|
|
|
|
Survey: Children not vital to a successful marriage
David Crary
NEW YORK — The percentage of Americans who consider children “very important” to a successful marriage has dropped sharply since 1990, and more now cite the sharing of household chores as pivotal, according to a new survey.
The Pew Research Center survey on marriage and parenting found that children had fallen to eighth out of nine on a list of factors that people associate with successful marriages — well behind “sharing household chores,” “good housing,” “adequate income,” a “happy sexual relationship” and “faithfulness.”
In a 1990 World Values Survey, children ranked third in importance among the same items, with 65 percent saying children were very important to a good marriage. Just 41 percent said so in the new Pew survey. Full story
|
Moore’s ‘Sicko’ scolds the U.S. health care system
Kam Williams
Michael Moore has made a career of exposing hypocrisy in the ranks of American corporate and political bureaucracies. His first film, 1989’s “Roger and Me,” detailed the economic blight visited upon his hometown of Flint, Mich., in the wake of automotive giant General Motors’ business decision to close down its Flint factories and outsource those jobs to Mexico. Moore continued his focus on greed and deceit in the upper echelons of American society in his two television series, “TV Nation” and “The Awful Truth,” and in his 1997 documentary “The Big One.”
In 2002, the controversial gadfly turned his attention to the gun lobby in “Bowling for Columbine,” a breakthrough effort that garnered Moore considerable national attention — not to mention an Academy Award for Best Documentary. Moore cashed in on his newfound cache with 2004’s much-talked-about “Fahrenheit 9/11,” in which he questioned whether or not President Bush might have had a hidden agenda in declaring war on Iraq.
Full story
|
New book spans gamut of African American history
Kam Williams
“African American history, to be clear, is so much more than a handful of extraordinary individuals or practices like slavery, Jim Crow and civil rights. A lot of it is painful, but it’s also inspiring and triumphant … It took the Civil War, the civil rights movement of the 1960s, and a lot of struggle in between to secure African Americans the basic right to citizenship that white Americans took for granted.
[This book] isn’t a big sermon on the struggle; instead, it’s a straightforward, interesting (I hope!), and honest overview of African American history from Africa through the transatlantic slave trade, slavery, the Civil War, Reconstruction, Jim Crow and the 1960s civil rights movement until now. Along the way, that history birthed a culture that includes the black church and education as well as sports, music, literature, television and film.” Full story
|
|
|
|
