It’s been a crazy busy July and beginning of August for the Williams fam, so we’re long overdue for a Blessing of Unicorns roundup! Here we go: kids playing in the streets, the cost of outsourcing hard things, Elisabeth Elliot and the writing of biography, technological anxiety, conservatives in academia, cheese sponsorships, a new book deal for a beloved Current writer, and a really good book I just started.
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Summer is a season when certain things emerge more clearly—like the need for better infrastructure for children to be, well, children. Tim Carney noted in his Family Unfriendly that for the past half-century or more, America has been building cities and neighborhood around cars, not around people (and certainly not with kids in mind). And so, I loved Stephanie Murray’s most recent Atlantic piece on this: “What Adults Lost When Kids Stopped Playing in the Street.” A taste from the introduction, before you go read in full:
In the summer of 2009, Amy Rose and Alice Ferguson, two mothers living on Greville Road in Bristol, a midsize city in southwest England, found themselves in a strange predicament: They saw entirely too much of their kids. “We were going, like, Why are they here?” Rose told me. “Why aren’t they outside?” The friends decided to run an experiment. They applied to shut their quarter-mile road to traffic for two hours after school on a June afternoon—not for a party or an event but just to let the children who lived there play. Intentionally, they didn’t prepare games or activities, Rose told me, as it would have defeated the purpose of the inquiry: “With time, space, and permission, what happens?”
The results were breathtaking. The dozens of kids who showed up had no problem finding things to do. One little girl cycled up and down the street “3,000 times,” Rose recalled. “She was totally blissed out.” Suddenly, the modern approach to children’s play, in which parents shuttle their kids to playgrounds or other structured activities, seemed both needlessly extravagant and wholly insufficient. Kids didn’t need special equipment or lessons; they just needed to be less reliant on their time-strapped parents to get outside.
The experiment also produced some unexpected results. As children poured into the street, some ran into classmates, only just then realizing that they were neighbors. Soon it became clear to everyone present that far more children were living on Greville Road than anyone had known. That session, and the many more it prompted, also became the means by which adult residents got to know one another, which led to another revelation for Ferguson and Rose: In numerous ways, a world built for cars has made life so much harder for adults.
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Ivana Greco’s essay in Public Discourse: “When We Outsource Every Hard Thing, What Do We Lose?” is a must-read. A taste:
Busy parents with full-time jobs are often told to outsource housework in order to save time. For many working parents, this is completely reasonable advice. Hiring a cleaning lady is standard, as is using grocery delivery services and paying someone to mow the lawn. Daycares or nannies are also a common childcare choice for full-time working parents. Most families also outsource at least some amount of their meal preparation: frozen dinners from the grocery store, meal preparation kits, or takeout from a local restaurant.
What do we lose when we outsource domestic tasks that seem unpleasant or routine in the name of efficiency? One important downside may be the loss of warm connections with family members. Consider changing a baby’s diaper. This would not top most parents’ list of favorite activities. Child development expert Magda Gerber wrote the beautiful book Dear Parent: Caring for Infants with Respect, which argues that this task can provide an important avenue of connection between parent and child. Gerber writes that in the first few years of life, a baby may experience six thousand diaper changes. “We are all affected,” she explains, “negatively or positively by the cumulative experiences in our lives.” Along with feeding, Gerber points out, diaper changes are some of the most frequent care tasks that a parent and infant participate in together. Treating a baby with kindness and respect during diaper changes matters for how the baby perceives herself and the link between parent and child. We don’t yet have “diaper changing robots,” but if we did, Gerber’s philosophy would encourage us to reflect on the fact that outsourcing diaper changes means outsourcing an important way a young baby bonds with her caregiver during a crucial phase of human development.
In the same way, we might consider whether the tasks of caring for a home could be a means of connecting with the people who live in it.
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Lucy S. R. Austen on The Two Cities podcast, talking about Elisabeth Elliot and writing biography.
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Philip Bunn reviewed Jon Haidt’s The Anxious Generation in Comment (check out also Jon Schaff’s review of it for Front Porch Republic earlier this year). Overall, the concerns about technology that the book (and these excellent reviews of it) bring up are especially significant, as kids of all ages get ready to head back to school—in the age of ChatGPT, no less (and we have a forum on this coming next month!).
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Mark Moyar is in The Chronicle of Higher Education this week, weighing in on the disappearance of conservatives in mainstream academia—nowadays, places like Harvard, that a generation ago had prominent conservatives on the faculty, don’t hire them anymore. (And I personally am convinced that once Robert George retires at Princeton, he will not be replaced by a conservative. I guess this one is kind of a duh)
This is a loss, Moyar notes, because the diversity of political views is valuable for all students to encounter.
I will add this from my admittedly limited experience. Before walking away from academia, I did peruse ads for a couple of years, and the statements required just to apply for a number of jobs ruled those out for me outright (e.g., multiple institutions required, as part of application materials, a statement about how the candidate will promote the rights of LGBTQ+ members of the campus community).
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A fun Olympics-related story: “Olympic silver medalist and Italian gymnast Giorgia Villa is sponsored by parmesan cheese and takes many of her photos while posing with large wheels of cheese.”
Ultra-marathoner Sabrina Little responded enthusiastically to this news on Twitter: “Mozzarella, if you need any ultramarathon philosophers, call me.”
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Amanda McCrina (whose Current essays you can check out here) is a novelist, who writes beautiful and exquisitely researched YA historical fiction set in WWI and WWII Poland and Ukraine. She just signed a deal for her new book this week: Snowbound is coming in 2026!
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Last but not least, going to mention a really good book I just started:
Benjamin Nathans, To The Success of Our Hopeless Cause: The Many Lives of the Soviet Dissident Movement.
Dan has pointed out that so much of my “fun” reading is heavily autobiographical these days. Growing up in the twilight of the Soviet Union has left me with a lot of questions about my family, roots, and possibilities. But some of the questions this book considers are ones we wrestle with right now as well: how do we live lives that are intellectually honest? What is the cost of intellectual honesty that challenges expectations that others have of us?