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Tuesday, May 12, 2009 world trends

INTELLIGENCE/ROGER COHEN

Grow Up? Why Bother? New York I was listening the other day to Jonathan Schwartz, an American radio show host with a passion for Sinatra and a hypnotic style of his own involving elaborate use of the pregnant pause. Adolescence, Schwartz observed, apropos of nothing, is now thought to end around the age of 32. “Yeah,” Schwartz said. Radio takes account of shallow human attention spans, allowing the listener to focus and drift away, demanding neither too much nor too little. I found myself jolted from my day-dreaming by Schwartz’s pushback of adolescence into the fourth decade. Adolescence — the phase between childhood and adulthood, during which kids passing through puberty and discovering sexuality display an uncanny capacity to sleep and drive their parents crazy — is generally thought to begin around the age of 11 and end at about 18. But observing my own children, I’ve been wondering about that definition, which is why Schwartz’s remark caught my attention. I’ve developed something I call the “Sophistication-Maturity Inversion Curve.” I gave it a fancy name in the hope it makes its way into some scientific journal, but the essence of the theory is simple: the more sophisticated a kid is, the less

Teenagers may be acquiring knowledge in a social vacuum. mature he or she may in fact be. Today’s teenagers are far more sophisticated than any previous generation. I didn’t know what sushi was until I was 25. Teenagers know global cuisine, tackle global problems by going green (when they remember to switch off the lights), understand global humanitarian law (at least as applied to what punishments parents may inflict), and are familiar with every global brand. But a lot of this knowledge is acquired in a social vacuum. If maturity involves the painful acquisition of knowledge through experience, it is put off by the ubiquity of the virtual world. The result is adolescence’s extension. In fact, it’s being stretched at both ends, with childhood curtailed by the above-mentioned sophistication, and adulthood delayed. Surveys suggest children now stop believing in magical creatures like elves four years earlier than their parents’ generation. In a sense, the prolongation of adolescence is logical. Why hurry to adulthood, with its responsibilities, when life is getting longer? If the 50s are the new 40s, as popular theory now asserts, why can’t 25 be the new 15, or even 32 the new 12? The 20s are being transformed for many from the age of the onset of work to odyssey years of exploration and experiment, often from a base, Italian-style, in the parental home. I was talking the other day to a young woman in her late-20s who was describing to me the phenomenon of what she calls the “man-boy.” These are male inhabitants of New York, aged about 25 to 40, whom she described as so emotionally stunted that receiving a call from one — rather than a text or e-mail — had become shocking. They’ve put off responsibility outside work — including relationships and marriage — as an intolerable burden on man-boyhood. Of course, any form of psychological theorizing is a little suspect. After all, we have a United States president who was raised fatherless and abandoned by his mother to his grandparents at the age of 10. Yet he’s a model of serenity. That’s especially surprising in that, at 47, Barack Obama is only 15 years past adolescence. For comments, write to [email protected]

Senegal’s Building Blocks, Primitive and Perilous By ADAM NOSSITER

GUÉDIAWAYE, Senegal — Aba Dione, 7 years old, perished in March in the trash-filled corner of an abandoned dwelling here, as good a place to play as any, it seemed, when the other options were garbage and more garbage. Except that in this case the thick carpet of crushed plastic bottles and bags, clothing shreds, old flip-flops and muck was deceptively floating on several feet of water; unknowing, Aba fell in and drowned. Garbage might have seemed safe to the boy because it is everywhere in this forlorn, duncolored slum abutting Dakar, the capital. Delivered on order for a few pennies a load by rickety horse-drawn carts speeding through the dirt streets of the Médina Gounass neighborhood of Guédiawaye, it is as pervasive as the hot midday sun in which it bakes. The people use it to shore up their flood-prone houses and streets in this low-lying area near the Atlantic coast; they have no choice. Garbage, packed down tight and then covered with a thin layer of sand, is used to raise the floors of houses that flood regularly in the brief but intense summer rainy season, and it is packed into the dusty streets that otherwise become canals. The water lingers for months in the low-lying terrain of this bone-dry country. Garbage is a surrogate building material, a critical filler to deal with the stagnant water — cheap, instantly accessible and never diminishing. The plastic-laden spillover from these foulsmelling deliveries pokes up through the sandy lots, In Médina Gounass, Miles 100 covers the ground between trash is used to build up aint-Louis MAURITANIA the crumbling cinder-block Guédiawaye low lying areas prone to houses, becomes grazing Thiès flooding, but the practice Diourbel Gounass Médina ground for goats, playKa Kaolack MALI Dakar spawns disease and poses SENEGAL ground for barefoot, runnyTambacounda a risk to children. nosed children and breedGAMBIA Banjul ing ground for swarms of Casamance River flies. Disease flourishes GUINEABissau “It’s not the best way,’’ said here, aid groups say: cholAtlantic BISSAU Pape Yabandao, a mason who era, malaria, yellow fever Ocean Dabola GUINEA Boke was working on the walls of a and tuberculosis. MALI house here. “But what can we Sixteen kilometers away 600 Miles Kindia Dakar do?’’ in the capital, piles of refuse BoboKoudougou WEST AFRICA Dioulasso Garbage had been an indisare merely an intermittent Conakry SIERRA NIGERIA pensable building tool for him, feature of the dusty cityLEONE Area of Freetown too. scape. Garbage in Dakar detail Bo Why? is dumped under tattered “I don’t have the means,’’ he signs warning “Dump no The New York Times said. “If you don’t have other sogarbage,’’ and trash fires lutions, and if everybody here uses garbage, you burn all night in neighborhoods by the beaches. have to, too. There’s water in the house and in the Torn black plastic bags festoon Dakar’s shrubrooms.’’ As he spoke, a garbage cart charged up bery, trees and fences in a metropolis of often a street in the distance to deliver its load. do-it-yourself services. Ami Camara, Aba’s mother, was not the first But here in Médina Gounass, the unrestrained to lose a child to the hidden bogs of Médina Gougarbage tide finds its apotheosis.

