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Posts by Paul Costello1

Montgomery and Prince George’s school enrollment lags pre-pandemic total

December 22, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Nicole Asbury

Maryland’s two largest school systems both have about 3 percent fewer students this fall than they did before the coronavirus pandemic, according to enrollment data made public this week.

Montgomery County Public Schools counted 160,770 students on Sept. 30. That was almost unchanged from last year’s total and about 4,500 fewer than the enrollment in fall 2019.Fast, informative and written just for locals. Get The 7 DMV newsletter in your inbox every weekday morning.

Prince George’s County Public Schools reported 131,390 students, spokeswoman Meghan Gebreselassie said Wednesday. That, too, was nearly the same as the fall 2022 head count, and it was about 4,600 students fewer than the 2019 enrollment.

The pandemic shuttered schools around the country in early 2020 and forced students to attend classes remotely, causing massive disruptions and enrollment drops. Statewide, Maryland schools lost more than 18,000 students in fall 2020.

This week’s data shows that enrollment in Maryland’s two most populous counties has not yet recovered.

The Maryland Department of Planning had projected in an August report that statewide enrollment would increase through 2024, a trend fueled in part by recovery from the pandemic and immigration.

Elsewhere in the Washington region, some schools are already bouncing back. In October, preliminary counts totaled more than 98,000 students in D.C. traditional public and charter schools, which outpaced pre-pandemictotals.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

The numbers from Prince George’s and Montgomery aren’t final. The Maryland State Department of Education expects to release a full enrollment report in January.

D.C. releases ‘highest ever’ school enrollment figures

Before the pandemic, Maryland officials expected public schools would expand. A 2019 state planning report projected seven years of enrollment growth, with most gains from 2019 to 2022. At the time, state officials projected Montgomery schools would have about 163,900 students and Prince George’sabout 133,400 by the 2023-24 school year. Neither system has reached those numbers.

Montgomery school officials attribute the decline to “significant impacts from the pandemic,” spokesman Chris Cram said. Some families enrolled children in private schools. Some teach them at home. Others moved out of the county.

During a Montgomery school board session Tuesday, county schools Superintendent Monifa B. McKnight acknowledged the setback the school system experienced during the pandemic after several years of growth. She added that officials expect enrollment to “move and change as the school year goes along.”

“We are a very mobile county,” she said. “Our students don’t fit into this perfect space of coming in and enrolling in MCPS by Sept. 30.”

Seth Adams, associate superintendent of facilities management, said the system projects enrollment to reach 167,000 by 2029. But he said a decline in births will slow kindergarten enrollment over the next few years.

Maryland colleges are trying to shake tepid enrollment. Results are mixed.

Montgomeryschools reported about 56,700 students identified as Hispanic this fall, the largest ethnic group in the system. About 38,400 of the county’s students are non-Hispanic White, about 34,700 are African American, and about 22,000 are Asian American.

Prince George’sschools did not immediately provide demographic breakdowns.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/11/02/montgomery-prince-georges-school-enrollment-lags-pre-pandemic-total/

Being 13

December 19, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Addi and a friend are in the backseat of a car. Addi is holding an iPhone, showing it to her friend, and laughing.

By Jessica Bennett Sept. 20, 2023 New York Times

As eighth grade began, Anna was worried that she wasn’t very popular because her parents wouldn’t let her on Snapchat. London had a tough couple of days; she had been sent to the principal’s office for lashing out at a girl who had been mean to her by sending a text impersonating a boy that girl liked. And when Addi’s school had a lockdown later in the year, she spent the evening decompressing with her sister, reenacting a TikTok sketch — her mind far from the flashing police lights that had reflected in the windows.

Anna, London and Addi — three girls from three states, who, at 13, were legally able to join social media, and whose cellphones were always close at hand.

I started following them a year ago, after they responded to an open call for teenagers who’d let a reporter into their lives and phones. With their parents’ permission, they each wrote weekly diaries and recorded voice memos about their days (except when they were grounded). The girls’ last names have been withheld to protect their privacy, but all of the images and text messages you see here are real.

I wanted to put a face to the alarmingheadlinesabout teensandsocial media — in particular, girls. And to understand one tension: What happens when girls’ self-confidence, which has been shown to drop right around this age, intersects with the thing that seems to be obviously contributing to their struggle?

Read On Below

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/09/20/well/family/13-year-old-girls-social-media-self-esteem.html

Norman Lear’s secret to longevity? Always being curious about others.

December 12, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Perspective by Hank Stuever Washington Post December 6, 2023 at 5:25 p.m. EST

The older he got, the more Norman Lear became the symbol of something he never agreed to be, but nevertheless was, up until his death Tuesday at age 101: the infinitely thoughtful, creatively productive, intelligently outspoken, most-elder citizen of the great American ideal, always open to what’s next, what’s happening, what’s now.

“I don’t wake up in the morning to be old,” Lear told me during an October 2017 day I spent with him for a Washington Post profile. “I wake up to do the things that were on my mind when I fell asleep last night.”

At the time, he was 95. He had been out the night before, very late, watching Dave Chappelle and others at a comedy club. He said that once he turned 90, he noticed that people applauded his presence alone, regardless of the occasion or work at hand. He was still learning to be gracious about that — the beloved, good-humored old man in the trademark white boater hat. Walk into any room, and they all stand and smile at you.ADVERTISING

His advanced age had become yet another feature of a person whose influence on television and cultural life was already part of history, and still part of its present: He had finished work on a second season (of an eventual four) of Netflix’s “One Day at a Time,” a funny and remarkably modern reboot of one of his 1970s sitcom classics. That afternoon, he would take a call from a producing partner on a series he was eager to make about getting old, tentatively titled “Guess Who Died?”

Obituary: Norman Lear, who brought social commentary to the sitcom, dies at 101

A couple of years later, ABC and late-night host Jimmy Kimmel dabbled in a completely unnecessary yet engagingly irresistible experiment: live prime-time reenactments of memorable episodes of Lear’s sitcoms (“All in the Family,” “The Jeffersons”), with Lear himself occupying a center seat of honor in the show’s studio audience. Applauded, again, for still being here, still being Norman Lear.

It was fun, yet there was also something subliminally wistful about the whole affair, some mutual acknowledgment that Lear’s style of sitcom — unabashedly topical, emotionally raw, empathetic yet hilarious, filmed with multiple cameras before a studio audience — had become a revered artifact. (The new “One Day at Time” got rave reviews and yet lived its short life entirely under the cancellation ax.) Archie Bunker, Maude Findlay, George Jefferson. The actors who originally played them were by then all dead. It was hard to avoid wondering how Lear truly felt about all this retro reverence.

He was sentimental (about his childhood, about his World War II service, about his country, about his kids), but not overly nostalgic. He loved the present, with all its attendant problems. He spent his life in the moment (the television moments, the political moments, the cultural moments), to such a degree that it’s difficult to think that he’s actually gone. Hardly any of us will get to our old age the way he did, and yet we seem to believe it’s widely possible, in no small part because a fair number of our celebrities, including the pioneers of TV (Lear, Betty White, Carl Reiner, Bob Newhart, Mel Brooks, Dick Van Dyke, et al.), have made it look so effortless.

