Glimpse

aliveandreaming:

Lake Powell helicopter Sep2010-0831 Web by Gleb TARRO www.fotowalk.com on Flickr.

dedicatedtodecay:

Untitled by seinberg on Flickr.

theworldwelivein:

Photograph by Richard Barnes

theworldwelivein:

Mesa Arch Sunrise | Mesa, Utah
©  realkuhl

theworldwelivein:

Sparks Marina, Reno, Nevada
© KwasiB

fuckyeahtravelinspirations:

Grand County, Utah, USA

lukehackney:

Cartographer David Imus spent 6,000 hours making “the greatest paper map of the United States you’ll ever see.”

Imagine two rowboats, both adrift at sea. The first rowboat has no oars. They can see an island in the distance. Somebody calculates the distance to it, and the rate at which they’re drifting, and concludes that they have only half the food and water they’ll need for everybody to reach the island. The conclusion is obvious*: at least half of them have to be thrown overboard. And the sooner it happens, the fewer of them will have to die.

Now imagine the other rowboat. It has plenty of food and water, and it has oars, but it has a different problem: it’s leaking, and fast. Somebody does the math, and they conclude that they can all make it to the island in the distance. But they can only make it if everybody who can row, rows, and if everybody else bails water as fast as they can, and if they cooperate in sharing the rowing, bailing, and resting cycles; if anybody is selfish, if anybody doesn’t cooperate, nobody will make it.

Call the first rowboat “America.” Call the second rowboat “the Netherlands.”

That’s the metaphor that came to my mind after spending a couple of days deciding how to explain Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex, by Amy Schalet (University of Chicago Press, 2011). Even though the book has nothing to do with rowboats, and only indirectly to do with the overall differences between Americans and the Dutch. What the book is really about is the regulation of teenage sex by their parents. You see, as someone who grew up in both the Netherlands and the US, baffled by the differences between the two, and who went on to do her Ph.D. research in the sociology of adolescent/parent relationships, Schalet has dedicated an entire book to trying to explain a major difference between two different cultures that were substantially identical as late as the late 1950s: democratic capitalist republics who won their independence from colonial imperial masters around the same era, dominated by conservative Protestants, who went through the same Great Depression and two World Wars, and the same sexual revolution when contraception and antibiotics were made widely available, and the same economic shock after the OPEC crisis. But in the years after that, huge social differences appear, and Schalet concentrates, as her academic speciality, on one of them.

It’s a glaring difference, and it has to do with what American and Dutch parents and teens “know for a fact” about teenage sexual development and maturity during puberty.

Read more.

theworldwelivein:

Bixby Bridge, Big Sur, California
©  Kristen Drozdowski.

sleepwalkingthrudreams:

Birds over Fisher Towers, Utah, United States by Xindaan on Flickr.

(via travelfiend-deactivated20120331)