The "random acts of kindness" phenomenon

Just looking through a high school yearbook from 1998, and one of the little feature articles was on "random acts of kindness." Maybe it was the context, but I thought, Y'know, that is a very '90s phrase. I don't remember hearing it in the '80s, nor seeing the behavior. But you would normally associate altruism with the '80s rather than the '90s, so something requires explaining here.

First, let's establish the timing. Here is a graph showing the frequency of the phrase in Google's digital library (Ngram). There are lone, infrequent examples from the '60s through the '80s -- as in, probably one reference a year, once every 5-10 years. It's not until 1993 that it begins a steady rise, though. Searching for the related phrase "random kindness" shows basically the same picture, only the out-of-the-blue rise begins in '92. "Acts of random kindness" explodes from out of nowhre in '94. Searching the NYT shows the first instance of "random acts of kindness" in '94, "random kindness" in '92, and "acts of random kindness" also in '92. Searching Amazon for books with "random acts of kindness" in the title shows that the earliest ones were published in '93.

What was it about the '92 to '94 period that led to the take-off of this movement? Evidently lots of people felt that there was a mismatch between the supply and need for kindness. As falling-crime times began, either folks grew stingier with kindness, or others were now in greater need as the society grew more antagonistic, or both. As recently as the 1980s, people were pretty friendly toward each other -- the low levels of shrill or harsh treatment meant that most people weren't in that great of a need for kind acts by others, and the relative lack of a glib and dismissive attitude meant that others were capable of pitching in when it was needed.

Obviously the movement did not reverse the trend, since social relations are even more fragmented now than 20 years ago -- hard as that may be to believe for folks who can still remember how sarcastic and apathetic the popular attitude had swung by 1994.

Still, did they at least pad the landing? It doesn't feel like it, not even during the movement's heyday in the later '90s or 2000s. Why not?

It wasn't simply the rarity of such acts. When they did happen, it wasn't appreciated by most of the recipients. If the performer overtly says that they're doing a random act of kindness, perhaps elaborating that it's part of a meta-goal to bring more happiness to the world, then the recipient feels like a charity case. Like they're just a tick mark moving some abstract quantity toward a quota. Even if the performer doesn't explicitly explain what they're doing and why, the utterly unusual nature of the act will tip the recipient off that they have some other goal in mind.

That brings up the suspicion of "ulterior motives." In friendlier times, the recipient wouldn't have thought much of the offer, but now that everyone's so hostile to each other, does this guy really want to be nice, or is he just trying to get something out of me? Like the "Free Hugs" thing -- clearly some outcast starved for physical attention who's trying to satisfy his need to touch girls, while dressing it up as altruism (if he has to hug the occasional dude, that's worth it to him).

It doesn't do much to elevate the performer either. Thoughtfulness should not be that thoughtful. The planned, deliberate, self-aware mindset that the performer takes on will lead away whatever other-minded intentions they may have had, and steer toward self-righteousness. And it doesn't do much to assuage their anxiety over how cold the world is growing, to believe that only calculated campaigns can keep relations friendly, rather than kindness spontaneously arising as needed. Finally, if there is an explicit goal in mind -- however fuzzy -- it sets them up for disappointment and burn-out when it, predictably, is not reached.

Beyond that, though, the most demoralizing part is the nagging doubts about how successful such a movement could be with everyone acting all isolated from each other. There doesn't need to be a national delegation, but even a local canned food drive or passing around the collection plate has a, well, collective atmosphere around it. It's not the kind of thing you can do all by yourself.

And the contact with the recipient seems too brief to sustain your motivation to continue. In practice, the performers took more of a stranger-oriented approach. Hold the door open for some old lady at the supermarket, wave a group of kids across the sidewalk instead of peeling out in front of them, and so on. But if they don't feel like members of your community, you don't get much satisfaction out of it. You don't get to see the enduring effects that you have on other people's lives because it's a one-off encounter. Nothing wrong with those drive-by forms of kindness, but they are the icing on the cake, and cannot substitute for friendliness among folks you know.

All of these factors explain why the movement arose when it did, but also why it's more or less burned out by now. Their heart was in the right place; it's just not an effective cure for the symptoms of anomie.

Historical precedents? Beats me. How would people 50 to 100 years from now learn about the "random acts of kindness" phenomenon of our times? It is something I can imagine the Pre-Raphaelites or other emo aesthetes taking a shot at during the Victorian era. Maybe during the mid-century, but maybe not -- they weren't as self-righteous as the Victorians or us.

