Thesis: in the English-speaking world, the last 50 years has seen a dramatic increase in the quantity *and quality* of text and visual mass media intended for children.
Let’s define some terms. I’m talking about books, cartoons, TV, and movies. Music is not included; comics and graphic novels are a special case. When I say “intended for children”, I am talking about mass media that is targeting children aged 4-12 as the primary audience. So, yes Disney movies are included here, no the original Star Wars movies are not. Kids absolutely watched Star Wars — I watched it as a kid — but they weren’t the primary audience.
Stuff aimed at the youngest children is excluded here, as is Young Adult stuff. (I agree that the boundaries of the latter category are very slippery.)
Detail to the thesis: this transformation was not smooth. To simplify, from the early 1970s to the late 1980s, text and visual mass media products for children were generally mediocre to bad. There were individual works that were good or excellent, but the average was dismally low. And the quality was not much better at the end of this period than at the beginning.
But starting in the back half of the 1980s, kids movies, TV, books and cartoons suddenly started getting /better/. And they got steadily better and better for the next 15 or 20 years, until by the middle 2000s they had reached a new plateau of excellence, from which they are perhaps only now just starting to descend. The period 1970-1985 was a dark age of kid stuff; the period 2000-2020 was a golden age. There was a massive cultural transformation here. And it happened fairly quickly, and it’s been discussed much less than you might expect.
[click to continue…]
From the monthly archives:
April 2024
Over the last year, three of the four most powerful navies[1] in the world have suffered humiliating defeats at the hands of opponents with no navy at all.
First, there’s Russia’s Black Sea Fleet. Until the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, it was regularly touted as a decisive factor in any conflict, capable not only of blockading Ukraine but of supporting seaborne assaults on ports like Odesa. The desire to secure unchallenged control of Sevastopol in Crimea was widely seen as one of the crucial motives for the Russian takeover in 2014.
Two years after the invasion, most of what’s left of the Black Sea Fleet has fled Sevastopol to take refuge in the Russian port of Novorossiysk, which is, for now, safely out of the reach of Ukrainian drones and anti-ship missiles. (As I was working on this post, Ukraine hit Sevastopol again, damaging three ships and the ship repair plant there) The Black Sea Fleet has played no significant role in the war, except as a supplier of targets and propaganda opportunities for the Ukrainian side. Its attempted blockade of Ukrainian wheat exports has been a failure.
But for the large community of naval fans, the failure of the Black Sea Fleet hasn’t been a crucial problem. The ominous assessments of its capabilities made before the invasion have been retconned with a narrative of Russian incompetence, Soviet-era holdovers and so on.
The effective closure of the Suez Canal by the Houthi movement is a much bigger problem. Well before the war in Gaza, the US and its allies had a large naval force in the Red Sea and Eastern Mediterranean devoted to keeping this allegedly vital sea lane open. That force now includes two USN carrier strike groups, destroyers and frigate from the Royal Navy and other allies, and a long list of other warships.
At least so far, the Houthis don’t have the capacity to strike US warships. But, even with relatively unsophisticated weapons, they’ve already come close enough to require a US destroyer to use its last line of defence.
The main focus of Houthi attacks has been commercial shipping, particularly any that can be linked in some way to the US, UK and Israel. And it’s these attacks that the joint naval effort is supposed to stop.
The effort has been singularly unsuccessful in this regard. Houthi attacks have reduced shipping through the canal by around 70 per cent, even before the recent sinking of a UK-owned bulk carrier and the claimed escalation into the Indian Ocean. As shippers reconfigure their operations volumes are likely to fall even further.
[click to continue…]
Here in the U.S., my home state of Indiana has a new state-mandated DEI initiative: The law specifies that:
“Each board of trustees [of a public college] shall establish a policy that provides that a faculty member may not be granted tenure or a promotion by the institution if, based on past performance or other determination by the board of trustees, the faculty member is:
(1) unlikely to foster a culture of free inquiry, free expression, and intellectual diversity within the institution;
(2) unlikely to expose students to scholarly works from a variety of political or ideological frameworks that may exist within and are applicable to the faculty member’s academic discipline; or
(3) likely, while performing teaching duties within the scope of the faculty member’s employment, to subject students to political or ideological views and opinions that are unrelated to the faculty member’s academic discipline or assigned course of instruction.”[i]