society

Primaries in Oregon and Kentucky drew attention to the salience of the white working class vote.

There was every reason to believe that the primaries in Oregon and Kentucky would end with Senator Barack Obama winning a majority of pledged delegates to the Democratic National Convention, reinforcing the widespread sense that Senator Clinton is at this point running a vanity campaign, a highly expensive effort to enhance her self-esteem. Thoughts naturally turn to the general election, in which Oregon and Kentucky (and states very much like them) will prove crucially important to building an electoral-college majority. Both have an unusually high proportion of white working class voters, as Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz note in a brilliant report on the changing class composition of the American electorate, and this represents a challenge to Obama, who has (as Clinton reminds us incessantly) had a hard time connecting with these voters.

Ninety-six people were arrested in a San Diego State University drug bust.

Where's Captain Renault when you need him? I'm shocked, shocked, to learn that drug dealing is rampant at fraternities at San Diego State (one of Playboy's top 10 party schools). Actually, what shocks me is the price the student dealers were charging for cocaine: $35 a gram. In my college days almost 30 years ago, at a small, northeastern liberal-arts school with a less illustrious party heritage, a gram cost $100. So in constant dollars, the price of cocaine has fallen by 85 percent, to about $16 a gram -- imagine how many more coke-fueled novels Jay McInerney could have written at that price!

The killing of a black high school student by a Hispanic illegal immigrant has revived Southern California's racially fraught debate about how police should treat illegal immigrants.

Outsiders can be forgiven for imagining that LA's touchiest racial controversies follow the black versus white narrative of the Watts riots, the Rodney King beating or the O.J. Simpson trial. But locals know better -- ask the Korean grocers whose stores were torched in 1992 (a year after Ice Cube’s racist harangues against them), or the South Central blacks who federal prosecutors say were targeted by a Latino street gang bent on “cleansing” the neighborhood.

A recent measles outbreak in San Diego highlights the growing number of parents who refuse to vaccinate their children against deadly diseases.

There's some nostalgia among doctors for the good old days when patients did what they were told, and doctors decided what to tell them. But it's hard for the rest of us to mourn this change; in general, patients probably know what they want better than their doctors. Increasingly, however, people are electing to make decisions that affect the whole community, not just themselves -- particularly in the area of childhood vaccinations. As the number of unvaccinated children grows, their right to make decisions about their own child's health is turning into the "right" to bring disease and death to the community. MORE

An Oregon man lost a considerable amount of property after a prank Craigslist ad invited all comers to strip his house clean.

Imagine Robert Salisbury's shock and horror as he saw thirty strangers cheerfully carting away his prized possessions -- and, one assumes, some of his not-so-prized possessions as well. It's easy to imagine bargain-hunters helping themselves to, for example, stray soup-cans, or an aging toaster oven. To be sure, Salisbury wasn't stabbed, shot, or, as in the case of another spectacular Craigslist crime, "tased" as a result of this prank. But our stuff is much more than just stuff. MORE

The New York Public Library announced a $1-billion renovation plan that aims to quadruple attendance at the flagship main branch by 2014.

For a building guarded by marble lions, projecting an air of welcome is not easy. That is why library president Paul LeClerc, who proudly spearheaded the successful new Bronx Library Center, wants to bring a cafe, information center, and lending capacity to the austere Manhattan branch. "This plan," an official told the New York Times, "is the further democratization of that building." MORE