Self-righteousness seems to show up during falling-crime, rising-inequality times. Widening inequality is marked by status contests among individuals, including do-gooders. Falling inequality, people aren't supposed to raise much of a hue and cry about things. Combine that with falling-crime / cocooning, and you get malaise, anomie, etc., but more of an Edward Hopper kind where no one makes an effort to help each other out. Though like I said, not like that appears to have much of an effect in our time.

At least people in the alienated mid-century didn't see themselves as targets for charity by deliberate do-gooders (from what little I can tell). That allows you to maintain more dignity through a period of social isolation. Performers of random acts of kindness only heighten your awareness of how unraveled the social fabric has become.

Frequent texting impairs sleep and social relationships

Here is a report on an article I haven't read, which shows that the more frequently a college freshman texts, the worse their sleep patterns are. They mention that one cause underlying that is the pressure they feel to respond to texts no matter when, and that their text-messenger ("phone") may be lying next to them at night, interrupting their sleep.

This is a clear symptom of OCD -- the strongly felt need to obsessively check and re-check the status of something, and to deal with it time and again through compulsive behaviors. In particular, for no real goal to have been accomplished at the end of all the checking and compulsive responding. Indeed, worse than just wasting time, their obsessive-compulsive behavior may be harming their basic, daily well-being -- like keeping them from getting a good night's sleep.

It might seem strange to suggest that an entire generation has OCD, but if that sounds odd, you haven't been around many Millennials.

Frequent texting also predicted greater vulnerability to stressful times in a social relationship. If you were already heading in the stressed-out direction, being an excessive texter made it worse. It's suggested that texting in a troubled time makes things worse because the lack of nuance and non-verbal communication allows a volatile situation to explode or melt down.

The study author was born in the late '60s and must have spent lots of time talking on the phone as a teenager during the '80s. So she knows that the face-to-face qualities aren't that important for effective communication. In general, the non-verbal only enhances the verbal, and is redundant. It makes for more vivid and memorable conversations, but isn't necessary. The only time when the verbal and non-verbal give opposite signals is when the person is lying. But in general, someone you're spending that much time on the phone with won't be lying to you.

Rather, the defect seems to be in literate as opposed to oral communication. When we digitize speech into literate chunks, we lose all the analog stuff -- inflection, pacing, stress, and so on. Not to mention non-linguistic sounds like laughing -- and what kind of laughter. That's hard to send in literate form.

There's also the analog changes in the person's face and mouth when they feel different emotions while talking. You can hear it when someone is smiling because the lips aren't in their usual position, their corners pulled up and back, pressing the top and bottom "rows" of the lips closer against the teeth. It just sounds different, and you know from experience that this deviation is caused by the lips deviating in a manner consistent with smiling. Lips tensed in anger make for another unusual shape to the vocal tract, and you can hear that too.

Whatever the link between excessive texting and fragile social relationships turns out to be, they are probably both co-symptoms of OCD and the related avoidant attachment style. Keep everything and everyone away because it could contaminate you or somehow else just get awkward. Dealing with others is awkward, so we won't deal with anyone. How will we still communicate with others, though? Just send a shitload of texts instead of calling them on the phone.

Technology does not force its adopters to use it in any particular way, but the other way around. If people hadn't gotten so avoidant and retarded over the past 20 years, perhaps cell phones would never have developed the texting feature. Normal people only used landline phones to talk, and that was quite stable from the 1960s through the early '90s. Only during the mid-'90s when America Online offered a primitive form of text messaging (Instant Messenger) did people begin to send literate messages to one another from the privacy of their own home, rather than call the person up.

(Even there, at first you only IM'ed people who were far away and would've costed a lot to call up, or who you'd never met in real life. IM'ing started out like a chatroom, only with two people. By the late '90s, it had become more common to IM your real-life friends instead of calling them up or hanging out with them.)

The fact that cell phones not only developed the texting feature, but that this would become the predominant way that the adopters would use it to communicate, just goes to show how socially-emotionally avoidant young people had become.

One last important thing: remember that "excessive" texting here is defined relative to the behavior of other college freshmen. I'm surprised they found a strong relationship between texting and anything because you'd think that all kids these days are hardcore texters, so you couldn't set aside the high-frequency from the low-frequency texters. (That would be a "restriction of range" problem.)

To really throw light on how texting frequency relates to sleep patterns, mental health, and so on, they'd need to look at young people who don't text much at all. See the characters in any classic teen movie from the '80s -- whatever their troubles may have been, they had a basic resiliency and didn't melt down or retreat into a cocoon, hoping their problems will magically go away.

