"Jen Bekman is a New York City gallerist, entrepreneur and writer. After building a successful internet career with companies including New York Online, Netscape, Disney and Meetup, Jen turned her internet experience and fresh perspective on to the art world. She is the founder of Jen Bekman Projects which encompasses three ventures: her eponymous gallery in NYC, Hey, Hot Shot!, a photography competition, and the pioneering e-commerce fine art print site, 20x200. 20x200's launch was entirely bootstrapped, and it quickly grew into a profitable, million dollar business. Jen was named one of Forbes.com’s Top Ten Female Entrepreneurs to Watch, as well as Fast Company’s Most Influential Women in Technology."

"Some activists lament how few anti-authoritarians there appear to be in the United States. One reason could be that many natural anti-authoritarians are now psychopathologized and medicated before they achieve political consciousness of society’s most oppressive authorities.

…

Americans have been increasingly socialized to equate inattention, anger, anxiety, and immobilizing despair with a medical condition, and to seek medical treatment rather than political remedies. What better way to maintain the status quo than to view inattention, anger, anxiety, and depression as biochemical problems of those who are mentally ill rather than normal reactions to an increasingly authoritarian society."

…authoritarians financially marginalize those who buck the system, they criminalize anti-authoritarianism, they psychopathologize anti-authoritarians, and they market drugs for their “cure.”"

"I’m sick & tired of things so vast I can’t understand them. Genetics. Capitalism. International relations…

Everything in my experience confirms that I am here. I stretch almost compulsively, feeling out my body’s physicality…

Somehow I have landed in a nunnery. Dedicated to the advancement of science & art. There should just be a fucking school, where people go to learn multiplication in the reproductive sense.

We are the scum of earth. The thought leaders. There is some debauchery, but in comparison this is a place of rigor. Home of chaste workers.

What’s disturbing is that the educated go out & control world. I met a consultant who has broken trust down to a science, which she sells to corporations. Trust, she says, is good for business. & what about business? What’s that good for? I asked her. She smiled smart-but-dead-like & said, you have to believe that growing the economy is good for the world. Consulting is a desired job—maybe the quintessential job—of the educated class."

"I certainly still lie awake some nights worrying that I am in denial, that Simon has some gross deficiency not yet identified, and I am did him great a disservice. I worry constantly that I should limit his reading and solitary time and push him into sports and classes and social activities. But just when I am about to write that check for ice hockey classes I touch base with my instinctive sense of my son, this imaginative, overly verbose happy creature, and decide not to risk ironing out his uniqueness.  Until we can figure out more creative ways to educate and encourage introspective boys who are neither high achievers nor troublemakers—boys “in the middle,” like Simon–I will keep holding my ground, my breath and my tongue, and shoo away the well-intentioned label makers who cross our path."

"Attention-deficit drugs increase concentration in the short term, which is why they work so well for college students cramming for exams. But when given to children over long periods of time, they neither improve school achievement nor reduce behavior problems. The drugs can also have serious side effects, including stunting growth.

Sadly, few physicians and parents seem to be aware of what we have been learning about the lack of effectiveness of these drugs."

Homeschooling didn’t “fix” anything for my son, at least right away. I made many of the mistakes I teachers made with him…

Yet every time I stepped back, allowing him to pursue his own interests he picked up complicated concepts beautifully…

The more I stepped back, the more I saw how much my son accomplished when fueled by his own curiosity…

Gradually I recognized that he learned in a complex, deeply focused and yes, apparently disorganized manner…Sometimes his intense interests fueled busy days. Sometimes it seemed he did very little— those were times that richer wells of understanding developed…

His greatest surprise in college has been how disinterested his fellow students are in learning…

My son taught me that distractible, messy, disorganized children are perfectly suited to learn in their own way. It was my mistake to keep him in school as long as we did. I’m glad we finally walked away from those doors to enjoy free range learning."

"Spitzer grew up to be a psychiatrist…his dislike of psychoanalysis remaining undimmed…then, in 1973, an opportunity to change everything presented itself. There was a job going editing the next edition of a little-known spiral-bound booklet called DSM - the Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.<br />
<br />
DSM is simply a list of all the officially recognised mental illnesses & their symptoms. Back then it was a tiny book that reflected the Freudian thinking predominant in the 1960s. It had very few pages, & very few readers.<br />
<br />
What nobody knew when they offered Spitzer the job was that he had a plan: to try to remove human judgement from psychiatry. He would create a whole new DSM that would eradicate all that crass sleuthing around the unconscious; it hadn't helped his mother. Instead it would be all about checklists. Any psychiatrist could pick up the manual, & if the patient's symptoms tallied with the checklist for a particular disorder, that would be the diagnosis."

"The panel I was on at SXSW dealt a lot with the distractions that seduce content-makers, particularly on the web. For a long time, I considered myself ADD & dreamed of a pill that could make it alright. But the longer I write, the more I think my problems have less to do w/ ADD, & more to do with my desire to avoid pain.<br />
<br />
It's painful to write. It's painful to take a clear look at your finances, at your health, at your relationships. At least it's painful when you have no confidence that you can actually improve in those areas. I would not speak for anyone else, but most of my distractions are traceable to a deep-seated fear that I may not ultimately prevail. <br />
<br />
I guess I could have taken a pill to ease that anxiety, and I would not disparage those who do. But there's something powerful…in knowing that the anxiety is not mystical. Surely, I still often procrastinate. But conceptualizing it as fear has really helped. I don't want to be a chump. I refuse to punked by the work."

