Men Adrift—The Economist

This is really, really long. But if you have any amount of patience, read it.

Tallulah, in the Mississippi Delta, is picturesque but not prosperous. Many of the jobs it used to have are gone. Two prisons and a county jail provide work for a few guards but the men behind bars, obviously, do not have jobs. Nor do many of the young men who hang around on street corners, shooting dice and shooting the breeze. In Madison Parish, the local county, only 47% of men of prime working age (25-54) are working.

The men in Tallulah are typically not well educated: the local high school’s results are poor even by Louisiana’s standards. That would have mattered less, in the old days. A man without much book-learning could find steady work at the mill or in the fields. But the lumber mill has closed, and on nearby farms “jobs that used to take 100 men now take ten,” observes Jason McGuffie, a pastor. A strong pair of hands is no longer enough.

Facebook Top Source for Political News Among Millennials—Pew Research Center

Sheesh. This kinda scares me. So much trash is on Facebook. This also, for the record, shows how influential that “Trending” sidebar may be. Facebook can very much decide what is “trending.”

Among Millennials, Facebook is far and away the most common source for news about government and politics. When asked whether they got political and government news from each of 42 sources in the previous week (36 specific news outlets, local TV generally and 5 social networking sites), about six-in-ten Web-using Millennials (61%) reported getting political news on Facebook. That is 17 points higher than the next most consumed source for Millennials (CNN at 44%).

2 million misinformed Internet-shamers just upstaged a bride at her own wedding—Caitlin Dewey

Caitlin is one of my favorite follows on Twitter. Love her stuff. Great piece here. I’ve written on Internet shaming before here.

Two weeks ago, an Iowa man committed the wedding faux pas seen — quite literally — around the world.

A single photo, posted first to Imgur and later to Reddit, seemed to tell the entire story: A woman in a coral dress with one hand clamped over her tearful face; a man on his knee in front of her with arm outstretched, grinning broadly; and in the background, sitting down, upstaged, an actual bride and groom — the bride’s head tilted, grimacing slightly.

KINDLE DEAL: Jesus>Religion by Jefferson Bethke ($2.99)

I’m reading Harry Potter right now. Classic video here. Before even YouTube, I think.