High-school students who seek to form coding groups find they have to win over their parents, school administrators
FROM TOP: DANIEL TEPPER FOR THE WALL STREET JOURNAL; CLAIRE WANGsmells, the new book suggests,
study the shapes of clouds, eat an
apple blindfolded, think about not
thinking.
In the five years since the U.S.
release of Japanese author Marie
Kondo’s mega-hit “The Life-Chang-
ing Magic of Tidying Up,” sales of
self-help and home organizing
books have soared. Annual print
sales of books related to tasks like
cleaning, caretaking and organiz-
ing rose 78% from 2014 to 2018
and are up an additional 94% in
the past year, driven primarily by
Ms. Kondo, according to the NPD
Group.
The latest entries train their
sights on the people making the
mess. The mantras strike similar
notes: Embrace simplicity, stop
trying so hard and slow down.
“There’s a profound desire and
even need among readers for this
kind of content,” says John Si-
ciliano, executive editor of Penguin
Books and Penguin Classics who is
overseeing several less-is-more
lifestyle titles including “The Book
of Ichigo Ichie” by Héctor García
and Francesc Miralles, due out in
December.
More back-to-basics campaigns
are coming. “The Power of
Nunchi,” a Korean theory on suc-
cess that encourages Americans to
trust their instincts when reading
people and navigating relation-
ships, hits in November. “Kaizen:
The Japanese Secret to Lasting
Change,” based on the practice of
taking tiny steps toward a goal, ar-
rives the following month.
The commerce around minimal-
Continued from Page One
ism troubles some of its fans. “If
you have someone who gets with
the idea of appearing on Insta-
gram like they have a very simple
life, already you’ve introduced a
goal into something that’s not
goal-oriented,” says Jenny Odell,
author of “How to Do Nothing,”
the 2019 book on the need for pur-
suits that defy productivity or
achievement.
And rival philoso-
phies have started
to emerge amid the
calls for harmony.
“Discard it even if
it sparks joy,” writes
Fumio Sasaki in his
book “Goodbye,
Things,” con-tradict-
ing Ms.
Kondo’s ad-
vice to read-
ers to keep
only items that
make them happy. Mr. Sasaki’s
minimalism is so extreme, he says
he easily moved out of his home in
30 minutes.
“I’m able to move anywhere I
like with the same casualness as
stepping out for coffee,” he writes
in the book, released in the U.S.
two years ago.
A spokeswoman for Ms. Kondo
declined to comment.
The author bio for “Goodbye,
Things” says Mr. Sasaki furnished
his home with only a small wooden
box, a desk and a rolled-up futon
pad. But in his book, Mr. Sasakicautions against striving for an ex-
cess of less. “Minimalism is not a
competition,” he writes. “Don’t
boast about how little you have.”
Caroline Donahue tried Mr. Sa-
saki’s approach but stopped. “It
didn’t feel like a relief to think of
just having a hand towel to dry my-
self with in the bathroom,” she
says, referring to the writer’s
description of his per-sonal hygiene routine. “Once or
twice when I bought a book I
thought it was silly and ironic to
buy a thing that was going to tell
me to have fewer things.”
The 42-year-old writer credits
Ms. Kondo with speeding her deci-
sion to leave Los Angeles and move
to Berlin, where she and her hus-
band felt they could live with less
stuff and enjoy a higher quality of
life. The change came after she cy-
cled through at least five lifestyle
methods: Not just Ms. Kondo and
Mr. Sasaki, but Janet Luhrs’s “The
Simple Living Guide” and ErinLoechner’s “Chasing Slow.” She
even tried a clothing purge via the
blogger Courtney Carver, attempt-
ing to live with just 33 items in her
closet for three months. Ms.
Carver’s book on that process,
“Project 333,” comes out this
March.
Simplicity gurus are arriving at
a moment of over-
load formany Ameri-
cans. Baby boomers are struggling
under the weight of possessions
handed down from elderly parents.
Consumers are clicking “add to
cart” at lightning speed. Families
are worrying about the waste un-
derpinning their abundant life-
styles.
Denaye Barahona started buying
her 5-year-old son five pairs of the
same pants in the same color so
neither of them ever has to think
about his bottoms. Suddenly, her
home life feels easier, says Ms. Ba-
rahona, author of “Simple Happy
Parenting” out this year.