"I felt less like myself. Though I could put more words to the page per hour on Adderall, I had a nagging suspicion that I was thinking w/ blinders on…"<br />
<br />
"There's also the risk that Adderall can work too well…Paul Erdös, who famously opined that "a mathematician is a device for turning coffee into theorems," began taking Benzedrine in his late 50s & credited drug w/ extending his productivity long past expiration date of colleagues. But he eventually became psychologically dependent. In 1979, a friend offered Erdös $500 to kick his Benzedrine habit for a month. Erdös met the challenge, but his productivity plummeted so drastically that he decided to go back…After a 1987 Atlantic profile discussed his love affair w/ psychostimulants, [he] wrote the author a rueful note. "You shouldn't have mentioned the stuff about Benzedrine. It's not that you got it wrong. It's just that I don't want kids who are thinking about going into math to think that they have to take drugs to succeed.""

"There are plenty of good reasons to ride a train cross-country, but for HUGH RYAN and his attention index, hitting the rails has one purpose: to escape the merciless internet."

"New research finds our minds wander much more frequently than we realize, and our inability to stay focused in the present leads to unhappiness."

"This animate was adapted from a talk given at the RSA by Sir Ken Robinson, world-renowned education and creativity expert and recipient of the RSA's Benjamin Franklin award."

"Stillness, meditation, reflection, silence. Radio documentary maker Alan Hall goes in search of refuge from the noise and bustle of the modern world, looking for moments of peace amid the hurly-burly of daily life."

"I worry about the echo chamber of tumblrs and their ilk and the meaningless repetition and amplification of digital objects. I’m obsessed with the way that people collect, hoard, and re-broadcast photos and music and words without also creating their own. I’m not saying every tumblr reblogging pictures of hot girls in kitten earmuffs or grainy photos of Parisian cafes is as intentional and special as Orozco’s working tables, but the impulse, I think, is similar. We are overwhelmed, and if we can pick and chose a few objects that we like, put them in a place where we can keep them, it helps us to exercise some kind of control over the flood, even if it leads to visual/aural/literary ADD and a tawdry kind of exhibitionism: look at all these things I found. But while I’d rather not bother with some peoples’ online collections, I think some are interesting as works in progress, and some seem like ready-made archives, perfect and complete."

"I have become a "bad student." I can no longer wander an art museum without asking a bazillion questions that the docent doesn't know or won't answer or desperately wanting access to information that goes beyond what's on the brochure...I can't pay attention in a lecture without looking up relevant content. &, in my world, every meeting & talk is enhanced through a backchannel of communication. This isn't simply a generational issue. In some ways, it's a matter of approach...Am I learning what the speaker wants me to learn? Perhaps not. But I am learning & thinking & engaging. I'm 31 years old. I've been online since I was a teen. I've grown up with this medium & I embrace each new device that brings me closer to being a cyborg. I want information at my fingertips now & always...What will it take for us to see technology as a tool for information enhancement? At the very least, how can we embrace those who learn best when they have an outlet for their questions & thoughts?"

"Ito describes two kinds of youthful Internet users: 1) those who use social computing technologies to facilitate high school affinity practices such as gossip and status-checking and 2) those who seek out more advanced forms of expertise in specialized knowledge communities. Bauerlein totally dismisses the latter group in his attack on the former, but -- speaking as the parent of a teenager who has used the Internet to learn about film noir, contemporary French drama, traditional printmaking, and the ethnomusicology of the blues -- I don't think the existence of this demographic should be completely discounted without any critical reflection."

"Leonardo rarely completed any of the great projects that he sketched in his notebooks. ... he had trouble focusing for long periods on a single project. ... Leonardo, it seems, was a hopeless procrastinator. Or that's what we are supposed to believe, following the narrative started by his earliest biographer, Giorgio Vasari, and continued in the sermons of today's anti-procrastination therapists and motivational speakers. Leonardo, you see, was "afraid of success," so he never really gave his best effort. There was no chance of failure that way. Better to "self-sabotage" than to come up short." ... "If there is one conclusion to be drawn from the life of Leonardo, it is that procrastination reveals the things at which we are most gifted — the things we truly want to do. Procrastination is a calling away from something that we do against our desires toward something that we do for pleasure, in that joyful state of self-forgetful inspiration that we call genius."

Nice collection of quotes from Deschooling Society followed by some good questions like: "Do we expect medical doctors to see 20 patients at one time and to diagnose and treat everyone equally? Is this what's happening in our schools? I know this argument has been made before, but it still feels relevant here. Why aren't teachers' colleges educating teachers to work with students as individuals as opposed to students as classes? Is efficiency still the most important factor a teacher should know?" ... Illich was spot on with: "Pedagogical therapists will drug their pupils more in order to teach them better, and students will drug themselves more to gain relief from the pressures of teachers and the race for certificates."

"While the Atlantic article warns against conclusions drawn from anecdotes, it is almost entirely anecdotal. Tellingly, it quotes not a single study that has measured any of the things mentioned as a concern by the author or anyone else."

"Eventually, though, it became clear that the Internet had become so much more distracting that I had to start treating it differently. Basically, I had to add a new application to my list of known time sinks: Firefox."

"Newly minted grown-ups are carrying out a massive natural experiment by choosing to do without the drugs that profoundly affected their experience of childhood."