Susie got swept out but she's waiting for every provisional ballot to be cured before she's willing to concede. Will she vote to approve H.R. 9495 during her lame duck? Well she wouldn't want an organization run by the sort of person to chop up a maple leaf and claim it came from another planet to be eligible for tax-exempt status, would she? It's the government's job to disarm our spiky-headed oppressors, and after all it's only following the rules.
Hahaha. Yeah, I fear Susie's political career may have hit a speed bump this cycle, since she's in what is probably a highly swingy, purple suburban/exurban district. She'll bounce back. She's not a quitter.
Great essay that helped clarify for me my own background. I’m about a dozen years older than you but this tracks. I guess my family was more in the orbit of the local Provincial Intelligentsia (parents came to UW from far away, met and stayed). They never became professors but my mom owned a bookstore that attracted not just that crowd but the kind of dropouts and slackers you used to be able to find in university towns like Laramie. My dad rose through the ranks of the UWPD but his passion was and is more along the lines of wildlife biology and similar sciency areas of studies. His friend group was and continues to be the more hippieish end of the outdoorsy spectrum.
So yea, that was the social milieu I grew up in and I expected a somewhat similar life. But instead I was always kind of a Failure to Launch kid and moved to Maine for failson reasons in 2005. I was eventually able to land a job with the state after my own Passion Field (journalism) didn’t pan out. Then Maine’s great cultural center of Portland became to expensive and I bought a house in our boring state capital and I’ve been recalibrating and trying to figure out what the new terms of the bargain are ever since.
The saga of repeatedly moving in search of affordability is one that should probably get more discussion than it does. I wonder how that will continue to reshape the social, cultural, political, etc. landscape of the US. I've actually never been to Maine. Need to get up there one of these days to sate my Stephen King nerdiness.
I actually went to three small schools in southern Manitoba and we had lockers from grade 1 to 12 in each of them. I think it was more common in older schools to trust kids with a proper locker or the number of people going to them decreased from when they were built so they just started assigning younger and younger kids lockers.
There is also...well, supply and demand. There is more demand for the creative professions you list than ever before. More people go to college. I doubt that people are spending less in cultural goods than they used to.
However, the supply of candidates has understandably exploded. Being a tenured professor, writing for a living etc are extremely desirable professions in many ways, and the barriers to giving it a try have collapsed.
(It's funny how difficult it is to find information on the actual number of tenured professors in the US over time, as opposed to the % of professors who have tenure, which tells the story academics prefer. But full-time faculty, for instance, has grown much faster than the general population since 2000.)
Yeah I'd be interested in a more rigorous analysis of the dynamics here. You're right that, for instance, people buy more books than ever before. Tho on the flipside, literary fiction sales are one of the weaker niches within book sales, and that's what matters to my tribe.
If you find some interesting data on all of this, please do share! I'd definitely try to incorporate it into future pieces.
Susie got swept out but she's waiting for every provisional ballot to be cured before she's willing to concede. Will she vote to approve H.R. 9495 during her lame duck? Well she wouldn't want an organization run by the sort of person to chop up a maple leaf and claim it came from another planet to be eligible for tax-exempt status, would she? It's the government's job to disarm our spiky-headed oppressors, and after all it's only following the rules.
Hahaha. Yeah, I fear Susie's political career may have hit a speed bump this cycle, since she's in what is probably a highly swingy, purple suburban/exurban district. She'll bounce back. She's not a quitter.
Oh, sure, we haven't seen the last of Susie.
Great essay that helped clarify for me my own background. I’m about a dozen years older than you but this tracks. I guess my family was more in the orbit of the local Provincial Intelligentsia (parents came to UW from far away, met and stayed). They never became professors but my mom owned a bookstore that attracted not just that crowd but the kind of dropouts and slackers you used to be able to find in university towns like Laramie. My dad rose through the ranks of the UWPD but his passion was and is more along the lines of wildlife biology and similar sciency areas of studies. His friend group was and continues to be the more hippieish end of the outdoorsy spectrum.
So yea, that was the social milieu I grew up in and I expected a somewhat similar life. But instead I was always kind of a Failure to Launch kid and moved to Maine for failson reasons in 2005. I was eventually able to land a job with the state after my own Passion Field (journalism) didn’t pan out. Then Maine’s great cultural center of Portland became to expensive and I bought a house in our boring state capital and I’ve been recalibrating and trying to figure out what the new terms of the bargain are ever since.
That's very cool that you're also from Laradise!
The saga of repeatedly moving in search of affordability is one that should probably get more discussion than it does. I wonder how that will continue to reshape the social, cultural, political, etc. landscape of the US. I've actually never been to Maine. Need to get up there one of these days to sate my Stephen King nerdiness.
It’s very much Stephen King territory especially once you get out of Portland
I actually went to three small schools in southern Manitoba and we had lockers from grade 1 to 12 in each of them. I think it was more common in older schools to trust kids with a proper locker or the number of people going to them decreased from when they were built so they just started assigning younger and younger kids lockers.
You learn something new every day! I remember finding lockers terrifying when I first encountered them in seventh grade
There is also...well, supply and demand. There is more demand for the creative professions you list than ever before. More people go to college. I doubt that people are spending less in cultural goods than they used to.
However, the supply of candidates has understandably exploded. Being a tenured professor, writing for a living etc are extremely desirable professions in many ways, and the barriers to giving it a try have collapsed.
(It's funny how difficult it is to find information on the actual number of tenured professors in the US over time, as opposed to the % of professors who have tenure, which tells the story academics prefer. But full-time faculty, for instance, has grown much faster than the general population since 2000.)
Yeah I'd be interested in a more rigorous analysis of the dynamics here. You're right that, for instance, people buy more books than ever before. Tho on the flipside, literary fiction sales are one of the weaker niches within book sales, and that's what matters to my tribe.
If you find some interesting data on all of this, please do share! I'd definitely try to incorporate it into future pieces.