they serve them food. and they'll have, when somebodyi is there, will have medical, streetside medical clinic pass c out sockli because that's what they need most of all. does that answer your questionl. about benjamin hill? >> thanks. >> just the town itself become, you know -- [inaudible] >> the question was, for the people listening on tv, asking, following up about whether the town itself became part of thelw entire process.wn i >> actually, they don't -- they're not able to capitalize>a on it because there's no, reallb no commerce. there are a few small grocery-type convenience stores and pharmacies and three churches. it's a very small town. so the town itself doesn't the benefit financially at all fromi the people coming through.iall >> okay. we're about out of time, believe

it or not, but i want to justr ask one final question real briefly and let everybody, let'a run down the line from sam to kathryn, and just let us know what's got your attention now,iy what's in your future, what are you working on? is you can't sit still, i imagine. ..ure in l.a., marijuana stories and humbled and doing something i would like to have you all check out my web site, sam quinones.com. does storytelling called true your -- tell your true tale. go to my web site sam quinones.com. i've got numerous stories up there now and i'm looking for many more. i don't pay anything but i do edit and sometimes that is more important. that is what i'm working on now and hoping to do a be a book as well on the issues of kidnapping

and home invasion and robberies in phoenix. >> one, continuing my journalism. i have a story coming out this week about kind of a historical look at the great copper mine strike in arizona in 1983, which would be very useful for us to review right now f, now that we have a new copper mine trying to come in to arizona and what happened there and what happened to those people. as far as my reporting on immigration, i'm really interested in looking at the detention centers that i mentioned ntearlier, the federa detention centers, in which migrants are held with essentially no rights. they don't have the rights of criminal suspects. they just have no rights at all they're held pretty much indefinitely without charges and without any expectation. they have no right to an attorney.at and they never know how long they're going to be there. so i think that's something that would be really good to write about. >> thank you. >> i fancy myself an addiction writer so i'm constantly writing

stories. i'm working on a novel. as what interests me, a kind of along the a lines of what margat says is that the families that are being deported, are being ripped apart, hundreds of thousands of people are being deported from this country that have been here for -- some of them 8, 10, 15 years. and their stories, i think, are very important and somebody should write about them. >> i thought my writing career was over. i think this was it. my husband keeps saying why don't you write another book. he wants me to get me out of his hair, i think. [laughter] >> i continue to go out in the desert. on patrols with sa mmasamaretin looking for help. i go gone nogales down toe aid center because people who get

deported or voluntarily returned have a lot of medical problems. and many times they have been in detention for three daze. i saw a man on thursday who had been in prison for three months because he was using someone' social security number to work. and they have these medical problems that have not been attended to. many of them diabetics on medication, the medication has been taken away. and not given back to them. so we hear these stories over and over so all of a sudden my head is full of these other stories. [laughter] >> i don't know. >> you kind of can't not create and can't not help, what's in your mind seven >> i know i've been writing and writing. i'm not sure how this is going to coalesce. it's about fear and at the moment it's about -- i have spent many years in mexico and it'sye about how -- it was pret much fear-free even though i was in these wild, wonderful places

in mexico and i have been so terrified in the last couple of years of my life for reasons like the u.s. government and by relationships and this and that. i have no idea what i'm saying. it's about fear. [laughter] >> ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being part of our session. [applause] >> yeah. >> finishing up our coverage of the 2011 tucson festival much of book. >> now, on booktv, kay says men in their 30s and 40s prefer to put off their adulthood and women pushed by their biological clocks is as driven as ever. this event was hosted by the

manhattan institute in new york city. it's about 40 minutes. >> how many of you have seen the movies i'm going to be discussing before and those who haven't might want to get out a little more. [laughter] >> this is a shot from "sex and the city." "sex and the city," as most of you was a television series as well as the subject of two movies or the title of two movies. there have been much spilled on this topic of this foursome but i want to say something about what's less commend. this is probably the highest educated group ever to appear on television. right? we have a harvard-educated corporate lawyer. we have a art gallery manager. a public relations consultant. and a journalist -- well, a sex columnist.

