Seen Read Heard: May 2023

Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show 

        Richard Reeves: The Men – and Boys – are not Alright

Two graduate school friends of mine are School Heads at wonderful all-boys schools in the northeast. We Zoom once a quarter to catch up. I make sure to ask them what they are reading, and what they recommend. They both had a quick answer this quarter: Richard Reeves’ Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male is Struggling, Why it Matters, and What to Do about It.  I have not read the book yet. In the meantime, they led me to a podcast interview with Reeves.  His work is straight from the data and is interpreted by him as a very respected and insightful researcher. He makes an important point about boys these days, not saying girls don’t need our loving attention as much as ever, but alerting us to the need to pay attention to the experiences of boys in the 2020s. I'll know more after I get to read the books this summer.

Podcast: The Ezra Klein Show

        Jean Twenge: The Teen Mental Health Crisis, Part I

        Lisa Damour, The Teen Mental Health Crisis, Part II

While I was on the Ezra Klein Show site, I came across two more wonderful interviews with a researcher and a psychologist, each sharing their findings on teen mental health challenges. 

It is not an exaggeration to say that mental health for our kids these days is at a crisis stage for many.  At FWCD, in her new role of Assistant Head of School for Academics and Student Support, Dr. Amy Witten has a major charge to assess our work supporting students, JK through 12, to use that assessment as a step toward creating a strategic plan to maximize our student support efforts over the next five years.

These interviews with well-respected researchers and commentators on the mental health of adolescents definitely add some valuable perspective to the conversation. Podcasts are hard for me to excerpt because I don’t have any underlining to reference. That said, I found both podcasts to be loaded with “hmmm” and “oh my” and even some “wow, never thought of that” moments. I recommend a listen.

City of Thieves by David Benioff

This novel, set in the Nazi siege of Leningrad (September 1941 to January 1944), reminded me of war novels along the lines of Catch-22 (Joseph Heller) and Slaughterhouse-Five (Kurt Vonnegut); more the latter than the former. All three of these books startle you with what seems like wildly imagined scenarios, only to find out much of what happened in the stories had a solid grounding in fact. In City of Thieves, two Russian citizens are jailed but allowed out of prisoner status to figure a way, in the midst of the siege, to get a dozen eggs for a Soviet colonel who needs them for his daughter’s wedding cake. The adventures of those two unlikely partners are compelling, tragic, absurd, and perhaps evocative of what life might really be like in a city under military siege for years on end.  It was hard not to think of Ukraine (Mariupol, Bakhmut) in 2022-23.