Michael Regan

Nearly a third of all Americans prefer getting text messages to talking on the telephone, a new report says–a number that soars to well over half among the most prodgious text users, primarily young adults. The new survey by the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds 83% of American adults own cell […]

While social media such as Facebook and Twitter have been blamed for contributing to teen ills from narcissism to cyberbullying, a new study by the Knight Foundation says they also raise students’ appreciation for the First Amendment and its guarantee of free speech rights. As the use of social media has expanded, the percentage of […]

As Congress continues to bicker over funding for the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the nation is on track for a record year for major disaster declarations. And counting all forms of emergency aid, only two states have not had a declaration of some kind in 2011, Mark Memmott notes at NPR. FEMA lists three types […]

The expectation that children will be better-off than their parents is a central tenet of the American Dream, Gregory Acs writes in a new study, but 30 percent of children raised in middle-class households fall out of the middle as adults. The report–Downward Mobility from the Middle Class: Waking Up from the American Dream–says marital […]

Taken less than a week after Tropical Storm Irene drenched New England, this Sept. 2 satellite photo shows a miles-long plume of sediment spewing into Long Island from the mouth of the Connecticut River (view larger image at  NASA Earth Observatory).

Although no firm figures have been released, information from the White House indicates states could receive $100 billion or more from the $447-billion job creation plan announced by President Barack Obama Thursday night, John Gramlich reports at Stateline.org. Included in that estimate is $18 billion in direct aid to states for school modernization and construction; […]

While many environmental advocates favor shifting energy-generation plants from coal to natural gas to combat global warming, a new study says that may not help–and could hurt in the long run, according to the National Center for Atmospheric Research. Ironically, that’s because coal emits more environmentally-hazardous particles. The study by Tom Wigley, a senior research […]

Buried in an otherwise gloomy poll–and aren’t they all these day?–is some good news for President Barack Obama: More than half of Americans support the idea of a large-scale government-subsidized construction program to create job, Carrie Budoff Brown reports at Politico. Such a plan is expected to be the centerpiece of the president’s jobs speech […]

Fifty-five percent of Americans think labor unions should have as much or more influence in the future as they do now, but an equal proportion say they don’t expect that will happen, according to a new Gallup poll. The share of people saying they expect organized labor’s influence to decline is up from 46 percent […]

Non-whites and Hispanics accounted for almost all the population growth in the country’s 100 largest metro areas between 2000 and 2010, a new Brookings report says, and 22 of those regions–including 10 in California–now have “majority minority” populations. Hispanic populations more than doubled in 29 of the 100 large metro areas, according to the report, […]

So far education hasn’t been a big issue in the Republican race for the 2012 presidential nomination, Sarah Butrymowicz says at the Hechinger Report–but the eight leading candidates do have track records on the subject. Butrymowicz sifts through their past statements to provide a digest of  the candidates’ stands. Hint: Not a lot of No […]

Although beset by some of the same problems that afflict the media generally, Spanish-language media tended to fare better overall than their mainstream English-language counterparts last year, a new report by the Pew Research Center says. Hispanic newspapers saw a small decline in circulation in 2010, reported Emily Guskin and Amy Mitchell of Pew’s Project […]

After jumping 24 percent in just one year, the number of 18- to 24-year-old Hispanic students attending college in the United States hit an all-time high of 12.2 million in October 2010, Richard Fry of the Pew Hispanic Center reports The number of Hispanic young adults enrolled in college grew by 349,000 between 2009 and […]

Six years after Hurricane Katrina provide a lesson in how not to prepare for and react to a natural disaster, elected officials from President Obama to governors and mayors made sure they were seen as engaged in planning for the arrival of Hurricane Irene, Carol Lee says at the Wall Street Journal. As the first […]