Nathaniel Rogers of The Film Experience tracked down the age at which all Oscar winners in the Academy’s 82 year history won their awards.  He found that men who won Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor were typically in their 30s and 40s.  In contrast, women who won were typically in their 20s or 30s.

Men:

Women:

Looking at it another way, 55% of the women who have been awarded Oscars were 35 and under, whereas only 14% of men were the same:

Perhaps we’re seeing an age bias in award nomination and granting.  It’s reasonable to expect that older actors would be much more likely to win awards, given all their years of experience acting.  But this is not what we see for women or men.  Alternatively, there is an age bias in casting such that the only men and women available for an award are in these age groups.  Disaggregating the data by decade might also reveal some interesting patterns or trends that are invisible in this data.  There is, then, much room for speculation.

The 30-second video below powerfully illustrates the spread of high joblessness rates from January 2007 to January 2010 (map by Latoya Egwuekwe; data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).

Facebook ad from Ryan R.

For some reason, this vintage ad seems so much more genuine than any of its modern equivalents:

At Vintage Ads.

The US Census Bureau put together the map below.  It shows what percentage of households in any given county include a married couple.  In the counties colored with the darkest turquoise, between 59.6 and 79.6% of households consist of a married couple.  In the counties colored white, less than 51.6 do.

I think it’s interesting to speculate as to how the reasons why there are more or less married couple households might vary by place. For example, some places may have disproportionate numbers of gay and lesbian residents who cannot, legally, get married. Others may have higher rates of poverty, which has been shown to decrease relationship stability, leading to less marriage and more divorce.  Still others may have normative or religious pressures in favor of marriage (Utah strongly stands out as the most marriage-prone state).  The racial/ethnic make-up of counties may contribute to marriage rates; we know, for instance, that black women marry at a lesser rate than white women for a whole host of reasons.  Racial/ethnic homogeneity may play a factor too, since interracial marriage is still uncommon and asymmetrical when it does occur.  Some counties have more disproportionate ratios of males and females, which may also shape marriage rates. What do you think?  More hypotheses?  Arguments one way or another?

Minstrelsy is a form of entertainment, popular from the 1830s till the early 1900s in which white, and later black, people painted their face black and performed a caricature of blackness.  The images below (borrowed from Jim Crow History and Wikipedia) are original advertisements for minstrel shows.

Haverly’s United Mastodon Minstrels (circa 1877):

Oliver Scott’s Refined Negro (1898):

Al W. Martin’s Uncle Tom’s cabin (1898):

Wm. H. West’s Big Minstrel Jubilee (1900):

Postcard (1906):

For more caricatures of black people in U.S. history, see these posts: one, twp, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, eleven, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, and twenty.

And for examples of modern reproductions of these stereotypes (literally), see these: one, two, three, four, and five.

For examples and discussion of contemporary “blackface,” see one, two, three, four, five, and six.  Also, bugs bunny.

Katrin sent us a great figure comparing the rate of socioeconomic mobility across several OECD nations.  Using educational attainment and income as measures, the value (between zero and one) indicates how strongly parental socioeconomic status predicts a child’s socioeconomic status (a 1 is a perfect correlation and a zero would be no correlation).

The figure shows that Great Britain, the U.S., and Italy have a near 50% correlation rate.  So, in these countries, parents status predicts about 50% of the variance in children’s outcomes.  In contrast, Denmark, Australia, Norway, Finland, and Canada have much lower correlations.  People born in the countries on the left of this distribution, then, have higher socioeconomic mobility than people born in the countries on the right.  Merit, presumably, plays a greater role in your educational and class attainment in these cases.

Source:  The New York Times.

Emily D., Jeff S., and Dmitriy T.M. have all sent in links to a series of billboards, recently put up in Atlanta, that suggest that abortion is a form of genocide against African Americans:

We’ve posted before on the argument that abortion should be made illegal because it is used disproportionately against the children of Black mothers.  There are good reasons to both credit and discredit this argument, but I’d like to point out something a bit different.

The fact that abortion is highly politicized in the United States, deeply connected to feminism (but not race or class movements), and framed as a contest between “life” and “choice” seems natural to most Americans. Indeed, it’s hard for many Americans to imagine a world in which the procedure is less politicized or debated differently.  But the politics of abortion in the U.S. is not the only kind of abortion politics that could exist.  Myra Marx Ferree‘s award-winning book comparing abortion politics in the U.S. and Germany, Shaping Abortion Discourse, is a great example (with Gamson, Gerhards, and Rucht).

So, whether you agree or disagree with the claims in these billboards, they nicely jolt us out of our acceptance of abortion politics as is.  How might thinking about abortion as a race issue or a class issue change the debate?

NEW! (Mar. ’10): Dmitriy T.M. let us know about this billboard in Poland, sponsored by the Center for Bio-Ethical Reform, that connects abortion to Hitler (found at Opposing Views). The text reads, “Abortion for Polish women introduced by Hitler on March 9, 1943.” It was put up in time for International Women’s Day on March 8th.

I’m putting it after the jump–it has images of bloody fetuses and might not be safe for some workplaces.