I was surprised the other day to realize that, along with writing this post on most days, I have quietly begun to read three other blogs on a regular basis.
The first is by a recent college graduate who is exploring the American West Coast and writing about what she sees, the people she meets, the places she sees, and her thoughts about it all. Her views are an intriguing mix of new ways of looking at things and a reminder of what it was like to be in my twenties. She belongs to a different generation, with new insights, new capacities, new problems, new social realities. I’m a psychologist, but I had no idea there are thousands of people out there thinking that they have an extra arm or leg , and posing ethical conundrums for plastic surgeons who try to help patients find a match between their bodies and their identities. Or that many young people feel so without hope that they yearn for the End of the World when they believe Christ will make it all better. Like every generation before, this blogger has no more experience than her allotted years, which I see as a significant strength. As I get older, problems somehow seem more intractable. We need the young for their belief that things can change. Because without that belief, they won’t. (http://lgenevieve.wordpress.com/)
The second blog I touch base with most days is by a science professor, I think, some place in New York. He is irreverent, often outrageously funny, sometimes completely irrelevant. And just often enough keenly insightful. http://beversluis.blogspot.com/ He inhabits a part of the cyber world into which I rarely venture, which is another reason I keep reading him.
And finally, I have discovered a blog written by the business editor of the BBC that does a better job of explaining the dark and convoluted world of finance for the nonprofessional than anybody else I know. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/robertpeston/ He speaks in plain English, and explains why what might seem like the obvious isn’t obvious at all, and why things governments and banks and businesses do that might seem to make no sense at all, really do have some rationality. He writes from the perspective of Britain, but his blog casts light on the global financial system. It will bore you to death if you don’t like that kind of thing, but I find it fascinating.