olivier asselin for The New York Times

nass. Hanging her head in the courtyard of a four-room shanty where she and 15 family members live, she quietly recalled bathing her young son after lunch and sending him out to play. Then his friends found his shoes, and his body. “Everything that happens is the will of God,’’ said the boy’s grandmother, Yaline Ndaye. “We can’t do anything about it.’’ She turned away. Local officials accept this near-worst-of-several-worlds with almost the same fatalism. “We wanted to stop this, because it is risky,” said Amadou Gaye, deputy mayor for Médina Gounass, which has a population of around 85,000. “But the people are too poor. If these areas are filled in, there’s less risk.’’ One risk quickly replaces another, however. Living in garbage — eating, washing and playing in it — “has harmful consequences,’’ said Abdou Karim Fall, of the antipoverty development agency Enda — Tiers Monde, which is based in Dakar. “All the diseases come with it,’’ he said, “and they are so far advanced in these neighborhoods. Children are the most exposed. People live all year long right up against stagnant water and garbage.’’

Toyota’s Home Undergoes An Identity Crisis

In Toyota City, Japan, more than 1,000 job seekers a day are lining up at Hello Work, a job placement agency.

By MARTIN FACKLER

TOYOTA CITY, Japan — For years, Toyota City prospered along with the giant carmaker that shares its name, growing into a global automotive manufacturing center as its official sister city, Detroit, slid into decline. Now, the current economic crisis has halted the good times in Japan’s Motor City. Toyota Motor, the city’s largest employer and dominating presence, has idled factories and slashed production amid its first annual net loss in 59 years. This has pushed Toyota City into its worst slump in memory, as jobs have vanished, tax revenues have dried up and tidy downtown shopping streets have grown eerily empty. The reversal of fortune has turned both Toyotas, the city and the car company, into grim symbols of a global downturn that has spared few, including the once seemingly unstoppable Japanese auto industry. “In the beginning, we used to aspire to be a second Detroit,’’ said Tatsuya Yoshimura, who owns a camera shop in downtown Toyota City. “Now, that is what we are afraid of becoming.’’ Many in this proud company town of 423,000 are questioning their extreme economic de-

jeremy sutton hibbert for The New York Times

pendence on a single corporation, even if it is the world’s largest automaker. “When Toyota sneezed, we caught pneumonia,’’ said Shoji Sawahira, head of the finance section at Toyota City’s city hall. “We never imagined this would happen to the world’s No. 1 company.’’ Fear of the future is palpable at the local unemployment office, the optimistically named Hello Work Toyota, which has suddenly found itself overrun by the newly jobless. Until last summer, the office sat largely empty as the local auto industry faced a chronic labor shortage, drawing workers from across Japan and as far away as Brazil and Peru. Now, Hello Work is crowded with more than 1,000 job seekers a day who line up for hours to claim unemployment insurance or sit anxiously at computer terminals scouring a job database.

One of those who came to find work was Masahiro Tanaka, 30, who lost his job at an auto glass factory in February. He said it was the first time he or anyone he knew had been cut in 12 years of working at auto parts factories in

Toyota City. “The only places that are still busy are those producing for the Prius,’’ Mr. Tanaka said, referring to Toyota’s fuel-efficient hybrid sedan, which has remained popular despite the slump. “Everywhere else, jobs are just gone. Completely gone.’’ Hello Work’s vice director, Masami Kawajiri, said 8,042 job seekers visited the office between January and March, up 133 percent from the same period a year ago. The sudden surge in job seekers has kept Hello Work’s staff working sixday weeks without breaks, Mr. Kawajiri said. “We’ve never seen it this busy,’’ said Mr. Kawajiri, who explained that overwork had turned one of his eyes blood-red. “I don’t even want to think of what will happen if the economy gets even worse.’’

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