[laughter] >> they represent what i call the new girl order. now, let's go to the next image. [laughte [laughter] >> whoops. more of the same and more of the same. could this be the new boy order? i call them a child man, and these are the characters are on the order of caricature but they have gained flak contemporary culture. this persona says i'm not a man. i'm not a boy. i'm something in between. you're not necessarily slackers. sometimes people make that mistake thinking that they are. some of them go to law school or work on wall street or may have no clue what to do. but they are partial, we know,

to movies and television shows with car chases, cyborgs, hobbits. they are partial to beer and video games, to frat house pranks and jokes. we'll be coming back to the child man in a little bit. girls of the new girl order and the child man are demographic first cousins. for one thing they are something in between adolescence and full-fledged adults. some sociologists and the psychologists refer to this group as emerging adults for reasons that will become clear, i prefer the term preadults. so what is a preadult? preadults are single young middle class people in their 20s and early 30s. they are in graduate school or moving between jobs. or tutoring high school high schoolers for the s.a.t.'s while writing screen places in their off-hours or if the intense 12-hour day early stages of their career.

preadults almost always live in cities, in texas, portland, seattle, chicago, d.c. and, of course, new york where they get to enjoy the sushi and indian restaurants, crowded bars, gyms, nail salons, cafes and the like. now, ordinary as it seems to us today, preadult is something very new. up until very recently, the central fact about a woman in her 20s and early 30s was that she was a wife and mother. whether she was a 23-year-old from ming china or a 26-year-old in mad men america. in fact, most people in their 20s were not single and if they were, they were not living with roommates in williamsburg, in brooklyn or dupont circle drinking shots with other preadult weekend. they were married and they had children and they had lawns to

mow and cars whose oil needed changing. now let's look at the numbers. notice that in 1970, the average age of marriage for men was 23. and for women, a little less than 21. today, it's 26 and 28 but that's a little bit misleading, actually, because the numbers for college-educated and those -- even those with some graduate school education are much considerably higher. for women with a b.a. the average age is about 27. for women with a master's or professionals degree -- professional degree it's about 30. now, this means we have a historically high percentage of single people in their 20s and early 30s. this gives you a little bit of an idea. now, unlike almost any other decade we're looking at here,

the majority of 25 years old are single. i wasn't able to get a chart on 30 years old but the trends are the same. an ever increasing number of people who are single at 30. and the numbers among college-educated is considerably higher. now, what does this mean? a lot of people say to me well, it's good to wait to get married and in many ways it is. and we can talk about that. but it has a significant social impact. tens of millions more young men and women happily free of mortgages, spouses and child care bills and a new stage of life has been born, sociologists love this kind of thing. they call it a new demographic. hollywood also loves new demographics. and by the 1990s, television moved its situation comedies out

of the suburban kitchen and into the city. and the main characters were no longer mom, dad and stepdad and the kids. they were preadults with names every extension in america knows chandler, rachel, jerry, elaine, george and let's not forget carrie, charlotte, samantha and miranda. this was the change as holiday was observing it that was happening by the early '90s. so whence cometh preadulthood? what's causing it? i see the cause is mostly economic. in the new knowledge economy you have to think, compute, analyze. you need to go to college and frad school. in 1960, barely 8% of americans had a bachelor's degree. for that matter, nearly 60% of americans lacked a high school diploma. today, close to 30% of americans have a college degree.

even more significant between 1985 and bevin frad school enrollments jumped a remarkable 67%. everyone will tell you education leads to the sorts of jobs that give you more money, more benefits, more stability, and more prestige. these are good reasons to spend years in a library or lab and pull off a steady paycheck until 22 or if grad school is in the cards 27 plus but there's another crucial reason that the knowledge economy has created this new stage of life. this economy is incredibly complex. it takes a long time to figure it out. in 1971, when i was graduating from a private liberal arts college, brandeis, as christina mentioned, my friends considered about five different sorts of careers that would be both interesting to them and consistent with their lifestyle or status expectations. just about all of them became

