David Lee's List: Culture

• information becomes a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment, rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.
• In fact I'd expand his list of distractions to include Web sites like Facebook and Twitter.
• The Internet just keeps giving us more ways to do nothing.
• We're putting our brains into neutral, and revving the engine.
• obsessing about earning energy packs, spending billions of dollars on virtual gardening tools
• We're turning the world around us into a videogame, using sites like Foursquare to tell our friends where we're eating lunch, and competing to see who can become "mayor" of some restaurant.

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• in 1983, women earned only 64 cents for every dollar earned by a man
• Today? Women earn just 77 cents. By other measures, women’s gains have stalled: board seats and corporate officer posts have been flat — or declined in recent years
• According to the American Bar Association, women in 2008 made up almost half of all associates, but only 18.3 percent of partners. Only 15 women run Fortune 500 companies.
• Even the positive numbers we’ve heard about during the recession are misleading — the ones that seem to indicate that women have suffered fewer job losses than men. The reason? Women are still concentrated in lower-paying fields, rather than the high-paying industries like finance and real estate that were hardest hit.
• Glenn Beck of Fox News suggesting that “ugly women” are probably “progressive as well,”
• Part of the reason we’ve lost our way, part of the reason my generation became complacent, is that many of us have been defining progress for women too narrowly. We’ve focused primarily on numbers at the expense of attitudes.
• Progress in one area without the other is no progress at all.
• women are less apt to fall apart — and this goes even for the primary breadwinners — because they are less likely to define themselves by their job in the first place

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