Another Week Ends: Sinead O’Connor, In Defense of Cry-Babies, the Importance of Play, and the Technology Arms Race

1. Yesterday, the passing of Irish singer Sinead O’Connor hit news-stands all around the world. Much more than a singer, O’Connor was also beloved for her candor, courage, and rich understanding of what it is to be human. Belinda Luscombe, for Time, reflects on how O’Connor’s art permeated the culture around her:

There were so many Sinead O’Connor songs in which she bared her soul, with all its glorious imperfections and inconvenient longings and difficult choices, it could have been almost anything from her songbook. “I’m not a pop star,” she wrote in her memoir, Rememberings in 2021. “I’m just a troubled soul who needs to scream into mikes now and then.”

O’Connor, whose family announced on July 26 that she had died at the age of 56, was for many of the women of my generation so much more than that, including both a balm and a battery. […]

Most people found O’Connor around the time of her 1990 cover “Nothing Compares 2 U,” a song written by Prince, but immortalized by O’Connor’s black and white music video — all bald head, oversized overcoat and wide-eyed ferocity. It became the anthem of every woman who was left by a guy because she was too much of a handful. It was the first inkling many of us had that being a handful might be the only way forward, and, for me particularly, that the guy who introduced me to her music might be O.K. with handfuls.

2. Musicians and artists, through song and various mediums, are able to do what many of us adults refuse to do: express our emotions. But children — as seen in grocery store lines, fast-food restaurants, little league baseball games, and even church services — are not afraid to share their feelings no matter how red in the face their parents find themselves. The self-awareness that young children lack is discovered in excess when they reach middle school, as tweens become awkwardly aware of their own bodies and of the social spheres of pubescent hell. Self-awareness is usually akin to wisdom (or at least self-awareness is supposed to make us wise), but is it inadvertently causing us to take ourselves too seriously? The School of Life touches on this dichotomy, suggesting that maybe our grocery-line-snot-stuffed-crying children don’t have it all wrong:

We [adults] register everything. We notice the withheld smile of a colleague we quietly despise, the silence all morning when we’d hoped for a message, the little cruel joke at our expense a family member made, the invitation we didn’t receive, the friend’s promotion that throws a spotlight on our modest achievements, the lover’s caress that went missing, the half day we wasted trying to get something to work that cleverer people would sort out in an instant. At the time, we laugh it off, we like to move on fast, we don’t even admit the distress to ourselves, but it’s all been noticed and it all festers within us. It settles in a deep reservoir which is slowly filling up and is connected by a complicated hydraulic system that eventually enforces on us a heaviness of spirit, a dry smile, a proclivity to rage and a bitterness and envy. We too quickly forget the exact details of what wounded our spirits and then can’t extract the splinters from our psyches. […]

One of the wisest things about very young children is that they have no shame or compunction about bursting into tears, because — compared with adults — they have a more accurate and less pride-filled sense of their place in the world: they know they are extremely small beings in a hostile and unpredictable realm, that they can’t control much of what is happening around them, that their powers of understanding are limited and that there is a great deal to feel distressed, melancholy and confused about. […]

It’s regrettable that such wisdom gets lost as we age. We start to associate maturity with a suggestion of invulnerability and competence. But this is the height of danger and bravado. Realising we can no longer cope is an integral part of true endurance. We are in our essence and should always strive to remain cry-babies, that is, people who intimately remember their susceptibility to hurt and grief. Moments of losing courage belong to a brave life. If we do not allow ourselves frequent occasions to bend, we will be at great risk of one day fatefully snapping.

The Christian call to live a child-like faith comes to mind after reading The School of Life‘s piece. But perhaps having faith like a child is not only about trusting in and depending upon Jesus. Maybe it is also an invitation to be a cry-baby, to run into the Father’s arms when we get hurt, and to shamelessly cry-out to God in our grief and fear. As Juliette Alvey wrote for Mbird, kids are comfortable being at their worst with those who they know will love them unconditionally (even self-awareness cannot fully keep us from reverting back to our child selves around our parents). And God, full to the brim with agape love, can take our worst — even our tantrum-throwing, snot-stuffed, cry-baby selves.

3. One more article on this topic, this time from Peter Gray on the importance of play on children’s mental health. The essay is a summary on his, David Lancy, and David Bjorklund’s work that was recently published in the Journal of Pediatrics. The rates of anxiety and depression among children and teens have only increased — can the scarcity of free play be a contributor?

With every decade children have become less free to play, roam, and explore alone or with other children away from adults, less free to occupy public spaces without an adult guard, and less free to have a part-time job where they can demonstrate their capacity for responsible self-control. Among the causes of this change are a large increase in societal fears that children are in danger if not constantly guarded, a large increase in the time that children must spend in school and at schoolwork at home, and a large increase in the societal view that children’s time is best spent in adult-directed school-like activities, such as formal sports and lessons, even when not in school. […]

Research, proving what should be obvious, shows that play is a direct source of children’s happiness. When children are asked to depict or describe activities that make them happy, they depict or describe scenes of play. There is also research showing that when children are allowed a little more play — such as when schools offer a little more recess—the kids become happier.

