The Wall Street Journal-20080111-The Informed Reader - Insights and Items of Interest From Other Sources
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The Informed Reader / Insights and Items of Interest From Other Sources
Society:
'Young Single Male' Is Urged to Grow Up
People shouldn't dignify the videogame-playing and hard partying of some 20-something males as a phase of self-discovery, Kay S. Hymowitz says in the conservative City Journal. She suggests the so-called Young Single Male grow up before he wrecks society.
Men are increasingly delaying marriage to their late 20s and beyond. As seen in movies such as the "40-Year-Old Virgin" or "Knocked Up," they fill their prolonged bachelorhood by watching gross-out videos on the Internet, playing videogames and flitting from one half-serious girlfriend to another.
Unlike bachelors past, these Young Single Males no longer bother posing as sophisticates. Instead, they indulge in scatological jokes and chugging contests. Partly this is a backlash against feminism, Ms. Hymowitz says. More fundamentally, pop culture has given the seal of approval to the long-running discomfort men have felt for the responsibilities of family life. Articles in Playboy were describing marriage as an encumbrance long before modern feminism arrived.
The downside to this attitude shows up in novels such as Nick Hornby's "About a Boy" and Benjamin Kunkel's "Indecision." In these stories, the protagonists' serial indulgence of easy pleasures leaves them isolated from others, with few aspirations. For Ms. Hymowitz, who has written extensively and sometimes critically about how the family has changed over the past 30 years, young men especially "need a culture that can help them define worthy aspirations," Ms. Hymowitz says. "Adults don't emerge. They're made."
-- City Journal -- Winter
Iraq:
National Library's Revival
Is Symbol of Secular Hope
The rebuilding of Iraq's national library is an encouraging symbol of secular culture surviving amid ethnic conflict, reports Tom A. Peter -- even if the librarian budgets for extra guards and ammunition in case the building is attacked.
Saad Eskander, director of the Iraq National Library and Archive in Baghdad and a former Kurdish dissident, returned to Iraq after 15 years in England to find the collection in ruins. Looters had taken furniture and equipment. Arsonists had burned the building twice in three days to destroy potentially damaging Baathist party records. The library lost approximately 95% of its rare books, 60% of the archival collections and 25% of the general book collection.
Complicating the rebuilding was the library's location, a violence- ridden no man's land between Baathist militant strongholds, al Qaeda hotbeds and a U.S. military base. Thanks to donations from several nongovernmental organizations and the Czech Republic, along with better security that came with the increase in U.S. forces, much of the restoration has been completed.
-- The Christian Science Monitor -- Jan. 9
Videogames:
In a Violent Virtual World,
A Patient Pacifist Arises
It isn't easy being a pacifist in a game called "World of Warcraft."
Nevertheless, Wow Insider -- a Web site devoted to a game in which participants pursue often violence-ridden quests alongside wizards and warlocks -- interviews a player who has gained some online notoriety by avoiding intentionally killing anything.
The anonymous 50-year-old player behind the pacifistic strategy seems to be motivated more by novelty than by politics. Guiding the characters nonviolently through the game requires patience. The player's characters, "Noor the Pacifist" and "Reinisch," can't accept any quests that involve killing. They fight only with a fishing rod, making their progress slow -- it might take an unusually long four weeks to take Noor from level 27 to 28, out of a maximum 80.
-- Wow Insider -- Jan. 8
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