I have always liked good summaries since before my grandmother gave me birthday subscriptions to Readers Digest for my junior high and high school years. That corresponds to the French College and Lycee years of school. Yes that College for Middle school and their teachers are called “professors” as was my Grandfather when he taught briefly before becoming a World War I hero.
NPR does what local television news used to do when there was a daily Duluth News Tribune. It summarizes much longer stories in the major press that still exists especially the New York Times and the Washington Post. But, whereas it will take me 6 to 15 minutes to read their stories till the end I can polish off the text of NPR in 4 to 6 minutes.
There were several stories that piqued my interest and I have yet to get to either the Times of Post websites. Here’s a couple of them with a little Welty commentary.
CORRECTION….I did start with the Washington Post which had a great article explaining that many minority voters in Canada, Great Britain and the US are moving to the conservative column to cast their votes. Here’s a bit from the Post story:
She pointed out that as culture wars consume politics, folks who are culturally conservative but economically liberal — including many working-class minorities and immigrants — might choose to vote based on cultural issues. Especially as their own algorithm-driven fragment of the media turns those leanings into outrage by amplifying moral- or emotional-based messages.
“Social media can subtly shape people’s information diet because algorithms are attuned to what people are engaging with online,” Wilson said. “So if someone’s paying attention to content that leans a little more socially conservative, the algorithm will feed you more and more of that. And before you know it, you’re in an informational ecosystem that’s pretty different from what you’d see tuning into mainstream media.”
I sent a graph from the story to myself showing where voters are getting their news these days and how its changed since 2012:

I’m still a sucker for written news.
BTW: In the subject heading where I sent this image to myself I wrote “the 3 As. Atomization, algorithms, anti-elitism.”
This is one of the reasons I’m interested in reading how the journalists of the Second world war in the book covered in the previous post. They helped keep America together through the perilous Civil Rights Era and the Vietnam War before the The three As above kicked in to overdrive in the age of they mass truth murderer Donald Trump.
AND NOW FOR THAT NPR STORY THAT CAUGHT MY ATTENTION: Its about women having fewer children globally
“In the U.S., this shift is driven in part by a growing number of women deciding against motherhood. According to Kearney, half of American women now reach age 30 without having at least one child. That’s a dramatic increase from two decades ago, when only about a third of American women didn’t have a child by that age. Many families are also choosing to have significantly fewer children.”
ALSO:
“So far, the U.S. population is relatively stable despite record-low fertility, but new data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows the nation’s fabric is already changing. Older people, those age 65 or above, now outnumber children in 11 states. That has risen sharply from just three states five years ago.
“Children still outnumber older adults in the United States, despite a decline in births this decade,” said Lauren Bowers, chief of the Census Bureau’s Population Estimates Branch, in a statement. “However, the gap is narrowing as baby boomers continue to age into their retirement years.””
