View the best links of January 2007 and February 2007.
If you only have time for one of these links, my recommendation is in italics.
March
From the NY Times’ Who Do You Think We Are?: “The General Social Survey has been performing [an] exploration of the American psyche for 34 years. The survey is a wonder of the social sciences. After the United States census, it is the most frequently analyzed data source in its field. Since 1972, 26 surveys have asked Americans questions ‘pertinent and impertinent’ on a vast array of subjects, from political leanings to attitudes toward homosexuality.” [The link includes a graph of the 26 surveys, showing how the responses trend from 1972 to 2006.]
From Slate’s An Economic Mystery: “In 1965, leisure was pretty much equally distributed across classes. People of the same age, sex, and family size tended to have about the same amount of leisure, regardless of their socioeconomic status. But since then, two things have happened. First, leisure (like income) has increased dramatically across the board. Second, though everyone’s a winner, the biggest winners are at the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder.”
From The American’s Feared, Loved, and Ridiculed: “The British and American versions of the popular TV comedy series ‘The Office’ both debunk the authority of the boss, but in ways that distinguish the two cultures.”
Harold Pinter won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2005. I just finished reading one of his plays as part of my grad school work. To find out more about him, I watched his Nobel Lecture, which was shown on video December 7, 2005 at the Swedish Academy in Stockholm. It’s 46 minutes long, and intense, but you should watch it, especially if you consider yourself an American, because it is an unflinching assault the Empire. Yes, it’s 46 minutes, but so is an episode of Law and Order, and this will do you more good.
From the NY Times’ Call Me, Ishmael: “Lately I’ve come around…to the realization that cellphones, while they might have their uses in what we are pleased to call ‘real life’…are nothing but an albatross around the neck of any writer who wants to tell a story…Take the ‘Odyssey.’ With cellphones, it becomes an epic version of ‘Honey, I’m on the train; is there anything you need from the store?’”