doctors, lawyers, professors, psychologists or journalists. here i'll give you a list of some of the jobs that today's college grad could consider, jobs that did not exist when her parents were her age. here we go. web designer, video game developer, diversity administrator, video producer, symptoms -- systems analysts geck geneticist, strategist, i could go on and on. then you can also bring into the mix the tens of thousands of administrative and technical and strategic jobs at companies like google, yahoo! sirius radio, microsoft, apple, hbo comedy central and any of the other 300 plus cable networks now entertaining us every day. even during the great recession, americans spend considerably

more on entertainment than they did 40 years ago. that means more jobs for artists, actors, comedians, directors, documentary filmmakers, video game creators and apps developer. and just to give you an example. this -- you may not know what this is. i've given you -- this is an app -- one of the most popular apps for the iphone. it is called ibeer. and if you install this into your iphone, you can make it look like you're drinking a beer. if you hold it up and down you just go like that. notice how it looks like you're chugging beer when you're turning it towards your mostly sunny. it is one of the most popular iphone applications as i said on the market. it has the virtue of demonstrating two things. the variety and strangeness of the knowledge economy.

this little damage has made its inventor a very wealthy man. what did he tell his parents what he wanted to be when he grew up? it's hard to imagine. [laughter] >> but it's the second thing it demonstrates is that the knowledge economy and its associated affluence tends to re-enforce the youth culture, in this case, the culture of dedicated to young men. now, the jobs that are available in the knowledge economy are it's not just a perry. gratifying, fun as we can see, exciting and even glamorous. young people, men and women are now in a position to ask a question that human beings had never been able to consider realistically. what should i do with my life. it's a hard question and it can take a long time to answer. in simpler economies, people followed the clearly marked pathways that led them to a trade, craft or wage labor or if they were very lucky to professional jobs.

a preadult just graduating college on the other hand is like a hero in a hitchcock movie. he or she is pushed off the bus in an unmarked crossroads in the middle of the desert. which way to go? a lot of today's careers are mysterious. how do you become a documentary filmmaker? a grant officer for an international aid foundation? an entrepreneur? now, i mentioned a little while ago that one of the major reasons people are taking longer to grow up these days and to marry -- the reason for the existence of preadulthood for joey and monica and ross and rachel is that so many more individuals are going to college and graduate school to make it in the college economy. now, that statement was actually a little misleading. to be more accurate, more women are going to college and graduate school. the both in both college and graduate degrees has come almost

come entirely from the half of the female mopping after 1970 the fraction of men with four-year college degrees stalled. the percentage of women with those degrees meanwhile exploded. i've got this slide to show you, give you a sense of this. notice the projection -- i don't know how seriously we should take these projections but that's kind of a scary-looking scissors right there. oh, on the graduate level, too i should mention are also outdoing men. there was an increase of full-time graduate students among men. about 32% about 1997 and 2007 compared to a 63% increase to female graduate students. now, not surprisingly given these numbers, preadult women, single childless women now earn

more than men in the great majority of american men and larger size cities. that's just an extraordinary statement right there. never been -- never been sued before. so what accounts for the women's success. how do we explain the coming of the new girl order. most people will define the answer as feminism. but -- and, obviously, that is a big piece of it but i don't think it's the whole story. interestingly enough, countries like south korea and japan never had an influential feminist movement are seeing similar success among women in school. i would add two other factors. the first is what barbara defoe whitehead has called the girl project. by the 1990s, and that seems to be a real dividing point that i described here. by the 1990s and even starting in the '80s parents were gaenldz

in a new kind of child or a rather girl-rearing. they were intent on creating a new breed of girl. self-confident, ambitious. that's the wrong one. okay. i'll go to the next -- there we go. girl power. they were intent on creating a new breed of girl, self-confident, ambitious even as some girls have said kick ass, they have their own tv and movie shows and their own scholarships. the message for girls, go forth and achieve. the other reason for women's success, i believe, is changes in the economy that i talked about earlier. these changes were very friendly to women. for the most part up until the 1970s, women looked for employment for the simple reason that they and their families needed the money. before that time, this is what work meant for men and women.

