeth Monroe:

Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend

They’ve never been together before—until now. They are arguably the two most iconic women on the planet after World War II. Nearly eighty years on, few on the globe would not recognize their images. They are both royals, albeit in different modes. They both proved, and continue to prove, the enduring truth that diamonds are a girl’s best friend, whether on the head or around the neck.

1 Both were born 40 days apart in 1926, the future British queen as Elizabeth Windsor and the future Hollywood queen as Norma Jean Mortenson.

2 Marilyn took as her surname the American president who declared an American empire in Latin America; Elizabeth ruled over a fading empire across the globe.

3 No one, as far as is known, ever called Elizabeth Liz—until now.

4 Few expected Liz to become queen, as her father was a shy second in line for the throne—and even fewer expected Norma Jean to become Marilyn.

5 Marilyn met Liz in 1956, but there is no record of what, if anything, they discussed.

6 Liz knew Winston Churchill well, while Marilyn and Churchill are joined together in a legendary joke.

7 Marilyn said, “we should wed, what with my looks and your brains,” prompting Winston to say that the other way around would be a disaster.

8 Liz and Marilyn are among the most iconic women in history: monarchs of mass media.

9 Liz has had her royal portrait painted many times but has never appeared on an Andy Warhol silkscreen.

10 Liz was born a brunette and never dyed her hair blonde.

11 Marilyn’s platinum blonde dye has been described as emphasizing her “whiteness,” while Liz got pushback from former colonies over white repression.

12 Marilyn won her iconography by dying young, while Liz won hers by living sixty years longer.

13 Liz appeared many times in public, but they are far less remembered than is her overall image; Marilyn likewise made few memorable films but has an image that has outlived them all.

14 Both Liz and Marilyn were consummate actors, but if Liz hated having been pushed into various roles, she never complained, unlike Marilyn, who complained all the time.

15 Liz proved that much of life is just showing up on time, while Marilyn proved that a successful acting life could be pursued while often not showing up at all.

16 Both Liz and Marilyn proved, albeit in different ways, that diamonds are a girl’s best friend.

17 Marilyn’s second husband, baseball legend Joe DiMaggio, was openly envious of Marilyn’s fame, but while Philip sometimes chafed in his role, divorce was never in the cards for those who truly do their duty.

18 In her late teens, Marilyn, frequently an orphan, developed a stutter, like Liz’s father George, who was never an orphan except in the emotional sense.

19 Had Marilyn not died when she did, she would have become an aging and forgotten Hollywood ex-star.

20 Had Liz died when Marilyn did, she would be recalled as a minor British monarch succeeded by a regency charged with helping her fourteen-year-old son Charles emerge, in time, as a king who loved plants.

21 Both Liz and Marilyn came into their own in 1952, when Liz became queen and Marilyn began to get bigger Hollywood roles as an up-and-coming screen presence.

22 Liz’sbrand was dignified solidity, while Marilyn’s was approachable sexuality (though Marilyn, like Liz, kept her distance from the adoring public).

23 Marilyn made a movie comeback in THE SEVEN-YEAR ITCH, while Liz’s son Charles suffered from it in his marriage.

24 Marilyn’s great sex scandal was that she had once, when strapped for cash, posed nude for calendars, while Liz’s great sex scandal came from one of her sons, dubbed Randy Andy.

25 Liz had trained for her role all her life, while Marilyn trained for hers via acting classes off and on throughout her life.

26 Liz was born to her role of hand-waving and speechifying, while Marilyn, who believed in Method Acting, sometimes thought she had to live a role before she could play it and once worked in a fish cannery in order to prep for a part.

27 Being funny was never in Liz’s job description; when Marilyn was asked what she had on while posing, she said it was the radio.

28 Liz was the epitome of the always regal brunette; Marilyn was the epitome of the seemingly naive blonde.

29 Liz expressed personal melancholy in public only once, when she gave her “Annus Horribilis” speech in 1992, while Marilyn, not schooled in stiff upper lips, was, thirty years before, suicidally depressed.

30 Liz was the daughter of a King, while Marilyn acted with a legend, Laurence Olivier, who played Henry V and Richard III.

31 Marilyn, in the ribald cheesecake of the 50s, was the un-Grace Kelly; Liz and Grace were both solemn European princesses.

32 Liz and Marilyn were both mere human beings onto whom millions projected meaning: onto Liz, during Covid, British pluck in the 1940s; onto Marilyn’s death the first dark chapter of the 1960s.  

33 As nearly all of Liz’s appearances were live events, she had few chances for do-overs, while Tony Curtis said Marilyn insisted on so many re-takes that kissing her during one scene was like kissing Hitler.

