An exciting jailbreak in Canada… involving a hijacked helicopter!

For Knight: the Great West Conference (America’s saddest sports conference) is/was the exemplar of conference basketball tournaments nobody cares about.

Since I am rather critical of Bloomberg when his nanny impulses are wrong, I suppose I should say that I think his hide-the-cigarettes idea actually isn’t half bad.

A teen in Colorado has created an oil-oozing algae. Another teenager designs a device that cleans plastic from the ocean.

It turns out, the Creative Class was mostly about benefiting the desirables and not so much about actually improving city economies. Seems to me that somebody (okay, Kotkin, but also me!) has been saying that for a while now.

Every wonder why Superman doesn’t just destroy meteors like the one that hit Russia? Here’s why.

Girl Meets World update: Feeny is in! Some of the other rumored actors thought to be in, however (Shawn, Matthew) may not be, however.

Bowl games without names should not be allowed to be major bowl games. If the Chick-Fil-A Bowl wants to be one of the semifinal sites, it needs to be the Chick-Fil-A Peach Bowl. Maybe CFA can work this into a promotion at their restaurants? Or the Peach Bowl can find a new sponsor.

I, for one, am pretty pissed off at Ruth Vader Ginsberg. There is nothing wrong with skim milk.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, there is no worse messenger for gun control than Bloomberg.

Okay, that does it. The sequester has got to go. I want our shapeshifting alien reptile secret service agents.

Teachers are ignoring the stigma against student grouping/tracking. Barry Garelick supports it. So do I. I find the arguments against it (rather than concerns over implementation, which are legitimate) to be rather weak. Redstone starts grouping at around the second grade.

I never thought about this, but yeah, it’d kind of suck to be a baseball player with a sucky baseball card.

Farming more with less land. So, are we looking at a farmland bubble?

Megan McArdle wonders:

These days, a nearly-perfect GPA is the barest requisite for an elite institution. You’re also supposed to be a top notch athlete and/or musician, the master of multiple extracurriculars. Summers should preferably be spent doing charitable work, hopefully in a foreign country, or failing that, at least attending some sort of advanced academic or athletic program.

Naturally, this selects for kids who are extremely affluent, with extremely motivated parents who will steer them through the process of “founding a charity” and other artificial activities. Kids who have to spend their summer doing some boring menial labor in order to buy clothes have a hard time amassing that kind of enrichment experience. […]

This entire thing is absurd. I understand why kids engage in this ridiculous arms race. What I don’t understand is why admissions officers, who have presumably met some teenagers, and used to be one, actually reward it. Why not give kids a bonus for showing up to a routine job during high school, like real people, instead of for having wealthy parents who can help you tap their affluent social network for charitable donations? Why have we conflated “excellence” with affluence, driven parents, and a relentless will to conform on the part of the kids?

The “why” is, of course, quite self-explanatory from my perspective. That the advantage goes to the affluent is not a byproduct. It’s the point. Who is more likely to be in a future position to do good by the university? Someone who comes from an affluent background or someone who works a routine job? In a world where students are penalized for the wrong extracurriculars, like the FFA or 4H Club, why in the world would we expect them to value someone who takes a job anybody could have?

You have to be special. It takes money to be special. That’s not totally fair. Private schools have been taking admirable steps to allow those whose parents make less money to get into these schools on grants instead of loans. So, while money does play a role, I would expect that it’s culture that plays a larger one. Some kid whose father is the Used Car King of Northern Idaho may have money, but it’s not necessarily the right kind of money. I mean, you can picture it, right? His father’s dealership with some huge, gaudy American flag. And hokey commercials. Fortunately, that guy is going to have very little clue how to get his kid into the Ivies. He probably thinks membership in the 4H club might help. He might think it’s a good idea for his son to actually work at the dealership to learn responsibility and work ethic. Such pedestrian values mean little compared to the enrichment of well-placed charity work.

Of course, coming from the background that I do, the entire notion of aspiring to go to a private school is a little bit weird. I was told from pretty early on that private school was an unlikely option. I got to see my brother admitted into a very exclusive school on the west coast only to be told “You can’t go. There is nothing that they have to offer that the flagship state can’t.” So in one sense I am sympathetic to the son of the car king, though on the other, there are more important things to life. Unless, of course, you want to actually run things. People from certain colleges get to do that, and they are particular about who they let in. Not just any smart kid, or rich kid, will do. So I do at times wonder about the cost of society.

Some of my parents’ values rubbed off on me. I, too, will be reluctant to bankroll my kid going to private school. Clancy feels even more strongly about this. I might actually make an exception for a school like Harvard. Fortunately for the top Ivies, I don’t have much idea of the hoops they would need to jump through and I am not sure how on-board I would be with doing what would be required for them to get in anyway. So they probably needn’t worry about the likes of the Trumans showing up.

Princeton alum Susan Patton garnered some publicity by writing a letter to the Daily Princetonian suggesting that the women attending the school take the opportunity to find a mate there:

A few weeks ago, I attended the Women and Leadership conference on campus that featured a conversation between President Shirley Tilghman and Wilson School professor Anne-Marie Slaughter, and I participated in the breakout session afterward that allowed current undergraduate women to speak informally with older and presumably wiser alumnae. I attended the event with my best friend since our freshman year in 1973. You girls glazed over at preliminary comments about our professional accomplishments and the importance of networking. Then the conversation shifted in tone and interest level when one of you asked how have Kendall and I sustained a friendship for 40 years. You asked if we were ever jealous of each other. You asked about the value of our friendship, about our husbands and children. Clearly, you don’t want any more career advice. At your core, you know that there are other things that you need that nobody is addressing. A lifelong friend is one of them. Finding the right man to marry is another.

