"[P]erhaps one-third of today’s young Americans will never marry, with couples living together not replacing marriages."

"More people, [says sociologist Brad Wilcox], are simply detached and on their own. Some women in America have publicly proclaimed that they are distancing themselves from men, abstaining from sex or going 'boy sober.'... One window into gender tensions is a viral meme on TikTok in which women discuss whether they would rather encounter a bear in the woods or a man. Many go with the bear. Young people are not only marrying less and partnering less; they’re also having less sex.... To me, the fundamental problem is the struggle of men to adapt to a world in which brawn matters less than brains, education and emotional intelligence.... I fear that I’m a romantic in a world that is becoming less romantic."

Writes Nicholas Kristof, in "Less Marriage, Less Sex, Less Agreement" (NYT).

Excerpting that quote, I was stunned by the last sentence — where the word "romantic" appears twice — because my post from an hour ago — the one about gendered architecture — features a quote with a distinctive use of that word from an essay called "The Gender of Genius," by Hilde Heynen. I'll re-excerpt from Heynen's essay:

According to Christine Battersby, the way we understand the term genius is rooted in 19th-century Romanticism, which admired originality and creativity in the individual. The Romantic notion of genius referred to men of great intellectual and artistic capacities, who were in touch with their feminine side – for great art requires sensitivity, emotionality and love. The great artist, for the Romantics, was thus a feminine male.... The gradual disappearance of women during the long march towards the top is in part explained by our romantic notion of the architect as artist and genius. As Naomi Stead has noticed, the figure of Ayn Rand’s Howard Roark in The Fountainhead, the ‘arrogant and virile hero architect, casts a long shadow over any discussion of authorship in the discipline’, infusing it with a mystique heralding the creativity of the individual artist-designer

Kristof's usage of "romantic" is so different, but it's an intriguing difference. Kristof is worried that men and women won't enter into romance with each other, and he associates maleness with "brawn" and seems to think men are impaired when it comes to the life of the mind. Heynen is talking about 19th-century Romanticism and an idea that the greatest minds are male.

Would you rather encounter a bear in the woods or 19th-century Romantic genius?

@susankehoe1 This bear likes my company. So he climbs on the deck and sits nearby. I truly believe he likes my company. Please don’t say otherwise🙏 #foryou #bear #love #wildlife #viral #woods #funny #laugh #smile #spirituality #bear #animals #enjoy #hangout #mountains #camp #country ♬ original sound - Susan Kehoe

"As Einstein said, those who created the problem will not be able to solve it."

Said Arnold Schwarzenegger, after the Supreme Court oral argument yesterday, which he attended. The "problem" in this case is political gerrymandering, and "those who created the problem" are elected politicians, who draw the legislative districts thereby setting up the game that they get to play in the next go 'round.

I'm reading the Schwarzenegger quote in the NYT article "Kennedy’s Vote Is in Play on Voting Maps Warped by Politics."

Of course, the problem of self-interested legislators is very well known, but the argument on the other side is that if the Supreme Court gets involved, it will create a different problem, and then — if we take the Einstein quote to heart — who will be able to solve that?

But is that really an Einstein quote? People love to pass along quotes they think are from Einstein because Einstein is the one name everyone associates with GENIUS! and we have this delusion that if a genius says something, on any subject, it must be genius. Consequently, the "Einstein" label gets slapped on some counterfeit goods.

The quote whipped out by Arnold Schwarzenegger is listed — at Wikiquotes — among the disputed Einstein quotes. And the wording — translated, I presume — is significantly different:

We cannot solve the problems using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them

"Einstein's famous saying in Copenhagen", as quoted in a FBIS Daily Report: East Europe (4 April 1995), p. 45

Following that quote, those who created the problem could solve the problem if they used a different kind of thinking.

Leaving The New Yorker to join a lyrics-annotating website?!

"Sasha Frere-Jones, the longtime pop music critic for The New Yorker, has left the magazine to join Genius, a website mounting an ambitious expansion after starting as a forum for annotated rap lyrics online."

Signs of the apocalypse for old media? Or just another data point in the very old process of taking a job that offers much better pay?

Mr. Frere-Jones will be an executive editor at Genius, two of its founders, Ilan Zechory and Tom Lehman, said in an interview, with a focus on annotations of music lyrics. He will start this week.

Genius, which was originally called Rap Genius before changing its name last summer, has received $55 million of venture capital funding and broadened its mission beyond music to include restaurant menus and Shakespeare, among other texts.

The reason Frere-Jones gives is "I don’t want to stay up until 4 a.m. any more at shows, and you can annotate lyrics during the day." He's 47. I get it. Sometimes I think, I'd love to live in New York again, because there are all those things you can only do in New York. But then the question becomes: Yes, but would you do them? And the truth is, even when I was in my 20s, when I lived in New York, I found it a struggle to listen to music that went on after midnight. I believe Frere-Jones that the work fits a non-young person's life more comfortably. Good for him for getting the money. And give the New Yorker gig to somebody new, who's up for that sort of thing. We'll all survive.

And Genius is a nice format for annotating lyrics, a writing format that's very similar to blogging, and quite delightful, really. A big distinction from blogging, however, is that your writings remain stuck on the lyrics you've attached them to. They don't continually sink down as new stuff is put on top. Not that a blog's archive can't be searched, but in blogging, you do have this sense of layers of time, with the top layer fresh and soon to be pushed down by the next new thing. The tyranny of the timeline is most notable on Twitter and Facebook. If you're a serious writer, it can really get to you.

Not that annotating lyrics on Genius seems serious, but the hiring of Sasha Frere-Jones makes it a little more serious than it was before.

ADDED: Hey, Genius has a law section. (They should give me a million dollars!) Here's Marbury v. Madison. [AND: The cases are too long to annotate in the spiffy way that works for songs. The Marbury annotations alternate between boring explanations of technical terms and smart-ass observations, for example, pointing out over-broad/unsupported assertions. And most of the lines are just there — in hard-to-read white text on black — without annotation.]