April 28, 2006
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Jeff Zelevansky/Reuters
A Gutenberg Bible (the Morgan has three) enclosed in a glass case in the original library, which has been spiffed up.
April 28, 2006
Art Review
The Morgan’s Treasures Bedazzle in Their New Jewel Box
By HOLLAND COTTER
IT has been 2 years, 11 months, 3 weeks and 6 days since the Morgan Library closed for its expansion by Renzo Piano. Not that I’ve been counting; I have a life. Still, the time has not sped by. We revere the Met, we adore the Frick, but the Morgan is extra special, in a class of its own. No place looks like it, feels like it or has what it has: namely some of the most sensationally compact art treasures anywhere in this treasure-loving town.
Now the counting can stop. At 10 o’clock sharp tomorrow morning the Morgan will reopen. And all concerned parties — you, me and everyone else in New York — can dash over to see what’s new and what’s not.
What’s new: a Madison Avenue entrance into Mr. Piano’s splendid four-story glass and steel court, a sort of giant solarium with see-through elevators. Mr. Piano has also created two good-size second-floor galleries, and a neat strong-box of an enclosure, called the Cube, for the Morgan’s famed reliquaries and altar vessels, medieval objects made with so much silver and gold that they seem to give off heat.
In addition the library’s former reading room is now a gallery for drawings. And Pierpont Morgan’s baronial private study, where shrewd minds and expensive cigars once gathered, has been refurbished and Lemon-Pledged. I’ll skip over the auditorium, new dining room and expanded gift shop, but will note that the Morgan Library has acquired a semi-new name; we must now call it the Morgan Library and Museum.
Of course the Morgan has always basically been a museum. That brings me to what is not new: almost everything in the celebratory exhibition “Masterworks From the Morgan,” which fills every gallery. Regular visitors will spot old favorites, like the ninth-century Lindau Gospels cover, encrusted with agates that glow like nightlights; Dürer’s pen-and-ink Adam and Eve; Michelangelo’s smudgy sketchlets of David and Goliath; and a good-as-new Gutenberg Bible. (The Morgan has three.)
But there are also things on view for the first time; a suave drawing by Juan Gris is one, a recent arrival. And some are fresh from a long vacation, as in the case of a set of 35 Milanese tarot cards hand-painted with allegorical figures. The work of a 15th-century master — Bonifacio Bembo seems likely — they haven’t worked a room at the Morgan for 20 years, but they’re certainly working one now.
Is there any logic to such eclecticism? Not really, though there is a binding thread, and it’s proprietary. Much of what is on view — the Gris is an obvious exception — was bought and owned by the library’s founder, J. Pierpont Morgan (1837-1913), or his heirs.
Morgan was born in Hartford. He went to school in Europe, came to New York City as an apprentice banker at 20, inherited family money and made more on his own. A lot more: enough to help bail out the federal government twice. In 1895, the year he established J. P. Morgan & Company, he provided Washington with $62 million in gold to reverse an economic depression. To avert a similar crisis 1907 he scared up $25 million in an afternoon.
He was a prodigious personality in a high-rolling age. By the late 1800′s New York was what London had been, the financial capital of the Western world. What it lacked was European-style culture, so its robber-baron citizens started buying some and bringing it home.
In short order we got the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Opera, and Carnegie Hall, along with Ignace Paderewski and Marcella Sembrich, as well as the occasional Raphael Madonna. It was around this time that Morgan, well into middle age, began buying art, in part from a sense of patriotic duty, in part because that was what grandees did; and in part, I suspect, to lift himself out of bouts of despondency, to which he was prone. His first wife died from tuberculosis four months after their marriage, and he never fully recovered from the loss.
He wasn’t an especially picky shopper, at least at first. He bought a bit of everything — Egyptian sculpture, Renaissance paintings, Gothic tapestries — often from a distance in odd-lot bulk: art by the box, the peck, the estate, tossing what he didn’t want and keeping what he did. In 1899 he picked up the tremendous Lindau book, outbidding the British Museum for it. With that his interest in medieval art, in the form of books and devotional objects, took hold.
Most of that art of princes and prelates was modest, even miniaturist, in scale. Over time Morgan gave his larger acquisitions away; thousands of objects went to the Met. But he kept the small-to-tiny stuff for himself. And the library that Charles Follen McKim designed in 1902 as an annex to the Morgan home was tailored to them: it’s a cross between a bank vault and a wonder cabinet.
What does this passion for reverse monumentality, for gorgeous smallness, for the imperialism of the minuscule mean? Does it represent a psychological return to a childhood world of controlled fantasy? An exercise in connoisseurial trophyism? A tacit acknowledgment of the fragility of beauty? Freud had many thoughts on this subject; so did Shakespeare, Einstein and Emily Dickinson. So did Morgan, through the objects he held dearest, many of which the library still has.