The rise and fall of music stars who wrote their own songs

For all the obsession with authenticity, contemporary culture is remarkably fake. Or perhaps designed-by-committee is a better way to put it. You feel that the most in pop music -- too bland to bother turning on the radio anymore. Not since about 1993, and that's being generous. More like the late '80s.

This is only one example of the stultification of culture during a period of falling-crime / cocooning. What are the pathways, though, that lead from cocooning to committee-created culture? As elsewhere, when folks don't trust one another, they can't form a cohesive group -- not even a small one, which ought to be easy (no huge "free rider" problem).

Have you ever noticed how there are hardly any bands or music groups these days? How the hit songs are performed by a lone singer, perhaps with the occasional guest vocalist? That's what you get when suspicion is the first thing people feel toward one another. Without an atmosphere of camaraderie like you find among band members, some kind of central committee will have to arrange and supervise the relationships between the relevant players. And the players will assume a more on-the-move mercenary role -- not being bound to any particular enduring group.

One easy way to see the unraveling of camaraderie in the pop music industry is to look at who's listed under the writer's credit for a hit song. If it's a talented and cohesive group, they're probably creating everything in-house. If each individual involved in the creation is thrown together for any given song, then the songwriting is probably outsourced to a specialist (or a team of them).

I went to the Billboard Year-End singles charts, and looked up the writer's credit for the top 20 songs of the year, from 1949 to 2009 in 5-year intervals, and adding 2012 at the end. (The year-end charts for 1949 came from this site.) The criterion for counting the song as "written by the performers" was pretty strict, but that avoids having to make lots of subjective judgement calls. Namely: everyone given credit for writing the song must be a performer on it as well.

Obviously that excludes songs whose lyrics and music were written by a songwriting team and given to a singer to perform. It also excludes songs where the performer may have contributed to the creation, but received major help from outside. For example, "Time After Time" from 1984 is credited to Cyndi Lauper, who sings it, but also to Rob Hyman of The Hooters, who played a big role in writing the music. So it is not counted. From the same year, "When Doves Cry" is credited only to Prince, who performs vocally and instrumentally, so it is counted.

It's not as though getting sole credit means you had no outside help or influence whatsoever -- only that it wasn't big enough for them to be added to the writer's credit.

The graph below shows the rise and fall of pop music stars who wrote their own songs:

The mid-century points near the bottom are a good reminder of how fragmented the society was back then, and how afraid they were to take a chance on each other -- or on themselves. Why didn't Frank Sinatra or Perry Como play an instrument, or take a shot at writing their own songs? "I'm no expert -- best to leave that to the professionals." Hey dude, it's not like "Summer of '69" is Keats for a modern audience. You don't have to be a wiz with words. Just give it a shot and see how well it goes. You never know till you try, right? But social paralysis was as powerful back then as it is now.

Not until the 1959 point do we see a breaking away from the mid-century model. And it's not really a rock 'n' roll rebellion, as most of the early rock of the '50s was written by outside songwriters. Rather, it's pop singers like Paul Anka and the Everly Brothers sticking their neck out a little bit by doing it themselves.

The mini-decline during the '60s would be even more pronounced if I had chosen a year other than 1964 for the mid-decade point. That was the year of Beatlemania, and 5 of the 7 songs shown were written and performed by Lennon-McCartney.

There appear to be shorter cycles on top of the overall rise-and-fall pattern. First a burst of enthusiasm for new writer-performers, followed by professional songwriters jumping on the bandwagon to make a more polished product. Then audiences getting tired with the polished state of things and wanting another round of Something New.

After the mid-'70s doldrums, the next surge of originality came with disco. Most people associate the style with cheesy polyester leisure suits, more than the actual quality of the music itself. It's not easy to write for so many instruments, let alone pen lyrics that will pick people's spirits up and make them feel like dancing their troubles away. But the Bee Gees and Chic made writing your own songs look easy, and they deserve more respect than they get from the nerdier sort of pop music critic.

The peak of homemade songs arrived with the New Wave / Heartland Rock / Hard Rock zeitgeist of the mid-1980s. Even then, "only" one-half of the top 20 songs were created entirely by their performers, so there was plenty of room for professional songwriters and singers to work together on a project-by-project basis. Still, it's striking how skilled the average pop star was in the '80s. Can't hand off those guitar solos to someone else -- that would be a loss of honor.

