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Last year, The New York Times Book Review ran a series of essays by leading intellectuals and writers commenting on our modern Democracy and where it stands today. Entitled Crossroads, this wonderful series ran for nine weeks and tried to address the following:

In almost every area of the collective American experience - from politics and the economy to education and the family - few ironclad truths remain. In the realm of ideas this open-endedness has had an unexpected consequence: the hard-edged and often polarizing disagreements of the past are now giving way to what seems the search for common ground, for consensus.

But what exactly does consensus look like in the 21st century, with its almost continuous narrative of change, much of it driven by technological innovation? And how to make sense of a world that grows ever smaller but also more atomized? These and other questions prompted Barry Gewen, a longtime editor at the Book Review, to approach a number of accomplished intellectuals and ask each to write an essay that distills the current state of thinking in a particular field.

You should definitely check them all out, as they are well-written essays discussing issue of today. One favorite is entitled, "The State of Families, Class and Culture," by Arlie Hochschild:

For whatever they think about gay marriage, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, the right to abortion -- the two sides differ surprisingly little in what they do. Two-thirds of older Americans who believe the Bible is the literal word of God are married, but so are two-thirds of those who say the Bible is a collection of myths. Or else the two sides differ in what they do but not in ways we'd imagine: rates of teenage pregnancy, out-of-wedlock births and divorce are higher in red states, for example, than in blue ones.

She continues:

Over the last 40 years, we have witnessed a profound shift in the American family, one that bears the deep footprints of a disappearing economic sector and a transformed culture. The shift has hit blue-collar families especially hard. These days, the best gauge of social class is years in school. In 1970, a female high school dropout had a 17 percent chance of becoming a single mother (versus 2 percent for a woman with a bachelor's degree). By 2007, her chances had jumped to a whopping 49 percent (versus 7 percent for the B.A. holder). Nearly all new mothers with graduate training, but only half of high school dropout mothers, are married.

There is much to read from here on out, but she ends with this:

Working-class families, where breakups come faster, have suffered a one-two punch. They have absorbed the decline of the industrial sector. They have also been exposed, like the rest of America, to a curiously consumerist approach to love. Paradoxically, those who call for family values also tout the wonders of an unregulated market without observing the subtle cultural links between the family they seek to regulate and the market they hold free.

The recent struggle for gay marriage can remind us all of the value of sustained commitment. So what can we do? In response to our fast-food culture, a "slow food" movement appeared. Out of hurried parenthood, a move toward slow parenting could be growing. With vital government supports for state-of-the-art public child care and paid parental leave, maybe we would be ready to try slow love and marriage.

Read the entire thing when you get a chance...

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