From 2017: Norman Lear put his foot down — and Trump’s White House flinched

It’s not. The wellness industry, AARP and so many others try to sell us the dream of the optimally fabulous old age — even as TikTok fills up lately with millennials in their late 30s complaining about back pain. (Imagine.) Lear was all the proof anyone needs that a charmed life is both charmed and earned, and when it came to aging, his response to it fit neatly with what his TV shows taught us all along: Life is not easy. Life is not fair. But how people live it is fascinating, and perhaps the secret is to remain deeply curious about how life goes for other people.

In his memoir and interviews, Lear talked about being a boy in New York and wondering, on elevated subway rides, what was going on in each and every apartment and house the train passed: What’s for dinner? What are they talking about? Early television’s attempts to answer this were overly sweet, ordered and White.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

Lear and his collaborators came along and suggested that the manners within the American household could be loud and rude and fraught with divides over almost any issue (politics, class, race, gender, religion, sex, money — the biggies), and tangled up in personal biases and the wounds of the human condition. Love could and should exist in there, too, and all of this could also be, in a perfectly placed swerve of comic timing, hilarious. The only way to understand the lives of these fictional other people is to eavesdrop from the fourth wall and accept them as they are, to the point where their responses and behaviors adhere to a formula that fits into 22 minutes of TV.

On this side of the fourth wall, we have the luxury of not having to wrap up our personal crises at the half-hour mark and at least the delusion that our lives do not hew to formula (when they so often do). Watching those sitcoms, America became like Lear on those train rides — desperate to look in and, in so doing by the millions, experience an electronic togetherness.

Another word for it is empathy. And another thing to remember, which was very important to Lear, was that in World War II he had been the one to open the bay doors of a B-17 and watch bombs descend on towns below, also filled with houses filled with families at dinner tables, also having conversations, also filled with stories he longed to know.

Empathy was a constant in Lear’s work and in his public life, as founder for People for the American Way, in which the principles and points of view evident in his television shows (Is it possible to reason with a bigot like Archie Bunker? What’s life like for a self-made Black businessman who moves with his family to a deluxe apartment in the sky? What options are available for Maude during an unplanned pregnancy?) apply to a political and social sphere: What if our decisions were based on acceptance and bridging our differences? What if we could truly and honestly relate, instead of siphoning ourselves off into niche audiences and markets?

By 2017, Lear had experienced the gall of watching Americans cruelly disregard one another’s experiences, backgrounds and beliefs in a tidal shift of populist politics. Television itself was deep into its own fragmentation process of streaming services offering hundreds of new TV comedies and dramas, which had a way of undoing communal experience. (Hence Kimmel’s fond desire to re-create old-fashioned sitcom broadcasts, if only for a night or two.)

Lear talked to me about his nightly habit of getting in bed and watching the entire MSNBC lineup for fresh outrages coming out of Donald Trump’s Washington.

Norman Lear turns 100 and shares the meaning of life

I asked Lear whether it was sometimes all too much for a nonagenarian to bear? Did he envy the many friends and loved ones who had already passed and were therefore spared what, on some nights after too much Rachel Maddow, had begun to look like the end of everything decent, constitutional and free — the things he held dear.

I had absent-mindedly brought my hand to my mouth as I listened to his answer. He laughed. Why would anyone want out?

“I’m much more involved with the wonder or the acceptance as a kind of miracle that you just put your hand up and put your finger near your lip,” he said. “It took you every f—ing split second of your life to get to do that, and several seconds more to hear me say what I’m saying, and it took me every split second of my life, 95 years, months, weeks, hours, days to say what I’m saying now and to shake my head yet again. So, does that say something about the moment and the importance of the moment? We’re living in a world where everyone, all the billions of them, lived so we can sit here and have this conversation.”

That moment faded into my past and his, but the lesson was clear — Norman Lear wasn’t planning to go anywhere soon, and he had left me with what felt like his best advice: Stick around and see how the show ends, for as long as it’s airing, and never stop wondering about the world around you and the feelings and interactions of the human characters in it.

By Hank Stuever is a deputy features editor at The Washington Post, focusing mainly on the Style section’s coverage of culture, politics, media, fashion and entertainment. He joined The Post in 1999 as a Style reporter. He was the TV critic from 2009 to 2020 and a senior Style editor from 2021 to 2023.  Twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/tv/2023/12/06/norman-lear-longevity-age-tribute/

Why Is It a Surprise That America Is Gloomy After a Devastating Pandemic?

December 12, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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An upside down happy face, magenta with beige facial features is draped by a green cord with blue and white beads scattered.



By David Wallace-Wells New York Times December 10th 2023

“Why is everyone so grumpy?” my colleagues Peter Coy and Binyamin Appelbaum asked last month, broaching the subject that has preoccupied confused economists and anxious Democrats.

American G.D.P. is booming, unemployment is near historic lows and inflation increasingly appears to be under control, such that even notorious inflation scolds have declared that a once improbable economic “soft landing” is imminent. But if every conventional top-line measure of the health of the economy is strong, why are so many Americans so despondent about the state of the country and its future, with poll after poll showing deep dissatisfaction with the state of the economy?

The outsize effect of inflation has been the most commonly offered hypothesis in debates over the “vibe-cession”: While the inflation rate has slowed considerably, prices are stable only at much higher levels than even three years ago. Other theories: that partisanship is clouding our judgment, that the media is shoving too much bad news down our throats and that the grimmest takes invariably take over TikTok. There are other propositions, too, each weedsier than the next: that wage gains powered by pandemic relief were reversed when that stimulus was withdrawn, that rent and the cost of homeownership are driving generational despair and so on.

But in fishing for causes, an obvious contributor is often overlooked: the pandemic itself. It not only killed more than a million Americans but also threw much of daily life and economic activity and public confidence into profound disarray for several years, scarring a lot of people and their perceptions of the country, its capacities and its future.

When Americans are asked whether the country is on the right track, or whether they themselves are optimistic or pessimistic, they don’t treat the query like a trivia quiz about the last quarter’s G.D.P. growth or the Black unemployment rate or even the size of their own paychecks or stock portfolios. They are effectively responding to the therapist’s query: How are things? They answered that question according to one set of patterns, stretching back decades. And the pattern did not begin to shift only when inflation peaked in late spring 2022, or when pandemic relief was relaxed in fall 2021, or when supply-chain issues first arose earlier that year. They began answering differently in 2020, as the scale and duration of the pandemic came into view.

For decades, surveys about the economy were such an accurate gauge of economic fundamentals that, practically speaking, there was little need to distinguish between the two.

That all changed in early 2020, when a significant gap opened between economic conditions and public perception. Perhaps the most vivid illustration of this gap comes from The Economist, which trained a computer model to use fundamental economic indicators to estimate consumer sentiment. Using those indicators, the model was able to quite closely predict public sentiment, showing a very close correlation between economic fundamentals and public perceptions that stretched back at least to 1980.

Then, in early 2020, the correlation evaporated in the United States. At first, the fundamentals tanked while Americans maintained a rosier view of things, but this relative optimism was pretty short-lived. By the fall, the gap had opened up in the opposite direction, with Americans more pessimistic about the economy than the “fundamentals” model predicted. By the spring of 2021, the gap was about 20 points. By the end of the year, which was both the deadliest in the pandemic and when inflation first arrived, public confidence was 30 points lower than the model suggested. By June 2022, when inflation peaked just after the cessation of the Omicron wave, the gap was about 35 points.

