1. Atlantic Cities: How Different Generations of Americans Budget Their Time
Example
2. Business Insider: How Women Spend Their Time Vs. How Men Spend Their Time
3. USA Today: Millennial doesn't mean liberal: Column
Bad news for Democrats: It seems Millennials are special little snowflakes after all.
A new report by the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way highlights the political complexity of a generation raised to believe they were utterly unique. When it comes to politics, they do it their way. Which could make the cohort that turned out en masse for President Obama unpredictable as voters.
Third Way focused on how Millennials' experience as the first generation raised in an information-on-demand culture has shaped them. They are not "adaptors." They have only known a world full of endless choices, not a life where you make do with what is available. ...
4. Forbes: Why Millennials Annoy Their Elders
... Anyone who frets over the idea that millennials aren’t drinking the kool-aid should stop and ask “What good has the kool-aid done me?” We raised our kids to be smart and to pay attention to the world around them. Are we going to castigate them now for doing that so well that they end up rejecting the deal-with-the-devil “Just put your career in our hands, focus on pleasing your employer, and everything will be fine!”?
I hope we trust our kids to make good choices, since they’ll be running the world in another few years.
I think we can put our trust in millennials. They have a better sense of priorities than many of their status-and-income-drunk elders do.
5. Atlantic: Study: Millennials Deeply Confused About Their Politics, Finances, and Culture
Or at least deeply contradictory: They're always connected but distrustful. They're selfish yet accepting of minorities. They're "independents" who mostly vote Democratic and love Obama while hating Obamacare....
6. PBS: How should the U.S. improve opportunity for young men of color?
7. Slate: “Kid, I’m Sorry, but You’re Just Not College Material”
... But what if such a cautionary sermon is exactly what some teenagers need? What if encouraging students to take a shot at the college track—despite very long odds of crossing its finish line—does them more harm than good? What if our own hyper-credentialed life experiences and ideologies are blinding us to alternative pathways to the middle class? Including some that might be a lot more viable for a great many young people? What if we should be following the lead of countries like Germany, where “tracking” isn’t a dirty word but a common-sense way to prepare teenagers for respected, well-paid work? ...
8. Atlantic: The Geography of Small Talk
How you start a conversation with a stranger depends on where you live. We survey the diverse geography of American greetings—from Honolulu to Hays, Kansas, from Anchorage to Appleton, Wisconsin, from New Orleans to New York. ...
9. Forbes: 'Where Are You From?' And Other Big Networking Racial Faux Pas
... So what’s the best way to approach ethnicity? If you’re dying to figure out if someone is of Korean, Vietnamese or Chinese heritage, is it ok to ask the first time you meet them? This topic is incredibly nuanced. There’s no right way to ask, though there are plenty of wrong ways. ...
10. Conversable Economist: How Academics Learn to Write Badly
Most of my days are spent editing articles by academic economists. So when I saw a book called Learn to Write Badly: How to Succeed in the Social Sciences, the author Michael Billig had me at the title. The book is a careful dissection of the rhetorical habits of social scientists, and in particular their tendency to banish actual people from their writing, and instead to turn everything into a string of nouns (often ending in -icity or -ization) linked with passive verbs to other strings of nouns. (If that sentence sounded ugly to you, welcome to my work life!)
I found especially thought-provoking Billig's argument early in the book about how the necessity for continual publications is relatively recent innovation in academic life, and how it has altered the incentives for quantity and quality of academic writing. ...
11. Gallup: Americans Most Likely to Say Global Warming Is Exaggerated
12. Gallup: Americans 'Level of Worrry About National Problems
13. Atlantic Cities: The Reason Songs Have Choruses
The secret lies in how your brain processes sound: People love repetition.
It is not hard to estrange the idea of the chorus. Why should songs have some parts that are repeated and others that are not? Imagine other works of art in which a quarter or half of the work is repeated: a movie that shows the same 10-minute sequence every 20 minutes, or a book that repeats every other chapter.
Yet, in popular music, the chorus seems necessary. It is, in many cases, the point of the song.
And now, in a wonderful essay on Aeon, Elizabeth Margulis, director of the Music Cognition Lab at the University of Arkansas, argues that repetition is the point of music. The chorus is merely our culture's embodiment of a deeper human desire to play it again. ...
14. Atlantic Cities: Watch Your Name Grow and Shrink in Popularity Across the U.S.
Loved this one. The Matrix effect.
15. PBS: Note-takers volunteer to help the elderly during doctor visits
... Wolozin is a volunteer for the Northwest Neighbors Village in Washington, D.C., one of the more than 200 “villages” across the United States. These neighborhood membership organizations provide volunteers and other resources to help with everything from transportation and snow shoveling to hanging curtains and solving computer glitches. ...
16. Carpe Diem: Today’s new homes are 1,000 square feet larger than in 1973, and the living space per person has doubled over last 40 years
17. NPR: With Sobering Science, Doctor Debunks 12-Step Recovery
Since its founding in the 1930s, Alcoholics Anonymous has become part of the fabric of American society. AA and the many 12-step groups it inspired have become the country's go-to solution for addiction in all of its forms. These recovery programs are mandated by drug courts, prescribed by doctors and widely praised by reformed addicts.
Dr. Lance Dodes sees a big problem with that. The psychiatrist has spent more than 20 years studying and treating addiction. His latest book on the subject is The Sober Truth: Debunking the Bad Science Behind 12-Step Programs and the Rehab Industry.
Dodes tells NPR's Arun Rath that 12-step recovery simply doesn't work, despite anecdotes about success. ...
18. Atlantic: Americans: Republicans in General, Democrats in Particular
When Americans think about government in the big picture, they can seem like a nation of Ayn Rands. People want to lay waste to the Leviathan. But when Americans consider specific aspects of government, a curious thing happens. People rediscover their love of Washington. On issue after issue, Republicans are winning the argument in general, whereas Democrats are winning the argument in particular. ...
19. Huffington Post: Native Americans' Ancestors Got Stuck On Land Bridge On Way To Americas, New Research Suggests
Native Americans along the Pacific Coast and aboriginal Siberians may have both originated from populations living on the land bridge now submerged under the Bering Strait, a new language analysis suggests.
The language analysis, detailed today (March 12) in the journal PLOS ONE, is consistent with the notion that ancestors to modern-day Native Americans were stuck in the region of the Bering Strait before making their way into North America.
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