So my mom and dad, in their late 70s, have a computer, which mom uses for Facebook, mostly, where she likes 12 Tomatoes recipes and reads about animal shelters and rescue organizations. She has an e-mail account, which is mostly full of coupons and advertisements. What dad does on the computer I don’t quite know, now that he’s stopped the stock trading he used to do. Streaming? Netflix? Amazon Prime? Even YouTube is foreign to her, except as a link... Read more
This is it! The book you’ve been waiting for, forecasting 33 years into the future — from the vantage point of 1967, two years before I was born. This is a book that I read a number of years ago, back I suppose in days before the local library diligently de-accessioned everything that was old. In the meantime, I lost sight of it, but then a reference to it passed through my twitter feed, and I splurged and spent $10... Read more
Because I finally found out how to access survey data on church attendance! This is the General Social Survey, run at the University of Chicago, funded by the National Science Foundation, with data going back to 1972. It tracks such questions as “do you believe in God?” or “what is your religious preference?” And it asks about church attendance. Now, I’ve seen statistics about church attendance before, largely in the form of a Gallup poll that asks, have you attended... Read more
It’s now something that’s been observed repeatedly: marriage is increasingly a middle/upper-class status. There are all manner of explanations for this: marriage is a poverty-avoiding tool, so unmarried people are more likely to be poor; poor people have lives which are chaotic enough that they can’t have the sort of healthy relationship that marriage requires; poor men are such screw-ups that women find the idea of marrying them no better than having another child to take care of; poor women... Read more
Will Franken resign, or won’t he? It won’t matter much to Minnesota voters, because Franken is a reliable party-line voter, and any replacement is likely to be as well. In the short-term, it’ll be a Democratic appointee; in 2018, there’d be a special election. Conyors? That seat’ll be filled by a special election, and the district is so heavily Democratic that its last Republican representative served in 1948. In Alabama, we’re looking at a meaningfully different situation. If Roy Moore... Read more
The rules: You, my readers, will nominate. It should follow the Time norms, the person who has had the greatest impact, for good or for bad. It should be a real person, not a collective group of people, not an idea or trend. I will choose the Person of the Year, from among your nominations, in a later post. If I choose your selection, I will invite you to write a guest post but my choice isn’t contingent on it. ... Read more
So after spending enough time working through iGen yesterday that I felt like I was writing a book report for homework, I’m trying to take a step back and look at her observations in a big-picture sort of way, because if her generalizations are true, we’re looking at a substantial cultural shift. And, about these changes, I’m asking myself: Which of these are just continuations of ongoing trends, vs. something truly new? Which are blips based on short-term news-cycle... Read more
Subtitled “Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood (and What That Means for the Rest of Us)” — which is quite a mouthful. Now, a month or two ago, I started to read a book called GenZ@Work, by a father-son team, David and Jonah Stillman, who collectively call themselves the “Gen Z Guru,” or, at any rate, that’s the name of their website. I wasn’t much impressed with... Read more
in the comments, that is? For context, my husband and I have been working our way through Games of Thrones DVDs from the library; over the past couple weeks, we watched season 7 via iTunes. And I have to say that, where in the first seasons, the sex and violence was a bit over-the-top, and there were scenes which took place in the brothel for no apparent reason, they seem to have dialed it back. Whether it was because they gained... Read more
So back a year ago, I wrote about how we replaced my husband’s car, or, as I prefer to think of it, The Car My Husband Tends To Drive (because I don’t like thinking of the cars as belonging to each of us individually); we switched out one Impala for another, with the new one, at any rate, having more bells and whistles in the electronics. It was actually a smooth car-buying experience, as these things go: GM offered (past... Read more
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In