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☆ Opinion | Where Should Agnostics Go on Sundays?
▼ + stars: | 2023-09-01 | by ( Ross Douthat | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +5 min

So what he’d like — well, here’s the quote:I can easily imagine a “church for the nones.” (It would need a more appealing name.) I could attend a Christian church on Sundays and teach my daughter about other beliefs the rest of the week. With all my reservations, I don’t really want to join an existing church. And I don’t think I am going to have much luck getting my fellow nones to join something I start. My sense is that the people who want what church provides are going to the existing Christian churches, even if they are skeptical of some of the beliefs.

Persons: Perry Bacon, ’, Jessica Grose, Nick Kristof, Bacon, certainties, Doesn’t Bacon, Hasn’t, he’s, I’ve Organizations: The Washington Post, Society for Ethical, Netflix Locations: America, ”

☆ Opinion | Margot Robbie’s Sly Interpretation of the Feminine Ideal
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-19 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In particular, I continue to marvel at the performance of Margot Robbie, who played the titular heroine — Stereotypical Barbie — and who I think isn’t getting enough credit for holding the movie together. She must journey to the real world, leaving an army of other Barbies behind, to get back to a state of unquestioning bliss. She grudgingly takes Ken (a perfectly doltish Ryan Gosling) with her, and in the real world he discovers the concept of patriarchy. A movie called “Barbie,” and Barbie didn’t always feel like the main character. I also kept thinking about Robbie as Stereotypical Barbie.

Persons: Barbie, Barbie ”, Margot Robbie, Barbie —, Ken, Ryan Gosling, Manohla Dargis, Ken’s, Robbie, Weird Barbie, Kate McKinnon, — didn’t, Allan, Michael Cera, Barbie didn’t, — Organizations: House Locations: America

☆ Opinion | Leaving the Office at 5 Is Not a Moral Failing
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-16 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

These concepts aren’t about goofing off all day or shirking responsibility; they’re about creating reasonable boundaries based on actual job descriptions. This shouldn’t be framed as a moral failing. Executives should take note: Laying down acceptable boundaries between the home and work lives of your employees doesn’t mean less profit. Not everyone should be a raging ambition monster — it is not sustainable for a varied and functional workplace. If, as a manager, you’re constantly requiring people to work overtime or out of the scope of their job description, it’s a sure sign that your company is not well structured.

Persons: ” Gabrielle Judge, ”, Williams, Lora Kelley, you’re Organizations: ” Harvard Locations: Britain

☆ Opinion | The Absurd Republican Argument for Rolling Back Child Labor Laws
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-09 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Vrbin’s report notes that Kellams isn’t against teenagers working, and that as a teenager she herself worked at a local chicken plant that has a history of violating child labor laws. Some of these laws, like Iowa’s, which allows 14- and 15-year-olds to work up to six hours a day during the school year, conflict with federal labor law. According to Nina Mast, a state economic analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, the ultimate goal of the proponents of these state laws is to weaken federal child labor law. Though there were attempts to weaken child labor law after that, he says, they weren’t really mainstream for decades. In his book, Fliter notes that as a presidential candidate in 2012, the former House speaker Newt Gingrich “proposed a plan to allow poor children to work as janitors in schools” and called child labor laws “truly stupid.” Since then, political attacks on child labor laws have increased.

Persons: ”, Tess Vrbin, Laura Kellams, ” Kellams, Nina Mast, John Fliter, Fliter, Mike Lee of, Newt Gingrich “ Organizations: Northwest, Arkansas, Children, Economic Policy Institute, Kansas State University, “ Child Labor, Fair Labor, Senate Locations: Arkansas, The Arkansas, Northwest Arkansas, ” Arkansas, Iowa , New Hampshire, New Jersey, America, Mike Lee of Utah, ”

☆ Opinion | ‘Huberman Husbands,’ ‘Bro Diets’ and the ‘Masculine’ Branding of Fitness Culture
▼ + stars: | 2023-08-02 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

It started with a suspicious green sludge at the bottom of our drinking glasses. I kept finding evidence of this murky, grassy sediment when I was unloading the dishwasher, and I asked my husband if he knew where it came from. He said something like, “Oh, that’s Athletic Greens” — a supplement powder that includes dehydrated fruits, vegetables and grains that you mix with water. And I would also hear him mention “zone 2” exercising — which, as a runner, I honestly wanted to know more about. (You can peruse mixed reviews on greens powders’ benefits here and here.)