Play, especially when children get older, is viewed as non-essential and superfluous. And when school-age kids do get to play, it is often as a reward in return for their accomplishments or hard-work. An adult’s need for rest can be equated to a child’s need for play. And as usual, our needs are often ignored by our culture’s (and in turn, our own) spiral toward productivity and efficiency. At the end of a long day, all we want to do is sleep or veg (read: rot) on the couch, and all children want to do is play. Neither our rest nor their play need be gruelingly monitored or regulated, for that would defeat the purpose of such things as gifts of grace.

4. In case you missed it, Elon Musk rebranded the chaotic, (sometimes) controversial, but beloved little app — Twitter. A large white “X” amidst a black background has now replaced the bright blue bird logo many have come to both love and/or hate. Is it due to Mark Zuckerberg’s (Zucks?) competitive app, Threads? (Btw, follow us). According to Musk himself, the logo change is intended to “embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique.” Musk has made big changes to Twitter before, even limiting the number of tweets a user can access at a certain time. The quota was created in an effort by Musk to improve user experience but it ultimately backfired and damaged user experience. This is what Alan Jacobs terms the “Elon Effect,”

You perceive a threat from a new technology; you employ technological means to address that threat; as a result, you either exacerbate the problem you were trying to address or create a new one.

The “Elon Effect” has also greatly influenced professors and educators, as the continued improvement of ChatGPT technology has created opportunities for students to cheat on papers and disrupted the environment of academic integrity. In response to the ChatGPT technology, educators have attempted to catch cheaters with an AI writing detector, GPTzero. The flaw in their ingenious attempt? Plenty of false positives (the Constitution was written by AI?!) and an absence of trust:

We can become so absorbed in trying to outwit each other that we lose sight of what a technologist might call the degradation of the user experience. What I, as a nontechnologist, would call it is an apocalypse, that is to say, an unveiling. And here is what is unveiled by this arms race: that teachers and students rarely trust one another. And in the absence of trust there can be no real community of learning. […]

Later, when I became a teacher, I often remembered my cheating and realized that if any of my students were to cheat in the same way I would have no way to know; all I could do was to state my expectations for academic integrity and hope that my students met them. Precisely because I so manifestly lacked the resources to know the truth, I could simply set the matter aside. But in the Internet era, especially now that it has developed into the LLM [Large Language Models] era, the opportunities for cheating and for catching cheaters have increased exponentially. There have always been ways to game the system, and ways to detect the gaming of the system, but they were often impractical. Now they’re right there in the forefront of our minds, all the time.

In 1944, T.S. Eliot wrote: “Not least of the effects of industrialism is that we become mechanized in mind, and consequently attempt to provide solutions in terms of engineering, for problems which are essentially problems of life.”

Jacobs doesn’t discount the professors’ concerns, but he does acknowledge that this technological arms race to maintain academic integrity may be getting in the way of actual learning (the Law has a way of doing that). And how are educators supposed to deal with the fallibility of technology and even of their own judgment? In news that just dropped this morning on NPR, even data from research on the topic of honesty can be discovered as fabricated.

The Eliot quote hits the nail on the head — attempting to solve technological problems with more technology is like frantically fixing terribly cut bangs with more trimming. Eventually, you discover that the problem can’t be solved with more of the problem: all you will get are more coding hoops to jump through and a haircut that brings you right back to the homemade haircuts of second grade.

5. For kicks and giggles, here’s the Belladonna Comedy’s recent post, “Itemized Receipt: 45 Minutes of Therapy.”

“Mmmmm” — $5.50

Comfy seating on luxury couch — $200.56

Agreeing that not leaving your apartment for five days straight is not a good sign — $7.00

Fancy frame for the Master’s Degree hung right above my head — $15.00

Questions about your relationship with your mother — $48.00 […]

Awkward silence while you cry — $95.82

Don’t have enough money to sit on a luxury couch? Doing chores not only allows for procrastination but also serves as a distraction from pain! Just take the Hard Times recent article entitled, “Woman on Tight Deadlines Totally Crushing Other Chores.” And last, but not least, a cartoon from the New Yorker:

6. And finally, an essay by Thomas Reese on the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds and how “We Want God to be Like Batman“:

Jesus tells a story, an allegory, about a farmer who sowed good seed and then found that weeds, sowed by an enemy, were growing along with the wheat. The farmer tells his servants to leave the weeds and let them grow with the wheat.

This sounds like a dumb idea. Anyone who gardens knows that you do not let weeds grow along with your flowers and tomatoes. Pull them up or spray them with weed killer. The farmers listening to Jesus must have been surprised by his story. They probably thought, “This guy is clearly a carpenter, not a farmer.”

In his parables, Jesus often says something surprising or shocking when he wants to make a point. In this parable, Jesus wants to emphasize that God does not act like we think he should. He does not act like we would act if we were God.

If I were God, I would be zapping bad guys with lightning all day long. The God of Jesus does not do this.

Superheroes might be cool, but it’s comforting news to know that God doesn’t work like we do.

Strays: