“Find out what kids are good at. It will change their lives.”

Last week, rapper and soul star Plan B made an impassioned speech at TEDx, outlining society’s failure to nurture its disadvantaged youth. Here is an extract …

I’m working really hard at the minute trying to finish my directorial debut, Ill Manors, which is a hip-hop-based film. When people ask me what the film is about, I say it’s about all the things we read in the newspaper; the despicable things that I don’t think many of us agree with when we read them. The papers tell us that they happen but they never tell us why they happen. So Ill Manors is trying to get to the bottom of why we have these problems in society with our youth, why we constantly keep on reading negative things about our youth.

The Joy of Quiet

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

‘Unprepared for the modern world.’ Is this an accurate assessment of the youth in your society?

Question Analysis and Context

‘unprepared for the modern world’ requires a consideration of the traits of the current world that are relevant for the question such as the competitive global environment which involves the threat of foreign talent, more companies going global and requiring workers to leave their comfort zone to work overseas; globalized world where countries (and Singapore) are more vulnerable to international events and trends; requirements of knowledge-based economies etc.

Why should marriage last forever?

When you live in a place with a 50 percent divorce rate, is “till death do you part” even a realistic concept? In a radical rethinking of matrimony, Mexico City’s assembly is mulling a proposed civil code reform that would enable the city to issue marriage licenses with time limits.

Singaporeans spend to decide gender of their baby

When it comes to fulfilling their long-cherished dream of bearing a son and heir, there is no limit to how far Singaporeans will go. Like Thailand, for example, or even the United States. The attraction of these places has to do with not just their skills in in-vitro fertilisation (IVF) treatment. After all, that is on offer here.

Moral decay at the top as bad as the bottom in the UK

David Cameron, Ed Miliband and the entire British political class came together yesterday to denounce the rioters. They were of course right to say that the actions of these looters, arsonists and muggers were abhorrent and criminal, and that the police should be given more support.

Internet repression, Western-style

Did the youthful rioters who roamed the streets of London, Manchester and other British cities expect to see their photos scrutinized by angry Internet users, keen to identify the miscreants? In the immediate aftermath of the riots, many cyber-vigilantes turned to Facebook, Flickr and other social networking sites to study pictures of the violence. Some computer-savvy members even volunteered to automate the process by using software to compare rioters’ faces with faces pictured elsewhere on the Internet.

After Riots, Britain Seeks Answers

LONDON — Outside a London court last week, as those accused of looting and rioting in the most destructive and widespread violence in recent British history faced justice, a mother turned to her 11-year-old son, accused of theft, and asked simply, “Why?”

That question has been at the heart of a fraught national debate as Britons puzzle over what drove even some previously law-abiding people to steal, sometimes risking arrest for nothing more than bottles of water. The debate has often divided people into predictable camps.

2011: The Year We Realised Our Elected Leaders Can’t Protect Us

By Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian

The soul sinks at the pictures – of a woman leaping from a burning building, of the owners of a family shop seeing their life’s work turned to ash, at the sight of a thug unzipping the rucksack still on the back of an injured teenager and taking from it what he wants. The soul sinks at the sight of people trashing the places where at least some of them live.

There is another sensation you feel watching these pictures, and it is one with which we are becoming increasingly familiar, especially in 2011, the year the news refused to stop. It is impotence.

The most unsettling reports have been of policemen standing back, apparently powerless to stop people as they smash and burn and steal. It’s deeply unnerving to see those we expect to protect us incapable and in retreat. Read the comment threads and Twitter feeds, with their demands that “this must stop”, or even for looters to be “shot on sight”, and you see the signs of impotent rage, the desperate desire for somebody to do something.

We Must Be Superstars: In Defense of Pop (and Maybe Narcissism, Too)

By Nitsuh Adebe
New York Magazine

So far, I’m not quite old enough to entertain any worries about the youth of the nation or the deficiencies of their character. Plenty of today’s young adults actually strike me as irritatingly great: Growing up with the Internet means they knew by age 10 what I learned last week, and a lot of them seem awfully bold and brave about asserting themselves all over everyone.

My opinion might be in the minority. Lately, the conventional wisdom is that young people think far too much of themselves—they’re coddled little zeppelins of ego in desperate need of shooting down. The cover of July’s Atlantic is emblazoned with the headline how THE CULT OF SELF-ESTEEM IS RUINING OUR KIDS; inside, quotes from psychologist Jean M. Twenge explain how we’re producing generations of feckless narcissists. Earlier this year, the online equivalent of applause greeted a study of pop lyrics from 1980 to 2007 in which a whole team of psychologists, Twenge included, claimed there’s been a rise in narcissism, self-regard, and antisocial hostility at the top of the Billboard charts: Songs have moved fromwe and us to me and I, and come over all ornery in the process. Surprised? New York Times columnist David Brooks, for one, already saw that as self-evident: “It’s nice,” he wrote, “to have somebody rigorously confirm an impression many of us have formed.”

“Rigorously” is a stretch. The study consists of little more than running ten lyrics per year through a word-counting computer program, which I can’t imagine taking longer than an afternoon. The study’s authors aren’t much interested in music, either: They’re merely using it as collateral evidence of some decades-long cultural slide into self-­absorption. Books to their names include The Narcissism Epidemic and Generation Me: Why Today’s Young Americans Are More Confident, Assertive, Entitled—and More Miserable Than Ever Before. As that subtitle suggests, these academics fret about a tidal wave of narcissism because they’re convinced it’s bad for the narcissists, leaving them ill-equipped to deal with the world. “They come off as confident,” the study’s co-author, C. Nathan DeWall, told NPR, “but if you insult or provoke them in any way, it sort of breaks their bubble, and they’re very fragile people.” That same week, bubble enthusiast Lady Gaga—who once said, “I want people to walk around delusional about how great they can be”—burst into tears when a journalist asked her about her recent single’s resemblance to a Madonna song.