samjones1

It was so great to hear from JP after all these years...he does, as some have suggested, sound a lot older than when we last encountered his voice back in the day. I don't have too much of substance to offer this time, but I did want to say that the last three words of the chapter were pretty excellent. They just sort of sat there in my mind like the proverbial fart in church...nobody wants to face them, but you can't help but notice that they're lingering close at hand.

This all reminds me a bit of the first Godfather movie, only set in an Age of Sail milieu...the opium is a very interesting twist. I can't wait to see how it all shakes out.

I think that a blow-up of this sort really highlights the differences between Brad/Claire's generation and my own generation. I am a few years older than Marie and Will, but I recognize the forces that Marie and Will are representing here (or at least what I think they're representing). The children of the 80s (my older brother and cousings) were very conscious of clothes, money, and status. In my high school years, only a decade later, many people seemed much more concerned about shared experience in forming cliques. I didn't get the overwhelming sense that everybody wanted (or even should want) the same things out of life. While we still had people like Marie, who ruled the roost through a very compelling combination of beauty, style, and material wealth, I also knew many people like Will who simply did as they wanted without concern for what was en vogue. Some of the most popular people that I knew were people who were know as "good guys": people who were pleasant and welcoming. I did go to a private high school (not as prestigious as Menlo or HW, but well regarded on the East Coast), so I don't think it's simply a matter of setting. Instead, I think it's a growing rejection of the sort of materialism that was rampant in the 80s and the embracing of individuality. Personally, I think that it's been taken a bit to the extreme these days...we get that whole "precious little snowflake" thing where parents think their child is the best regardless of their actual skills and talents, and a great deal of self-indulgence among later generations in response to this tension. On the other hand, we have, over the intervening years, developed a sense that the growing inequality between rich and poorer people is problematic for societies. You do a great job of capturing this type of social tension within the microcosm of a family environment. What was OK in the 80s and 90s is now called for what it is: snobbery! Another great chapter, Mark!!

These last two chapters have been so charming! It's great to see Tony starting to come around and realize he's gay. Knowing the baggage he must have from his Dad's circumstances, I can't imagine what a tough thing that must be for him. I can't wait to read how all this develops!

It was great to check in and see a chapter for the new CAP story. Things are off to a quick start - I wouldn't like to be Marie and John in Chapter 2 (or later depending on potential POV changes). Will is starting to learn that what sounds good on paper may not be so great in practice...as you've been saying in your responses, he'll figure it out. Can't wait to see where you go with all this, Mark!!

I am finding this discussion of academic vs. "real world" knowledge very interesting. I think some I the disagreement here might be related to your specific fields of study. Law research, as far as I can tell from my limited exposure to law journals, is very practical in its application. History research, on the other hand, seems rather less about the practical. No less important, but perhaps more difficult to apply in our everyday lives. I am ABD in a business related field. I can tell you that CEOs aren't reading what we are writing in journals. Sure, some of my colleagues package their work in a more applied form and write books on management or strategy or whatever to help inform practice. A lot of them also consult to provide insights into organizational affairs. Those are things done for moneu, however...we don't get "credit" for books like thay, generally speaking. What my colleagues are doing for academic research, however, is often very disconnected from practice. It shouldn't be, perhaps, but it is. In my field, for example, the practitioners don't even care about some constructs we (the academics) view as important because they simply don't focus on them as part of their everyday work. Even though the work we do is insightful ( at least we think so), nobody really cares. Of course someone can be intelligent and learned without having an academician's focus on topics and information. It's like the difference between applied and pure mathematics...one might make derivative trading models, and the other might calculate surface space for geometric shapes that can't exist (oversimplified here, but illustrative). I think that is all Methodwriter is trying to say here, and I think he's correct. Just because someone knows a lot of information doesn't mean that he's academic.

I remember saying last year that you would win an award for Paternity...and now it's happened!! Congratulations to you, Mark. You deserve every award you get. :-)

I'm going with Robbie's brother (Ella's real dad, not Wally) as dad and Ye Olde Random Town Trollop as mom.

