“It was as though we were looking at Mao,” recalls Charlie Reina, a former Fox News producer. The Foxistas went wild. They let the dogs out. Woof! Woof! Woof! Even those who disliked the way Ailes runs his network joined in the display of fealty, given the culture of intimidation at Fox News. “It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with the network’s parent, News Corp. “There are people who turn people in.”

This article appears in the June 9, 2011 issue of Rolling Stone. The issue is available in the online archive now.

The key to decoding Fox News isn’t Bill O’Reilly or Sean Hannity. It isn’t even News Corp. chief Rupert Murdoch. To understand what drives Fox News, and what its true purpose is, you must first understand Chairman Ailes. “He is Fox News,” says Jane Hall, a decade-long Fox commentator who defected over Ailes’ embrace of the fear-mongering Glenn Beck. “It’s his vision. It’s a reflection of him.”

A curious vocal pattern has crept into the speech of young adult women who speak American English: low, creaky vibrations, also called vocal fry. Pop singers, such as Britney Spears, slip vocal fry into their music as a way to reach low notes and add style. Now, a new study of young women in New York state shows that the same guttural vibration—once considered a speech disorder—has become a language fad.

Vocal fry, or glottalization, is a low, staccato vibration during speech, produced by a slow fluttering of the vocal chords (listen here). Since the 1960s, vocal fry has been recognized as the lowest of the three vocal registers, which also include falsetto and modal—the usual speaking register. Speakers creak differently according to their gender, although whether it is more common in males or females varies among languages. In American English, anecdotal reports suggest that the behavior is much more common in women. (In British English, the pattern is the opposite.) Historically, continual use of vocal fry was classified as part of a voice disorder that was believed to lead to vocal chord damage. However, in recent years, researchers have noted occasional use of the creak in speakers with normal voice quality.

In the new study, scientists at Long Island University (LIU) in Brookville, New York, investigated the prevalence of vocal fry in college-age women. The team recorded sentences read by 34 female speakers. Two speech-language pathologists trained to identify voice disorders evaluated the speech samples. They marked the presence or absence of vocal fry by listening to each speaker’s pitch and two qualities called jitter and shimmer—variation in pitch and volume, respectively.

This is fascinating.

I’ve noticed that many college educated, classy-sounding, hottie or hottie-aspiring, and young professional women do this. When combined with other intonations it sounds very sophisticated — as if the speaker spends a lot of time and money on herself. That’s the impression it gives me, anyway.

Another way to say this is that this speech pattern is the new ‘hoity toity’ way of speaking for women wishing to sound young, hip, and attractive. Again, that’s my feel for it.

I left after spending a weekend with a girl who does this consistently in her speech, called a department store about some shoes and the woman on the phone did the exact same thing. It was fascinating.

Listen for it.

A striking visualization.

But America’s Constitution is more than just a secular document; it’s literally godless. It doesn’t claim that the ideas it contains were the product of divine revelation. It states that governing power comes from the will of the people, not the commands of a deity. It doesn’t assert that God has specially blessed this nation or shown it special favor — in fact, it never mentions God at all. And it mentions religion in only two places, both of them negative mentions: in Article VI, which forbids any religious test for public office, and in the First Amendment, which forbids Congress from passing any law respecting an establishment of religion.

If America’s founders had meant to establish a Christian nation, this is where they would have said so. But they said no such thing. And this leads into a historical fact that the religious right would dearly love to forget: the godlessness of the Constitution was a point of major controversy in the debate over ratification. When it was drafted, the fact that it made no explicit mention of God or Christianity wasn’t a minor oversight. It was a major, deliberate omission that was obvious to all. Religious language was omnipresent in other legal documents and charters of the day, including the ones that inspired the Constitution in the first place.

Compelling.

Yep.

Men read technical manuals and comic books. But the well-read American male of the past is mostly gone. Although all Americans are reading less — one survey found that the typical citizen reads only four books a year and one in four reads none at all — men are the biggest drop outs. They account for only 20 percent of the fiction market.

This is fairly horrifying.

But there might still be another possibility — something we couldn’t really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

We start by accepting that food and shelter are basic human rights. The work we do — the value we create — is for the rest of what we want: the stuff that makes life fun, meaningful, and purposeful.

This sort of work isn’t so much employment as it is creative activity. Unlike Industrial Age employment, digital production can be done from the home, independently, and even in a peer-to-peer fashion without going through big corporations. We can make games for each other, write books, solve problems, educate and inspire one another — all through bits instead of stuff. And we can pay one another using the same money we use to buy real stuff.

Strange. Compelling. Strangpelling.

The question we have to begin to ask ourselves is not how do we employ all the people who are rendered obsolete by technology, but how can we organize a society around something other than employment? Might the spirit of enterprise we currently associate with “career” be shifted to something entirely more collaborative, purposeful, and even meaningful?

Instead, we are attempting to use the logic of a scarce marketplace to negotiate things that are actually in abundance. What we lack is not employment, but a way of fairly distributing the bounty we have generated through our technologies, and a way of creating meaning in a world that has already produced far too much stuff.