this is not to say that there weren't women who had gone on to scientists, doctors, lawyers and the alike and that discrimination didn't keep them from doing so but most middle class women who began scanning the help wanted ads after the feminist revolution were doing it precisely at the moment when the knowledge economy was coming into being. the preindustrial and industrial economy relied on fiscal strength and endurance. perhaps there were women who could be men's equals in the steel meals, on the auto line, building bridges of the like but there weren't many. by the 1980s, machines became more productive, communications and transportation cheaper and more efficient. american manufacturing jobs began their storied decline. this was in many respects sad news as you know for women's working class particularly working class men but it happened to have been somewhat good news for women. manufacturing jobs may have

diminished but consumer goods were becoming cheaper. these examines needed to be designed, planned, packaged, marketed, advertised, analyzed and sold as well as to be capitalized, regulated and legalized. in manning up, i describe a startling expansion of careers, for instance, in the design field. this is especially the case with the internet where we've come to expect information to be prevented form but there's also communication. the publishing publish is now largely a female occupation. so is journalism. women hold the larger number of degrees they are half of news anchors. they are two-thirds of television producers including over half executive producers. in fact, women now account for over half of all workers in management and professional occupations. so there we have design, journalism, public relations,

marketing, event planning, managing. these are jobs for people who can communicate, persuade, charm, and multitask, who score high on empathy, communication skills, planning and relationship-building. in older economies, this may have been what work promised women but in the knowledge economy, we have this. when i was going to look -- women in the workplace i got lots of very smiling women sitting at their offices and at their desks, they must know something i don't know. [laughter] >> among knowledge economies preadults women are the first sex and this is something as i said before that is new to human civilization. i know it sounds like an exaggeration. it is not. let us return, therefore, to the child man, the young single dude

not child but not adult either. i see him as the result of four huge shifts. first is preadulthood. a decade or more of single life devoted to work and self-exploration. women also spend years in preadult hood, the single years of the 20s and 30s but here's the difference. women have the advantage, miserable as it makes them about knowing about biological limits. the large majority of women and men say they want children. that's what the surveys consistently say. but for women whose fertility begins to decline by the time they are 30, that means that they will not be able to play or work without serious distraction for very long. even though it's unsure whether they will have children know that the decision alone imposes boundaries on their adulthood. men don't have these pressing

limits and they can take their time and they do. the second force shaping a child man is a highly segment and uncensored media environment. in the past men never paid attention to media and they had trouble trying to reach that younger male demographic. by the mid-'90s they found each other and fell in love. we got maxim magazine, cable news network, hollywood movies, also discovered the formula for attracting young males, car crashes and cyborgs and embarrassing bodily features and exposed female body parts. one of the most successful sky channels is called spike. it's came in 2003 with reruns of star trek and the original show called babe hunt. in which contestants try to detect the differences in two identical pictures of nearly naked women.

now, trying to find an image for you but i would have gotten kicked out of the harvard club. so the third reason for the child -- we got the two that i mentioned so far. the third reason for the child man is female independence. the young man reaches the age where in every other period of history he would be defining himself as potential husband and father. with the understanding that he had a clear and important social role. today, provider husbands and fathers are optional. with reproductive technology, if women so choose, they could simply buy sperm and forget about the man who delivered it. meanwhile, young men have seen fathers and uncles discarded by wives. cast out of their home and separated from their children. no wonder they look around as a culture, shrugs and do their own thing. and here's the final thing for the appearance of the child man. we've seen a general and

cultural ambivalence of men. by the 1990s the entire culture as we just saw come a you go girl cheering section. it would be nice to say that americans love both their boys and girls equally but there was reason for men to suspect highways. -- otherwise. you may -- some of you may have heard this experience girls rule, boys drool. this is a very popular little phrase that went on girls' backpacks and lunch boxes, so on and so forth. the other one says not all men are annoying, some are dead. not even funny. so advertisers and screen writers at the same time were giving us is long line of low i.q. television dads. we had homer simpson and ray romano, tim allen and the drumbeat from the popular culture said men are dumb. they're unfeeling. they're incompetent and women

don't really need them. at the same time, the qualities of character that men had needed to be -- needed to play their traditional roles, fortitude, courage, confidence, fidelity were becoming obsolete and even a little embarrassing. we have a new term out that's gained some traction. the term is man splaning. it's a combination of man and explaining. according to the urban dictionary a popular source of trendy terms. it's what men do in order to, quote, dominate the conversation and to make statements that are not based on facts assuming that people will believe and agree with him because he is a male. so that -- you know, and once again this attack on the idea of the authoritative male. and some men decided they better cool down the masculine personality. they adopted the useful playfulness hesitantity.