I've moved from merely horrified to positively livid! The plan sounds so logical, so well thought out and so careful of JJ's feelings. It just seems like the absolute wrong thing to do, leaving him to basically figure things out on his own. Sure, there will be a therapist...but why would such a modest kid open up to a stranger? While he's developing a rapport with a counselor, he's left to stew in his own juices with ruminative thoughts and self-recriminations. JJ's adherence to authority aside, I think this is, quite possibly, the lousiest treatment plan I've ever heard of. Maybe that's just me...clearly I'm not a therapist. Again...great writing, horrifying content. Chapter 91 and some emotionality can't come soon enough (if rumors are to be believed).

This is exactly the sort of thing that I started to suspect. This is so much worse than what happened to Will, mostly because that was clearly melodramatic (IMO). This, however...it's just too horrifying for words. You're writing is superb as always...horrifying, but superb.

Perhaps this is because I'm a social scientist, but I really balk at the generalizations of psychologists as pseudo-scientists I am reading here. It may be true that there is subjectivity in social science work, and it may also be true that replications are not done with nearly enough frequency. This doesn't mean that our work does not have rigor and validity. I think people forget about the days of ill humors and flat-earth, heliocentric geography and astronomy. They forget how many years the "hard" sciences have had to progress. They forget that measurement error and incorrrect theories have been an essential part of scientific progress for centuries. Psychology isn't even 150 years old yet, yet it's made extraordinary strides in our understanding of the workings of the mind and of human behavior. Dismissing the field out of hand because of its softness relative to physics and chemistry is a mistake IMHO.

Sorry to not use the quote capabilities...I couldn't get my mobile device to allow me to quote. :-/ It's always good to keep on your toes, Westie, when dealing with research both scientific and "scientific". While I tend to agree with Mark's assessment of the literature on corporal punishment, that doesn't mean the research shouldn't be carefully and continually subjected to scrutiny for problems with validity and rigor. As with any social science, causality errors and spurious conclusions are something we have to guard against vigilantly. If people were certain of the answers, after all, there'd be no research.

I agree wholeheartedly with Mark. I wasn't hit as a child, but I know plenty of people who were (with around degrees of severity). What they all agree in is that the hitting had no deterrent effect. For some, it bred anger and resentment. For others, it left them unable to build connections for fear of abuse. Some just ignored it entirely. You don't have to believe either of us, though. There is an overwhelming body of evidence which supports the view that spanking, in any form, is somewhere between useless and harmful for most people. Here's an article I pulled up about it...took me 2.6 seconds to find it (I have a slow connection today). http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mobileweb/lisa-belkin/spanking-is-wrong_b_1659964.html I can understand how people might intuitively think that spanking would deter bad behavior. It just doesn't seem to be borne out by research. That's not to say I agree with these parents who try to reason with their children in the middle if Target when the kid has a tantrum on Inauguration Day (specific, I know)...clearly something to instill discipline and good social behavior is important. I just don't think it should be spanking or hitting.

Another excellent chapter, Mark. I haven't felt this nervous reading one of your stories since...well, about 50 chapters ago. :-P This Coach of JJ's sounds like bad news...bad, bad news. Having read a few news stories over the years about allegations and convictions for improprieties between figure skating coaches and their charges, I sincerely hope that JJ is just feeling the pressure to perform and not suffering from some trauma. I'll be waiting to see what happens!

This is a very fair point. Fiduciary responsibilities of board members are generally to shareholders. All the stock in the company is held by the three of them, Stef, Robbie, and Brad. If Stef and Brad decide that Robbie is competent, that is, in essence, the exercising of their fiduciary responsibility to themselves. True, they need to make sure that they are not committing fraud against their vendors and employees. At the end of the day, though, the only people (aside from employees losing their jobs, etc.) that lose if Robbie fails here are the three shareholder. There aren't other shareholders to sue them.

