Jean Baudrillard has died in Paris at age 79. I went off to the University of Utah with a running start on Place Last Seen, a novel in which I wanted to explore, among other things, what happens when we come up against the undeniable reality of the physical world. What I encountered there was a department enamored of the (genuinely interesting) ideas of Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida et al, ideas which in Baudrillard’s case included the argument that reality has disappeared altogether, leaving us with only simulation and hyperreality. While I never did buy into the essentialist cast of these…
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I spent last weekend in Seattle — I had two days of meetings last week for my Corporate Job, then hung out with my stepmother for the weekend. Susan’s only eight years older than I am, and she and my dad have been divorced for a long time, but we kept her after he moved to Europe. During all those years I was the bratty teenager living with Susan and my Dad it would never have occurred to us that all these years later that Patrick and Dad would be gone and it’d just be the two of us together,…
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Gee, when you make it easier for women to have kids without giving up all their independence, financial security, and career trajectory, they have more children. Here’s the money quote: Curiously, Europe’s lowest birthrates are seen in countries, mostly Catholic, where the old idea that the man is the breadwinner and the woman is the child-raiser holds strong. Portugal, Spain, Italy and Greece have among the lowest fertility rates in Western Europe. Meanwhile, countries that support high numbers of working women, like Finland, Norway and Denmark, have among the highest birthrates. How did what’s been called “the fertility paradox” come…