me, i'm not that man. i'm a guy. an ironic slow to commit uncertain guy. just the other day i stumbled across this post from a popular female blogger. she called the post, ask me out on a damn date. and she continued in this vein. don't ask me to hang out with you. don't ask if i'm free sometime on friday night and say you'll be in touch that night to see what's up. don't ask me if i'm interested in getting a coffee sometime. ask me out on a damn freaking date. so you get that from a lot of young women today. oa on the one hand they want the sign from the equality and they've gotten from the schools with their teachers and their parents but they want something a little bit different when it comes to dating. the child man then is the lost son of a host of economic and cultural changes.

the democratic shift i call preadulthood, femininism, the wild west of our new media and the shrugging iffyness on the subject of husbands and fathers as well as a general cultural ambivalence about men. now, this finally leaves us with a question that might have occurred to some of you in this room. why are we spending our lunch hour at the harvard club discussing babe hunt and ibeer? because you've forgotten we are after all here at the manhattan institute, the influential public policy think tank that attends to subjects like fiscal, on tort reform, indication and policing not the dating frustrations of single career women. as it happens, i have an answer to that question. the trends i'm describing bode ill for the family. i think we are looking at more family breakdowns which in turn

increases government spending and dependency which in turn leads to new jersey and california as well as more general decline in skills and innovation in future citizens. this has not been a big issue before now as many of you know hopefully because you read my previous book. college-educated women may talk they live in a post-marital future like they can take or leave marriage and children but compared to their low-incomed counterparts they live as my friend amy wax like the 1950s. they wait to have children you believe they marry. they generally stay married. divorce rates among the college-educated have declined substantially. since 1980. the large majority of children growing up with college-educated mothers are living in leave it to beaver land and doing quite well. that's not the case for the less educated. 40% of children today are born to unmarried mothers.

almost all of those mothers are in low-incomed and lacking a college degree. they are not members of the new girl order. divorce too is far more common among low-incomed than college educated war on terrorism. at least that's the way it's panned down so far. i don't see how that can continue. a big part of the reason for family practicedown at the lower end of the income scale is the dearth of marriageable males that is men who are women's equals or better in terms of earnings, reliability and competence. remember 57% of grads are women. college graduates are women. now, neil spore once said that prediction is very difficult and especially about the future. but i'm going to end today by making four predictions.

first, i predict we will see some more women marrying down and i use that word with slight quotation marks but not much. for reasons that are deeply rooted in our biology and culture, women want to marry higher or at least very equal status males. perhaps that is why marriage is between more educated women and less educated men tend to break up at fairly high rates. second, i predict more educated women remaining single and childless. third, i predict significantly more educated mothers giving up on finding a marriageable husband and deciding to go to the sperm bank. fourth, as men look around and see lower expectations from the culture around them, we will see more child men. finally, and feel free to argue with me here, i predict more sales for ibeer. thank you very much.

[applause] >> thanks. thanks, kay. we have time for some questions and we do have a microphone, i think, so if you could wait for the mic to be delivered and just identify yourself, that'd be great. we'll start over here on the left side. >> kay, this is your friend amy wax. >> hello, amy. >> i teach at pen law school and i wanted to ask you about a phenomenon that i've actually recently looked into it which is men still overwhelmingly dominate in certain presinks of power and influence. so take, for example, what i call journals of opinion, you know, if you look at the new york books, "the new republic," all those sorts of publications on the right and the left, the weekly standard, the people who

