By turning our culture over to the spectacle of child stars and their growing pains, we simply wind up taking their childishness seriously and ensuring that they don't grow up at all. And neither do we.
Interpretation
The quote critiques society's obsession with child stars, suggesting it hinders their growth and reflects our own immaturity.
Tom Junod's quote highlights the potential dangers of idolizing child stars and the spectacle surrounding them. By placing undue focus on their lives and struggles, society risks not only stunting the development of these young celebrities but also reveals a reluctance to confront maturity and responsibility ourselves. It suggests that both the child stars and their audience are caught in a loop of childish behavior that fosters immaturity.
In practice
In a discussion about the impact of celebrity culture on youth, this quote can be used to emphasize the need for maturity.
It is insufficient to say that my experience as a bully haunts me. Rather, my experience as a bully has been fundamental to the creation of my conscience, because it is what prevents me from making the basic human claim that I am a good person.
Storytellers all, we humans might run out of time even as we triumph over the problem of running out of space. But we will never run out of stories.
That's the first thing you learn when you busk in the New York City subways: you immediately join the ranks of the marginalized, the unhinged prophets, the Christian shouters, the Hare Krishnas, the Jehovah's witnesses, the father-and-daughter kitaro team, the violinists playing for their sickly wives.
Cooking is, to me, the perfect fusion of generosity and selfishness, indeed the resolution of generosity and selfishness, the answer to my torn nature.
I cook so that there is no absence. I cook so that I am always there, even when I'm gone, even when I die, and my cooking translates in my daughter's memory as, simply, this: time.
The premise and promise of Big Data is that there are no stories, only patterns; that the human preference for story is aligned with the human tendency for error; and that only through dislocations in scale - the scale of sample size and of time - will truth emerge.
The individual does actually carry on a double existence: one designed to serve his own purposes and another as a link in a chain, in which he serves against, or at any rate without, any volition of his own.
I bold it impossible, that the great monarchies of Europe can subsist much longer; they all affect magnificence and splendor.
Relativity applies to physics, not ethics.
Myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of the human life.
The language of science—and especially of a science of man—is, necessarily, anti-individualistic, and hence a threat to human freedom and dignity.
Hanging out with politicians and corporations is very unhip work. But I think that the U2 audience have turned out to be incredibly subtle in their understanding.
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