By the late '80s, there were more professional outsiders jumping on board during the twilight phase of rock and synth-pop. But unlike earlier periods, things did not bounce back with Something New during the '90s -- or the 21st century, for that matter. Something that only the performers could come up with by themselves. There was a blip in 2004, perhaps another example of the mid-2000s respite from the overall boringification of the culture since the '90s. However, a lot of those songs are rap, hence the "songwriting" quality is not impressive. No singing, for instance, just plain speech.

And now we're right back to mid-century levels of creation-by-committee. It's mind-blowing to look at writer's credits from recent years -- sometimes 3, 4, 5, 6 people being listed. Perhaps the performer is thrown in there somewhere, but they are mostly being supported by an ad hoc team of consultants. And the results are predictable. There's no real sense of passion, commitment, and camaraderie. Each song sounds like the individuals involved were just going through the motions, rehearsing a script.

The only song written by the performer in 2012 was "Somebody That I Used to Know" by Gotye, which is easily the only halfway decent song from last year -- and the most distinctive. It didn't sound like the rest of the 21st century centrally planned pop pap. It's reminiscent of The Police or Peter Gabriel, not out of blind imitation, but simply because songs sound more memorable that way when their performers have something personal invested in them.

As for the rest of it, future generations will probably resonate with it as much as they would with Rosemary Clooney and Eddie Fisher. Meanwhile, they'll still be playing the Beatles, the Bee Gees, and the Boss.

Has grade inflation struck IQ tests, too? A look at kids of New York elite parents

Via Steve Sailer, here is an NYT article on the increasingly high-stakes contest among New York parents to get their kids into elite kindergartens. The focus is on the IQ test used to sort out the top 1% from the rest. Several sources express concern that something funny is going on because the fraction of all New York kids clearing the national top 1% mark has shot up in recent years. Just 6 years ago, only 18% cleared that mark, while last year 29% did.

The IQ / HBD crowd should show some more interest in corruption, test prep, and other forms of grade inflation among the elite -- not just in the obvious places like the Atlanta public school system (wink wink).

Intra-elite competition has been ramping up for decades now, so we can't assume that the most powerful and wealthy group of parents in the country aren't making good use of that power and wealth to get artificially better outcomes for their kids, and hence lower outcomes for everyone else, where those resources are limited.

Looking through the ERB report on changes over time, it's clear that something funny is going on. There's an increase in the mean combined score of 0.375 Standard Deviations -- in just 5 years (fall '07 to fall '12). If we phrased it in terms of height, it's as though these kids had gotten 1.1 inches taller on average in just 5 years. Little of that is due to changes in verbal scores, which are pretty flat. The performance scores, however, have increased by 0.6 SD, almost linearly over time. In height terms, that's 1.8 inches taller on average than 5 years ago.

Moreover, there are no changes in the national sample of children, whether for the verbal, performance, or combined scores, and whether you look at mean scores or 90th or 98th percentiles. Something is going on specifically in the New York bunch of test-takers.

Now, what would champions of the "cognitive elite" say about a group of Atlanta public school kids whose mean IQ scores had apparently risen in 5 short years by nearly 0.4 SD, and whose performance scores had risen by 0.6?

Demographics? Nope -- the ERB looks at age and sex, and there's no change. They don't mention race, but by fall 2007, New York super-parents were already fully white / Jewish / NE Asian. Environmental improvement? Nope -- those kids of Manhattan super-parents weren't starving, disease-stricken, etc., "back" in 2007, only to have recovered by now.

That leaves artificial causes. Since the verbal scores are flat, you might think that it's mostly test prep -- little human beings are already designed for verbal communication and reasoning, but not for weird new things like "what picture comes next in this sequence?" or "3 of the cells of this matrix are filled in. What goes in the missing cell?" There are larger marginal returns if you prep for the performance sub-test, and don't waste too much time on the verbal one.

That's some pretty damn good test prep, if that's all there is to the rise in scores. Remember -- 0.6 SD in just 5 years, on an IQ performance test, not some quiz of factoids. I don't doubt test prep is the new normal for Manhattanite children, and that smarter kids will get more out of it than duller ones. But, not enough to produce such a huge fast increase.

Rather, the likely causes are some mix of tacit grade inflation and outright corruption. IQ-focused nerds can join the 21st century and recognize how rampant such practices are -- including among the very top of the elite, like grade inflation and "No Child Left Without Latin Honors" at Harvard.

I have no experience with Manhattan super-parents or the local test-production and test-prep industries, so I have no intuition about what mix is the most likely. Grade inflation sounds more likely -- understood as necessary by the test-makers, or the super-parents will take their business elsewhere. That will hit the company financially and reputationally.