A similar analysis by The Financial Times shows the same pattern: An expectations gap in the United States opened up in 2020, grew in 2021 and held steady through 2022. Other ways of charting the divergence tell slightly different versions of the story: Data from the Conference Board show steep falls in confidence in 2020, followed by messier data since. Last month my colleague Paul Krugman published his own analysis, using a different model built on the University of Michigan data, which more clearly showed the effect of inflation in 2022 but also showed larger gaps at earlier points in recent economic history — and made the current divergence, which measures at about 15 points, seem less anomalous as a result. In fact, the most striking feature of his chart may be the step-change downward in 2020, for both “observed” and “expected” sentiment. The current gap appears no bigger than the negative gap that prevailed in 2009 and 2010 and not much bigger than the positive one that held through the Trump “boom,” when partisanship probably helped contribute to public confidence 10 points higher than the fundamentals suggested.

If all of these analyses suggest that the gap between fundamentals and mood represents a negative vibe, it is probably worth considering, alongside the economic factors, the way that vibes of widespread social dislocation, illness and death have contributed, as well. But it is remarkablehow invisible the pandemic has been in recent debates about American gloom, with only a few economists even considering the role that recent mass death and social disorder may be playing in our moods. America’s worst year for Covid deaths ended just 23 months ago.

There were secondary effects: mass unemployment, G.D.P. contraction and a stock-market collapse, a rapidly expanded social safety net. But each was reversed fairly quickly, leaving behind a discombobulated economy that nevertheless looks, at first glance, pretty healthy. These days, both consumers and businesses are acting as if the economy is booming, spending and investing and mostly reporting good news about their own finances. But when asked to assess the broader state of the world, they invariably get bleak. “The pandemic shattered a lot of illusions of control,” the University of Michigan’s Betsey Stevenson recently told The Times. “In terms of sentiment,” the former Federal Reserve economist Claudia Sahm wrote this fall, “the pandemic caused a sudden increase in pessimism that hasn’t gone away.”

Covid-19 isn’t a total explanation, of course. People do worry about price levels, not just the rate of change, and for much of the past two years, inflation outpaced wage growth. Much of the gains Americans got from pandemic stimulus policies disappeared in 2022, when they were rolled back, driving child poverty back up and leaving millions more disenrolled from Medicaid. Partisanship skews perceptions, and perhaps the media does, too, including by underplaying the way that a Trump presidency would make inflation worse. (Though none of those phenomena were new in 2020 or 2021.)

But let’s not forget that the backdrop for all of this economic dislocation was the pandemic itself — a tough and disorienting few years for almost everyone, whether you spent them anxious about infection or outraged about mitigation overreach or somewhere in between. According to the General Social Survey, the share of Americans describing themselves as “very happy” fell about 40 percent between 2018 and 2021 and has only halfway recovered since. The share of Americans who described themselves as “not too happy” roughly doubled early in the pandemic and has barely declined since.

That alone is a big hole to climb out of, emotionally and politically, and as Jerusalem Demsas noted recently in The Atlantic, it takes a little time for perceptions to catch up with reality. Would it have been reasonable, in 2010 or 2012, to ask about public confidence in the economy or the shape of the future without emphasizing the financial crisis in the rearview mirror? In 1992, 15 months after the end of what was in retrospect a mild U.S. recession and in a much calmer time for partisanship and news polarization, the percentage of Americans who said they were satisfied with the direction of the country hit a new low: 14 percent.

This time around, the top-line recovery was remarkably swift. But while President Biden is being graded harshly — with lower approval ratings at this point in his first term than any other president since Jimmy Carter — only one leader of a Group of 7 nation is more popular than he is. In Britain, Rishi Sunak’s net approval hit negative 45 in September; in Canada, the Justin Trudeau government has a negative 33.

What’s unusual isn’t America’s gloominess, the Financial Timesanalysis illustrates, but that the economic reality in the United States is buoyant compared to those peers. Consumer confidence in the United States is roughly the same as it is in France, Germany or Britain, each of which has had worse experiences of inflation and a worse postpandemic economic performance than ours.

It may be that there are some unusually negative features of the American recovery buried deep in the data, or that there is something unique about the way American partisanship and news polarization shaped the country’s experience of the pandemic and the pandemic recession. But it’s also worth noting that things look and feel pretty bleak everywhere, regardless of the economic data. In the aftermath of what counts these days as a world-historical trauma, the world as a whole remains in a pretty gloomy place. Is that really a surprise?

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/06/opinion/bad-economy-vibes.html

People Are Pessimistic About Their Economic Futures. Can You Blame Them?

December 12, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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A colorful, simple drawing of a person lying facedown, their legs on the lawn, their torso on a sidewalk and their head on the street. Scattered on the ground are a small American flag, a “Joe” hat, a “Joe” button and a “Biden Harris” lawn sign.

By Steven Rattner  served as counselor to the Treasury secretary in the Obama administration.

As a part-time commentator on things economic, I’m often asked a seemingly straightforward question: If the economy is so good, why are Americans so grumpy?

By many measures — unemployment, inflation, the stock market — the economy is strong. Yet only 23 percent of Americans believe the country is headed in the right direction, a strong headwind for President Biden’s approval ratings. Meanwhile, Donald Trump’s formidable base of disgruntled voters endures.

As I’ve engaged with my many interlocutors, I’ve concluded that voters have valid reasons for their negativity. In my view, blame two culprits: one immediate and impacting everybody, and another that particularly affects young people and is coming into view like a giant iceberg. Both sit atop the leaderboard of reasons for the sour national mood.

While inflation has provided the proximate trigger for unhappy feelings, an understandable grimness about our broader economic prospects, particularly for younger Americans, is playing a major part.

Start with inflation. Until the chaos of the pandemic, there hadn’t been a year with average annual inflation above 4 percent since 1991. As a result, for more than two-thirds of voting age Americans, 2022 was by far the highest inflation of their adult lifetimes.

To them, higher prices just means less spending power. A recent Blueprint/YouGov poll on the economy found that just 7 percent of respondents were principally concerned about the availability of jobs, while 64 percent were most worried about prices.

The problem for President Biden is that by a margin of 43 percent to 23 percent, voters believe that he is more focused on jobs. By strikingly similar margins, they credit Republicans with mirroring their priorities: 54 percent said prices while 18 percent mentioned jobs.

Even as inflation has receded from its June 2022 peak, sentiment has hardly shifted. Many Americans appear to believe that it’s not enough for costs to rise more slowly and that prices should fall toward prior levels.

To economists, that’s a fantasy. Prices writ-large haven’t declined substantially since the Great Depression, and the price drops that consumers seem to want would most likely indicate the kind of troubled economy they fear.

With each disappointing poll — many of the recent ones show Mr. Trump edging out Mr. Biden — the frenzy among Democrats to revive their 2024 prospects has only grown. Efforts by the White House a few months ago to trumpet “Bidenomics” (a portmanteau of two of the Democrats’ largest liabilities in 2024: Mr. Biden and his economy) as a success have fizzled.

Maybe that shouldn’t be surprising. Voters may have internalized the fact that Mr. Biden’s initial policy agenda included substantial increases in government spending, a potential source of inflationary pressure.

The longer-term issue that bubbles up from polls and other data is deep pessimism about the future. Uncharacteristically, a stunning majority of Americans now believe that the next generation is likely to have a lower standard of living.

