May 2012
9 posts
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Link: An interactive Timeline of "Conservative... →
Today the Public Insight Network introduces a timeline that we need your help to complete. We want to know the key moments that shaped people’s outlook as conservatives. We’re plotting a lot of them on a timeline. Please take a look and then add your own story.
What about "marriage" through the ages?
In order to start a civil discussion about same-sex marriage in America, we asked people from our Public Insight Network to tell us the stories behind their thoughts on the matter AND to give us questions they’d ask people who think differently about the issue than they do.
David from Deerword, Minn., takes the long view of “tradition” by posing this question:
Why are you...
What if it were your kid?
In order to start a civil discussion about same-sex marriage in America, we asked people from our Public Insight Network to tell us the stories behind their thoughts on the matter AND to give us questions they’d ask people who think differently about the issue than they do.
This question from Jennifer in St. Paul, Minn. found some small amount of middle-ground on the issue when answered by people...
How does same-sex marriage affect life, liberty,...
In order to start a civil discussion about same-sex marriage in America, we asked people from our Public Insight Network to tell us the stories behind their thoughts on the matter AND to give us questions they’d ask people who think differently about the issue than they do.
Tiffany from Lakeville, Minn. wanted people opposed to same-sex marriage to tie the issue back to some cherished American...
Is same-sex marriage a "slippery slope"?
In order to start a civil discussion about same-sex marriage in America, we asked people from our Public Insight Network to tell us the stories behind their thoughts on the matter AND to give us questions they’d ask people who think differently about the issue than they do.
Stan from Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif. is looking for answers to a very common question raised by opponents of legalized...
If the sanctity of marriage is paramount, what...
In order to start a civil discussion about same-sex marriage in America, we asked people from our Public Insight Network to tell us the stories behind their thoughts on the matter AND to give us questions they’d ask people who think differently about the issue than they do.
One question, posed by Jenny from Excelsior, Minn., drew impassioned responses from many people in the network who...
How do non-traditional families have "the talk"?
In order to start a civil discussion about same-sex marriage in America, we asked people from our Public Insight Network to tell us the stories behind their thoughts on the matter AND to give us questions they’d ask people who think differently about the issue than they do.
Laurie from Fargo, N.D., wants to know how legalized same-sex marriage will change “the talk”.
How would you...
Reality check: What experience informs your...
The big social and political story of the week has been marriage. Just a day after North Carolina voters constitutionally banned same-sex marriage in their state, President Obama revealed his “evolution” on the issue has finally led him to support marriage rights for gay and lesbian couples.
In a year when everything is political, we’re trying to step back and hear real stories...
April 2012
5 posts
Continued: More on men and (lack of) friendships →
Our earlier pieces exploring the challenges adult men face in finding and forging close male friendships led to a featured chat today on The Daily Circuit at Minnesota Public Radio. We continue to get an array of comments to our original question posted through the Public Insight Network. Today’s Daily Circuit discussion added a new layer of perspective, and another place for you to share...
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Withdrawing from the bonds of boyhood and the...
By Neal Karlen (4.4.2012)
Last fall, on the anniversary of 9/11, New York University Professor Niobe Way went to Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village. Way, an authority on developmental adolescent psychology focusing on male friendships, was astonished by what she saw.
“It was 8:30 a.m., just around the time the planes had hit the towers,” she told me. On the nearby benches,...
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(Aging) men and women on (aging) men and...
Our recent musings on men and friendship, prompted by a guy-trip to watch baseball in Arizona, sparked some provocative responses to our Public Insight Network query. Why, we wondered, does it seem hard for men to make new friends after they enter adulthood? Is that universal to the male experience, or is it changing with the times?
The range of viewpoints varied, but most agreed that men...
March 2012
16 posts
The Boys of Spring
Editor’s note: Opening day of Major League Baseball is next week – as sure a sign of spring in America as the equinox. In honor of that seasonal ritual, Public Insight Network reporter Neal Karlen offers an essay on the game and how it causes him to reflect on the bonds between men. His musings prompted a query about men and age and friendship; we’d love to hear your thoughts.
By Neal...
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“If you want to find real American heroes, find them in communities that are...”
– Newark, N.J., mayor Cory Booker, speaking with Henry Louis Gates, Jr. on the PBS program “Finding Your Roots.” Booker, who grew up in a middle-class family, lived for eight years in Newark’s Brick Towers, an infamous housing complex that was demolished in 2006.