It's like during the last economic bubble, the ratings agencies inflated the worthiness of various financial packages because if one of them were more honest, the customer would shop it around to another ratings agency that would give it higher marks. The customer holding this batch of mortgages (or whatever) was not interested in an honest appraisal -- they wanted to pass it on to some sucker for as much money as possible, and a higher rating means more money.

Similarly, parents don't want an honest score for their kids -- they want the highest score possible, in order to pass them along to the school that will give them the greatest resource-earning potential into the future. They can't all get the maximum score, or the jig will be up. But that still leaves plenty of room for gradual, subtle rating inflation. The cumulative effect is more pronounced (like the '07 to '12 comparison), but by then your kid has already taken the test and gotten his inflated score, so what do you care if the bubble bursts in the future and wrecks the community? Gotta look out for Number One (and mini-One).

Corruption is not out of the question either, but probably less of a factor. You see that more when the test-takers are below average, and the proctors will just erase the wrong answers the students gave and write in the correct ones. Maybe with orders from above, lest the test make the public school system look bad. But not so much at the elite level -- parents in general aren't greasing the administrators' palms to get their kid into Harvard. Same with the housing bubble -- holders of the mortgages didn't plunk down however-many dollars on the conference table. They used the less detectable tactic of shopping their product around to find the highest rater, with competitive ratings agencies only too eager to accommodate the demand for inflated ratings.

I'm not sure how much revenue the ERB brings in from New York parents, in order for their shopping-around to drive possible decisions to inflate scores. I'm guessing it's more of a reputational concern -- if New York elite parents drop your test like a hot potato, you look like losers. That would hold even for an established IQ test like the SAT -- but would really slam a more unknown test that's just starting out (only existing since the mid-2000s), trying to distinguish itself from all the other tests that elite parents could choose from. Theirs is an endorsement that money can't buy. You have to make it worth their while in other ways.

Both of these causes still don't explain why the rise in scores is most dramatic for the performance and not the verbal scores. Perhaps the grade-inflaters know how to make it seem less noticeable. It is what they do for a living, after all. Like, if the goal is to inflate overall GPA, then (at least at first) inflate the grades for music class but not for math class, which would raise more red flags. And perhaps part of what those $200-per-hour tutoring sessions get you is some first-hand knowledge of the questions through someone who's socially connected and hard-up for money in uber-expensive New York City, though restricted to just the performance sub-test. Again, don't want to give away too much and have it look obvious. And to maintain a decent bargaining position, you want to still be holding onto something they want, not just give it all up on the first date.

All of these hypotheses and their predictions should be followed up on, to see where the culprit truly lies. Though good luck figuring it out. It's not simply a case of "getting your hands on the data" -- that's just test score data. The "data" that you're really after is the behavior and relationships among the various players -- and they're not likely to reveal that much to outsiders.

There's also likely an understanding that the test is designed to get the Children Who Matter into the Schools That Matter. If they don't, why, the global economy could unravel or blow up in 20-30 years. How could America run itself without the right children getting into the right schools? So, you cut them some slack in advance appreciation for the all the society-holding-together work their children will be contributing throughout their lives. Like driving home-ownership rates up to 100%, handing out mortgages to illiterate Mexican strawberry-pickers, opening the floodgates of immigration, and so on.

In summary -- time for the IQ crowd to stop pretending we have a meritocracy these days, to stop being such naive pawns in the elite's game of self-advancement. Intra-elite competition couldn't get any fiercer (although stay tuned for some scenes from next week's episode), and evidence of "rating inflation" of one kind or another has been obvious for decades now. As elite households fight more ruthlessly against one another in naked self-promotion, they'll result to whatever it takes. We don't live in a restrained, sportsmanslike meritocracy but in a no-holds-barred war of all against all.

Miley Cyrus explains that youngsters' kabuki faces stem from autism

A recurring topic around here is how incapable folks these days are of expressing simple basic emotions, resulting in grotesque caricatures when they try to make any face other than that of an iPhone zombie. (See here and here.)

This broken system of expression is particularly strong among Millennials. Boomers and X-ers know how to and have had plenty of practice with showing genuine smiles back in the good old days. So when they make their weirdo face -- albeit not very frequently -- it's more like they're hiding who they really are, because you're not allowed to be yourself anymore in these stuffy, snarky times we live in.

