On the front page of The New York Times Book Review this week was ‘Sticks and Stones’ By Emily Bazelon, reviewed by Andrew Solomon. Emily Bazelon charts the experiences of a few bullied children and synthesizes the scholarship on how to contain or prevent such harm.
The subject of this book review in conjunction with another article in the same paper, ‘This Story Stinks’ By Dominique Brossard and Dietram A Scheufele, is a sad commentary on civility today. The article notes how “uncivil comments [on internet articles] not only polarized readers, but they often changed a participant’s interpretation of the news story itself.”
Is bullying and rudeness actually growing – or are we just noticing it more?