【導(dǎo)讀】August6,2020Vol.170No.6. COVER. TheMythAboutBoys. Thursday,Jul.26,2020. ByDAVIDVONDREHLE. DavidBurtforTIME

　　

【正文】 n Gage discovers the woods on multiday pack trips. I call this place Boy Heaven, she says. Falling Creek subscribes to a philosophy of structured freedom, which is essentially the same philosophy paying dividends among boys at the opposite end of the economic ladder at the Frederick Douglass Academy. It works across the board, says Anderson, and she wishes more of the boys she sees in her busy Nashville practice lived lives of structured freedom too. Whether it39。s urban kids who can39。t go outside because it39。s too dangerous or the overscheduled, overparented kids at the other end of the spectrumI39。m worried that boys have lost the chance to play and to explore, Anderson told me. Our society takes a dim view of idle time and casts a skeptical eye on free playplay driven by a boy39。s curiosity rather than the league schedule or the folks at Nintendo. But listen to Anderson as she lists the virtues of letting boys run themselves occasionally. When no one39。s looming over them, they begin making choices of their own, she says. They discover consequences and learn to take responsibility for themselves and their emotions. They start learning selfdiscipline, selfconfidence, team building. If we don39。t let kids work through their own problems, we get a generation of whiners. That made sense to me. As I watched the boys at Falling Creek do things that would scare me to death if my own son were doing themhammering whitehot pieces of metal, clinging to a zip line two stories above a lake, examining native rattlesnakesI didn39。t notice many whining boys. Yates Pharr, director of Falling Creek, seemed to read my mind. It39。s the parents who have the anxieties nowadays, far more than the boys, he said. We39。ve started posting photographs of each day39。s activity on our website, and still I39。ll get plaints if we don39。t have a picture of every camper every day. Worrying about our boysreading and writing books about them, wringing our hands over dire trends and especially taking more time to parent themis paying off. The next step is to let them really blossom, and for that we have to trust them, give them room. The time for fearing our sons, or fearing for their futures, is behind us. The challenge now is to believe in them. NATION Is Fred Thompson the .39。s Savior? Wednesday, Jul. 25, 2020 By JAMES CARNEY Fred Dalton Thompson, an American lawyer, lobbyist, character actor and former Republican Senator from Tennessee , still contemplating a run for the white house. McLean, Virginia 2020 David Yellen for TIME For those not paying close attention, and others simply in denial, it is worth taking a moment to review just how bleak life has bee for members of the Grand Old Party. Last fall Republicans were swept from power in both houses of Congress. This summer the incumbent Republican President is setting standards for unpopularity not seen since the Nixon Watergate era. In recent weeks the campaign of the warhero Senator who was once the party39。s presumptive nominee has all but collapsed in debt and blame. The latest financial reports show that the .39。s always reliable money advantage has vaporized, with Democratic candidates outraising Republicans by more than $100 million for next year39。s federal elections. Adding a little salt to his party39。s wounds, Newt Gingrich, leader of a Republican revolution that seems but a misty memory, summed up the current field of wouldbe . Presidents as pygmies. Faced with this litany of despair, many Republican faithful, from the grass roots to the Capitol, have concluded that Fred Thompson, the preternaturally avuncular actor and former Senator from Tennessee, is the cureall for their party39。s ills. Thompson has yet to enter the presidential race. He has, in fact, postponed until after Labor Day an official announcement that was supposed to be made in July. And yet Thompson already shares frontrunner status with former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani in some national polls of . voters. People are not inspired。 everyone39。s flatlining, says Ken Duberstein, former chief of staff for Ronald Reagan. Right now, Fred is all things to all people. Everyone39。s waiting to see if he can live up to expectations. With those expectations casting Thompson as Reagan reincarnate, it39。s easy to understand why he39。s staying out of the race for as long as he can. The next Republican debate takes place Aug. 5 in Des Moines, to be followed six days later by the Iowa straw poll in Ames, an expensive faux election that measures the muscle of a candidate39。s anization and the thickness of his wallet more than his actual appeal to caucus voters. Thompson advisers decided that the risk of underperforming at either of these highprofile events was too great — and outweighed any advantages that would be gained by launching the campaign over the summer. As one Thompson partisan noted, John McCain39。s spectacular fall from Establishment frontrunner to underfunded underdog proves how hard it is to sustain a lead, month after month, without faltering. Thompson will spend the rest of the summer raising money, which he was scheduled to do conspicuously at a donor event in Washington on July 28. Another advantage to waiting: the longer he remains an unofficial candidate, the longer NBC can air reruns of Law amp。 Order featuring Thompson as Manhattan DA Arthur Branch without running afoul of the equaltime provision of federal campaign law. His timing has been brilliant so far, insists Tennessee Congressman Zach Wamp, who led the effort to convince Thompson he should run. While he39。s been waiting, some candidates have been falling and the others haven39。t been moving. Frankly, there39。s been a lot of advantages to [it]. He39。s probably gotten more attention not being a candidate than he would have being a candidate. Not al