2024-08-29
10 分钟The Economist Hi there, this is Jason Palmer,
co-host of The Intelligence, our daily news and current affairs show.
This is Editor's Picks,
where we take an unmissable article from the latest edition of The Economist and get someone with better diction than mine to read it aloud.
Have a listen.
An older boss was correcting a younger female employee.
There is no P in hamster, said the boss.
But that's how I spell it, the twenty-something objected.
The boss suggested they consult a dictionary.
The employee called her mother, put her on speakerphone,
and tearfully insisted that she tell her boss not to be so mean.
It is an arresting vignette.
The tearful employee appears to have imbibed the notion of my truth,
a popular phrase intended to rationalise the speaker's beliefs and shield them from criticism based on facts.
You may say that one plus one equals two, but my truth is that it makes three.
Postmodernists deem this way of thinking sophisticated.
Keith Haywood calls it childish.
He is right.
But Mr Haywood, a criminologist at the University of Copenhagen, goes much further.
In Infantilised he contends that young people today are less mature than previous generations and that Western culture is to blame.