old age

Earlier this week I wandered into the periodicals room at Butler while taking a break from reading and started reading through Granta's issue of Best of Young American Novelists. The introduction notes that the jury chose to lower the age from 40 to 35 because the kids are so precocious these days. But also noted is that sixty percent of those selected for the British edition came from Oxford and Cambridge and many of the Americans came from Ivy League or similar undergraduate institutions. So really it means that the kids are so precocious because they come from the means to be precocious.

I write this while I'm getting ready to teach ninth and tenth graders ethics for Columbia's summer program for high schoolers, which is just about exclusively the offspring of the well-to-do.