In the Marble Hall, for example, at the former 36th Street entrance, you can see a sample of his prized collection of ancient Near Eastern cylinder seals. These incised stone sculptures are so tiny, you can’t make visual sense of them until you make an impression, which as often as not turns out to be a panorama of muscle-bound gods and half-human beasts engaged in cosmic wars.
Of the European paintings that line Morgan’s study, the very smallest — three Hans Memling panels — are by far the best. And the most spectacular of his medieval pieces, the Stavelot Triptych, a reliquary of the True Cross, is only a foot and a half high.
What this piece lacks in height, it makes up for in metaphoric depth and breadth. A miracle of metalwork and enameling, it is actually composed of three triptychs in different sizes, two of Byzantine origin contained within a larger Gothic one. Here Eastern and Western cultures meet. And as the reliquary draws your attention inward toward the two splinters of wood nested at its center, it also releases a spiritual ripple effect, as energy radiates from the relic, to its container, to the Cube, to the library, to the city and beyond.
Illuminated gospel books, some the size of a computer motherboard, work on a similar principle of worlds-within-worlds amplification. The Evangelist Luke, with a wrestler’s neck and prehensile toes as portrayed in the Morgan’s Reims gospel book, is a man, a saint and an embodiment of sacred history. The heavenly Jerusalem depicted in the earliest surviving complete copy of the “Commentary on the Apocalypse” by Beatus of Liébana, is seen in God’s-eye aerial view. But with flattened walls that look like carpets and a checkerboard floor, it’s an ornamental view of the End of Time, distilled to pocket size.
Finally, a similar sense of compressed vivacity comes through in the autograph manuscripts Morgan started buying even before he collected art. In one major purchase, he acquired all 40 volumes of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden journal, along with the pine box Thoreau made to hold them. The two pages open for view in a new gallery devoted to literary and historical manuscripts are filled, top to bottom and edge to edge, with stream-of-consciousness words. In them, acute, you-are-there observation is inseparable from philosophical speculation. That’s also the case with Galileo’s doodly sketch of the satellites of Jupiter.
Since Morgan’s death nearly a century ago, other handwritten material, less exalted though still notable, has found its way into the holdings. My favorite acquisition, which came to the library in 1969, is a cluster of poems and stories written in feverish, eye-punishing minuscule by the four teenage Brontë children: Bramwell squeezes 2,500 words on a page; Charlotte binds her stories into books an inch wide. And bringing the Morgan more or less into the present is a Bob Dylan souvenir: lyrics for “It Ain’t Me, Babe,” scratched on a sheet of hotel stationery. It dates from 1962 and arrived at the Morgan in 1999.
“Museums are cemeteries,” Mr. Dylan once said in an interview, though his presence here suggests that the Morgan is, at least, a cemetery in active use: pages will be turned during the course of the show to avoid light damage. And the Morgan will be presenting more contemporary manuscript shows, including one of Dylan material, in coming months. Actually for the Morgan, the analogy I prefer is to a reliquary, once a carved casket of solid stone, now also a vessel of translucent crystal, thanks to Mr. Piano and Beyer Blinder Belle, the architectural firm he worked with. With reliquaries, size means nothing; the energy inside means all. It’s a super-radiant energy; an entire city can be soaked in it, though, naturally, the closer you are to the source, the more you get. And transmission is instantaneous: no fuss, no worry, no wait.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Reggie Bush Is Seeking High Ground
April 28, 2006
Sports of The Times
Reggie Bush Is Seeking High Ground
By HARVEY ARATON
REGGIE BUSH couldn’t put an exact figure on how many people had volunteered to represent him, market him or arrange the cleats in his closet these past few months. He settled on a conservative round number.
“Infinity,” Bush said, earnestly. Perhaps he confused the question with how many yards he expects to gain once he begins carrying and catching the football next season, in Houston, if the Texans choose him tomorrow over defensive end Mario Williams with the first pick of the N.F.L. draft.
These past few months as the rarest of cuts the next Barry Sanders or Gale Sayers among the prime beef on the football meat market have seemed longer than any of his three seasons at Southern California, Bush said. He has worked out for the world and been subjected to unremitting wooing by so many people with fancy business cards, including one who hinted at being a messenger from God.
“He said he could help me in a spiritual way,” Bush said. “He gave me his card and said I should send him a check.”
Lord knows how Bush or any of the chosen few prospective draftees invited to work on their news media skill sets in Manhattan yesterday had found time to be college students. (Da-dum.) Eventually, Bush chose as his agent one Joel Segal, no relation to the ABC film critic or, more important, to the aspiring marketing guru Michael Michaels, in whose home near San Diego Bush’s mother and stepfather reportedly lived, until recently, for an undisclosed period.