Tell us where you...
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QUESTION: WHAT'S YOUR IMMIGRATION STORY?
We’re looking for recent immigration stories. If you or your parents are immigrants to the United States, your story could help inform our reporting.
What are the basic facts of your immigration story? When you read about the immigrant experience and immigrant issues in the media, what about your story is missing? Many families have objects (pictures, artifacts) that they bring with them...
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QUESTION: WHAT WAR EXPERIENCES CAN'T BE CAPTURED...
Newsweek has published previously unseen photos taken in 1965 from the Vietnam War. If you are a veteran or have seen war up close, I’d like to ask you a few questions. When you look through photo galleries like this one, what about your experience is not captured – or can’t be captured? Do you have any photographs of your own that you’d like to share?
Tell us your story or...
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Do You Vant to be Alone?
(QUESTION posted by Neal Karlen. 3.13.2012)
Last week, Public Insight Network Senior Reporter Jeff Severns Guntzel posted about the dream of home ownership dimming for younger Americans. Between 2009-2011, mortgages granted 20somethings were half that of a few years before. In a stressed economy, young people are moving back in with their parents, tripling up in apartments and perhaps resigned to...
A Collision? Today's News and Cold War Memories
(QUESTION posted by Neal Karlen. 3.12.2012)
Iran’s apparent proximity to nuclear capability has given Americans of a certain age a foreboding sense of, as Yogi Berra once said, deja vu all over again. While no one has predicted a return to the days of backyard bomb shelters and family meetings to vote on which neighbors to include in case of nuclear attack, a new atomic arms race in the...
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Is this song about you?
Bruce Springsteen releases his new album today.
Many of the songs on “Wrecking Ball” channel a working-class anger about hard times in America. In the song “Jack of All Trades,” for example, he rages against big banks and repeats a theme of resigned self-reliance with the refrain “I’m a jack of all trades, we’ll be alright.”
Here’s our...
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Is "the end of home ownership as a national...
When we’ve focused on opportunity here, we’ve mostly focused on education and jobs. Homeownership hasn’t come up much. Yet.
There’s a very interesting conversation happening over at The Atlantic. Last week, in his post, The End of Ownership: Why Aren’t Young People Buying More Houses?, Derek Thompson pointed to this statistic from a recent Federal Reserve study:
...
The high toll of toil
By Neal Karlen (3.2.2012)
Given enough time, terrible jobs, like terrible relationships, can be hilarious in the retelling. Just as often, however, those hardest gigs of one’s life result in a form of enervating post-traumatic stress syndrome that never really fully goes away.
Michelle Franco, 35, falls in the latter camp. She is among dozens of Public Insight Network members who answered...
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Question: Did you make the right choices about...
We live in an age where we can run up debt — or spend a small personal fortune — earning a bachelor’s degree, only to wind up chasing some vague notion of “good job” while settling for work that leaves us underwhelmed and underpaid. And that’s if there is work to be had at all.
According to a recent Harvard study, more than a quarter of American workers with...
February 2012
28 posts
Where have all the heroes gone? (To chips and...
By Neal Karlen (2.29.2012)
In The Right Stuff, Tom Wolfe’s epic history of the beginning of the manned space program, he called astronaut John Glenn the last American hero. After Glenn became the first American to orbit the earth, the time for heroes, Wolfe wrote, “had come, and it had gone, perhaps never to be relived.” Gone were the days, “when an astronaut could parade up Broadway while...
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“If wealth is the surplus security or ‘cushion’ that comes from...”
– The organizing question behind a new reporting beat at Marketplace, led by Mitchell (@entrepreneurguy) Hartman. With the gap between the wealthy and the poor growing in America, the program plans to report on “this paradigm shift that’s seeing American society reshaped before our very...
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“I don’t know what to tell my daughter. She’s seven and we...”
– Jonpaul Barrabee, 35, works as a criminal defense attorney in Detroit. I interviewed Barrabee about his work and the view that work provides him of life in America now. This quote sticks with me. Lots of people have said this to me in lots of different ways, and Barrabbe captures the essence of the...
'Tween the Baby Boom and a Hard Place
By Neal Karlen (2.17.2012)
“Tweeners.”
In popular parlance, the word denotes the time between the wonder years of childhood and the woeful travails of teendom, roughly ages 10-12.