The communist answer to this question was just to distribute everything evenly. But that sapped motivation and never quite worked as advertised. The opposite, libertarian answer (and the way we seem to be going right now) would be to let those who can’t capitalize on the bounty simply suffer. Cut social services along with their jobs, and hope they fade into the distance.

But there might still be another possibility — something we couldn’t really imagine for ourselves until the digital era. As a pioneer of virtual reality, Jaron Lanier, recently pointed out, we no longer need to make stuff in order to make money. We can instead exchange information-based products.

HT @sgharms.

Pretty much. It’s even worse with “cured cancer” and “solved immortality” pieces out of the medical space.

Habeas Data.

That’s why long-term unemployment has become such a problem.  Our unemployment problem is not, as in previous recessions, that too many people are entering unemployment. Layoffs and discharges are actually lower than they’ve been in a decade.  Rather, our problem is that people aren’t exiting unemployment.  And that’s a much bigger issue.

Human capital is like almost any other form of capital: it is a depreciating asset.  The longer you stay out of the workforce, the less valuable you are to potential employers.  You lose market intelligence and industry connections.  Your technical knowledge and skills atrophy.

This article captures the unemployment situation in a way that I’ve not seen anything else do.

Nearly half of Americans are living in a state of “financial fragility,” a new paper by the National Bureau of Economic Research reveals. To determine this statistic, researchers from the George Washington School of Business, Princeton University, and Harvard Business School asked survey participants whether they would be able to come up with $2,000 for an “unexpected expense in the next month.” 22.2 percent predicted they would be “probably unable” and 27.9 percent said they’d certainly be unable to foot the unplanned bill. The hypothetical cost “reflects the order of magnitude of the cost of an unanticipated major car repair, a large co-payment on a medical expense, legal expenses, or a home repair.” But, it was the participants’ method of coping that really determined their fragility:

Taken together with those who would pawn their possessions, sell their home, or take out a payday loan, 25.7% of respondents who were asked about coping methods (equal to 18.6% of all respondents) would come up with the funds for an emergency by resorting to what might be seen as extreme measures,” the authors write. “Along with the 27.9% of respondents who report that they could certainly not cope with an emergency, this suggests that approximately 46.5% of all respondents are living very close to the financial edge.

And 50% don’t believe in evolution. I wonder what the overlap is…

Roby, raised in Montgomery, Ala., is on the House Committee on Education and the Workforce, and the Subcommittee on Early Childhood, Elementary and Secondary Education.

“It’s no panacea, but this legislation will point us in the right direction. Looking at hard data, we know our children are struggling with a heck of a lot of the math, including the geometry incorporating pi,” Roby said. “I guarantee you American scores will go up once pi is 3. It will be so much easier.”

[ This one got me...Before I saw the comments indicating it was fake I was about to quit my career and become a political activist. ]

I maintain the problem in this country is lack of regulation, a government which pimps out its people to runaway corporate monstrosities. Corporations have all the control and they use and dispose of human beings as they see fit.

We have been told the only way is a global economy, it’s really too complex for us simpletons to get it, but for real honest and truly it benefits all of us to globalize the economy. It’s good for americans to allow companies to set up shop in countries with abominable standards of living and human rights, where these corporations can pay people bullshit for the same labor.

Americans cant find jobs because companies ARE NOT HIRING AMERICANS.
If you physically produce products, the manufacturing is in some third world shithole hiring people who they can pay pennies, and merely fire when lose a hand during the manufacturing process.
If you produce a skilled service, then immigrants from the third world have immigrated here and are now working for less money, with less benefits, while you sit around with your thumb up your ass holding out for a job where you are treated like a human being. Not likely when hatians will work for nothing and tolerate standards of living which are far below that of americans.

This old man pining away about an enterprising productive spirit absent in todays young people as the cause of the current employment problem… sounds just like an old man pining away, full of utter shit. People in his generation found it easier to find work, because people in his generation didn’t have to compete with hatians working for much less in terms of monetary compensation benefits or respect. People in his generation got educated, and competed only against americans, and there were jobs in america then.

There is a reason the media (which is to say, the government/rich/corporate class) has ridiculed and satirized to unspeakability the stereotype of the disgruntled american worker who is weary of immigrants and corporations setting up manufacturing in third world dumpsters. The reason this line of thought has become a joke is because it is infuriatingly correct, and the parasite class depends on us never waking up and figuring that out.

Follow it through for the full comment.

Interesting numbers.

Some of the world’s fastest supercomputers are being set up in Hong Kong to address the age-old mystery of human intelligence.

The study of intelligence quotient (IQ) is being conducted by BGI Hong Kong, [formerly] known as the Beijing Genomics Institute. It will survey DNA samples from 1,000 child prodigies from China’s best high schools, comparing them with samples from 1,000 children of average intelligence, searching for genetic variations.

The study will examine protein coding genes of the extremely smart children, many of whom are expected to enroll at Harvard, Yale or Cambridge. The results will be correlated with each youngster’s school test scores, in hopes of learning how specific genetic variations affect intelligence.

Yet another way we’ll watch China pass us by. They’re taking over Africa, becoming a manufacturing powerhouse, and now looking into how to engineer their children to be smarter.

Meanwhile, we have Dancing With the Stars.