The experience of Millennials, however, has only been with the sarcastic, glib, avoidant, and dismissive period of the past 20 or so years. They're not the pretty girl who makes herself look drab in order to avoid the inevitable assaults of beauty-hating bow-wows. They're the doughy, pizza-faced slug who slathers on juggalo make-up in order to suggest that "I can look pretty, I just don't want to." Get real, you skag.

In a new interview with Rolling Stone, pop star and suspected faggot-trapped-in-a-chick's-body Miley Cyrus explains why she always sticks her tongue out and dials the facial fakeness up to 11 when she's having her picture taken:

"I just stick my tongue out because I hate smiling in pictures. It's so awkward. It looks so cheesy."

The key word there being "awkward" -- expressing basic emotions is awkward, presenting an attentive and affectionate face for your fans is awkward, and trying to make yourself likable is awkward. Young people today are pretty fucking awkward. And yet, does warping your face into a kabuki mask make you look more normal, cheerful, and not-cheesy? Nope. Check out a gallery of this freak sticking her tongue out for the camera.

So there you have it, straight from the horse's mouth. Millennials themselves realize that they aren't taking duckface pictures, staring down at their phones, etc., because it's cool, comforting, fun, or whatever. They're aware that they're just too damn sheltered and awkward to know how to behave around people who don't come from their nuclear family.

Miley Cyrus represents the more antagonistic subset of emotional retards. But her less hostile peers like Selena Gomez, Nicki Minaj, and Kesha aren't any more developed. When they attempt a smile, it still looks smug or strained -- and irritated that you're causing them strain by expecting a normal smile.

Here's something you don't see much of nowadays. So cute and wholesome:

That looks like it's from 1987 or '88, when Debbie Gibson was only 17, yet looking more mature than bratty Millennials in their mid 20s today. Only when helicopter parents began to prevent their children from socializing with their peers did young people become incapable of even feeling basic human emotions, let alone express them to others. Helicopter parents have no one to blame but themselves for producing a generation of Lady Gaga's and Miley Cyruses.

If they want more Debbie Gibsons and Tiffanys, they're going to have to let their kids have their own (i.e. unsupervised) social life. That's what pushes a person to grow up -- having to fit into a group, leaving behind childish egocentrism.

And it's not just the "bright bubbly smile" look that young people used to be capable of. Check out the music video for "Foolish Beat" and note how effortlessly grown-up she looks and acts. Not one of those '80s hall of fame songs, in my book, but focus on how she presents herself. No caricature or irony back then to provide the lazy / retarded way out.

Baby names that would sound trendy but not lame

I've been digging through baby name data again on the Social Security's interactive site, and one thing that causes such distraction when you're coding the data is how irritating so many new names sound. Check out the top 1000 names for 2012, for instance.

"Pretentious" is the first word that comes to mind -- Dalton, Princeton, Colton, Jayden, Hunter, Archer, Aubrianna, Mackenzie, Harper, Brooklynn, Aurora, Arabella, ad nauseam.

What makes names trendy is primarily their sound-shape ("phonotactics"). Today's trendy names have lots of vowels compared to consonants, male names all end in unstressed -n or -r, and other sound-based regulations. Within this primary constraint, parents are more free to choose a name from the Old Testament, a cosmopolitan city, a Celtic surname, an elite school they hope their kid will get into, and so on.

Sadly, even the non-pretentious names that seem to be taken from pop culture, allude to the culture of the Millennial era -- Ryker, Dawson, Cullen, etc. It would be nice to find some more down-to-earth references that are more wholesome and All-American, while still fitting into the primary constraints on sound shapes.

I'm pretty sure your daughter would be the only Lauper or Brinkley at school, and your son the only Delorean or Halen. (And if you didn't get that son you were hoping for, you can always name her Haylynn too.) Girls' names are always more innovative, for better or worse (usually worse). So why not...

Bonjoviana
Brianarama ("ah"), or
Breannarama (with the stressed vowels as in "Anne")
Durannabella
Ediebrickella
Divinylynn

If you're going to scar your kid by picking their name from pop culture, it may as well be something cool.

When did students start confronting teachers about grades?

We can ignore whatever the baseline level is that's due to human nature and focus instead on when teachers and professors become more and more vocal about how students whine, complain, and attempt to negotiate about grades they think are unfair.

Searching the NYT and LexisNexis for "grade grubbing" and "grade grubbers" shows that there are two distinct usages from two different periods. It begins sometime in the 1970s and refers to college students whose sole focus is maximizing their GPA -- they forego having a social life, extra-curriculars, intellectual curiosity, and so on, in order to memorize more facts and study harder before tests. There's no suggestion, though, that this involves regular and predictable confrontations with their professors to complain about grades, and then haggle over what a truly fair grade would be.

