…look at the cultural aspects of dieting.

…The Death Clock, I’m going to live to be 98. And I’ll probably still be complaining about the older generation.

A U of Wisconsin study’s named Seattle #2 in “America’s Most Literate Cities.” Minneapolis, our ol’ sister city at the other end of the historic Great Northern RR line, is #1; Portland’s #9. And where would you imagine the third-busiest readers to be? Why, Pittsburgh, of course.

Some people who sincerely want social workers to understand today’s teens have compiled a somewhat ridiculous glossary of supposed youth buzzwords. Some of the terms on the list are at least a decade out of date (“baby daddy,” “mack”). Most are demeaning, particularly when stuffed and mounted in this particular context (“skeeza,” “thugged,” “pigeon”). If anyone, besides clueless white mall rats, actually uses more than a few of the phrases in everyday conversation, I’d be truly surprised.

There’s another one of those research reports out that claims nobody’s reading in America anymore. And, like most prior reports of its type, its findings aren’t as dire as its headlines suggest.

Actual book sales, it turns out, have been flat or slightly increasing during the recent economic sadness. And that’s not counting audio books, e-books, and the good ol’ Internet (which is for the most part a reading exercise).

It’s the consumption of “literature,” that amorphously-defined area of non-genre fiction, that’s not kept up with population growth, or even fallen a bit, over the past two decades. (Although its audience decline in that era is not nearly as precipitous as that of network TV in the same period.)

I’m currently trying to get a PR job in a book-related company. What I’ll tell them is what I’ll tell you: Books aren’t going away any time soon. They are, as a character on Max Headroom once said, “a non-volatile storage medium.”

As for “literature,” it’s always been a specialty taste in this country. When book people wax nostalgic for the days when NYC publishing was run by tweed-suited gentlemen in funky little offices, they’re pining for a day when the book biz was so small and concentrated as to have been a boutique industry. The peak years of fiction book sales, roughly the ’50s through the ’70s, coincided with the peak years of mass-market paperbacks, when everything from Orwell to Salinger could be found on the drugstore spinner racks.

Among consumer-product industries in this country, the book industry is among the most resistant to change. Yet change it must, if it’s ever going to achieve its full potential as a business and as a force for influence on the culture at large.

More about all this later, maybe.

“Patriotism is when love of your own people comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.”

An NY Times Sunday-magazine piece claims “the happier your mood, the more liable you are to make bigoted judgments.”

…the real dividing point in U.S. politics is “between those who know they are right and those who are a bit doubtful.”

…that I only reached level three on “The Geek Test,” a Cosmo-like quiz to learn how geeky you truly are.

…(no apparent relation to former Meet the Press MC Lawrence Spivak) wants progressives to stop being so darned defensive. She says the left has to do more than just react against the right; and it has do do so through old-fashioned marketing.

…not to be judgmental about judgmental people anymore. But sometimes I can’t help it. Such as when KOMO’s voice-O-relative-sanity Ken Schram gently lambastes the NIMBY hypocrites fighting he homeless “Tent City” camp in Bothell.

…on her website (and soon to be book) Class Matters, that there are more “Others” in this nation besides just upscale women and upscale gays.

…are so cynically resistant to sales pitches, even video-game companies don’t know how to sell to ’em!

…the pix of grinning female US soldiers abusing Iraqi prisoners as a sign that women aren’t necessarily more “moral” than men after all:

“A uterus is not a substitute for a conscience. This doesn’t mean gender equality isn’t worth fighting for for its own sake. It is. If we believe in democracy, then we believe in a woman’s right to do and achieve whatever men can do and achieve, even the bad things. It’s just that gender equality cannot, all alone, bring about a just and peaceful world….”In short, we need a kind of feminism that aims not just to assimilate into the institutions that men have created over the centuries, but to infiltrate and subvert them.”

…that the Iraqi prisoner-abuse scandal is simply the most visible recent symptom of a decades-long decline in U.S. values; a decline driven, he believes, not by sex and liberals but by corporate power-madness and individual greed. Smith quotes urban historian Jane Jacobs:

“A culture is unsalvageable if stabilizing forces themselves become ruined and irrelevant. . . The collapse of one sustaining cultural institution enfeebles others, makes it more likely that others will give way . . . until finally the whole enfeebled, intractable contraption collapses.”