A Wall Street Journal-NORC poll from March found that just 21 percent of respondents felt confident that life for their children’s generation will be better, matching the record low since this question was first asked. In 1990, 50 percent of those asked felt life would be better for their kids.

The pessimism is easy to understand.

Consider one marker of generational progress: moving out. Nearly half of all Americans aged 18-29 live at home with their parents, the highest share since the Great Depression. In recent decades, rents in American cities have far outstripped income growth for young Americans, even those with college degrees.

Those seeking to buy their first home and “climb the property ladder” face the double whammy of high house prices and high mortgage rates, creating a massive affordability problem.

Even more fundamentally, voters — admittedly, not economists — may deserve credit for at least subconsciously comprehending two immense longer-term challenges: lagging productivity and a huge and fast-rising national debt.

Increasing productivity — how much output per hour an individual worker generates — is the only lasting mechanism for improving the standard of living. During the halcyon postwar era, between 1947 and 1973, productivity increased at a remarkable 2.8 percent annual rate.

Then its growth — save for the computer revolution boom from 1995 to 2005 — slowed markedly, to just 1.8 percent between 1973 and 2019 and an even worse 1.3 percent in the last decade of that period. Living better becomes more challenging.

The reasons for this slowdown are myriad and much debated. They range from less innovation and less investment to corporate consolidation, land use restrictions and, over the last 15 years, the sluggish recovery from the Great Recession.

Moreover, workers have not shared fully in even these more meager productivity gains, as they did in the past. Since 1990, worker productivity has risen by 91 percent, but compensation (adjusted for inflation) has risen by just 58 percent.

The national debt, which was a (relatively) modest $5.7 trillion when President Bill Clinton left office early in 2001, has reached $33 trillion. This constitutes a form of intergenerational theft; while it will most likely never be repaid, rising interest costs will eventually require higher taxes or cuts in federal programs or both.

Perhaps this is why younger Americans are particularly troubled. Mr. Biden has far lower support among this cohort than he enjoyed in the 2020 election, when 60 percent of those under 30 pulled the lever for him. Today, his share of that group hovers around 50 percent in polls.

And, among 2020 Biden voters in swing states surveyed in another recent poll, just 11 percent of the 18-to-29-year-olds thought positively of the current economy, the smallest share of any age group. (Economics are hardly all that is worrying these Americans; among other things, they are also perturbed by his handling of the Israel-Hamas war, which just 20 percent of young voters approve of.)

What can Mr. Biden do, with the election just 11 months away? Probably not much. While inflation is happily showing signs of ebbing, the deeply structural productivity problem, decades in the making, would require many tough choices and require many years to address, even if our deep political divisions were to end and a national consensus were to form around the need for action.

Regardless, the narrative that we are in a bad economy is clearly deeply embedded in Americans’ consciousness. And there are early signs in softening retail sales that consumers’ propensity to spend is starting to wane, suggesting weakening economic conditions ahead.

But the president is not without hope. Once he has an opponent, he can attack their record and policies. That worked for Barack Obama in 2012 and for George W. Bush in 2004.

When stacked up in polls against a “generic Republican,” Mr. Biden trails by 16 percentage points in swing states. Against the likely nominee, Mr. Trump, he trails by just four.

Given the extreme views of today’s Republicans on issues like abortion and democracy (not to mention Mr. Trump’s obvious character flaws), shifting the focus of the 2024 campaign to his opponent may work well for Mr. Biden — even if the economic mood remains cranky.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/07/opinion/economy-young-voters-inflation-biden.html

This Is Not the Way to Help Depressed Teenagers

December 12, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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An illustration of a headless student sitting at a school desk, holding his head in his hands.

By Darby Saxbe is a clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Southern California.

Ever since the pandemic, when rates of teenage suicide, anxiety and depression spiked, policymakers around the world have pushed to make mental health resources more broadly available to young people through programming in schools and on social media platforms.

This strategy is well intentioned. Traditional therapy can be expensive and time-consuming; access can be limited. By contrast, large-scale, “light touch” interventions — TikTok offerings from Harvard’s School of Public Health, grief-coping workshops in junior high — aim to reach young people where they are and at relatively low cost.

But there is now reason to think that this approach is risky. Recent studies have found that several of these programs not only failed to help young people, they also made their mental-health problems worse. Understanding why these efforts backfired can shed light on how society can — and can’t — help teenagers who are suffering from depression and anxiety.

Consider a “social-emotional skills training” school program called WISE Teens. Led by clinical psychologists in training, it consists of eight weekly hourlong classroom sessions in which students learn to manage their emotions with the help of tools and principles drawn from cognitive behavior therapy and Zen Buddhism.

Last month, the journal Behavior Research and Therapy published a study of 1,071 Australian teenagers who were observed from 2017 to 2018: One group participated in WISE Teens; another group participated in a standard health-class curriculum. Compared with the teenagers who got the standard education, the students in WISE Teens reported more depression, more anxiety, more difficulty managing their emotions and worse relationships with their parents. One out of every eight WISE Teens participants appeared clinically depressed after completing the program, compared with one out of every 13 participants who did the regular health classes.

These results are striking but not unique. Last year, an even larger study of a school-based mindfulness program, which looked at more than 8,000 British teenagers in more than 80 schools, found that the program did not improve mental health — and in fact led to worse anxiety and emotional problems, and lower levels of mindfulness skills. Yet another study published last year, which included some 2,500 Australian teenagers, also found that a mental health program made students more distressed.

Why were these programs counterproductive? The WISE Teens researchers suggest, convincingly, that the teenagers weren’t engaged enough in the program and might have felt overwhelmed by having too many tools and skills presented to them without enough time to master them. (The study found that WISE Teens participants who spent more time practicing the skills at home showed some slight mental health benefits — though most of the participants did not engage in home practice.)

But I would venture three additional explanations for the backfiring, all of which dovetail with what other research tells us about youth mental health.

First, by focusing teenagers’ attention on mental health issues, these interventions may have unwittingly exacerbated their problems. Lucy Foulkes, an Oxford psychologist, calls this phenomenon “prevalence inflation” — when greater awareness of mental illness leads people to talk of normal life struggles in terms of “symptoms” and “diagnoses.” These sorts of labels begin to dictate how people view themselves, in ways that can become self-fulfilling.

Teenagers, who are still developing their identities, are especially prone to take psychological labels to heart. Instead of “I am nervous about X,” a teenager might say, “I can’t do X because I have anxiety” — a reframing that research shows undermines resilience by encouraging people to view everyday challenges as insurmountable.

It’s generally a sign of progress when diagnoses that were once whispered in shameful secrecy enter our everyday vocabulary and shed their stigma. But especially online, where therapy “influencers” flood social media feeds with content about trauma, panic attacks and personality disorders, greater awareness of mental health problems risks encouraging self-diagnosis and the pathologizing of commonplace emotions — what Dr. Foulkes calls “problems of living.” When teenagers gravitate toward such content on their social media feeds, algorithms serve them more of it, intensifying the feedback loop.

A second possible explanation for why these programs backfired is that they were provided in the wrong place and to the wrong people. The structure of school, which emphasizes evaluation and achievement, may clash with practicing “slow” contemplative skills like mindfulness. And many of the skills taught in these programs were developed for people coping with severe mental illness, not everyday stresses. These tools might not feel applicable to teenagers who aren’t deeply struggling — and on the flip side, their wide-scale adoption might make them seem too generic and watered-down to teenagers who are truly ill.