"Grade grubbers" in the sense of pests who annoy teachers doesn't show up until the early 2000s. Presumably, the shift in the meaning was gradual, and so likely took place during the '90s.

Looking for the earliest account of an ongoing epidemic of student complaining and entitlement, I found this webpage / article from 1997. Its citations include contemporary news reports, academic articles, and first-hand stories from professors around the country. Part of it is concerned with the declining quality of the preparation that students arrive at college with, and the amount of work they put in when they get there. But it also features a lengthy review of student attitudes and behavior regarding fair grades -- by the time of the article, they'd begun to feel like just showing up to class and completing the assignments (no matter the quality) should secure a high grade, they demanded grade inflation in general, and in particular cases they would confront professors to have their test or paper score bumped up.

How far back did this go? Going through his list of over 100 citations, there are few from the 1980s, and none point to student vs. professor confrontations over grades. The only references to the decade are to the late '80s, and have more to do with falling achievement levels and growing apathy among students. Even the citations from 1990 to '92 don't support the view of "students as haggling pests." Not until the citations from 1993 to '96 do we see an explosion of that picture. Here's a quote that the author chose from a 1993 article in Harvard Magazine ("Desperately seeking summa"):

A student in a history course at Harvard “told … [the instructor] that he needed a better grade … because he needed to get into medical school. ‘I may not be very good at history,’ he said, ‘but I’m going to be a very good doctor, and I really reject the idea that you have the right to keep me out of medical school’.… Students are more likely to contest grades now. For many instructors, grading is the most distasteful thing they do. Often students help to make it unpleasant."

The author points out that the "student empowerment" movement of the 1960s can have little to do with the phenomenon of aggressive complainers since it far post-dates the heyday of the counter-culture. That's true of just about everything wrong with social relations these days -- they're a product of the 1990s, and were absent as recently as the '80s (e.g., political correctness, diversity sensitivity, multiculturalism, date rape hysteria, feminazis, homo enablers, etc.). Conservatives must wrap their brains around this fact of the timing, or else they'll cluelessly blame The Sixties and propose solutions that, whatever their worth in other respects, will do nothing to turn the tide against Millennial-era problems.

What about the link to widening inequality, and the attendant growing competition among aspiring elite members? We'd expect that kind of dog-eat-dog world to breed the aggressive grade-haggling that we see today. (See this article by Peter Turchin for a good review of the dynamics of inequality and its consequences.)

Income inequality began to grow sometime in the mid-to-late 1970s, and the higher ed bubble got going around 1980 (shown by percent of high school grads in college, and college tuition -- higher prices reflecting higher demand). Why the lag of 12-13 years from the start of the higher ed bubble until constant professor complaining about constant student complaining? I doubt it'd take that long to manifest itself, or for observers to notice. Compare the case of yuppies -- punks were already spray-painting "Die Yuppie Scum" back in the '80s, and an acclaimed movie from 1987 skewered the prevalent view on Wall Street that "Greed is good."

For that matter, forget the higher ed bubble. Once inequality starts to widen by the late '70s, why don't we read widespread reports of high schoolers -- or their parents -- pestering their teachers about boosting grades? The "grade grubber" in the '70s sense is still there -- Brian from The Breakfast Club, the nerd in Heathers whose contribution to talking about the suicide of a classmate is if they'll be tested on it later. Or that other grade-grubber in Heathers, whose sole purpose is maximizing his chances to gain early acceptance into an Ivy League school ("and please let it be Harvard," he begs God while praying at a classmate's funeral). But absent are any journalistic reports or fictional portrayals of high school kids confronting their teachers to haggle over grades.

One of the early-2000s references to confrontational grade grubbling in the press came from a high school teacher. My sister-in-law spontaneously remarked that complaints about grade-obsessed parents these days could have been said about her high school back in 1995.

So, it seems that hostile self-promotion is a product of both the rising-inequality trend and the falling-crime / cocooning trend. It can't be just the first, or else we would've seen it during the later '70s perhaps, but definitely throughout all of the '80s. And it can't be just the second, since I don't have that impression of the last stretch of cocooning from the mid-30s through the '50s. Students from that era are also bored, apathetic, dorky, and docile. But not hostile and self-promoting on top of it, like today's dorky student body.

That predicts that we'd see something similar going on among students of the Victorian era in Europe, and the Gilded Age in America. I have no idea whether that's borne out or not, though. They didn't have the same widespread level of public education and higher ed that we do during this incarnation of the "worst of both worlds" zeitgeist. But, it's something that someone could look into.

