…The American Dream plays a lot better in white than black.

The "marriage gap" between white and black plays a big part in this story. African-Americans are much less likely than their parents were (or than white adults are now) to be married. They are also more likely to have children outside of marriage than their parents were, or than white adults are today.

When 25 percent of children in a community are born outside of marriage (as among whites today) that's a serious problem. When almost 70 percent of children in a given community are born outside of marriage (as among African-Americans today) that's a tsunami blocking the intergenerational accumulation of human and social capital.

So far, the silence about the issue among our leaders is deafening. Hillary, Barack, Fred, Mitt, Rudy: Who will take up the challenge of reducing the marriage gap written so starkly in black and white? Who wants to rebuild the American Dream for all our children?

(HT: Family Scholars Blog)

11. China Spies: "A report by the US-China Economic and Security Review Commission paints an alarming picture of Chinese espionage as the "greatest threat to US security," constituting an "aggressive and large-scale industrial espionage campaign" against America."

12. From the abstract of the paper, "The Mortality Cost To Smokers" [PDF]

This article estimates the mortality cost of smoking based on the first labor market estimates of the value of statistical life by smoking status. Using these values in conjunction with the increase in the mortality risk over the life cycle due to smoking, the value of statistical life by age and gender, and information on the number of packs smoked over the life cycle, produces an estimate of the private mortality cost of smoking of $222 per pack for men and $94 per pack for women in 2006 dollars, based on a 3 percent discount rate. At discount rates of 15 percent or more, the cost decreases to under $25 per pack.

(HT: Freakonomics)

13. Rich Lowry on progress in Iraq:

Forget the briefings from generals, the intelligence evaluations and the Pentagon status reports. There is a handy indicator for whether the war in Iraq is going well — its relative absence from the front pages.

(HT: Maggie's Farm)

14. Wilfred M. McClay on Why Conservatives Should Care About Cities:

One should, to begin with, set aside the idea that conservatism is at bottom merely a timeless philosophy of landed elites and fixed social structures. For the idea of conservatism, far from being anti-urban, has always been inextricably bound up in the history and experience of great cities. When Russell Kirk wrote his celebrated book The Roots of American Order, he ingeniously built it around the central cities of the history of the West: Athens, Jerusalem, Rome, and London (and arguably also Philadelphia). Each city was taken to exemplify a foundational stage in the development of American liberty and American order. This was not merely a literary conceit, like a metonym. Such developments could only occur in cities. The civilization that conservatives wish to conserve is rooted in them. It is no accident that the Book of Revelation at the conclusion of the Christian Bible aims at the creation of the New Jerusalem, not the New Tara Plantation or the New Grover's Corners.

15. The Lassie Experiment: Will Fido Save You in an Emergency Or Just Let You Die?

16. C. S. Lewis on Torture:

"The identity, or close connection between the Fairies and the dead was certainly believed in, for witches confessed to seeing the dead among the Fairies. Answers to leading questions under torture naturally tell us nothing about the beliefs of the accused; but they are good evidence for the beliefs of the accusers." --The Discarded Image, p. 137

(HT: Dangerous Idea)

17. Picture of the Week: Washington, DC on $85 a Day

Flickr user Musely took this series of photographs lining up the illustration of buildings on the back of US currencies with the actual buildings in Washington, D.C.! Shown are the Lincoln Memorial ($5), the US Treasury ($10), White House ($20), and the Capitol ($50). (HT: Neatorama)

18. Can bloggers be journalists? Federal court says yes -- Journalists aren't defined by a title but by what they produce, and a recent federal ruling allows bloggers who produce journalism to have the same rights and privileges as more traditional news writers.

19. Tom Gilson debunks the Resurrection Fable Fable

20. Good spellers age better than poor spellers

Poor spellers get worse at spelling as they get older, whereas good spellers don't. That's according to Sara Margolin and Lise Abrams who say that being a good speller appears to afford people protection from the detrimental effect that getting older can have on spelling ability.

21. Jean Burgess on Vernacular Creativity:

I used the concept to talk about everyday creative practices like storytelling, family photographing, scrapbooking, journaling and so on that pre-exist the digital age and yet are co-evolving with digital technologies and networks in really interesting ways. So the documentation of everyday life and the public sharing of that documentation, as in sharing photos on Flickr, or autobiographical blogging; these are forms of vernacular creativity, remediated in digital contexts. These are also cultural practices that perhaps we don't normally think of as creative, because we've become so used to thinking of creativity as a special property of genius-like individuals, rather than as a general human -- some would say -- evolutionary process. I found the term really useful for focusing on the fact that there is much about the current explosion of amateur content creation online that has a long history, that isn¹t particularly revolutionary, and that relates to specific local contexts and identities. Vernacular creativity is ordinary.

