Listening to a very dumb song on the radio the other day, one which praised the medium of radio, I got to thinking about radio in my life, and came up with the following list of radio moments.

The list will date me (I was born in the mid-seventies), so I expect others will have different memories: share them with a comment! Anyway, in no particular order:

• Fall, 1989: On a shortwave, I was able to listen in live to massive anti-communist protests in Prague and elsewhere in what was then called Eastern Europe.
• February 1990: Nelson Mandela, recently released from prison, holds a speech. He is greeted by cheering crowds, who he thanks, but who don’t let the man speak for 15 minutes. The weight of the moment sticks with me to this day.
• Spring 2003: Americans invade Iraq. I hear a live report with soaring jets overhead being met with anti-aircraft fire. In a moment of still, I hear a sparrow chirping. I was the same kind of bird as in the bushes outside my own window at home, and that brought the fear of war to me, away from the thrill of action and technology.
• February 2008: Now I’m married and have a toddler. On the night of super-Tuesday, when the news-anchors said “Clinton” and “Obama” hundreds of times over, my son started saying “Mama!” whenever the eventual president’s name was mentioned.

Those are four memories of radio, what about yours?

I watched the first few painful moments of Mtv’s College Life series, a set of pseudo-documentaries of freshman life at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Often recognized as a party school, the UW is a frequent subject for discussions of collegian debauchery, and that is clearly what MTV wanted.

They picked the usual suspects for “reality” shows—party animals, evangelicals who want everyone to know about their abstinence, and so on. I freely recognize that if they’d depicted normal students, it’d be too dull to bear—laundry, libraries, money woes, and inane late night conversations.

As a 33-year old returning grad student, I feel entirely other than these kids. When I was 25 I felt old. No longer. I watch them trudging around campus, ear buds, rubber boots and all, and feel sorry for them. Freshmen simply cannot understand all their feelings, much less adequately interpret them.

MTV’s cringe-inducing headline (“This isn’t reality; this is real”) tells us that, as a society, we are bored to tears. The remedy, of course, is to watch freshmen, as an in-town reviewer put it, wallow in banality.

But the question remains: can freshmen even understand freshman life, let alone college life?

America’s most infamous teen mother gave an interview the other day, about, well, teen motherhood. Bristol Palin (Sarah Palin’s daughter) basically said she’d made mistakes and others ought to avoid those mistakes, but:

But I think abstinence is like...I don't know how to put it, like...the main...Everyone should be abstinent, but it's not realistic at all.

I believe this is what she's saying: Even if abstinence works in practice, nobody's putting it to practice: people aren’t being abstinent.

So what’s the answer? I’m inclined to agree with her; I am a member of a very solid church where probably more children are born outside of marriage than not. This is not for lack of teaching, support, and so on. Abstinence works, if and only if it is actually practiced.

So … under what circumstances would it be realistic? What would that look like?

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Advertisers drop enormous sums of money, quite simply, because it works. More toy ads viewed, more toys bought. Usually quite soon. More car ads viewed, more cars bought.

And, of course, more beer ads viewed, more beer drunk.

A recent study by faculty at the Universities of Texas and Florida found that Youth attending schools with 20 percent or more Hispanic students see an average of seven times more alcohol ads each day than students at schools with a smaller Hispanic population.

My guess is that this is probably a function of urban design: highly Hispanic neighborhoods are quite likely going to be mixed-use neighborhoods, where commercial and residential properties are close to each other. Still:

"Alcohol advertising around schools with 20 percent or more Hispanic students used the culture of the community significantly more," said Dr. Kelli Komro, associate professor of epidemiology in the College of Medicine at the University of Florida. "Those ads employed visual elements like logos of local sports teams, Spanish words and symbols of Hispanic culture such as Mexico's national colors. This may build brand recognition early on, putting youth at even greater risk for early onset and long-term alcohol use. Previous studies have shown that Hispanic youth are at higher risk for starting to use alcohol at a young age and for high-risk alcohol use."

[photo credit: sxc.hu member wax115]

The print news are in trouble, we all know that. But is it a good idea for the government to prop them up by buying their product?

I just saw in Le Monde that the French President is proposing giving a one-year newspaper subscription to each 18 year old citizen. It's being talked about on two fronts: fostering citizenship and as a bailout for struggling old-media.

Le Monde, of course, is highly in favor. But certainly not because of the hordes of money they'd amass, as one of the biggest dailies in the country. No--and here they sound as self-important as the mainstream papers in the US--their pleasure is entirely altruistic. They wish for greater societal glue, by which they mean greater integration of the young into the worldview of the French elites.

The French media are notorious for groupthink with the entire intellectual establishment, what the left call Pensée unique or single-thought. As an example, the Le Monde editorial approvingly quotes Bernard Spitz, an economist and secretary general of a think tank, former presidential cabinet member, media mogul, government researcher, and so on--an example of revolving doors between various elite establishments.