are writing for them are overwhelmingly male and that's true of the 20 something to 30 something generation. there's a whole body of social science that suggests that even among college graduates men are far more informed. they know more about a range of topics. they're more curious. i just would ask you to comment on that when do you think that will continue? >> well, i do, actually. a couple of things come to mind. one is i've talked a little bit about how women are doing so well and so much better actually than their male peers and that they are earning more than men when they are in their -- in the preadult years. however, i should say that by the time they get to the age where they have children, their earnings begin to decline

relative to men. that explains why we always hear about the wage gap although those numbers tend to be very, very dubious in terms of what's being compared to what. so -- you keep that in mind talking about that. i don't think we saw the -- and i don't know that we can solve the conflict for women between having children -- a family and getting ahead in the workplace. there's always going to be some conflict there. but to get more precisely to your question, amy, i think that war on terrorism, you know -- we get into these essentialist arguments with them but in general i see women as less aggressive in terms of debate. you know, i've never looked actually at the numbers of debaters.

i know among in the schools these days they're pushing debate quite a bit. i've never really looked to see what -- how those numbers break out, but i wouldn't be surprised to find those champion debaters are male. why that is, you know, it has something to do with the kind of adepression and focus on facts that i think are required for that kind of -- that kind of debate. so i do believe it probably is an essentialist legion >> okay. over here. >> ed thompson with the ayn rand institute. it seems to be based on economics and cultural influences and so forth but you haven't mentioned anything about early education. and i'm interested in progressive education. i use the term as a catch-all,

you know, multiculturalism and john dewy. i can see you nodding. from the reading that i done on the subject, cognitive development in young children is thwarted by the education system which because happens to be dominated by women ironically. what's your take on progressive education? what i'm trying to say is, all these young adults who should be adults where children are and grow up with pseudoself-esteem. >> i think christine has written about primary education and it's the way that it is unfriendly to boys. we've seen a big decline -- or a

big transformation in the kind of books that students, young students, are being asked to read. you won't find the adventure books anymore or not very much. different kinds of books that might have appealed to boys. i remember reviewing a book from some time ago about the change in textbooks, history textbooks. and the writer said that if you were to look at the updated textbooks, you know, post-feminist textbooks about the settling of the american continent, it would sound like it was entirely something of women and girls and their maintains there's no question there's that going on. there's been this femininization i think of earlier education. as for the progressive part, you know, i've seen girls who don't

do very well in progressive education either. it is possibly true that boys need more structure than girls because they're simply more physically restless and because they also seem to like more competitive game-like education. so i've heard from a number of teachers that if you can arrange things so your child -- so a boy knows that if he reads a certain number of books, he's got certain kinds of rewards and he likes those kinds of things a lot. i suppose, insofar as progressive education really discourages any kind of competition, that's probably been somewhat to the disadvantage of boys. >> right in the middle there. >> bob weissberg. i'm going to get you to change

the focus a little bit and look at boy's physiology here. i saw a poll in japan that said something like 35% of young japanese males have no longer any interest in sex. they're not pursuing women. that's a remarkable statistic and the other thing i heard -- >> stop, i really would like to know the questions they asked those men. [laughter] >> it's interesting many of these mean are extreme versions of what you're talking about. some never leave the house and they play video games all the time and i also heard and i cannot track this down the declining testosterone levels in the american public could this be something that's going on that we are just losing that masculine drive and desire? i mean, the argument always was that many men got married because they were tired of hunting, gathering. they wanted to become farmers.

[laughter] >> i mean, it's true. >> yeah. >> a lot of men that's the great impetus regularity, and men, these creatures, simply looking interest in sex or getting it off pornography off the web or doing it some other way and that physical suspect -- aspect may be put on your list. >> i haven't heard a loss of interest in sex by boys and what i heard is the predominance of porn in their life. this has become a profound new way of spending your time. for young men. we published an excerpt of my book in the "wall street journal." about 10 days ago, and i got a

number of letters from young men who said, i've got porn. i don't want to bother with real women and suddenly you hear more than that you hear women complaining of guys who have some very strange ideas about -- how their sexual encounters should go. ideas that they have learned from watching so much porn. so i do think that is a factor in what i'm describing. >> right there. we're trying to get to you. >> hi, lionel tiger. i taught anthropologies at rutgers over 40 years. an observation about the issue of why girls do better than boys at college. and uniting that with your

