November 25, 2017

From Harper's:

States with more evangelical Christians have more Google searches for the word “porn.”

From The Economist:

Morgan Stanley, a bank, expects Amazon to grow by an average of nearly 20% a year between now and 2025.

From The New Yorker:

In most places on earth, staying is the norm. Mobility is regarded with ambivalence: leaving is turnover; it weakens families and social trust.

But in America, a country formed by the romance of the frontier and populated mostly by people who had left somewhere else, leaving has always been the celebrated story—the bold, enterprising, properly American response to an unsatisfactory life at home. Americans were for a long time the most mobile people in the world, and this geographic mobility drove America’s economy, and its social mobility as well.

Because Americans moved for work, mostly from poor areas to richer ones, after 1880 incomes around the country steadily converged for a hundred years.

From The Guardian (Katherine Rundell on "The book that changed my life"):

Jane Austen’s Emma.

From The Guardian (Katherine Rundell on "The book I wish I’d written"):

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson; except that, if I had written it, I would see the joins and scratches and compromises. So, none.