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David's plague may have deterred census takers for many years, but when the Founding Fathers invented American democracy, they realized that if you are going to have government by the people, you need to know who and where they are. The founders stuck a Census requirement in the Constitution so that every 10 years, the young, stretchy country would recalculate which states got how many lawmakers. They worried that a state might try to inflate its population to increase its representation, so they cleverly arranged that the first Census would also be used to spread around the costs...
...hundred twenty years later, lawmakers are so unpopular, it's a wonder people fight over the means of getting more of them - except that nowadays about $400 billion per year in federal aid follows the Census numbers, for everything from jobs to bridges to schools, so this really matters. (Watch an interview with Census Director Robert Groves...
...makes you wonder whether the government should have just sent an e-mail instead of a packet that looks like junk mail. (How about spending a little more money on design?) But the Census officials worried about privacy, so the increasingly irrelevant post office, whose volume dropped 13% last year, gets a spring boost...
...long as we're spending all this money to reach so many people, imagine what we could find out. Which do you favor, Leno or Letterman? Smooth or chunky? Faith or works? Liberty or equality? As it is, we had little to argue over in my house. This year's is one of the shortest forms in history, and it is aggressively uninteresting; our dry cleaners demand more information before they'll do home delivery. The trickiest part for us was to name what used to be known as the head of household, now designated "Person 1." My husband...
...Child in Time This 1987 novel features mind-bending discussions of quantum physics and the nature of time, circling around the tragic disappearance of a 3-year-old girl...