“We’re moving a little bit be-
yond the mechanics of declutteringand more into the mindset of it,”
says Francine Jay, who preaches
what she calls mindful minimalism
in her 2019 book “Lightly.” In-
cluded in her prescription for sim-
plicity: Create breathing space at
home by using no more than three
decorative items per room, eat less
by baking cakes in coffee mugs
and opt out of gift exchanges.
Attempting to find the root
causes of the mess, professional
organizer Tracy McCubbin has
identified seven “emotional clutter
blocks” in her boldly titled new
book, “Making Space, Clutter Free:
The Last Book on Decluttering
You’ll Ever Need.” A messy master
bedroom holds clues to a deeper
problem. “When it’s a couple,
there are intimacy issues,” she
writes. “If the client lives alone, he
or she is keeping secrets.”
Self-help books that lean into
Zen-like ideas are particularly pop-
ular at the moment, timing that
makes sense to Ken Mogi, author of
the 2018 title “Awakening Your Iki-
gai.” Zen Buddhism developed in
Japan during a period of upheaval,
says Mr. Mogi, who draws connec-
tions to today’s anxieties.
Shunmyo Masuno, head priest
of a 450-year-old Zen Buddhist
temple in Japan, prescribes 100
tips for finding calm and joy in his
2019 book “The Art of Simple Liv-
ing.”
The slim volume, published in
more than 30 languages, encour-
ages readers to find peace by not
wasting food (eat discarded radish
greens, for instance), watching a
flower grow and walking around
the house barefoot.
Leslie Yazel, editor in chief of
Real Simple magazine, urges cau-
tion if the quest for that simplicity
comes with a hefty price tag.
“Too many products that prom-
ise to simplify your life actually do
the opposite.,” she says. “Often
when I see the latest kitchen gad-
get, I think, ‘Or you can just use a
paring knife.’ ”T
he first rule of Hack
Club is: You talk
about Hack Club. The
second rule of Hack
Club is: You talk
about Hack Club.
Teenagers across the country
are forming hacking clubs, attend-
ing hackathons and trying to
spread the word that hacking
doesn’t always mean breaking
into government servers or steal-
ing bank data. Convincing teach-
ers and parents of that isn’t al-
ways easy.
“My dad was like, ‘You’re always
up to something. You’re always on
your computer. I don’t know what
you’re doing,’ ” said 15-year-old
Snigdha Roy of Mount Sinai, N.Y. In
July, she became executive director
of TeenHacks LI, a Long Island club
that organizes hackathons, typi-
cally one-day events in which stu-
dents in small teams compete to
create apps or
websites.
Her parents,
she said, finally
got looped in
about her activ-
ities when she
had to get their
permission to
attend a hacka-
thon at the
University of
Pennsylvania. It took her about
two months of showing them her
coding projects and putting them
in touch with members of her
hackathon team before they
agreed to let her go to the Sep-
tember event.
“I thought it had to do with tak-
ing people’s credit cards,” said her
mom, Shailly Roy.
Parents have good reason to be
suspicious, however. A U.K. teen-
ager last month was arrested for
allegedly hacking into musicians’
websites and stealing unreleased
music. Another U.K. teen who was
convicted of hacking the British
telecommunications firm TalkTalk
Group in 2015 now faces computer-
fraud charges in the U.S. for alleg-
edly accessing a cryptocurrency
exchange. A group of teens once
infamously hacked into Microsoft
Corp.’s Xbox gaming system.
So what, exactly, are these teens
doing?
At Penn, Snigdha and her team
created an app that lets you scan a
container of food for a list of in-
gredients and suggested recipes.
No credit-card stealing.
Teens who are forming hacking
clubs or attending hackathons say
what they really are doing is hack-
ing traditional education,
by creating ways to learn
about coding from each
other instead of a
teacher in a classroom.
Of course, some are actu-
ally doing real hacking—
but even that can be for
good, not evil.