A third possible explanation is that these interventions offered enough information to highlight a problem, but not enough to fix it. As research has repeatedly shown, the most effective therapies involve not just learning skills but also developing meaningful relationships. Even the most structured cognitive behavioral approaches recognize the value of a strong working therapeutic alliance between therapist and client. Effective therapies often require clients to do hard things: Exposure therapies for anxiety, for example, ask clients to confront fears they’d prefer to avoid. Such interventions work best with steady, consistent, hands-on support from a dedicated therapist.

To be sure, psychologists have done some important and innovative work making mental health interventions more broadly accessible. To cite just one example, Jessica Schleider, a psychology researcher at Northwestern University, has tested several single-session treatments that can be offered online and show promising results in teenagers. But although such offerings fill gaps in our mental health infrastructure, they cannot take the place of more time- and resource-intensive forms of care.

The hard truth is that soaring rates of teenage depression and anxiety present a structural problem requiring structural solutions, including the training of a much larger work force of therapists. In school settings, creating more opportunities for young people to build relationships with adults through smaller class sizes and greater access to traditional guidance counselors might move the needle more than specialized mental health curriculums can. Other, more prosaic-seeming changes like starting school later to encourage sleep, decreasing the homework burden and creating more opportunities for play, exercise, music, arts and community engagement are all empirically supported strategies for improving mental health.

In the meantime, those serving up mental health guidance, both online and at school, should be cautious. It’s critical to keep pace with the evidence and attend to the first principle of all health care providers: First, do no harm.

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/opinion/teenagers-mental-health-treatment.html

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Opinion | Jamieson WebsterTeenagers Are Telling Us That Something Is Wrong With AmericaOct. 11, 2022

Opinion | ‘The Ezra Klein Show’Why Are Teens in Crisis? Here’s What the Evidence Says.May 19, 2023

OpinionCan You Punish a Child’s Mental Health Problems Away?Opinion | Henry NichollsLet Teenagers Sleep InSept. 20, 2018

How my millennial daughter built her credit score above 800 in 5 steps

December 12, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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This is an update of a column that originally published Dec. 4, 2019.

While I generally discourage young adults from using credit, at some point they do need to prove they can manage debt.I

The widely used FICO credit score, which is derived from information in your credit file, ranges from a low of 300 to a high of 850. Your score — along with other financial factors — directly affects how much interest you pay for the money you borrow. Your score also influences your insurance rates, as well as your ability to get an apartment or even a job.

But how do you show a lender that you can manage debt well if, to get credit, you have to have a positive credit history? That’s what one reader wanted to know.

“My child graduated college, moved home, got a good job, opened a bank account at a small local bank with direct deposit, and then applied for a credit card at a large national bank,” the reader explainedduring an online discussion. “The bank turned [my child] down, however, saying, ‘the credit reporting agency serving your area has reported no credit history for you.’ What does a new graduate need to do to establish a minimal history sufficient to get a credit card?”Advertisement

It might surprise you, but it doesn’t take very long to establish a good credit history. So, there’s no need to panic on behalf of your teen or young adult child.

If you plan it right, you can help your young adult child build an excellent credit profile just in time to qualify for a loan or apartment lease without needing a co-signer.

Four years ago, I helped my 24-year-old daughter establish credit with the goal of buildinga good credit score. Here’s a step-by-step guide on how we started the process.

Step 1

As our daughter was getting close to graduating from college, my husband and I made her an authorized user on our joint credit card. This tactic is called “piggybacking.”

The authorized user will benefit from the positive credit history of the primary cardholders. In our case, we both had credit scores well above 800.

Treatment of authorized users can vary by card issuer. But generally, adding an authorized user to your credit card account lets the credit history of that particular card be transferred to the authorized user’s credit files. Keep in mind, positive and negative information on the card can be added to the authorized user’s credit reports.

The point wasn’t to allow our daughter to use the card much — and she didn’t. She just piggybacked on how we handled the card, paying it on time, keeping balances super low and paying them off every month.

Exercise caution when adding an authorized user. Although the person has your permission to use the card, there is no contractual responsibility to pay any of the charges on the card. So be extremely careful about using the piggybacking strategy.

Step 2

We had our daughter apply for a general-purpose credit card.

She was turned down because her income was too low. At the time, she was working as an intern with a small monthly stipend. But we just wanted to test whether our credit history alone was enough to get her approved.

Having been rejected, she then applied for a secured credit card, which is backed by money deposited into a savings account. For example, if the required deposit is $200, that becomes your credit limit.

I had a perfect 850 credit score. Then I paid off my house.

If the young adult already has a banking or credit union account, start the search for a secured card at that institution. Bankrate regularly profiles the top secured-card offers. On its list of best secured cards for November 2023 are several credit cards with no annual fees, and most require a deposit of only $200.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

Shop around to avoid cards with high fees, and make sure the issuer is reporting to all three credit bureaus — Experian, Equifax and TransUnion. Don’t worry too much about the interest rate, because the balance should be paid off every month.

Our daughter was approved for a secured card from her credit union with a $250 limit.

Step 3

The next part is crucial: We told her to make only a few small-dollar purchases each month and to pay the entire balance off before the due date.

The two biggest factors to getting and keeping a good credit score are paying your bills on time, and amounts owed. The lower the amount of debt you are carrying the better.

By the way, carrying balances from month to month and incurring interest does not help your score. The credit score rewards an open and active account in good standing with a zero balance.

Credit score facts vs. myths: 5 things to know

Our daughter stuck to the plan and used the secured card to just buy gas and a subway card.

“I paid off the balance as soon as the charge posted,” she said.

With no credit history of her own other than the boost from being an authorized user when she applied for the secured card, her credit score was 698, which was pretty good.

Step 4

After just three months, her credit score jumped to 737. Once it hit that mark, we advised her to stop using the secured credit card. She tucked it in a drawer.Advertisement

A few months later, her score had increased to 743.

Step 5

Several months after getting the secured card, it was time to apply for a regular credit card, one not backed by money in a savings account. She applied at the same credit union that had given her the secured card.

Stop believing these common credit score myths

She was approved for a credit limit of $2,000.

She repeated the strategy of limiting her use of credit, keeping her utilization rate to about 10 percent of her available balance. And she never charges more than she can pay off by the next due date.

Eventually, her lender raised her credit limit to several thousand dollars. Her most recent FICO credit score was 810. The average U.S. FICO score as of April was 718.

In all, it took about a year for my daughter to establish a good credit history, which led to building a very good credit score. FICO says a good credit score is generally considered to be in the 670 to 739 score range. Anything higher is exceptional.

Mission accomplished. She has established that she can handle debt.

B.O.M. — The best of Michelle Singletary on personal finance

If you have a personal finance question for Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary, please call 1-855-ASK-POST (1-855-275-7678).

My mortgage payoff story: My husband and I paid off the house in the spring of 2023 thanks to making extra payments and taking advantage of a mortgage recast. Even though it lowered my perfect 850 credit score and my column about it sparked some serious debate with readers, it was one of the best financial decisions I’ve made.

Credit card debt: If you’re in the habit of carrying credit card debt, stop. It’s just a myth that it will boost your credit score. For those looking to get out of credit card debt, see if a balance transfer is right for you.

