Culture: September 2011 Archives

Can the Middle Class Be Saved? - Magazine - The Atlantic

"One stubborn stereotype in the United States is that religious roots are deepest in blue-collar communities and small towns, and, more generally, among Americans who do not have college degrees. That was true in the 1970s. Yet since then, attendance at religious services has plummeted among moderately educated Americans, and is now much more common among college grads. So, too, is participation in civic groups. High-school seniors from affluent households are more likely to volunteer, join groups, go to church, and have strong academic ambitions than seniors used to be, and are as trusting of other people as seniors a generation ago; their peers from less affluent households have become less engaged on each of those fronts. A cultural chasm--which did not exist 40 years ago and which was still relatively small 20 years ago--has developed between the traditional middle class and the top 30 percent of society."

(Via Rod Dreher, whose response is also worth reading.)

Speech Accent Archive at George Mason University

"The speech accent archive uniformly presents a large set of speech samples from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English read the same paragraph and are carefully transcribed. The archive is used by people who wish to compare and analyze the accents of different English speakers." (Via a comment on the dearauthor.com blog.)

BBC - Voices - The Voices Recordings

A collection of thousands of sound clips from all over the United Kingdom of people speaking their own various accents and dialects. (Via a comment from Courtney Milan on dearauthor.com)