Persons: Andrew Huberman, Canon, Joseph Bernstein, Huberman, Goop, ”, he’s Organizations: that’s Athletic Greens, Stanford, Athletic Greens

☆ Opinion | The Church of Group Fitness
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-26 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Some talked about clubs that formed organically in their neighborhoods or towns, like that Colorado hiking group. But they found community — and more — in CrossFit, a group class that involves a variety of high-intensity exercises and weight lifting. CrossFit also has parallels with some religious organizations in terms of the potential to alienate people who disagree with conservative-aligned beliefs. Petrzela described an unsavory side of group fitness involving entitled star instructors and the businesses that profit from them. Still, there are many positives to glean from group fitness.

Persons: Jeffrey Johnson, Louis, ” Johnson, ” Casper ter Kuile, ”, Johnson, CrossFitters, There’s, CrossFit, Greg Glassman, George Floyd, Covid, Natalia Mehlman Petrzela, Petrzela, Ter Kuile, Angie Thurston Organizations: Harvard Divinity School Locations: Colorado, Illinois, St, Haiti, CrossFit

☆ Opinion | This Summer Has Been a Travel Nightmare. Technology Isn’t Helping.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-19 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Summer is generally the busiest travel season of the year, and the Northeast, where I live, has been hit with consecutive weekends of severe thunderstorms, leading to thousands of flight cancellations. Dealing with the fallout of the cancellations is an additional fiasco on top of the already chaotic summer airport scene. At the risk of sounding like a hack comic — What is the deal with airlines? I tried to change that flight on my phone using the airline’s app, so I could get home sooner, but it and the airline’s website kept crashing. I went to the airport, but the gate agents told me they couldn’t reach the airline’s booking system, either on their computers or on the phone.

Locations: Savannah , Ga, New York, New York City, Atlanta

☆ Opinion | ‘And Just Like That,’ Everyone Is Part of the 1 Percent
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-15 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) was often cash poor because she spent her writer’s income on things like expensive shoes. At one point, she got into money trouble after a breakup and had to rely on her friend Charlotte (Kristin Davis) to bail her out. Let’s be clear: These women were always quite privileged — perpetually sipping pricey cosmopolitans in the greatest city in the world. But in the original series, they had to work for a living, and sometimes they had to worry about money. We see Miranda logging long hours in the office, Samantha courting prospective clients and Charlotte showing the latest art to potential buyers.

Persons: ” Miranda isn’t, Samantha, Kim Cattrall, Carrie, Sarah Jessica Parker, Charlotte, Kristin Davis, Miranda, We’re, Big, Chris Noth, ” Carrie, podcaster, can’t, — Organizations: City Locations: Charlotte

☆ Opinion | Colleges Can Do a Lot for Social Mobility Right Now
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-12 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

As Katharine Meyer, a fellow in the Brown Center on Education Policy at the Brookings Institution, has written: “Overall enrollment is down, especially at community colleges. There are more ‘stopped out’ students — students who left college with some credits but no degree. Restore Funding That Was Cut After the Great RecessionIt sounds obvious, but if we want a more effective system of higher education, that requires money. According to analysis from the National Education Association, “In 2020, it looked like things were slowly improving, but then the pandemic hit. found that “32 states spent less on public colleges and universities in 2020 than in 2008, with an average decline of nearly $1,500 per student.”

