I live in one of the Philadelphia suburbs that was hotly contested during the primary, and I got a lot of flyers from Obama (almost every day in the last couple of weeks). At least, I thought they were from Obama - they were actually from the Employees Service Union in support of Obama, although that was in very tiny print.

I found it interesting that those ads were very different in tone from the Obama campaign ads I saw - they were much more "populist", and focused on specific economic issues. (One said something like Obama will use the money we're wasting in Iraq to support your kids' schools, another one said Obama would provide health care for kids, etc.) I was an Edwards supporter originally, and I thought the ads were reminiscent of the Edwards campaign ads and speeches.

The pharma industry model is based on selling drugs at higher prices in Western countries, to recoup the cost of research. They can sell drugs at lower prices in less developed countries and still make a profit, as long as enough people pay the higher price to cover the research costs.

Unfortunately, if a drug is sold for pennies in Brazil or China, someone will import it into the US and sell it for the same price here. Or, people will hear that drug X is being sold for $5 in India and start protesting that charging the US more is unfair. But it's not possible for everyone to pay the "China price" and for the company to still cover its costs.

In the short term, companies can make a profit by selling at a lower price. But in the long term, the companies will start looking at research and thinking, is it worth spending billions if we can't make it back later? They will quietly stop pursuing research in areas that won't be profitable for them, like AIDS or malaria research. (I've already seen this happening.) In the long term, we'll have less research and fewer drugs.

(I'm sure people will say, "but what about all the money they spend on advertising?" The companies wouldn't spend money on advertising if they didn't make back every dollar of that money in increased sales. Eliminating advertising might be a good thing in terms of society, but it wouldn't result in more money for research.)

I'm not sure what the answer is. I don't think people in developing countries who desparately need drugs should be denied them. But commercial pharma research just isn't possible if everyone in the world pays the "China price".

Bicycling may have started as a wealthy pastime, but it affected poorer women as well as wealthier ones. As bicycles became more accepted, prices came down so most people could afford one. It gave women the ability to work further away from home, so they could perhaps find a job with higher wages or better conditions. It led to women having more freedom to travel by themselves.

Bicycling also had a major influence on the Victorian dress reform movement. Even poor women who worked in factories were still expected to wear corsets and long skirts at that time. The popularity of bicycling made "reform" clothing more popular, and so it became more socially acceptable to wear bloomers, shorter skirts and less restrictive undergarmets.

Because, as we all know, no one ever had affairs before Sex and the City. If it's not on TV, it doesn't really exist, you know. (If only Anna Karenina had been on HBO!)

Academic literary criticism may be less popular. But I think there's more discussion about books now than there was 20 or 30 years ago, because of the internet. It's not all "thumbs up" Amazon reviews and snarky blog posts. There are web sites devoted to book reviews and discussion. The reviewers may not be paid, but most of them take it seriously and discuss the books with thought (although perhaps not in academic terms). There's a lot more discussion of genre fiction, which was mostly ignored by literary critics in the past. (It may not be the "great American novel", but it's what people are reading.) And in discussion groups and on web sites, there are heated discussions about book reviews, with comments from readers and reviewers.

It may not be the same as the academic criticism of the 1950's (or the 1850's) but this enthusiastic discussion of books shows that reading is still important to a lot of people.

I'm not a big fan of "fashion advice". I don't care what's trendy or what the latest designer is selling this season. However, I'd like to see more discussion of what to wear to work, and that's surprisingly hard to find. For example, I was interested in the article about evening wear. I don't go out much, but every year my company has a Christmas party, and it's actually quite difficult to find evening wear that doesn't show any cleavage, especially if you have a very large bust. What looks modest if you're a B cup isn't so modest when you're a DDD. But it's not a subject I see in women's magazines - the clothes there are all about showing off your boobs, not covering them. The article at the Journal Woman site didn't have much specific advice for how to find appropriate evening wear, but perhaps in another article. (Although, I suspect anyone who reads the WSJ on a regular basis has a clothing budget that's way out of my league.)

As a childless, single woman, I don't necessarily relate to the articles about childcare and baby pictures (a Dad would probably find them more relevant than I would), but I found several of the articles on the site interesting, and they covered subjects I don't see in my normal work-related reading.