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...
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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...
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LISTEN: Workin' Hard Blues
“While we’re on the subject of hard work, I just want to say I always was a man to work…” That’s Woody Guthrie in his sometimes surrealist ramble, “Workin’ Hard Blues.” It’s apropos, and was suggested by Public Insight Network source Gabriel Heller, 36, a self-described house husband and game developer in Minneapolis, whose hard work led to an...
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"I love my job": A Storify joint
Today I’m reading through the more than 200 responses (more coming in as I type) to my Public Insight Network query on hard work. I took a break and went searching in Twitter for people talking about their jobs. I searched “I hate my job” and wanted to share what I found, but I don’t want to get anybody fired for my curiosity, so I flipped “hate” to...
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Watch: Art up from the ashes in urban Detroit
(2.2.2012) Today’s Daily Dream is a video about what happens when you expect nothing and decide to create something. Produced by HDNet and brought to our attention by Susan Leem at beingblog:
The Heidelberg Project is a living outdoor art installation in the heart of urban Detroit. Artist Tyree Guyton created a massive art installation spanning two city blocks where deteriorating homes are...
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“This book, being about work, is, by its very nature, about violence — to...”
– Studs Terkel, from the introduction to Working, his oral history, where “people talk about what they do all day and how they feel about what they do.” Hear audio of some of the 130 interviews Terkel conducted for the book. It was published in 1974, during another time of great economic...
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The promise of America: Florida edition
(2.1.2012) As Floridians went to the polls this week, we asked Public Insight sources from the Sunshine State what they expect from America. Here’s some of what we heard.
JOSUE MATOS, of Bristol, worries that everyone wants to live like kings, but “that’s only going to require more and more peasants.”
“I own a home and I expect to be able to keep it, but I’m...
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QUESTION: HOW HARD DO YOU WORK AND WHY?
In a recent interview, Allison Altdoerffer, 24, described conflicting feelings at the end of her work week: “After I clock in a 60-some-hour work week, I feel a sense of pride looking at the numbers. It is so tied to our pride to say, ‘I’m working hard.’ I think that is a little strange, but I’m not sure I could ever walk away from that fully.”
Does this...
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Education, opportunity and dreams for a child
(2.1.2012) Responding to our query about the “American Promise”, George Tucker, of Fort Lauderdale, Fla., told us “I think everyone should have the opportunity for an education whether they work hard or not.” Then he went on to tell us why he feels so strongly about that:
“I come from a blue-collar family. Neither of my parents finished college. My father is a...
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“After I clock in a 60-some-hour work week, I feel a sense of pride looking at...”
– Allison Altdoerffer, 24, who works in public relations in San Francisco and blogs about adjusting to professional life after college. We’re thinking a lot about hard work and why we work the way we do. More on this soon. (Interviewed by Jeff Severns Guntzel)
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January 2012
40 posts
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What vets think we should be asking about war,...
By Jeff Severns Guntzel (1.30.2012)
Thick in the air of the American now is the experience of veterans of war. Reporters have been busying themselves for years trying to understand the scope of it. But the job can never be called done. There are simply too many individual experiences — infinite combinations of need, personality and strength of community. In a Public Insight Network query...
“Who determines what ‘hard work’ is, whether it is hard enough or...”
– Dave Oldham, of Southington, Conn., in response to our query about reaping the benefits of the “American promise”. The query prompted lots of good comments about what “hard work” really means. We’ll explore that question in coming days.
Link: "The Great Divide" →
Our partners at the St. Louis Beacon have spent the last year asking sources in the Public Insight Network to help them cover class in their community.
It’s a St. Louis-based project, but what they heard resonates around the nation as politicians and economists debate the growing gap between wealthy and poor, and as fears grow about the erosion of a secure middle class. Their reporting is...
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More voices on the notion of an "American promise"
(1.27.2012) We received so many personal reflections on “the basic American Promise” that President Obama referred to in his State of the Union speech, that we’re posting one more set. You can still add your voice. We’ll follow up on some of these themes next week.
JEFF BARGER, Lorton, Va.:
“My only expectation of America is the freedom to make my own choices, my...
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One man's dream: threatened by grief, saved by...
By Neal Karlen (1.27.2012)
RALEIGH, N.C. — Today, political morticians of most every genus are finishing their dissections of this week’s State of the Union Address. Yes, the conventional wisdom now conventionally goes, Obama occasionally played political chess. Yet more seriously, he seemed to have confronted the quandary of whether or not the American Dream of owning a home, sending...
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REBLOG: Talent and Timing
(1.27.2012) It’s impossible to examine “the American now” without imagining its future. And with technology developing more quickly than our ability to predict it with any reliable precision, imagining that future is more of a guessing game with every passing moment. Here, via azspot, is a more eloquent and globally-minded way of putting it:
“Long before Beethoven sat before a...
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LINK: Where Did All the Workers Go? 60 Years of... →
Click through to have a look at the graph. But just as compelling is this question, posed by Derek Thompson over at The Atlantic (1.26.2012): “Why isn’t anybody talking about the tragic decline of agriculture? The industry’s share of workers has fallen by 80 percent in the last 60 years. Nobody seems to think that’s much of a tragedy, but we do consider it tragic that...
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'working wealthy' versus 'jaw-dropping rich'
Richard Benzinger, of St. Louis, is a doctor in his 40s. He answered a Public Insight Network query sent to people among the 2 percent of Americans earning more than $250,000, which asked, “Do you consider yourself wealthy?” (1.27.2012)
How did you get to where you are today, and are you better or worse off than you were growing up?
My wife and I are both doctors and were supported...
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QUESTION: WHAT DO YOU FEAR?
Fear. We all experience it. Sometimes we are mocked for it. Politicians, the media and advertisers (not to mention spammers) prey on it. In these uncertain political and economic times, what are you most afraid of? What is behind that fear?
Tell us your story…
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