“A hacker, to me, is
anyone who’s able to see
a problem, understand
that something doesn’t
work and come up with a
solution,” said Chaleb
Pommells, 14, of Miramar,
Fla., who is working on
developing a website to
show voters which politi-
cal candidates have bene-
fited from super PACs. He
started a maker space at
his church a few months
ago in an effort to bring
computer-science educa-
tion to minority students
and is trying to start a
chapter of the nonprofit
Hack Club at his high
school. But he, too, had
to explain his pursuits to
his initially suspicious
mom, when he was invited to a
hacking summit this past summer
in San Francisco.
“When Chaleb initially came to
me about this, I said, ‘What do you
mean, hack?’ ” said Sharmaine
Pommells, who was familiar with
the news of a local teen who hadallegedly hacked into his school’s
computer system to change grades.
“I have friends whose teachers
don’t want them to call it ‘hack
club.’ If you call it ‘code club’ or
‘girls who code,’ or ‘maker club,’
it’s fine. It’s pretty disappointing,
because ‘hack club’ or ‘hackathon’ence at all, due in part, to a lack of
funding.
“Our generation is going to face
the biggest challenges humanity
has ever had to solve, including
climate change. All of these giant
problems are rooted in technology,
and we need more thoughtful, un-
conventional problem solvers, and
that’s what we’re trying to create,”
Mr. Latta said. “By using the word
‘hack,’ it gives students a sense of
identity.”
Michigan State University last
month published a study, based on
interviews with nearly 50,
teens, to determine how illegal
hacking begins and found that ini-
tial hacking attempts usually
aren’t serious but that kids can de-
cide to take their hacking abilities
further once they see what they
are able to accomplish.
Some programs redirect that
rising talent for non-nefarious pur-
poses. An 11-year-old boy who at-
tended last year’s Def Con hacking
conference was able to breach a
replica of a Florida election-results
website in just 10 minutes.
Joshua Kats, a 16-year-old in
New York’s Staten Island borough
considers himself an ethical
hacker, and says he once pointed
out a bug in Apple’s iPhone voice-
memo software. He co-founded a
Hack Club chapter at his school
last month.
“Our high school is a perform-
ing arts school, mostly focused on
music and visual arts, so the fact
that 60 students are interested in
a computer-science club is great,”
he said.
Jack Cable, a 19-year-old Stan-
ford University student and self-
described “white hat” hacker, says
the world is coming around. Many
government groups and corpora-
tions invite hackers to do their
best to penetrate their systems,
in an effort to find and patch
weaknesses. Sometimes money is
offered in the form of “bug
bounties.”
“Ten years ago, someone get-
ting into hacking would have had
no resources to try real-world sit-
uations that were legal because
there was nowhere to try out your
skills,” said Mr. Cable, who started
hacking when he was 15. “Now,
with bug-bounty programs, ethical
hackers have a legitimate place to
practice their skills.”
That’s good because, much like
Matthew Broderick’s character, Da-
vid, in the classic 1983 movie
“WarGames,” Jack has even hacked
the Pentagon—at the Defense De-
partment’s invitation, of course.sounds orders of magni-
tude cooler,” said Claire
Wang, 14, whose Haw-
thorne, Calif., school,
which focuses on STEM,
was supportive of her
forming a Hack Club
chapter.
Zach Latta, a 21-year-
old who at 16 dropped out
of high school to work as
an engineer at a San
Francisco tech startup, is
behind the bluntly named
Hack Club organization. It
provides high-school stu-
dents with a curriculum,
connects students
through a Slack channel
where they can contact
each other with technical
questions, and teaches
them how to raise money
and nab corporate spon-
sorships for hackathons.
Mr. Latta estimates that
each week, about 3,
students in the U.S.—plus
an additional 2,000 stu-
dents in South Asia—at-
tend Hack Clubs his group
has helped organize.
Other organizations are doing
similar things to encourage kids to
code at a time when computer-sci-
ence education in K-12 schools is
lacking. A Microsoft survey last
year found that two out of every
10 teachers said their students
don’t learn about computer sci-Students at Susan E. Wagner High School in New York’s
Staten Island meet weekly to code. Below, Claire Wang
programmed a robot at her Hawthorne, Calif., school.Competitors
VietoTeach
Simplicity
Trying to declutter your mind and
closet? Make space for how-to books.THEWALLSTREETJOURNAL. Wednesday,October2, 2019|A
LIFE & ARTS
FAMILY& TECH| JULIEJARGON