Top 5: Childhood anxiety + the war on minimalism
+ so much more
“What Happened to American Childhood?” (The Atlantic)
Because if you can only read one article this week, let it be this one. We found ourselves nodding and shaking our heads an innumerable amount of times while reading this article on common parenting practices and the rate of anxiety among children (even without a pandemic).
“With no school, calls drop but child abuse hasn’t amid virus” (AP)
Because April is child abuse awareness month, and while schools are closed, reported cases are going down. But unemployment is going up, so there may be more hidden cases of abuse than anyone can measure.
“The Second Phase of Unemployment Will Be Harsher” (The Atlantic)
Because “More broadly, the crisis will accelerate some long-running market trends toward industry consolidation (which reduces one’s choice of potential employers), automation (in which machines replace human labor), and worker precarity (which happens when the convenience of employers and customers entirely overrides the well-being of individual workers).”
“The ugly side of politics emerges” (Axios)
Because most predictably, in a hyper-partisan country, the next phase of the coronavirus will probably get very political and even more polarized.
“What Does the Good Life Look Like Now?” (NYT)
Because we all have had to give up some pleasures in life (some way more than others), and Trish Hall asks: what will we take back up? What will we let go?
BONUS: “The Pandemic Has Made a Mockery of Minimalism” (The Atlantic)
Because this article pairs well with the NYT article in #5. Additionally, it is just a beautifully written article. Here are the first two paragraphs:
“No comparison for the coronavirus pandemic is quite apt, in part because no world-stopping catastrophe in recent memory has been so quiet. Terrorism, war, hurricanes, and earthquakes create excessive, ultra-visual chaos: fireballs, rubble, water, wounds. The virus, meanwhile, cannot be seen, and the crisis it’s created has, in a horrifying way, tidied the world. Just as each added tally in the death count represents a subtraction from the human whole, the visceral and visual impact of the pandemic has been a mounting absence.
Everywhere you look, there’s deletion. The streets have been cleared of bustle. Masks replace that most idiosyncratic thing, the human face, with blankness. Protective gear renders medical teams into interchangeable forms. In ICUs, ventilators and tubes obscure the faces of patients. Grocery-store aisles are picked over, yawning and vacant. The attempts to counter the overwhelming stillness and sparseness can sometimes worsen it. When the 7 p.m. cheer goes out, I look out my window, but none of the cheerers is ever in direct view. The wild human voices seem disembodied.”
Image is of a “dirty storm” in Chile which recently won a photography contest. Image credit: Francesca Negroni for an Our World In Focus contest via Good News Network.