We live in an exciting and interesting time — one when some of our most commonly accepted ideas, traditions and principals are being challenged. This past week featured a fascinating read in the Wall Street Journal asking “Are Playgrounds Too Safe?”, making the case that “decades of dumbed-down playgrounds, fueled by fears of litigation, concerns about injury and worrywart helicopter parents, have led to cookie-cutter equipment that offers little thrill.” The result being children less compelled to play outside, potentially stunting emotional and physical development and exacerbating a nationwide epidemic of childhood obesity.

Recently Forbes featured an article smartly challenging things many of us grew up being taught and often adhere to still. But in today’s world, the rules of our parents’ past are ones we have to ask in all earnest and respect — do these rules still apply?

1. The people in charge have all the answers.
That’s why they are so wealthy and happy and healthy and powerful—ask any teacher. 

2. Learning ends when you leave the classroom. 
Your fort building, trail forging, frog catching, friend making, game playing, and drawing won’t earn you any extra credit. Just watch TV. 

3. The best and brightest follow all the rules.
You will be rewarded for your subordination, just not as much as your superiors, who, of course, have their own rules.

As we collectively marvel, mouths agape, at the wonder passing over New York City—the space shuttle, the space shuttle!—we are reminded of how rare these moments of wonder truly are in today’s cynical world of snarky blog posts and curmudgeonly, ennui-filled responses to anything remotely fun or good or precious. How sad we are as a people that, in response to an icon of American engineering and space exploration swooping past overhead, this writer’s response was to call attention to the fact that obviously it’s a much bigger deal that people are wearing shorts in SoHo right now. (It is only 50-some degrees, people!). Meanwhile, better humans than us were sobbing on nearby rooftops over the joys wrought by this magical moment.

But I am a part of the problem, not the solution, and my response was a defense mechanism, a posturing of judgy 21st-century proportions. The first step is admitting it, right? To admit it and then to do a better job at being earnest, honest, authentically joyful, less guarded. Basically, to be less of a snarky pain in the butt. Here are some ways to foster that.

Read more.

It is intriguing that huge numbers of women are eagerly consuming myriad and disparate fantasies of submission at a moment when women are ascendant in the workplace, when they make up almost 60 percent of college students, when they are close to surpassing men as breadwinners, with four in 10 working women now outearning their husbands, when the majority of women under 30 are having and supporting children on their own, a moment when—in hard economic terms—women are less dependent or subjugated than before. 

It is probably no coincidence that, as more books like The Richer Sex by Liza Mundy and Hanna Rosin’s forthcoming The End of Men appear, there is a renewed popular interest in the stylized theater of female powerlessness. This is not to mention a spate of articles on choosing not to be married or the steep rise in young women choosing single motherhood. We may then be especially drawn to this particular romanticized, erotically charged, semipornographic idea of female submission at a moment in history when male dominance is shakier than it has ever been.

Read full Newsweek article.