notion of reproduction both men and women but certainly women more clearly articulate a sense of wanting children. my impression, and i think it's bourne out by the data is that when women are doing well at school, they're studying for two. any sensible young woman knows that if she's planning on prince charming to scoop her up, care for her forever in a gilded carriage, she's likely to prove naive beyond telling. and so these young women understand that if they got an education, they can take care of themselves and as so many of them end up doing is take care of a child or two children. so it seems to me the biological part of what's constituted male or female has to be given a rather techney color salience here because otherwise it becomes too much a question of gung ho girls and down boys and

it's an issue that is quite profound as you indicated. >> absolutely. i can add one little anecdote to that. there's a study that i saw that showed that low-incomed women who are single mothers often go to community college after their children are born. and they almost always say it's because of the child, for the child. so i think you're quite right. >> we just have time for one more question. why don't we go way to the back. >> yes. two related questions. first, how do you see this generation of 20 somethings ideaist aficionados ages in their 40s, 30s and beyond. ? there any country that's more, quote-unquote, more advanced in the united states in terms of this phenomenon?

>> look, i think -- most young men will get into their 30s, look around and decide, okay, you know, it's time they settle down and maybe it won't be until their 40s or maybe a little older. i spoke to a young woman who is in her late 30s and single and would very much to single down and she told me dating a 40-something guy who is now looking at himself in the mirror going oh, i see wrinkles. she said there is a biological clock for men too, it's just a different clock. that may be true. you know, one thing -- one question to ask is, whether the men and women for that matter who have spent so much of their time taking care of themselves and no one you else whether they

will adapt to marriage is another question. . the success of men as i mentioned is something we've seen all over the place. that's why i call it the new girl order. all over the developed world, in asia, in japan, korea, china and eastern europe, everywhere where people are going to universities girls are doing better. now how it will play out in those various countries, i think it's really going to depend on individual cultures and how they deal with this. but i think that we will be seeing a collapse infertilty as we have seen in these other countries. >> thank you, kay. thank you for coming. >> the book is called "manning up." [applause]

>> president obama issued a provocative nation this is read across america day. [applause] >> all right. obama, there we go. and so we're grateful he did that and we're especially grateful that mrs. obama and

secretary duncan so please welcome our readers. [applause] [inaudible] >> we're also excited about reading, right? >> yes! >> the president is a reader. he's a facts guy. he reads so much. he knows facts about everything so you guys want to be facts people? >> yes! >> you got to read in order to do that. we're going to start out by reading something fun. secretary duncan and i were big dr. seuss fans. arnie, you want to talk about your reading exploits? [laughter] >> well, we both have two children at home who are a little bit older than most of guys but if we had a nickel for every dr. seuss book we read

we'd be more. -- rich. turn those tv off at night and leaving those video games alone reading not just your homework but for pleasure you become lifelong readers. you can do anything you want thod >> right. >> and i'll tell you one quick story, my parents were a little bit crazy. i grew up -- guess how many tvs we had in our home. >> 8. >> 0. we had 0. i would sneak over to my friend's house and watch tv and my parents read to me and my brother and sister every single night and we didn't always understood that but it instill our love of reading. the more you guys are just reading for pleasure, whatever it might be, stories, mysteries, adventure. >> comic books, nonfiction, whatever it might be, just read for fun. if you do that, you're going to do very, very well the rest of your lives. >> that's right. >> are you guys ready to hear a story? >> okay. >> green eggs and ham. ever heard that one before? >> yes!