Body dysmorphia and cocooning

It's something I've covered here and there before, but as occasionally happens, I wrote an entire blog post in someone else's comment section. Here is the post, about some nude model with already large breasts who's gotten them enlarged several times nevertheless. Not too different from the "sweater girl" phenomenon of the mid-century, exaggerating their chest size with bullet bras in order to prop up their sense of self-worth.

When people cocoon, they lack the feedback from others that tells them where they rank -- pretty, average, ugly, etc. So they take up solitary pursuits like breast augmentation to convince themselves that they're worthy -- y'know, rather than putting themselves out there for the boys and seeing how many date offers they get.

Add body dysmorphia to the list cocooning's web of dysfunction.

"Sir" or "Mister"?

With the return of overly formal and distant/avoidant social relations, people feel less comfortable addressing strangers in friendly ways.

You still hear "dude" and "man" among youngish males, but even there it's not as common as it used to be. "Dude" is now more of an interjection, like "Wow!" Hence, "Dude! You'll never believe what I just saw..." It expresses the speaker's feelings rather than address another person in an informal way, a la "What's up dude?" "Not much, dude. How 'bout you dude?" (No one claimed that informality would make you sound smarter.) It seems like "man" is the only one left, like a fast food worker who gives you your order with a "Here you go, man." "Cool. Thanks, man."

The change that really rubs me the wrong way, however, is the ubiquity of "Sir" -- like, I'm not royalty,  I'm not a potential employer who you're petitioning, and I'm not one of your superiors whose butt you have to kiss. It's not only retail workers who are required to say this -- it's panhandlers (who have no boss giving them orders) and everyday people on the train or other public spaces. In the retail setting, their bosses aren't just giving them pointless orders to address customers more formally -- it's likely because today's customers expect that level of formality from the workers.

I wish it were just a sign that I'm considered an old geezer by the young 'uns, but they all think I'm in my early or mid 20s, and besides, they address one another that way too. Generally girls call guys their own age "Sir" in the right context, while guys tend to reserve "Sir" for older men.

I'd be fine with no address at all in the retail setting, which is where you hear it most often. "Is there anything I can help you find?" -- I don't need to hear "Sir?" at the end. "Sir" makes it feel more like a patron-client relationship, rather than them being there to help out another person like themselves. Again, I don't blame the workers so much, although I'm sure that as members of today's world, they too prefer that kind of detachment rather than talking to strangers in a friendly way. It's due more to distant customers these days wanting more, well, distance between themselves and the workers.

If they're going to use some kind of address, what ever happened to "Mister"? That sounded more informal because people used it not only in a polite context -- "Need any help carrying those bags, Mister?" -- but also in a talking-down or putting-in-their-place context -- "And just where do you think you're going, Mister?" It was a leveling form of address, not used only toward superiors. Even when it was used toward elders or superiors, it just sounds more like someone you know from the neighborhood, like "Mr. Callahan from next door." It made young people sound less groveling and pathetic when they addressed their elders, and didn't make the elders feel like distant old fogies who needed to be carefully addressed in order to protect their ego.

Plus, "Mister" allowed all manner of ironic usages among folks who already knew each other. One friend tries to back out of a commitment to another one, and he replies jokingly but seriously with, "Woah, guess again, Mister. C'mon, there'll be girls there -- it'll be cool." It's like a friendly little poke in the ribs.

Or a girlfriend might refer to her boyfriend playfully as though he were a stranger. Remember at the end of Back to the Future, when Marty McFly is trying to appreciate what a sweet ride his new black truck is? His girlfriend Jennifer walks up behind him, pauses, and teasingly asks, "...How 'bout a ride, Mister?" It's such a warm way to flirt because "Mister" calls subtle attention to the fact that the two of you are in fact already close to each other.

And of course, sometimes the usage was intentionally underscoring the fact that the two were total strangers -- as in, "strangers in the night," or "relying on the kindness of strangers." Like some babe asking for a ride home: "You goin' my way, Mister?" Or when she recognizes that you're new to the nightclub or bar: "Say Mister, don't believe I've seen you around here before..." It's acknowledging the lack of a former acquaintance, while treating it as no big deal, nothing that we ought to let stand in the way of hitch-hiking, dancing, or what have you.

It really was a versatile form of address, and it'll be a sign of changing times once we start to hear it (or something like it) in common speech again. Until then, for God's sake, don't call me "Sir." It takes you right out of the moment.