But ordinary doesn't mean generic or boring, not necessarily anyway. Each example of vernacular creativity is also a representation of a specific life, a specific time, a specific place. Because of this specificity, the ordinariness of vernacular creativity doesn't necessarily equate to uninterestingness. The practices and artifacts of vernacular creativity are of course very rich and meaningful in relation to the social contexts in which they're created, communicated, and disseminated: think of your own family photo album, and then a complete stranger's family photo album from the 1960s that you stumble across in the back of a junk shop in a different country, for example. Both ordinary at the point of origin, both full of meanings and stories, but in different ways. The point is, culture doesn¹t have to be sublime or spectacular to be useful or significant or interesting to someone, somewhere.

22. Going Fishing? Catch-and-release In Less Than Four Minutes, Please

Recreational fishing that involves catch-and-release may seem like just good fun, and that released fish go on to live happily ever after, but a recent study shows that improper handling techniques by anglers can increase the likelihood of released fish being caught by predators. After the stress of the catch and lack of oxygen from being out of water, the fish is in a weakened state.

23. Economist Tyler Cowen on the future of the music business:

In the past most people didn't much like or listen to most of the music they bought, or in any case most of the value came from their very favorites. A relatively small percentage of our music purchases accounted for most of our listening pleasure. So if people can sample music in advance, and know in advance what they will like, music sales will plummet. This will be a sign of market efficiency, not market failure.

Admittedly copyright issues are being superimposed on this scenario at the same time, so the net assessment of current music trends is complex. But when there is uncertainty about consumer tastes, falling output can be a strong Pareto improvement. (It's just like how having lots of dates is not necessarily the sign of a happy love life.) Less music is being produced, but we're getting more of the stuff we want.

24. Most adults who attended religious services as a child are glad they did

Study results released from Ellison Research (Phoenix, Arizona) show that only 7% of all American adults have not had any point in their lives when they regularly attended religious worship services (attendance of once a month or more).

Just over half of all adults (51%) say they currently attend religious worship services of some kind once a month or more, leaving 42% who can be considered “lapsed” – meaning they attended regularly at some point, but no longer do so.

Most of this previous attendance was during childhood. Nine out of ten adults attended religious worship services regularly at some point before the age of 18, including 86% of those who no longer attend today.

25. LOLCat of the Week

moar funny pictures

26. Richard John Neuhaus's opening statement in a debate on the separation of religion and politics:

I speak in favor of the separation of church and state, and therefore against the resolution that religion and politics should always be kept separate. Permit me to explain. To enforce the exclusion of religion from politics, or from public life more generally, violates the First Amendment guarantee of the “free exercise of religion.” The free exercise of religion is the reason for the separation of church and state—a principle that aims not at protecting the state from religion but at protecting religion from the state.

In the First Amendment, religious freedom is of a piece with, indeed is in the very same sentence with, free speech, free press, free assembly, and the right to challenge government policy. Hence the resolution put before this house flatly contradicts the guarantees of a free and democratic society enshrined in the Constitution of the United States.

Secondly, I urge you to oppose the resolution because it is foolish to attempt to do what by definition cannot be done. Such an attempt can only intensify confusions and conflicts, further polarizing our public life. To exclude religion is to exclude from politics the deepest moral convictions of millions of citizens—indeed, in this society, the great majority of citizens. Thus the resolution before this house is a formula for the death of democracy and should be resolutely defeated.

(HT: One Eternal Day)

27. How to Improve Your Social Skills: 8 Tips from the Last 2500 Years

(HT: Dumb Little Man)

28. Good Families Postpone Menstruation:

More research from Bruce Ellis at Arizona indicating that high investments from mom and dad enable teenage girls to postpone menstruation. This is important because girls who have menstruation at later ages are less sexually active as teens and less likely to become pregnant as teens.

29. Caligynephobia, the fear of beautiful women.

30. Social Change Relies More On The Easily Influenced Than The Highly Influential -- Rarely is it the case that highly influential individuals are responsible for bringing about shifts in public opinion. Instead, scientists find that it is the presence of large numbers of "easily influenced" people who bring about major shifts by influencing other easy-to-influence people.

31. Ouch! Men have a higher pain threshold than women -- It's a question that continues to cause friction between the sexes: who has the higher pain threshold? Now one of the most detailed investigations of its kind has reported that it's men who have the higher threshold, but only at 5 of 12 of the pairs of pressure points investigated (thresholds were the same for both sexes at the other points).

32. People can put a price tag on economic justice, economists say -- How much would you pay to live in an equitable society in which people get what they deserve and deserve what they get" Economists at Carnegie Mellon University and the Free University of Berlin have developed a mathematical model to measure the value that people place on distributive justice -- whether goods are distributed fairly among all members of society. Applying their model to pre-existing survey data, the authors found that, on average, people are willing to sacrifice about 20 percent of their disposable income to live in an equitable society --but they also found that the value a person places on equity is substantially affected by their race and educational background. Whites place a higher value on equity than non-whites, and equity is valued more by those with high levels of education than those with less education.

33. A Day's Air Traffic as Seen From Space

Designer Aaron Koblin composited a day's worth of FAA data to make some intriguing animations. (HT: In the Agora)