The reaction and pushback was swift, to say the least. Princeton alum Maureen O’Connor calls the advice sexist (“pushing women — and women alone — to define themselves by their spouses and to make life choices according to an outmoded understanding of romantic attraction”) elitist (“this embarrassing window into how Ivy Leaguers talk to each other should be as cringe-inducing to modern audiences as Patton’s take on gender relations is”) and Nina Bahadur also offers a plethora of criticisms of varying quality.

I can understand at least some of the objections. That this advice seems so frequently geared towards women (by a woman with two sons, in this case) has to be grating to women who resent the notion that mate-seeking is of primary or greater importance to women than to men. There is, of course, a rationale behind this view. My own experience aside, women are more likely to rely on her husband for income than vice-versa. And Bahadur’s protestations aside, women complain quite regularly that men do not place sufficient emphasis on intelligence or even look at intelligence as a negative value, which (to me) has the implication that they would value intelligence. Both of these things, are part-and-parcel to precisely what a lot of women view as being wrong with the world, however, and I can understand the reluctance to chart a course accepting a status quo you want to see changed as a given. So the pushback here is, at least to some degree, understandable.

Is it productive? Is Patton right? That, I don’t know.

Someone else pointed to this Atlantic article on the virtues of getting married later in life. It’s looking primarily (though not solely) at income. Which is one metric. It also discusses divorce rates.

Some of this can be chalked up to simple self-selection, though. Which is to say, when getting married later is “the responsible thing” that’s what responsible people are going to be doing, regardless of the merits. If wearing puce every day is “the responsible thing to do” then people who wear puce every day will show better results than people who don’t. Further, getting married later (and finishing college, which the article also focuses on) are indicative of longer time horizons and greater impulse control, which are both conducive to higher earnings.

At the same time, marriage can very much complicate the natural progression of a woman’s (or man’s) career. I had to put my career aside for my wife’s, but I didn’t have to put my college career aside because I’d already graduated by the time we met. There is nothing to stop a group of people from going to college together, but it requires some givens that aren’t always there. In my wife’s case and my own, we didn’t graduate at the same time and she went to medical school a distance away from where she completed undergrad. Would I have had to transfer? Would she have had to forego medical school? Given that Patton specifically exhorts underclassmen girls to date the range, that will inevitably lead to different graduation points. Sacrifices have to be made that don’t have to be made under the post-collegiate progression. At that point, you’re simply looking at situations involving career sacrifices, which are much easier to rebound from than dropping out from college or needless transfers.

My more conservative soul, however, is at least somewhat sympathetic to where Patton is coming from. She is absolutely right that nowhere after college will you be surrounded by such good opportunity. There is almost something cruel about the post-collegiate progression in that respect. It becomes really hard to meet people after college. Especially if you’re not the outgoing type. And, ahem, especially if you’re a guy who works in IT. There is Internet dating and the like, but my success with that was always limited. The Internet (as with BBSes before it) was helpful in meeting the people I did, but the big hits of my life (Julie, Evangeline, Clancy) did not involve online dating sites (as such).

And there are times I really question the wisdom of the status quo. I was not really ready to get married until sometime after I graduated from college. Had I married the girl I was with when I was in college, I’d be divorced or miserable now. It’s impossible to separate that, though, from the society from which I come. If getting married when you’re twenty were common, it would have changed a lot of dynamics. The self-selection issue wouldn’t be there. The “Am I missing something by settling down so young?” questions would cut less deeply, and so on. When social institutions support early marriage, such as in Utah, divorce rates are not appreciably different than elsewhere. The Mormon timeline seems to demonstrate that there is another way. Of course, the Utah experience is not something that non-Mormon (or non-religious, anyway) women are likely to want to embrace. Apropos the above, Utahn women attend and graduate college at lower rates than women nationally (though they graduate at higher rates than men).

Conservative commentator Jonathan Last is making the argument in his new book (that I have not yet read) that we have a “fertility gap” between the number of kids that people are having and the number of kids they want to have. Which means that, not only are people having fewer kids than Ross Douthat might prefer, but they’re having fewer kids than they want. Late marriage plays a role in this. As does the social structure that so often encourages it. Clancy and I kind of wanted three if we had any, but due to biology and age we’re likely two-and-done. In a social structure where getting married younger was a norm, that might be different. This is a cost of the post-collegiate progression and one that Patton’s advice – if widely accepted – might mitigate.

The other criticism of Patton’s piece is the (alleged) snobbery. From a personal standpoint, though, her suggestion is probably sound. People from Princeton don’t need to marry people who went to Princeton, but they’re probably going to want to marry people of a similar background more often than not (yes, even the men). People who went to college are generally going to be looking for the same thing, and people who went to ubercollege… ditto. Though on a personal or individual level, this is sound, it would potentially exacerbate class divides with assortive mating. Which means that it might not be as good a thing for society as a whole. What effect it would have, given that assortive mating is already occurring, is unclear.

Patton defends her original letter (and speech) here and here.