34 During World War II Marilyn worked in a munitions plant, while Liz drove an army transport jeep.

35 Liz’s physical body was secondary to her institutional body—with Marilyn it was dramatically the other way around.

36 Liz’s grandfather and father—and Liz herself–were both determined td be boring as a welcome contrast to their louche predecessors, but it was impossible for Marilyn to be a bore.

37 Neither Liz nor Marilyn had a lot of formal education, but both were periodically autodidactic:  Liz in constitutional history and Marilyn in French existentialism.

38 When she turned 11, Liz knew she would be queen someday; when Marilyn was 11, she began going to movies: an escape from being bounced around among her mother, an orphanage, and a parade of relatives.

39 Liz’s uncle abandoned the throne; Marilyn’s father abandoned her—both men left deep imprints.

40 In the mid-50s three-quarters of Australians turned out to see Liz, while one quarter of American soldiers stationed in Korea turned out to see Marilyn.

41 In the late 50s Marilyn married a left-wing intellectual; Liz, though of Tory background, liked left-wing prime ministers best of all.

42 In her twenties Liz’s reign sunk from Empire to Commonwealth; Marilyn, in hers, rose from bit player to celluloid legend.

43 There were a few anti-royalist attempts, failed, to remove Liz’s head from British stamps; there were studio attempts, also failed, to remove Marilyn, chronically late, from making movies.

44 Despite other studios trotting out Jayne Mansfield and Mamie Van Doren as Marilyn pretenders, she was never displaced as THE iconic blonde, while Liz’s fame was displaced by her star-quality daughter-in-law Diana.

45 Marilyn sang Happy Birthday to President Kennedy in a tight dress that made her look semi-nude, while, during the previous spring, in a more dignified occasion, JFK was the first American president to visit Liz at Buckingham Palace—she did not sing “Hail to the Chief.”

46 When she broke up with DiMaggio, Marilyn cried in public; when Diana died, the British public asked that Liz “show that she cared.”

47 Marilyn, always a Californian, forged her own path; when Liz’s grand daughter-in-law Meghan did that and moved to California, Liz disapproved.

48 They both proved that flawed and living persons can become enduring symbols.

49 Neither was ever underdressed when the cameras rolled.

50 Liz was replaced by a man; Marilyn could never be.

the Biblical

The Biblical In-QUIZ-ition:

A Scriptural Ultra Sound Just for YOU!

By Ron Nief with Tom McBride

Nowhere in the Bible does it say you must KNOW the Bible in order to go to Heaven. But once upon a time in America people not only kept the Family Bible in a pride-of-household place. They read it daily. Above all, it was the linguistic sea they swam in. Hundreds 0f familiar phrases emerged from its tissue-thin pages. The Bible was a linguistic way of life. 

That was a while ago. How familiar are you with those days of yore? This little quiz—our own version of the old “inquisition” of the Late Middle Ages—is a quick and dirty way to find out. 

If you find yourself nodding in familiarity at most of this quiz, then, whatever else you may be, you are also Biblically literate.

If most of this is lost on you, then at least you’ll learn that some of America’s most famous phrases actually came from what used to be called The Good Book. There are worse things than not knowing that Job might have had a starving turkey and that “a house divided” didn’t originate with Lincoln. 

Have fun! Fifty flagellations with a wet scourge if you flunk. Or perhaps you should just make an exodus to YouTube for forty days and forty nights and watch some old Billy Graham clips.

Part 1: Paul and Mrs. Lott—TRUE OR FALSE

Paul preached that robbing Peter to pay Paul was OK with him.

Coveting the folks next door is a neighborly thing to do.

Sweet Honey from the Rock was a drummer with a Reggae band..

Mrs. Lot was on a high sodium diet.

The three kings were Hart, Shaffner, and Marx.

Part 2: Weeping on the Banks

The Israelites sat down and wept by which river?

  a. The Tigris

  b. The Euphrates

  c. The Sewanee

  d. The Hudson

  e. All of the above     

Part 3: Ezekiel and the Land of Nod: Answer Yes or No

Did Jonah sing with the fishes?

If I offer a mea culpa, should you respond with your own culpa?

Was the celestial vision limited by the moat in God’s eye?

Did Job have a pet turkey?

Should I report sightings of a pale horse to my therapist or just assume everybody sees them?

Did Ezekiel have a set of wheels?

Is R.I.P. the proper zombie un-greeting?

Are the Seven Seals a circus act?

Do Simple Gifts include cheese and wine?