Persons: Josh Wyner, Katharine Meyer, ” Organizations: Aspen Institute’s, Community, Brown Center, Education, Brookings Institution, Budget, National Education Association, “ Locations: United States

☆ Opinion | Why We Shouldn’t Lose Faith in Organized Religion
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-09 | by ( Tish Harrison Warren | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

Stephen Prothero wrote the book “Religious Literacy,” about the absence of religious literacy in American civic life. I wonder how many people who are reading that have alarm bells going off about the state of American civil society. American religion has long been entrepreneurial, and American religion will likely adapt in ways that increase religious participation in the medium to long run. But I fear that American society and social services will suffer in the short run. This is my understanding of religion, of pluralism, of social change: If you tell an inspiring story, people will want to move in that direction.

Persons: Stephen Prothero, Jessica Grose’s, ”, — Organizations: Catholic Locations: America

☆ Opinion | Pro-Vaccine Views Are Winning. Don’t Fear the Skeptics.
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-05 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

With Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, vaccine skepticism has been back in the headlines. (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine outweigh the risk — the same percentage that Pew found in 2016 and 2019. When you look at rates of vaccination among young children for potentially dangerous infectious diseases, the data is encouraging. According to a study published in January in the C.D.C.’s Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report:Vaccination coverage among young children has remained high and stable for most vaccines, although disparities persist. Per the C.D.C., for children born in 2018 and 2019, coverage was over 90 percent for the polio, M.M.R., hepatitis B and varicella (chickenpox) vaccines.

Persons: Robert F, Kennedy Jr, ’, Kennedy, Dennis Kucinich, Kennedy “, ” Kennedy, He’s, I’d, Pew, Per, there’s, ” Organizations: Democratic, Pew Research, Centers for Disease Control

☆ Opinion | Why Platonic Friendships Are So Hard to Keep
▼ + stars: | 2023-07-01 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

It wasn’t until watching the show that I realized that all the close male friendships I had in my 20s have sort of fallen away. My husband has similar relationships to his opposite-sex friends. Part of this perception is because opposite-sex friendships are so new, historically speaking. As William Deresiewicz wrote in an essay for Times Opinion in 2012, “Friendship between the sexes was more or less unknown in traditional society. But part of the perception that there might be something untoward going to between heterosexual, opposite-sex friends is grounded in psychological reality.

Persons: I’m, hetero, There’s, William Deresiewicz, Deresiewicz, Aleksandra Szymkow, ” Organizations: Center for Research, SWPS University Locations: Warsaw

☆ Opinion | Religion Creates Community. We’re Losing That.
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-28 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

If you get off that track (or never started on it), the U.S. is a more difficult place in which to thrive. What’s more, they write:Modern American churches are financially incentivized to target the wealthy and create a space where those on track feel comfortable. Not because I think people need to be religious to live good lives — I don’t believe that — but because almost everyone needs community to flourish. As the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam, whom I spoke to for this series and who wrote “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community,” has been preaching for decades, increasing social isolation is bad for all of us. At the same time, examples of that kind of grace don’t erase the damage that is sometimes done in the name of religion.

Persons: “, Robert Putnam, ”, Carson Curtis, ” Burge, Burge, Frank Capra, I’ve Organizations: Harvard, American Community Locations: America, U.S, Arizona

☆ Opinion | The Largest and Fastest Religious Shift in America Is Well Underway
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-21 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Donnell McLachlan, 29, who lives in Chicago, has been sharing the story of his deconstruction on TikTok @donnellwrites, where he has nearly 250,000 followers, since 2021. He was brought up in what he describes as a small Black church on the South Side of Chicago in the Pentecostal and Apostolic traditions. “I started to notice the distance between what we professed and what we actually did,” he told me, especially when it came to women, the L.G.B.T.Q. community and Black Lives Matter. And just like language, there are many interpretations and ways to express it.