I have really appreciated the most recent series of chapters, both from Will and Wade's POV. I feel, however, that this chapter is an especially notable success at showing WIll at his most "developing". There is a bit of self-absorption (with his worry about how he is impacting Brad and Robbie's relationship) mixed with moments of true clarity (where he realizes that the adults in his life are people with outside pursuits aside from him). He also seems to be able to understand the situation with Ryan and Tony (in terms of relationship issues) while only partially grasping his role in the board room scenario (he feels like a pawn without understanding quite why that might be so). It reminds me of what became the major theme of my own teen years: going from knowing I knew everything to understanding I know very little, while trying to constantly bridge the gap between those two extremes. I think that this chapter, more than others, gives us a very realistic portrayal of what it might be like to live in the mind of a teenager. I've often thought that you have a singular ability to convey that reality to the audience through your words. Love him or hate him, Will comes across as any other mature teen that I've met in my life. It's a triumph of subtlety in the midst of fiery times, a marked departure from Chapter 82 (which I also loved)! I share Rjo's concern over the issues between Robbie and Brad. I never really thought that they'd break up back in Millenium, but I really wonder how they'll manage to get through this latest storm. I do hope it works out in the end, though...as much as Robbie usually manages to intensely irritate me, I still feel like he's a good match for Brad. Thanks for all the great writing you do, Mark!

Just reading the words "hanging chads" and "butterfly ballots" brought a shiver to my spine thinking of the 2000 election. At least this time I got to read about Lizzy getting the wind knocked out of her sails...a much better outcome! I can't wait to read about how the news reporter treats this whole affair in the paper. Nice chapter, Mark!

I was thinking more about refusing to not fly after 9/11. Clearly, I understand that failing to follow FAA instructions leads to bad things. I think Brad isn't one to "let the terrorists win"...that's what I had in mind.

Poor Darius! Many of us have that one (or several) person in our life who can make us lose ourselves. Ella seems to have that sort of sway over Darius. One would think that another woman he cared about less would have been left at the party as soon as she started hanging on some other guy. The aftermath will be interesting to see! I agree wholeheartedly with some of the posters in the forum. Will has shown here that, although he is willing to make allowances for friends, he is comfortable in his own skin. It's good to see him backing up his brother despite their problems, and good to see them back in sync again! Thanksgiving ought to be a wild ride...pun intended.

I sense a red-ass beat down coming on for Mr. Conway. I feel like I'm watching one of my siblings about to get punished for bad behavior! Meanwhile, I also feel some trepidation for the potential of a Somers/Calvert/Granger menage-a-trois. I'm sure it would be a hot time, but I feel like it's George, not Calvert or Somers, who would be ill-equipped to handle it this time. He has just come of a return home where he was betrayed not once, not twice, but three times by lovers: his wife, Sir Phlip Kerry, and then the other Lord who raced off to Bertie's side. Calvert has shown himself to be susceptible to the wiles of cute guys, while Somers has a wandering eye as well. I feel like George is going to spend too much time worrying about losing Calvert to Somers to make that activity worth it. Sill, we shall see if he agrees!

It's interesting how just a couple of years can make a huge difference in terms of how events shape your life. I was 20 on 9/11, and I remember that day as if it just happened. I was watching the Today show with my brother, who just happened to have woken up late to take the train into Boston for work. I remember a professor at school not being able to get home from Boston for some time because they shut down the trains...the news kept speculating that Boston might be next. I remember my brother getting a letter from the Navy a couple days after the event, and how we thought it was him getting sent to the Middle East (it was actually his reserve discharge papers). I usually try to ignore 9/11 when it comes around, but I feel weird about doing so even this many years later. It's like I want to forget, but can't, but pretend I can anyway... I'm teach college students now. The younger ones are either international students who weren't directly impacted or 18/19 year-olds who were 8/9 year-olds back on 9/11, The ones who are my age or older were quite pensive this year on 9/11. The people in their late 20s were a mixed bag...some are indifferent, some still have bad memories. It's hard to know how any individual will be impacted by an event like 9/11. Personally, I think Mark would be able to craft a beautiful story just focusing on how our CAP friends deal with the aftermath...I bet it would be a microcosm of the world around them. Will getting pissed of at JJ for not caring, Stef crying, Brad refusing to ground his plane, Robbie trying to buy into one of those conspiracy movies, JP shifting his research interests to the Middle-East, Darius trying to actively, rather than tacitly, trying to pass as Latino to avoid racism. Maybe something like "A Summer Love" - short, but intense and moving. It's so nice to have had something from you to read, Mark. I hope, however, that you won't try to overtax yourself. Good on you also for letting your readers know that you need both time and additional positive reinforcement! If you aren't feeling it, you simply aren't feeling it. Get some drinks, enjoy the changing seasons (if you have seasons where you are), and know that we will be here whenever you're ready to come back!