Money moves for life: For a more sweeping overview of my timeless money advice, see Michelle Singletary’s Money Milestones. The interactive package offers guidance for every life stage, whether you’re just starting out in your career or planning for retirement.

Test yourself: Do you know where you stand financially? Take our quiz and read more personal finance advice.Show moreShare253Comments

By Michelle SingletaryIf you have a personal finance question for Washington Post columnist Michelle Singletary, please call 1-855-ASK-POST (1-855-275-7678). Her award-winning column, “The Color of Money,” is syndicated by The Washington Post News Service and Syndicate and carried in dozens of newspapers. Twitter

https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/24/how-build-credit-score-800/

At 33, I knew everything. At 69, I know something much more important.

December 12, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Albert Bierstadt: Witness to a Changing West - Fine Art Connoisseur

Anne Lamott is an American novelist and nonfiction writer. Her latest book, “Somehow: Thoughts on Love,” will be published in April 2024.

Today I woke up old and awful in every way. I simultaneously cannot bear the news and cannot turn it off: It’s cobra hypnosis — Gaza, Israel, the shootings in Maine. The world is as dark as a scarab. I have two memorial services on my calendar this week. A dear friend is in the hospital waiting for a liver, dying. She keeps assuring me, “I ain’t in no ways tired,” and I say, “Oh, stop with that or I’m not going to visit again.” I’m exhausted just driving 90 minutes to and from San Francisco to see her.

My body hurt quite a lot when I got out of bed this morning, and I limped around like Granny Clampett for the first hour, until it unseized. Worse, my mind hurt, my heart hurt and I hated almost everyone, except my husband, my grandson and one of the dogs.

I don’t think I could have borne up under all this 20 years ago when I thought I knew so much about life. That was not nearly as much as I knew at 33, which is when we know more than we ever will again. But age has given me the ability to hang out without predicting how things will sort out this time (mostly — depending on how I’ve slept).

In many of Albert Bierstadt’s Western paintings, there is a darkness on one side, maybe a mountain or its shadow. Then toward the middle, animals graze or drink from a lake or stream. And then at the far right or in the sky, splashes of light lie like shawls across the shoulders of the mountains. The great darkness says to me what I often say to heartbroken friends — “I don’t know.”

I don’t know. Not yet.

My white-haired husband said on our first date seven years ago that “I don’t know” is the portal to the richness inside us. This insight was one reason I agreed to a second date (along with his beautiful hands). It was a game-changer. Twenty years earlier, when my brothers and I were trying to take care of our mother in her apartment when she first had Alzheimer’s, we cried out to her gerontology nurse, “We don’t know if she can stay here, how to help her take her meds, how to get her to eat better since she forgets.” And the nurse said gently, “How could you know?”

This literally had not crossed our minds. We just thought we were incompetent. In the shadow of the mountain of our mother’s decline, we hardly knew where to begin. So we started where we were, in the not knowing.

In the center of many Bierstadt paintings, you sometimes see animals grazing or drinking. They’re fine, they’re animals; they are just doing animals. But they are not the point — the point is the light. No matter how low you are, the light can reach you. It falls on animals, including us. This is positively biblical. Some of Bierstadt’s animals are lined up at the water as if they’re going to march onto Noah’s Ark. Or they’re huddled together as on a park bench, just hanging out. You have to wonder if the older deer are slightly surprised upon waking every morning, as I am, fumbling around for their glasses.

The animals never seem to have anywhere to go. I used to have lots of places I had to get to. I had to go out for this or that, and it was an emergency — graph paper! I suddenly, urgently, needed to drive to town for graph paper. Also, in the old days when there was something to celebrate, I’d go out to a nice restaurant with friends. To celebrate now, I might exuberantly skip flossing for a night, and maybe if the news is good enough, the hip exercises. Wild times.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

In my younger days when the news was too awful, I sought meaning in it. Now, not so much. The meaning is that we have come through so much, and we take care of each other and, against all odds, heal, imperfectly. We still dance, but in certain weather, it hurts. (Okay, always.)

The portals of age also lead to the profound (indeed earthshaking) understanding that people are going to do what people are going to do: They do not want my always-good ideas on how to have easier lives and possibly become slightly less annoying.

Now there is some acceptance (partly born of tiredness) that I can’t rescue or fix anyone, not even me. Sometimes this affords me a kind of plonky peace, fascination and even wonder at people and life as they tromp on by.

The price of aging is high: constant aches, real pain and barely survivable losses. But each time my hip unseizes, it reminds me that this life is not going to go on forever, and that is what makes it so frigging precious.

Another gift of aging is the precipitous decline in melodrama. Enjoying how unremarkable life is takes practice and time, and then the little things start to shine and delight. Life gets smaller and in its smallness it starts winking at you. On my first day back in New Mexico recently, the high desert looked barren and brown. Pretty, yes, but a little dead. Then the tiny desert flowers, yellow, lavender, magenta and baby blue, made their way into my consciousness, and the earth’s shades of ochre and red started to warm me, and before long the formerly dead desert was alive and awash in dynamic, undulating streams of color.

Sometimes at the right or the top center of Bierstadt paintings is a trippy splash of light, often a mystical, jagged slash that breaks through dirty-looking or white-fire clouds. There might be bright reflections, or long, slanted fingers of sun shining down with religious airs, organ music playing softly in the background. Puffy rainclouds glow. All say, “Yes, there is the deep dark, but we have some light as well.”

Will my brothers or I inherit our mother’s Alzheimer’s? I don’t know. I do know that I recently parked in front of my house and sort of forgot to turn off the engine. Three hours later, a formerly standoffish young neighbor knocked on my door to tell me this, and I pretended to have known. I said the battery had been low and so I was letting it recharge.

“Ah,” she said.

Now she is sweet when she sees me. We wave to each other when we pass in our cars, reflecting a new affection. Reflections say, “In the dark, there’s still some light around. So don’t ever think things are too dark. We’re not going to give you the entire reserve, but we just want you to know it is there. And more may be on its way.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/11/20/aging-acceptance-wisdom-albert-bierstadt/

Students who miss school get help, not punishment

December 12, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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By Donna St. George

Mariana Perez missed schoolmore often last yearthan she does now. The eighth-grader in Maryland is part of a longtime Montgomery County program to help middle school students improve attendance and feel more connected to their education.F

She said she sees the difference in her grades.

“C’s to B’s, and B’s to A’s,” said the 13-year-old, who meets weekly with a volunteer mentor and others who are pulling for her in the county’s Truancy Prevention Program. “It helps to have advice,” she said this week.

Even though the worst of the coronavirus pandemic may be finished, students across the country continue to rack up absences at alarming levels. An analysis released in October showed two-thirds of the nation’sschools faced severe absenteeism in 2021-2022, with no signs yet of a widespread rebound in the year that has followed.

High levels of absenteeism often derail students. They are less likely to read on level by third grade. They are more likely to score lower on standardized tests and get suspended in middle school, research shows. They are at greater risk of dropping out of high school.

As school districts search for ways to tackle the issue, the Montgomery County program Mariana participates in is well-regarded and expanding. It is meant to identify the root causes of absenteeism with each student individually and find ways to overcome them. The idea is encouragement and relationship-building, not punishment.

“It is absolutely, abundantly clear that it is needed now more than ever,” said John McCarthy, state’s attorney in Montgomery County, who led the effort to create the program.

