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There’s a totally amazing piece in today’s New York Times about Urban Baby, a web site where mothers post about their lives. As you might expect, there’s plenty of questions and advice about teething, naps, and feeding. But the site is also a hotbed of simmering class war. Why? Because child-rearing is the one sure place where the myth of the classless society falls apart — and supposedly liberal parents bicker over the virtues of suburban life, snipe about the value of a $700 Bugaboo stroller, and fight like rabid dingos to get their kids into elite preschools.
It is a curious feature of UB that in an atmosphere with a constant undercurrent of class antagonism, participants feel regularly compelled to divulge their assets and earnings. One afternoon last week a woman sent a query about whether she was doing decently on a salary of $100,000 a year, with two children and a one-bedroom apartment. Last month, another wrote in to say that her family’s income of $350,000 a year made it the poorest in her private preschool. The month of December provided frenzied speculation about Wall Street bonuses among many women who work in finance and wives of investment bankers who asked what they could all expect.
“It’s really funny, because it allows me to really see into the economy and where the bonuses are going,” said Raquel Palmer, a principle in private equity at KPS Special Situations Funds in New York. A mother of two, she was drawn into UB after a single visit when she read a posting about a woman trying to seduce her doorman. “A lot of the people on the site will consider themselves middle class, and they’re getting $200,000 bonuses,” she said.
I'm Clive Thompson, a writer on science, technology, and culture. This blog collects bits of offbeat research I'm running into, and musings thereon.
Currently, I'm a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine and a columnist for Wired magazine. I also write for Fast Company and Wired magazine's web site, among other places. Email or AOL IM me (pomeranian99) to say hi or send in something strange!
New technique renders objects at sea “invisible” to waves of water
Poll: Young people who use landlines are more conservative than those who use mobile phones
At Amherst college, 1% of first-year students have landlines, 99% have Facebook accounts
North Dakota the most outgoing state, according to study of “the geography of personality”
» visit the Collision Detection archives
September 26, 2008 » 01:57 PM
From an interview with ethnobotanist and anthropologist Wade Davis:
One of the cultures you celebrate in Light at the Edge of the World is the Inuit. What do you most admire about them?
Davis: The Inuit didn’t fear the cold; they took advantage of it. During the 1950s the Canadian government forced the Inuit into settlements. A family from Arctic Bay told me this fantastic story of their grandfather who refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his tools and all of his implements, thinking that would force him into the settlement. But instead, he just slipped out of an igloo on a cold Arctic night, pulled down his caribou and sealskin trousers, and defecated into his hand. As the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of an implement. And when the blade started to take shape, he put a spray of saliva along the leading edge to sharpen it. That’s when what they call the “shit knife” took form. He used it to butcher a dog. Skinned the dog with it. Improvised a sled with the dog’s rib cage, and then, using the skin, he harnessed up an adjacent living dog. He put the shit knife in his belt and disappeared into the night.
September 25, 2008 » 11:21 AM
“Video from a camp north of Toronto in December 2005 shows a car spinning around in a nearby, snow-covered parking lot. Prosecutors characterized that as special driver training but the defense, and many outsiders, said it was nothing more than “cutting doughnuts,” a favorite winter pastime of young Canadian motorists.” - A key piece of evidence submitted in the trial of a gang of alleged young Canadian terrorists.
September 24, 2008 » 11:21 PM
“Life imitates art imitating life: just thought a gnat crawling across my monitor was part of a Flash-based ad. I clicked it.” - A Tweet from Bill Braine.
September 24, 2008 » 02:37 PM
“Funniest FB friend request ever: “Twitter friend hoping to get to second base (Facebook!) ;-).”” - A recent Tweet by Pistachio
September 24, 2008 » 12:28 PM
Chinese powdered-milk crisis creates a new market: The return of the wet nurse
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