It’s a 50/50 split of America’s GDP (or Gross Domestic Product). GDP is the officially recognized monetary value of all goods and services produced by a country within 1 year.
So what this map is showing that 50% of all the money generated in the United States comes from a tiny proportion of the country in geographical terms. It is of course much more of an even split in terms of population.
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Students of Jean-Paul Sartre will recognize here the problem of existential anguish, which he explains in “Being and Nothingness” through the metaphor of vertigo. The sense of vertigo you feel when walking along a narrow mountain path, Sartre writes, is not the fear that you will fall off but rather the fear that you will suddenly decide to jump. Free will is terrifying because it necessarily entails the freedom to change radically in the future.
The freedom to do anything we want later becomes the freedom to thwart our present desires. I decide to quit smoking now, but later, when someone offers me a Lucky Strike, I exercise my free will to decide that what I really want to do is quit smoking tomorrow. Halfway to the filter, I realize that actually I wanted to quit all along, and the question of who is in charge becomes depressingly complicated.
The tattoo tries to make an end run around this problem by indelibly marking the one part of the self that remains tangible and consistent: the body. It is what behavioral economists call a precommitment device, ensuring that our present values remain in force in the future. You take a cab to the bar when you are sober, so that you will not be tempted to drive home when you are drunk. You wish to stop texting your ex-girlfriend late at night, so in the clear light of morning you delete her number from your phone.
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One of the most disturbing facts about American marriage today is that while divorce increased at similar rates for the wealthy and the poor in the 1960s and ’70s, those rates diverged sharply starting around 1980. According to the sociologist Steven P. Martin, among Americans who married between 1975 and 1979, the 10-year divorce rate was 28 percent among people without a high school education and 18 percent among people with at least a college degree: a 10 percentage point difference. But among Americans who married between 1990 and 1994, the parallel divorce rates were 46 percent and 16 percent: an astonishing 30 percentage point difference.
The problem is not that poor people fail to appreciate the importance of marriage, nor is it that poor and wealthy Americans differ in which factors they believe are important in a good marriage. The problem is that the same trends that have exacerbated inequality since 1980 — unemployment, juggling multiple jobs and so on — have also made it increasingly difficult for less wealthy Americans to invest the time and other resources needed to sustain a strong marital bond.
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“A basic challenge is that Ph.D. programs have fostered a culture that glorifies arcane unintelligibility while disdaining impact and audience. This culture of exclusivity is then transmitted to the next generation through the publish-or-perish tenure process. Rebels are too often crushed or driven away.”
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Until the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act in 1998, films could generally enjoy 75 years of copyright protection. Anything that had fallen out by then, however, was understood to stay in the public domain. That alone covers a wealth of film history, including much of the work of foundational filmmakers including Griffiths and Keaton.
After 1923, public-domain challenges arise when the copyright is not renewed. Later Congressional extensions of copyright complicate the matter (and have been the subject of debate), but the initial period is crucial.
“Most commonly, a film’s copyright might not be renewed after its initial 28 years of protection had expired,” Michael Mashon, head of the moving image section at the Library of Congress, wrote in an email.
What you get for… $600,000 Explore an antique palazzo in Malta House hunting in … Austria He cited the examples of the Buster Keaton film “The General” (1926), “His Girl Friday,” “Meet John Doe” and “Nothing Sacred,” a 1937 screwball comedy starring Carole Lombard.
Other films didn’t follow basic rules for maintaining copyright. For instance, “The Night of the Living Dead” and “Carnival of Souls,” a Herk Harvey horror film that has since received a Criterion Collection release, both failed to display a copyright notice clearly enough in the credits.
That notification eventually ceased to be a requirement, but not before affecting Sam Peckinpah’s debut feature, “The Deadly Companions,” and “Charade.”
As a result of these lapses, many of the films proliferated in quick-and-dirty editions on home video.
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Albatross, thy name is DVR. It is the thing that turned TV into homework, ruthlessly cataloging my failings in the form of a queue that never dies. When the old DVR had to be returned before moving, 30 or so hours of unwatched programming went with it. (Apologies to the Kardashian-Humphries wedding. I just couldn’t.)
Stumbling onto oddball TV used to be one of my great pleasures, but the urge to keep up with too many shows necessitated a recording tool that allowed for viewing flexibility, and then that same tool, by constantly reminding me how behind I was, became the thing that made life the most inflexible.
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A top-secret document, obtained by the former N.S.A. contractor Edward J. Snowden, shows that an American law firm was monitored while representing a foreign government in trade disputes with the United States. The disclosure offers a rare glimpse of a specific instance in which Americans were ensnared by the eavesdroppers, and is of particular interest because lawyers in the United States with clients overseas have expressed growing concern that their confidential communications could be compromised by such surveillance.
The government of Indonesia had retained the law firm for help in trade talks, according to the February 2013 document. It reports that the N.S.A.’s Australian counterpart, the Australian Signals Directorate, notified the agency that it was conducting surveillance of the talks, including communications between Indonesian officials and the American law firm, and offered to share the information.
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It used to be more common for a husband to have more education than his wife in America. But now, for the first time since Pew Research has tracked this trend over the past 50 years, the share of couples in which the wife is the one “marrying down” educationally is higher than those in which the husband has more education.
Among married women in 2012, 21% had spouses who were less educated than they were—a threefold increase from 1960, according to a new Pew Research Center analysis of Census data.
The share of couples where the husband’s education exceeds his wife’s increased steadily from 1960 to 1990, but has fallen since then to 20% in 2012.
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“If you want Google search, they’re going to shove Google Plus at you pretty hard, so the consumer’s forced to take the product they don’t want to get the product they want,” said Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School who studies antitrust law and the Internet.
“That raises big questions under antitrust law,” he said. “It reminds me a little bit of Microsoft when Microsoft was fearing Netscape and decided to bend over backward and do anything possible to tie Explorer to their operating system.”
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Generally speaking, antitrust regulators are most worried about mergers that create monopolies that can raise the prices of goods and services when customers have few or no other choices. But officials should be just as concerned about deals that turn a business into a dominant buyer that can make or break its suppliers.
An all-powerful cable company, for example, would be able to influence and control what Americans could watch or read by refusing to carry channels or certain Internet services, or it could favor its own content. Comcast, for example, might find it tempting to treat programming from NBC Universal, which it owns, better than shows from rival networks and movie studios.
Officials at the antitrust division of the Department of Justice and the F.C.C., who have spoken recently about the importance of competition in the increasingly concentrated communications industry, need to study this deal closely. If they find that the merger would give Comcast too much power, the agencies can demand that the company make significant divestments (Comcast has offered to divest three million customers to get regulators to look upon the deal favorably) or they could sue to block the acquisition altogether.
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shaun james bockert 