I got back from San Francisco late last night, and I am ready to resume my Marx tutorial, but first, a story about my granddaughter. Athena is two and a half. She talks a blue streak, and is totally pulled together, but she is tiny -- standing tall, she doesn't even come up to my waist, and I am of what used to be called middling height. Yesterday morning, she came downstairs after she got up, dressed in a darling red and white bunny suit, carrying an oblong black object. "What is that, Athena?" I asked. "Daddy's IPad," she said. She proceeded to put it on the living room table, contemplate the array of Ap logos for a bit, and then select a monkey game -- an interactive puzzle game with a talking monkey who sets you a variety of puzzles and awards you stickers when you get them right, which you move with your finger onto a white sheet of paper -- all of this on the screen of the IPad. As I stood there mesmerized, looking down at Athena and the IPad, she proceeded to work her way through the entire game [obviously something she had done before.]
I mean, SHE IS TWO AND A HALF!!!!
By the time she is old enough to go to preschool, she will undoubtedly have an email address and an IPhone and lord knows what else.
It took me a week to learn how to use my IPad, and I am seventy-seven years old.
As Gwyneth Paltrow says, in SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE, the morning after her first night with Shakespeare, "It is a new world."