Persons: Donnell McLachlan, “, ”, McLachlan, ” McLachlan, ” Jill Fioravanti, Fioravanti “, Hillel Organizations: Southern Baptist Convention, Conservative Jewish Locations: —, Chicago, Maryland

☆ Opinion | Soon We Won’t Have Enough Kids to Fill Our Schools. That’s a Problem.
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-14 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

The number of school-age children in America is declining. And declining university enrollment based on a lower school-age population — which has been described as a “demographic cliff” — is something that some colleges are already grappling with. K-12 public school systems around the country are facing a similar demographic reality. As The Times’s Shawn Hubler reported in May, “All together America’s public schools have lost at least 1.2 million students since 2020,” according to a survey from the right-leaning American Enterprise Institute. Even in states like Arizona, where there’s been overall population growth in recent years, enrollment has remained below prepandemic numbers, and rural schools in the state have been struggling for several years.

Persons: Shawn Hubler, “, Thomas Dee, ”, there’s Organizations: American Enterprise Institute, Stanford’s Graduate School of Education Locations: America, Chicago, Michigan, Philadelphia , New York City, Seattle, Boston, United States, Florida’s Orange County, Orlando, Pinellas County, Tampa, Arizona

☆ Opinion | It’s Not Just Men and Boys Who Are Struggling Right Now
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-10 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

When I spoke to Potts earlier this week, she said part of her motivation for writing the book was that the conversation about who is struggling in America had been very focused on men. For all the advances we’ve made for girls and women, Potts said, “There are a lot of communities around the country where women are still really expected to take a back seat for men,” and they’re expected to rely on men. There’s also a permissive attitude toward boys that girls don’t benefit from. And after years of struggling, Darci is now sober and doing well, she says. The takeaway is that problems for girls and women in some parts of America are as sticky and complicated as the problems for boys and men: They’re cultural, they’re economic, and they’re entrenched.

Persons: Potts, Darci, we’ve, There’s, ” Potts, Clinton “, they’d, hadn’t, ” Organizations: Bryn, “ Locations: Bryn Mawr, America, Missouri, Chicago, Arkansas, Clinton

☆ Opinion | Why These Six Americans Moved Away from Organized Religion
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-07 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

“Nones” — the term of art for those who say they have no particular religious affiliation — is an unsatisfying label. I’m not the first to notice that it sounds like “nuns” when said aloud, and that, as a result, it can confuse people who aren’t steeped in sociological jargon. But more crucially, “nones” obscures the diversity of backgrounds and beliefs among the millions of Americans who fall into this very broad category. Previously, nones had been defined by what they aren’t — adherents to a religious tradition — rather than who they are or what they believe. “They haven’t really thought about truth, meaning, etc.,” he said.

Persons: “, I’m, ”, nones, David Campbell, Geoffrey Layman, John Green, Campbell, religionists, Secularists “ Organizations: Notre Dame

☆ Opinion | ‘Doing the Work’ and the Obsession With Superficial Self-Improvement
▼ + stars: | 2023-06-03 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

And when you notice something like this on social media, it’s a safe bet that there’s an aspect of performance at play: “Do the work” isn’t just about doing the work; it’s about being perceived as a person who does the work. The colleague wondered, “Why didn’t she just say she was sick?” That’s because until very recently, saying “I need a mental health day” wouldn’t have been understood as an acceptable motive for missing a class. But now, focusing on your mental health is more normative. Tannen agreed with Smith that when you’re talking about “doing the work” and tending to your burnout, there’s “a sense that this makes you a good person,” Tannen said. But when we talk about introspection and reflection as work, it cheapens the whole enterprise.

Persons: Mychal Denzel Smith, ” Smith, “, ”, Deborah Tannen, Smith, Wright Mills, Tannen, ” Tannen, it’s Organizations: Georgetown University, Wright

☆ Opinion | The Duggar Family and Reality TV’s Exploitation of Kids
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-31 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

While it’s legal to put kids in reality shows, in many cases, it’s hard to see how it’s ethical. In the documentary, Jill says the Duggar children were never adequately compensated for the loss of their privacy. “That’s how this whole system is set up, for the men to have just total, ultimate authority over their family,” she said. “Yes,” Jill says in the film, “we were taken advantage of.”Jim Bob ultimately offered Jill and Derick a lump sum, they say, but there were strings attached. “You had to sign another deal with my dad — his production company,” Jill said, for a term that “would be like forever.