For Elia Bassin, 29, however, “tweener” means being caught in an employment and technological vise between baby boomers and those who’ve just graduated from college. Bassin is a former...
New Math? When education and opportunity are far...
A story about America’s growing education gap in The New York Times last Friday (2.10.2012) week reminded us of a word we’re seeing over and over again when we ask people what they expect from America: opportunity.
Many of the people we’ve heard from used the word to draw a contrast with what President Barack Obama said in his State of the Union address in January: that...
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LINK: Critics of Safety Net Programs Depend on... →
A rich multimedia package — with video, charts, a map and poll results — accompanies this piece from The New York Times about a central and widespread contradiction of our political moment. “The government safety net was created to keep Americans from abject poverty, but the poorest households no longer receive a majority of government benefits,” write Binyamin Appelbaum...
Work, Worry and What Might Be Next for Generation...
By Neal Karlen (2.10.2012)
Work-wise, this wasn’t how it was supposed to work out for Courtney Kimmel’s Generation Y, the inheritors of America’s marketing bulls eye from the once fashionable, now aging nihilists of Generation X. “You suddenly realize now that all these truisms about work and prosperity we’ve taken for granted our whole lives are crap,” says...
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"... an all-out global war for good jobs."
Here are some numbers to make your head spin: “Of the seven billion people on Earth, there are five billion adults aged 15 and older. Of these five billion, three billion tell Gallup they work or want to work. Most of these people need a full-time formal job. The problem is that there are currently only 1.2 billion full-time, formal jobs in the world. This is a potentially devastating...
Rock 'n Roll Credit Where Credit is Overdue
By Neal Karlen (2.10.2012)
Of all the variables that alienate one from one’s workplace, perhaps one of the worst is not getting credit when you do fabulous work. This April, the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum will try to right the egregious wrongs of the rock ‘n roll past by paying homage to the perhaps hardest working bands in show biz: groups who, because they backed up...
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"The comfort of the rich depends upon an abundant...
By Jeff Severns Guntzel (2.8.2012)
This post is not about the servant staff at “Downton Abbey” (pictured above). But bear with me, it’s apropos.
Susette Carroll, 32, is a single mother, part-time student (communications with a minor in Native American studies) and a delivery driver for a pizza place in rural Kentucky, where she lives. I called her after she responded to my...
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“The idea that 90 or 95 percent of Americans are struggling may have achieved the...”
– Scott Winship,a fellow in the Center on Children and Families at the Brookings Institution, in a New Republic article that challenges conventional Great Recession thinking about the middle class. Read the full article, “Stop feeling sorry for the middle class! They’re doing just...
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Eastwood, America and ads that sell... but what?
By Jeff Jones (2.7.2012) Two minutes of sobriety may have been the real surprise winner on a Super Bowl Sunday that was otherwise exactly what we have come to expect: a glitzy half-time show and lots of silly, cheeky ads. Then, just as the nation settled in for an exciting second half of football, it suddenly paused and held its collective breath. If you haven’t seen the “Halftime in America”...
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LINK: Most Americans Want a Walkable Neighborhood,... →
From good: The symbol of American success often involves having the biggest house possible, but our outsized fantasies seem to be shifting. According to a new survey, more than three quarters of us consider having sidewalks and places to take a walk one of our top priorities when deciding where to live. Six in 10 people also said they would sacrifice a bigger house to live in a neighborhood that...
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“Michigan State University surveyed more than 700 employers seeking to hire...”
– From an NPR story by Jennifer Ludden about how helicopter parents have graduated from college to the workplace. In the context of what we’re hearing from PIN sources about perceptions of a declining work ethic, it’s hard to know whether to shake our heads at the kids who won’t...
Great Expectations: Super Bowl edition
(2.5.2012) With the nation’s attention on the Hoosier State for the weekend, we poked through the Public Insight Network for people writing about “Indianapolis” and “American dream” and found this thoughtful response from Indy resident Sara Pugh:
Q from PIN: From your point of view, what’s the commonly accepted definition of the “American...
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College in America: a series of broken...
Access to college is a common expectation in America (or at least it used to be). But a few Public Insight sources have asked a good question: Are colleges expecting enough from their students? Here’s what’s making one former instructor nervous:
By Jeff Jones (2.2.2012)
NOVATO, Calif. — Rick Zalon started teaching because he almost died. In his late 40s, he was stricken with...