Two-thirds of schools struggle with high absenteeism following the pandemic

Inspired by a similar effort in Baltimore, the program was started in two middle schools in 2010. It now serves 19 middle schools, with six more to be added in the spring and another four in the fall of 2024. The goal is to reach all 40 middle schools in Montgomery County, McCarthy said. Seven to 10 students from each school participate.

The 10-week program depends on volunteer mentors, school staff members and employees of the state’s attorney’s office, where truancy prosecution is viewed as a last resort. Students meet with them one at a time, once a week, reflecting on how they are doing, why they were missing school and how to do better. They talk about their grades.

“We just try to build up rapport,” said Michael Durso, a retired school principal and former county school board member, who has volunteered with the program for five years. “It’s: How are you doing? What are the barriers that get in the way of coming to school?”

Some students miss school because of family needs, including tending to younger siblings. Some take jobs to help support their families. Some lack transportation to get to school if they miss the bus, and increasingly some struggle with anxiety and depression. Many want to avoid school because they are being bullied.

One student faltered until his third try at the program, said George Simms, an assistant state’s attorney and chief of the community outreach division. Then one day, it seemed to click: When the boy missed his bus in the morning, he came up with another way to get to school — taking a Metro bus and walking a mile, Simms said.Share this articleNo subscription required to readShare

“He is completely turned around,” he said.

Students are considered truant in Maryland when they are absent without an excuse for more than 20 days in a school year. In Montgomery County, a Truancy Review Board handles about 10 truancy cases a month but strives to work with families; very few are steered into the court system, Simms said.

If a parent were charged in a truancy case, the offense would be a misdemeanor that could carry jail time or a fine but would most likely involve probation on the condition of school attendance, Simms said.

School system leaders, who collaborate with prosecutors on the program, similarly say that students benefit most when schools join with families.

“Punishing parents doesn’t do a single thing to help us build relationships with them,” said Steven Neff, the school system’s director of pupil personnel and attendance services.

Not every child in the Montgomery County program reaches their attendance goals, making them eligible for a “graduation” ceremony. Graduation rates for the program vary from about 60 percent to 70 percent, McCarthy said. Still, he said: “I think every child improves.”

The Montgomery County initiative is one of many programs across the country that aim to reduce absenteeism or truancy.

In D.C., where several efforts focus on the issue, some have shown promising results but are small or underfunded, said Danielle Robinette, a policy attorney at the Children’s Law Center. She said programs with an individualized approach have been more effective than those that are punitive.

In Montgomery County, the problem is so extensive that it will require many more programs and efforts to effectively meet the need, said Durso, the former school board member and program volunteer.

In recent years, Montgomery and other school districts nationally have tracked absences by calculating rates of “chronic absenteeism,” when students miss 10 percent of their school days for any reason. Montgomery’s rate worsened during the pandemic, but the first quarter of this year showed improvement.Montgomery officials have announced a plan to combat the problem.

Students involved in the voluntary prevention program — once known as Truancy Court — are referred by schools and must have parental consent to participate. They receive points for their accomplishments over the course of the program and receive prizes.

At the program’s “graduation” ceremony — held at the county courthouse — students are handed certificatesof achievement. Speeches are given. Parents and grandparents look on, snapping photos.

“I was one of the kids with the lowest, lowest grades,” one 11-year-old boy told the audience at a graduation this year, according to a recording of the event. The sixth-grader said he wrote goals into a book every week as part of the program. “Every single week I completed every single achievement that I wrote,” he said. His grades rose markedly.

“I appreciate being in this program because it is one of my achievements in my life and will be the first achievement I have ever done,” he said.Share91Comments

By Donna St. GeorgeDonna St. George is a national education reporter for The Washington Post, where she has been a staff writer since 1998. She previously worked at the Philadelphia Inquirer and the New York Times

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/11/24/truancy-chronic-absenteeism-school-program/

What’s Your Life Story You’ve Been Holding Back from the World?

December 7, 2023 Paul Costello1 Uncategorized
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Discussing the role of storytelling through George Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing

Natasha MH·

This essay discusses the 2022 fantasy romantic drama Three Thousand Years of Longing directed and produced by George Miller, starring Idris Elba and Tilda Swinton.

It is imperative that I provide a preamble of sorts about storytelling and its potency to affect the world before I begin discussing Three Thousand Years of Longing.

“The purpose of a storyteller is not to tell you how to think, but to give you questions to think upon.” ― Brandon Sanderson, The Way of Kings

The best stories, I believe, are like onions. To enjoy it, you have to peel it to get beneath its surface. And by doing so, it won’t leave you unaffected. With each layer you peel, you get watery eyes. You peel and you peel, each covering lending a hand to enhance flavor.

Some onions are more pungent than others. There are sweet, red, yellow, shallots, and green. Like stories, onions are one of the largest plant genera with hundreds of different species. Genre upon genre, our world is filled with stories, some disguised as truths, some swallowed as lies. There are bound to be preferences or exceptions, like honor among thieves.

It’s not just the kernel of a story that matters. It’s how a story is told. It’s how you weave the story that wins the heart. There are stories that burrow in my mind for days, weeks and months. There are stories that have spooked me for years.

Since the dawn of time, storytelling has been man’s most powerful weapon. We often forget that it is stories that have kept us alive. Stories are the alchemy of life, the yolk of our existence. Science is what enables us to make sense of it all through logic. But stories, that’s a different practical magic. Tempestuous, bizarre, magnificent, and tragic. Stories are what keep us flourishing, loving, and hopeful.

Storytelling has been used by the viziers of every kingdom known to man to navigate kings, sultans, and their enemies. Stories were used to improve empathy, justice, order, cooperation, and other critical elements when we say the word civilization.

But the secret to a powerful story, what has egged mankind for all these time, is longing.

Longing is the delicate string that binds our today with tomorrow. Longing is the elixir of youth, the serum that frightens many of premature death, death before fulfillment. Longing is what keeps ghosts and spirits roaming through the halls of dilapidated mansions. Longing is the canon that expanded kingdoms across vast continents and deep oceans, built legendary empires through barren deserts and white mountains. Longing is what weakened even the mightiest of kings and brought giants to their knees.

Although released as a movie, Three Thousand Years of Longing is based on a 1994 short story ‘The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye’ by A.S. Byatt.

The story opens with a lonely but independent woman named Alithea Binnie. A narratologist by profession, Alithea is a specialist in world literature, which takes her all over the globe, examining stories and conducting lectures on intertextual analysis. Her work combs through metaphors, cultural symbolisms and languages.

But almost from the beginning of the story we see Alithea harboring a secret. She possesses an ability to see mythical creatures and literary characters, some almost demonic. There seems to be an enmesh between her real world and her fantasies. As viewers, we can only guess if it’s a bane, a blessing, or a red flag for a medical condition such as a brain tumor that is presenting her “hallucinations.”

At a conference in Turkey, Alithea visits the Grand Bazaar and picks up a antique glass bottle.

“How can we tell if it’s genuine?” Alithea asks her seller.

“You can see specks of blood from the glass blower’s lungs in its design.”

One might shudder at the thought of such a revelation. Alithea’s colleague advises her to select a different ornament, one that’s less “flawed” and more pleasant by historical account. But Alithea refuses. All the more, she is drawn to the aberrant nature of the glass bottle.