Is Biblical Exegesis the version written with no mention of Christ?

Part 4: Armageddon and the Burning Bush: TRUE OF FALSE

1. Armageddon is the battle where Henry V ended the Hundred Years War.

2. Gideon bibles are left behind by traveling salesmen.

3. The Potter’s Field was a disputed real estate development in “A Wonderful Life.”

4. “Turn, turn, turn” and “sitting shiva” are yoga poses.

5. Eschatological and scatological are two ways of looking at the end.

6. If not watered, the flowers of the field will grow into burning bushes.

7. Forty days and forty nights was the length of a month in the before times.

8. Jacob was a wrestler.

9. The Morning Star is a newspaper.

10. The New Jerusalem is neither a suburb nor a hippie commune.

11. Frank, Incense and Myrrh is not a law firm.

12. The biblical weatherman taught that a red sky at night is a sailor’s delight and also suggested the sun also rises.

13. Sodom and Gomorrah are New Jersey suburbs that have been there absolutely forever.

14. The Twelve Tribes was the basis for the Canadian Hockey League.

15. Saving the best wine until last is the first rule of the afterparty.

16. The watchman on the wall and the elf on the shelf have much in common.

17. Beware the tittle and jot, though they amount to relatively little.

18. For Job, the skin of his teeth was worn down by weeping and gnashing.

19. The voice of the turtle is heard throughout the land only during mating season.

20. A coat of many colors will turn to sackcloth given time.

21. The Apostle Thomas was not only doubting, he was generally late.

22. When Jesus said a house divided could not stand, he was quoting Lincoln.

Part 5: Extra Indulgence

If you inherit the wind, what do you wind up with?

The Land of Nod is or is not a safe place to sleep?

The Mindset List of Anxious Adolescence: A Teen’s Brain on Social Media

The great social media platforms permit teens, and the rest of us, to network, find interesting acquaintances, and share inspiring moments. Social psychologists and parents say that social media also makes teens anxious. Adolescence is a tough time anyhow—all those self-esteem and developmental issues—but social media platforms, combined with recession, pandemics, and political bitterness, make things even worse. Lots of kids do fine with Facebook and Instagram and all the others, but many will struggle and find social media a paradoxically addictive burden. Here’s the pubescent mindset of an incessant process that some experts think is becoming a national problem.

1.  Our social sciences teacher said people our age bet overly nervous about friendship.

2. I’m glad to see that Abby is over in Ridgewood now, but what am I missing out on?

3. I don’t know this person, but it wouldn’t be nice not to accept his friendship.

4. Mario likes all my posts—does he really mean it?

5. I posted an hour ago; why hasn’t Rebecca liked it yet?

6. Antonio likes all my posts but never comments; what am I doing wrong?

7. There’s no way I can break up with Deb and forget about her without de-friending all her friends, Help!

8. I read on a blog that humans are wired to keep up with 150 close acquaintances max; I’ve got over 2500 friends and counting.

9. Galen comments but never likes—is he sending me a message?

10. Eli keeps putting his face on Dr. Kevorkian’s body; should I tell his parents and get dissed for interfering?

11. Can you believe that Deb has actually friended her mom?

12. How can I tell when Gwen is being ironic when she won’t use emojis?

13. I’ve always wanted to say, “I’ll log into your breakdown if you’ll log into mine,” but I’d lose a thousand friends if I did.

14. Do they care what I think as much as I care what they think?

15. Why do I feel like I’m always “on?”

16. Julie always expects me to common right away—stressed out when I have nothing to say

17. I’ve been bullied a little bit, but Jeffrey has been blackmailed, so I’m doing pretty well.

18. They say you get depressed if you’re on more than three hours a day, so I keep mine down to 2 hours and 59 minutes.

19. Carlos’ parents actually tried to hide his phone while he was sleeping—do I secretly wish my parents would do that?

20. I don’t know a single lurker who’s not on a downer most of the time.

21. Why does everyone seem happier than I am? Are they asking the same thing about me?

22. My best friend is the class weirdo, but we keep it strictly off line.

23. Hey, I’m also able to share beautiful moments and link up with people overseas, and that sometimes happens twice a week.

24. My older sister is so cool: she told me she felt a lot of pre-screen anxiety, too, when she was my age.

25. You can control how many yogurts you drink, but you can’t control being tagged unless you want to disconnect—social suicide.

26. In digital society, it’s not possible to be too effusive, or too glossy.

27.  Some days I see cute pics; other days, cries for help; some days cries for help LINKED to cute pics.

Contact: mcbridet@beloit.edu