Can anyone point me to any data which would belie these predictions? Article from which the graph is sourced is here.

I've become convinced that people in our age bracket are going to have to work very, very, hard to pay for their parents. Not only by doing the right and familial thing of caring for them when they become old and gray, but also by paying for the government debt incurred when they made up the bulk of the voting population.

A prediction to debate: we'll see tax increases in the next five years.

More on technology, this time with favour

"It's my memory. I call it my other brain," said Ms. Walmsley. "It's not a cool gadget. It's my lifeline."

So says a diagnosed amnesia sufferer, referencing her smartphone.

While many of us here at the Lair don't suffer from amnesia (well, let's just say we've not been diagnosed), I think we can identify with that. In fact, I remember a contributor of many a fine morsel at the Lair stating boldly in reference to one such device/program: "It basically runs my life."

I have to say that, as a late adopter, and as one who suffers from amnesia of a certain variety (My beloved prefers to call it squirrel syndrome), such little devices have dramatically improved my life. I'm serious. If I had a blackberry with outlook earlier in my life, I would have avoided much heartache. I'm assuming a hearty "hear hear" from the readers here familiar with my past ways.

Does anyone at the Lair have any examples of technology that has significantly improved their lives?

I love to tell the story

"Mistake me not," said the Cardinal, "the literature of which we are speaking—the literature of individuals, if we may call it so—is a noble art, a great, earnest and ambitious human product. But it is a human product. The divine art is the story. In the beginning was the story. At the end we shall be privileged to view, and review, it—and that is what is named the day of judgment.
"But you will remember," he remarked, as in a parenthesis and with a smile, "that the human characters in the book do come forth on the sixth day only—by that time they were bound to come, for where the story is, the characters will gather!"

h/t Culture Making

I think that there's something slightly amiss here: for some reason, I think it will be our stories that are viewed and reviewed alongside the divine story and not us who view and review the divine story, but nonetheless, I really, really appreciate this bit, and I think I'm going to try to pick up the book from the library.

Isak Dinesen, by the by, is really Karen Blixen (what a name!), of Babette's Feast and Out of Africa fame.

I'd like to ask those in the lair what they make of this, particularly with regard to how it relates to their relationships and the way in which they communicate with friends; those who recognize the divine art, and those who perhaps can't, don't, or won't see it.

For the tech addicts among us.

“Did you know that now, thanks to iPhone, you can use location services to tell your friends where are you are at any given moment, and if they’re on iPhone and have that same app they can find you, and then you can then ask iPhone to tell you if there are any Tex-Mex restaurants within a five-block radius, and what movies are playing at the nearest cinema? Then you can use Twitter (or, rather, one of the 14,000 Twitter apps) to tell your followers what you’re up to, and automatically feed that into your Facebook page so that your Facebook friends can comment on your movie plans, and advertisers can scour your personal messages and use keyword searches to send target messages to each of you, and deep thinkers like Robert Scoble and Chris Anderson will reassure you that you are not just getting sucked into the maw of the brain-killing machine, and this is not just mindless time-wasting twattle but is in fact extremely profound and revolutionary and important and intellectually challenging. Because in the old days you just read books and that was so passive, but now you’re so engaged and interactive, you’re not just a media consumer but you’re also a media creator — why, in fact, you’re a public intellectual — and if you don’t fully immerse yourself in every last bit of this shit then you will no longer be participating in your culture which means you will lose your job and everyone will laugh at you because you just don’t get it and you might as well be some 90-year-old dude sitting in a pee-stained bathrobe drooling.”

Thanks to Alan Jacobs for this.

Steiner on the Bible as Inspired Literature

I've been wrestling with the question regarding to what extent we ought to read the Bible "as any other book." I just got access to George Steiner's review of Alter and Kermode's Literary Guide to the Bible. His basic critique is that the recent trend evident in The Guide reduces the Bible to mere literature without accounting for its otherness. I love this quote in reference to the book of Job:

"I can--just--come to imagine for myself that a man of more or less my own biological and social composition could have written "Hamlet" or "Lear" and gone home to lunch and found a normal answer to the question "How did it go today?" I cannot conceive of the author of the Speech Out of the Whirlwind in Job writing or dictating that text and dwelling within common existence and parlance." (Steiner, "The Good Books," The New Yorker [Jan 11, 1988], 97)

Islamic Superheroes

The BBC runs a spot on Islamic Superheroes today, created by the Kuwaiti psychologist Dr Naif al Mutawa. He writes an open letter to his sons explaining why he created these characters. A quote:

So, at the age of 32, I uncapped my pen to create a concept that could be popular in the East and the West. I would go back to the very sources from which others took violent and hateful messages and offer messages of tolerance and peace in their place. I would give my heroes a Trojan horse in the form of THE 99. Islam was my Helen. I wanted her back.

Two Questions

In conversation with folks last night at Theology on Tap we were reminiscing about "big questions" in how and why we live our lives the way we do. There are always a host of big questions about how to live as Christians with integrity in North America, but we boiled it down to two basic ones that - to me - grabs the great idols of our time (and I think especially of our generation):

1. Do you pray?
2. Do you give?

Consistent prayer - not evangelical guilt-manipulated "I wish I prayed more"; but real, robust, ritual prayer is a statement about time, as much as where we put our money is a statement about value. The only two things we probably ever really control in this life are our time and our money. Surely what we do with them is the most profound incarnation of our beliefs, and the gods - or God - that animates our lives.

There is no shortage of excellent Christian living amongst 20'somethings, but how much of that excellence is the product of socializiation and not out of a deep relationship with God?

Finally, my friend Geoff Ryan challenges #2 saying it is not merely "do you give," but "how do you give?" The North American church has outsourced mercy, and a committed 10%+ tithe that operates from the suburban margins and never threatens to encounter the other is not sufficient.