Parenting Post-9/11

The “Parenting Post-9/11” chapter examines the environment that Generation Disaster’s caregivers created within the family microsystem throughout their childhood and adolescence, as parents are generally the most important developmental influence during those formative years. It then considers how this cohort’s parents were impacted by 9/11 and all of the subsequent societal changes, as well as their fears about children’s safety amid the rise in school shootings, and it demonstrates how children’s responses to stressful and traumatic events are closely correlated with their caregivers’ reactions. The chapter considers whether accusations of “helicopter parenting” by these caregivers are valid, and it examines the impact of smartphones and other technologies on the first group of parents and children that had to incorporate these tools into their family dynamics.

The Road Not Taken

This article explores the position taken by the Herut party and its leader, Menachem Begin, on fundamental issues of democracy and regime type. It analyzes the democratic model that Begin and Herut sought to promote during Israel’s formative years: a presidential democracy with a clearly defined separation of powers preserved in a rigorous formal constitution that includes both judicial supremacy and a mechanism for judicial review. The article illuminates an important and unexplored chapter in Israeli historiography—the right wing’s position on the formation of Israel’s democratic regime—and addresses the ideological roots and foundations of the Likud movement in the spheres of government and law.

Sources of Inspiration in the Early Life of Leonardo da Vinci

Although the early life of Leonardo da Vinci in Florence seems singularly unproductive, particularly considering the acknowledged breadth of his genius, an inferential examination of his early work reveals an interesting scope of likely activities. A self-referential element is his only signed and dated work, a landscape drawing, which is identified as a likely commemoration of the date of his conception in Vinci, a unique concept in art historical analysis. To develop a fuller picture of his accomplishments in this early period requires an interconnected series of analyses and reappraisals, including an interpretation of the otherwise puzzling set of young men in red caps painted by Botticelli as the incipiently famous group of artists that trained in Verrocchio’s bottega. These analyses fill out the picture of Leonardo’s formative years in the hillsides and towns around Vinci, as not only a precocious artist based on exposure to works by famous artists before leaving Vinci, but as a handsome studio model, an extempore musician, a leading member of the redcap band of remarkable apprentices in Medici Florence, an engineering assistant to his master Verrocchio, and a collaborative associate of the pioneering group of Florentine perspectivists including Uccello and Toscanelli in their later years.