The Week

Harvard sociologist Alex Inkeles—presumably because he has nothing better to do—has been investigating laughter, or rather what people “report” about their own laughter, or rather the possible relation between what people report about the frequency with which they laugh and—why but, of course, their social status. And the relation, it turns out, is not at all what we have been brought up to believe: “. . .the lower you are in social status, the less likely you are to report having laughed during the day”; if you are a lower-status woman, indeed, the chances are you will report not laughter but tears; all this, moreover, is just as true in “warm countries” as in “cold countries.” And, one supposes, just as true whether you are relaying such information or, like us, laughing at it—and indulging a low-status tear over the research funds that must have gone into that one.

A dispatch from Canada indicates left-Liberal forces will soon launch a third party, patterned after England’s Labor Party. How to launch a third party (the question so many American conservatives have brooded over) ? A half dozen labor leaders simply decide to launch one. The plan: every union member in Canada will put up a dollar a week—unless he “publicly” disavows his sympathy with the party to which the million dollars per year will be consigned. Such are the ways of Industrial Democracy.

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Harvard sociologist Alex Inkeles—presumably because he has nothing better to do—has been investigating laughter, or rather what people “report” about their own laughter, or rather the possible relation between what people report about the frequency with which they laugh and—why but, of course, their social status. And the relation, it turns out, is not at all what we have been brought up to believe: “. . .the lower you are in social status, the less likely you are to report having laughed during the day”; if you are a lower-status woman, indeed, the chances are you will report not laughter but tears; all this, moreover, is just as true in “warm countries” as in “cold countries.” And, one supposes, just as true whether you are relaying such information or, like us, laughing at it—and indulging a low-status tear over the research funds that must have gone into that one.

A dispatch from Canada indicates left-Liberal forces will soon launch a third party, patterned after England’s Labor Party. How to launch a third party (the question so many American conservatives have brooded over) ? A half dozen labor leaders simply decide to launch one. The plan: every union member in Canada will put up a dollar a week—unless he “publicly” disavows his sympathy with the party to which the million dollars per year will be consigned. Such are the ways of Industrial Democracy.