Persons: Josh, Jill Duggar Dillard, Jim Bob, Michelle, Jill, Derick Dillard, Julia Willoughby Nason, I.B.L.P.ers, “, ”, ” Jill, ” Jim Bob

☆ Opinion | Cable News Viewers Aren’t as Extreme as You Might Think
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-17 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +3 min

Over email, I asked Kalla whether we know if watching partisan media leads people to vote in a particular direction. It turns out that watching partisan media doesn’t necessarily lead to voting at all. He replied that “‘partisan media only’ viewers are a bit more likely to have voted in the 2018 general election than the ‘entire sample’ but not a massive difference. It bothers me because it feels we’re stuck in a doom loop of Trump coverage that we haven’t figured a way out of since 2015. As they wrote in a Times Opinion essay from 2020, “Most Americans — upwards of 80 percent to 85 percent — follow politics casually or not at all.

☆ Opinion | Dooce and Other ‘Mommy Blogs’ Deserve Credit for Shaping the Internet
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-13 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

In the past few months, several internet giants have fallen. BuzzFeed News folded. Vice is headed for bankruptcy. And with the recent publication of Ben Smith’s “Traffic: Genius, Rivalry, and Delusion in the Billion-Dollar Race to Go Viral,” there’s been a resurgence of chatter about Gawker Media, which went kaput in 2016. (I worked at Jezebel, which was under the Gawker Media umbrella, from 2007 to 2008.)

☆ Opinion | ‘Christianity’s Got a Branding Problem’
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-10 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

“Virtually every major theme in the sixties’ controversies would divide Americans for the rest of the century, setting the fuse for the so-called culture wars,” they note. The “aftershock” was the backlash in the 1970s and ’80s against what were thought of as countercultural values. As these subjects were surveyed into the earlier 2000s, the pew gap only widened. The connection between political conservatism and religiosity has kept many Republicans in the pews, while it’s pushed scores of Democrats away from religion entirely. While moderate and liberal boomers did move away from religion as they got older, the percentage of American nones really began to increase in the late 1990s.

☆ Opinion | John Mulaney and the Insatiable Modern Audience
▼ + stars: | 2023-05-03 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

Judging by the reaction online, not to mention the texts on my phone, people had feelings about this — lots of them. Mulaney made the word “parasocial” go mainstream. But I do think many people’s expectations of celebrities have become unreasonable in the social media age. It used to be much easier for famous figures to maintain a firewall between their public personas and their private lives. Smith turns this idea over and over throughout the book — more than 100 pages later, she writes: “Maybe this isn’t a tell-mine.

☆ Opinion | Dads Still Get Extra Leisure Time. Moms Are Still Subsidizing It.
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-26 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +4 min

The only marriage type where husbands devote more time to caregiving than their wives is one in which the wife is the sole breadwinner. In those marriages, wives and husbands spend roughly the same amount of time per week on household chores. (A subsequent reform in 2002 that allowed an additional nontransferable month was not found to lead to more separations.) The cultural hurdles women face at home overlap with hurdles women face in the workplace. First, she told me that she’s done the math based on time-use data and found that women are, in effect, doing about an extra month of unpaid labor a year, while men get an extra month of leisure.

☆ Opinion | Why Those Super Low College Admissions Rates Can Be Misleading
▼ + stars: | 2023-04-22 | by ( Jessica Grose | ) www.nytimes.com time to read: +2 min

Livingston cited the common app as a reason for the influx of applications, but she also noted that the loosening of standardized testing requirements played a potential role as well. In “Who Gets In and Why,” Selingo explains how colleges that are just outside the small group of tippy top schools have manipulated their yield rates. After realizing that strong students were applying to more schools, some colleges started pressuring students to make binding early decision choices. Reading Selingo’s book made me realize the extent to which colleges can game their applicants. It also made me realize how deliberately opaque their decision making is.

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