Back in her room, Alithea attempts to scrub clean her new find, and out comes a Djinn. He tells her that he is to grant her three wishes but she ought to choose wisely. There are conditions to the rules: he cannot grant more wishes or for absolutes, such as to erase all the ills of the world. He can only grant her wishes pertaining to her personal desires.

Alithea is all too familiar with narratives of genies and Djinns. They’re known to be tricksters, out to fool men. “Only bad luck comes out of all the wishes,” she tells the Djinn. “Moreover, with a life fulfilled, there is nothing I’d wish for.”

Alithea: There’s no story about wishing that is not a cautionary tale. None end happily. Not even the ones that are supposed to be jokes.

The Djinn is angered by Alithea’s incurious and insouciant demeanor with his gifted presence.

“It is impossible. Everyone has a desire.” Djinn declares. “But you and I are the authors of this story, and we can avoid all traps.”

“I am fulfilled,” replies Alithea defiantly.

Alithea was more interested to know how the Djinn got trapped inside the bottle. As a lover of stories, she’s curious about the Djinn’s life granting others their wishes.

And so begins a series of stories that encompasses three thousand years of love, loss and servitude.

“All great literature is one of two stories; a man goes on a journey or a stranger comes to town.” ― Leo Tolstoy

The Djinn begins his recount by professing his love for the Queen of Sheba. They were inseparable lovers until King Solomon came to court her attention. At first Sheba was disinterested. A half Djinn herself, the queen presented a challenge for Solomon to test his wisdom. This includes answering the question known as difficult to man: “What women most desire.”

Here, the story takes a twist. It has been told to us for centuries that Solomon called Sheba to come to him in “humble submission.” According to Djinn, who was there to witness as Sheba’s lover, it was Solomon.

Solomon was obsessed with conquering the queen in her own bed. He also was deceptive. He sought the help of spirits from other realms for the answer. Upon whispering the secret into her ears, Solomon won over the queen. The Djinn was caught spying on them, thus, Solomon used magic to entrap the Djinn and cursed him to be a genie in a bottle.

For 2,500 years the genie languished in solitude, submitted to pangs of anger and hopelessness. The conversation between Djinn and Alithea marks a cornerstone to our understanding of both characters.

Djinn: And there I am, left to my own oblivion, with no one to hear my voice, no one to know me, nor feel me, nor sense me. You can’t imagine.

Alithea: Well, actually, I can.

Djinn: Can you imagine the loneliness? How it might overwhelm?

Alithea: I can.

Alithea: We exist only if we are real to others. Do you agree?

Alithea: I do.

Djinn: This, then, is our fate, Alithea. If you make no wish at all, I will be caught between worlds, invisible and alone, for all time.

“Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can’t remember who we are or why we’re here.” ― Sue Monk Kidd, The Secret Life of Bees

The subsequent stories shared by the Djinn further demonstrates the power of storytelling. Eventually, Djinn succeeds in winning Alithea over to make her wish for a desire. His weaving of stories invokes Alithea’s deep seated longings — those she knew existed, and those she never knew she wanted.

Djinn was right about one thing when it comes to human nature: we are never without a secret desire waiting to be fulfilled. It’s difficult to accuse Djinn of manipulating Alithea’s vulnerability. All the while, it appeared as if she was the one in full control of their discourse.

That brings us to what makes Three Thousand Years of Longing a modern masterpiece: how one can collapse the story and interpret it in a hundred ways.

I offer one perspective.

Throughout the movie, inserted in subtle clues in various scenes, discerning viewers can construct a hypothesis that the tales have little to do with Djinn and his folly. Through the frames of different characters and assorted lovers, through episodes of deception, betrayal, greed and death, we are looking at the life story of Alithea herself.

“It’s like everyone tells a story about themselves inside their own head. Always. All the time. That story makes you what you are. We build ourselves out of that story.” ― Patrick Rothfuss, The Name of the Wind

There is an existential question for all of us here: What is our story that we have been holding back from the world?

This is rather telling from their conversation. As we’re taken into the second chapter of the story, we begin to see how Djinn and Alithea’s worlds begin to converge.

Alithea: This is the story you’ve been avoiding telling me all along.

Djinn: This is the story I’ve avoided telling even myself.

As tempted as I am to expound Three Thousand Years of Solitude deeper, I must resist. I feel it would be a disservice to anyone inclined to watch the movie. It’s best to allow yourself to deduce the story and formulate your own interpretation. That, I believe, is the beauty of its story arc.

But I will leave you with this: What I found profound about the connection between Alithea and Djinn is the evocative vignettes centered on love as a theme. They mirror our flaws.

Each portrayal of love is flawed by design. Some viewers may feel dissatisfied with this, or even see it as a provocation. Yet I find this approach realistic, mature, and though-provoking.

Once again, with its strength tied to the power of storytelling, each vignette is a cautionary tale of what love means to different people, influenced by time, culture, and the old time villain, selfish greed.

We often think that war is the downfall of humanity. Through each tale, it is in fact love that has been the cause of our ruin. Our desire for what cannot be; our longing for what has been lost; our insatiable thirst for a love that does not belong to us; our incapacity to temper the power of love when it is in our hands. I find this relates to the earlier conversation at the Grand Bazaar about specks of blood from a glass blower’s lungs trapped in an intricate glass bottle. Nothing that’s authentic comes devoid of human suffering.

Suffering, languishing, and longing are cardinal components of our human existence. Perhaps that is why we are in constant search of a reason to believe in what’s elusive. We are a cup filled to the brim yet never full.

For us, human love needs to be owned, to be caged, to be imprisoned, like a genie in a bottle. Love is forced to be the panacea to all our ills and yearnings. We idealize love to end wars and bloodshed. Yet we find reasons to create them through hate and jealousy.

It is love that entrapped the Djinn in the bottle in the first place. It is love for stories that isolated Alithea from the rest of her world.

Like Djinn’s second lover, Zefir, who wished for knowledge through ferocious reading, we are obsessed with the pursuit of solving everything. Yet we are incapable of handling the enormity of consciousness and its consequences when given all access.

We seek fulfillment only to keep rewriting the journal of our desires. We know what we want based on seeing what others have. We live by comparison. Nothing will ever be enough, because at the heart of longings, we know not of what we truly seek in life. That in itself, is our human tragedy.

Alithea: Do you know the answer to her question?

Djinn: What women most desire?

Alithea: Yeah.

Djinn: Do you not know? If you don’t know, I cannot tell you.

Alithea: Well, surely we don’t all want the same thing.

Djinn: Madam, your yearnings are not at all clear to me.

It is upon Alithea’s self-actualization that she willingly releases her love for Djinn so he can be what Djinn needs to be in his own realm: free to grant others their wishes. By doing so, both are finally set free — until they find themselves in a new perpetual, self-constructed prison.

Unless we find the right words to write our story designed for triumph, we shall persist as a tragic hero awaiting an action that will reveal our hamartia.

As for Alithea Binnie, with all that’s been said and done, did her encounter with Djinn really take place? Or did her loneliness and amalgamation of narratology concoct the whole experience? Was she led by her deep-seated longings to an impossible love affair? Or did she finally fulfill her secret desire?

I leave that onion for you to peel. Meanwhile, be careful what you wish for.

https://medium.com/counterarts/whats-your-life-story-you-ve-been-holding-back-from-the-world-16f43fbe78b2