>> sam, i am sam. sam i am. that sam i am. that sam i am. i do not like that sam i am. do you like green eggs and ham? >> i do not like them, sam i am. i do not like green eggs and ham. >> would you like them here or there? >> i would not like them here or there. i would not like them anywhere. i do not like green eggs and ham. i do not like them, sam i am. >> would you like them in a house? would you like them with a mouse? >> i do not like them in a house. i do not like them with a mouse. i do not like them here or there. i do not like them anywhere. i do not like green eggs and ham. i do not like them, sam i am. >> would you eat them in a box? would you eat them with a fox? >> not in a box. not with a fox. not in a house.

not with a mouse. i would not eat them here or there. i would not eat them anywhere. i would not eat green eggs and ham. i do not like them sam i am. >> would you, could you in a car eat them eat them here they are. >> i would not, could not in a car. >> you may like them, you will see. you may like them in a tree. >> i would not, could not in a tree. not in a car. you let me be. i do not like them in a box. i do not like them with a fox. i do not like them in a house. i do not like them with a mouse i do not like them here or there. i do not like anywhere. i do not like green eggs and ham. i do not like them sam i am. >> a train, a train, a train, train. could you, would you, on a train? >> not in a train, not in a tree, not in a car. sam, let me be, i would not

could not in a box i will not eat them with a mouse. i will not eat them in a house. i will not eat them here or there. i will not eat them anywhere. i do not like green eggs and ham. >> say, in the dark, here in the dark, would you, could you in the dark? >> i would not, could not in the dark. >> would you, could you in the rain? of >> i would not could not in the rain, not in the dark, not in a train, not in a car, not in a tree, i do not like them sam, you see. not in a house, not in a box, not with a mouse, not with a fox. i will not eat them here anywhere. i do not like them anywhere. >> you do not like green eggs and ham? >> i do not like, sam i am. >> could you, would you -- [laughter] >> i would not, could not with a goat.

>> would you, could you on a boat? >> i could not, would not on a boat. i will not, will not with a goat. i will not eat them in the rain. i will not eat them in a train. not in the dark, not in a tree, not in a car. you let me be. i do not like them in a box. i do not like them with a fox. i will not eat them in a house. i do not like them with a mouse i will not eat them here or there. i do not like them anywhere. i do not like green eggs and ham. [laughter] >> you do not like them so you say? [laughter] >> try them try them and you may. try them and you may, i say. >> sam, if you will let me be, i will try them then you will see.

>> are you trying them. >> yes. >> say, i like green eggs and ham. i do. i like them, sam i am. and i will eat them in a boat. and i would eat them with a goat. and i will eat them in the rain. and in the dark and on a train. and in a car and in a tree, they are so good, so good you see. i will eat them in a box, and i will eat them with a fox. and i will eat them in a house and i will eat them with a mouse and i will eat them here and there and i will eat them anywhere. i will eat them sam. i do so like green eggs and ham. thank you, thank you, sam i am. >> give a round of applause. [applause]

>> i have some other very special guests for you. who do you think that might be? no, president obama is not here. [laughter] >> but someone even taller than president obama. cat in the hat. the cat in the hat be here? where is cat in the hat. where? well, tell him to come out. >> come out! >> come out, cat in the hat. [applause] >> oh, that tail, look at that tail.

all right. [laughter] >> now the cat in the hat and sing one and sing two. all of us together and mrs. obama and secretary duncan and dr. billington, we want to do a readers pledge with you. are you ready? >> yes. >> you got to raise your right hand. your other right hand. raise your hand. >> let's see all the hands. >> now, when you hear me say something i want you to repeat it after me so nice and loud, are you ready? are you ready? >> yeah! >> all right! i promise to read. >> i promise to read. >> each and each night. >> each day and each night. >> i know it's the key. >> to growing up right. >> i'll read to myself. i'll read to a crowd. it makes no difference.

it's silent or loud. i'll read at my desk. at home and at school. on my bean bag or bed. by the fire or the pool. each book that i read puts smarts in my head. 'cause brains agree more thoughts. the more they are fed. so i take this oath. to make reading my way. of feeding my brain what it needs every day. all right, everybody, clap. [applause] >> booktv will be covering the virginia festival of the book live online on thursday march 17th and friday march 18th.

we'll be airing several events on each of those days live online. and here's a look at our schedule. on thursday at 10:00 am eastern, donovan webster, jeff goldsmith and bruce hillman will discuss medicine that changed our lives. ..