This...this quote right here is exactly why I think you find so little sympathy for your discourse here. This is exactly the tactic that you used a few weeks ago when I and others pointed out all the flaws in the study you cited to support your contention that 14-year olds have only a certain amount of sex and no more. This quote shows no small amount of hypocrisy on your part. It has become quite apparent to me (and everyone here, I think) that you have a hypothesis, you've gathered a few of pieces of evidence to support it, and you are going to beat people about the head with these data until we submit. That is a fine tactic to use in court and politics: stay on message and win the war via attrition. Browbeating people who give up a great deal of their free time to provide reading material for our entertainment is an entirely different scenario, however. Here, such behavior simply makes you look like an internet troll. There is also nothing to win by attacking Sharon. I hope that she and everyone else simply refuses to engage you and your palaver any further.

It's good to see you taking time for yourself to deal with real-life busyness! I hope everything settles for you soon. The beginning of the semester is really a tough time, so don't push yourself too hard.

I think Centex makes an excellent point (sorry for no quote, but I'm using my phone to reply and can't seem to quote with it). I've heard it said in these fora that the shift in Brad's and Robbie's personalities has been swift and unanticipated. I disagree wholeheartedly. Clearly Brad has been on a downward trajectory with his mental well being since his battle with the Carmichaels. Start with the mental stress of the battle and add to it the knowledge that he ordered the assassination, torture, and/or framing of people involved in the plot. Soon after he had an attempt on his life in the Texas factory and a kidnapping where he was forced to deal with the potential torture of his son. Ever since then, his desire to maintain control after being violated so deeply, coupled with only recent counseling for his ordeals, suggests to me a mental environment ripe for some erratic behavior. I think Brad has as much to be traumatized over as does Will. I think we are going to see Brad explode alright...I just think its going to be in despair over his own trauma and not so much in anger at Will. Thank you, Mark, for another great chapter!

No. I do, however, know a guy who had sex on the local elementary school playground with two different guys at the same time at 13. He lived in a trailer park, however, so I doubt his parents had anything to destroy or any money to send him to Rome. Luckily, he landed on his feet...he has his own CPA firm now! The chair behind his desk is, however, very well cushioned. I bet he'd make a good main character for a story...or at least his high-school aged self. The fact that Will is not the "norm" is what makes him interesting. 11 sex partners didn't seem like a lot to me at the time...it didn't seem like a lot for my group of friends either. It still doesn't seem like that many to me. I can't discount my own trampiness making me an outlier, however. I also have landed on my feet, though, so I suppose that's just how the cookie crumbles. Finally, I call shenannigans on your contention that 11 sex partners would be a lot in any time and era and not the norm for a freshman in high school. Last time, you cited statistics (albeit inappropriate ones, in my estimation). You should support this claim with evidence. Does this claim include only gay students or gay and straight students both? What constitutes sex? Are we controlling for environmental factors, such as socioeconomic status, geographic location, and ethnicity? What sort of confidence interval are you using to make the claim? What is norm (more than 50%?)? I think you're just saying this based on your experience and do not (and cannot) know this as a fact. I'm willing to concede, however, if you can prove me wrong with empirical evidence.