When asked yesterday to explain why the story has been, as he put it, “blown out of proportion,” Bush said not now. When?
“It’s on our time,” he said, referring to himself and his parents, LaMar and Denise Griffin. “We’re not going to let anyone dictate to us.”
Based on what Bush’s lawyer told The Associated Press earlier this week, there is probably not much more to say beyond oops. “As is the case with most 20-year-old college students, Reggie was not aware of personal or financial arrangements related to his parents or their home,” the lawyer, William David Cornwell Sr., said.
Vouching unflinchingly for Bush’s character yesterday was Matt Leinart, the Trojans’ all-American quarterback during Bush’s three years at U.S.C. “Reggie’s the perfect example of a freak athlete on the field and the best kid off the field,” Leinart said. “He’s going to be fine.”
Of course he is, now that Mike Ornstein, Bush’s marketing representative, has landed him a recently announced deal with Adidas. Meanwhile, Segal, the agent, is on the clock, talking turkey with the Texans should they soothe fan frustration over the snubbing of the Texas luminary, Vince Young, by importing another Bush who could run for at least another eight years.
But back on the West Coast, Tom Hansen, the Pac-10 commissioner, has said that an investigation by the conference could force U.S.C. to forfeit last season’s games. And if the Pac-10 and the N.C.A.A. become hysterical over this, if Bush’s 2005 eligibility winds up being annulled, would the Downtown Athletic Club be justified in stripping him of his Heisman Trophy?
Right. As soon as it figures out what to do about O. J.
Some perspective would seem to be in everyone’s best interests here. The last thing the bureaucrats need when college football’s popularity is soaring is to make a mountain out of a misjudgment. If Bush’s family did get ahead of itself, if it drew on the vast earning potential that has been forecast for Bush since he and Leinart began making Coach Pete Carroll a wealthy genius, restitution for the cost of residency could easily be made.
Who doesn’t believe that such arrangements are not rampant in the seamy underside of big-time Division I sports? If college football looks nothing like anyone’s vision of amateurism from the outside, imagine what it must look like from within.
“It’s tough, it’s cutthroat and you learn about how people are, how they try to jump on the bandwagon,” Leinart said, referring to his own experiences these past few months, fighting the cling-ons.
Leinart was widely praised for completing his eligibility, but Bush jumped at the opportunity to turn pro and just might have gone sooner had the N.F.L. not prevailed in a federal appeals court two years ago over Maurice Clarett in its case to bar players until they are out of high school three years.
“A touchy subject,” Bush said when asked if he’d had a rooting interest in that showdown. “I just watched from a distance and learned from it.”
Just what, exactly, cynics will ask. They will wonder how Bush could not have known if something shady was going on with his parents. But even if he did, can we expect a college football star to police his family when coaches are seldom held accountable for the behavior of their players?
While Bush and Leinart loomed large in New York, it was reported yesterday that Mark Sanchez, U.S.C.’s redshirt freshman quarterback, was released from police custody after being arrested on suspicion of sexual assault. The Associated Press said it was the third run-in with the police by a Trojans player in a little more than a year.
One last thought: Maybe Pete Carroll could make better use of the spiritual adviser’s card than Bush. (Da-dum.)
E-mail: hjaraton@nytimes.com
Today’s Papers
Running on Empty
By Joshua Kucera
Posted Friday, April 28, 2006, at 5:44 AM ET
The New York Times and Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal world-wide newsbox all lead with Republican senators proposing a package of measures aimed at reducing the burden of high gas prices, including cutting taxpayers a $100 check. The Los Angeles Times leads with the normally apolitical Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani saying that Iraq’s militias should disband. USA Today leads with the Transportation Security Administration offering bonuses of up to $1,000 to airport screeners to keep them working over the busy summer travel months.
The GOP gas plan would open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to oil production and raise taxes on oil-company profits, but the promise of free money was the major attraction. As the Times dryly puts it, the plan “could strike a public chord, particularly with its promise of a $100 check to millions of taxpayers.” The checks would come at the end of the summer and would be available to anyone under a certain income level, whether they drive a Hummer, Prius, or Schwinn. Democrats countered with their own proposals, including a temporary suspension of the federal gas tax, and President Bush asked for the authority to raise mileage standards on cars.
All this came on the same day that Exxon Mobil declared huge quarterly profits, 7 percent more than last year and the fifth-highest by any public company in U.S. history, according to the AP.
No one takes the proposals seriously, especially not the editorial pages, where words like “silly,” “pander,” and “stunt” are used liberally. (A good history of bipartisan “stupidity” on the issue was in Slate this week.) The new Fed chairman suggested that, of all things, conservation might be the answer.
Gas prices aside, the U.S. economy is trucking along: The government is expected to announce today that the economy grew 5 percent in the first quarter of the year, the highest rate since 2003, the NYT reports on the front page.
The LAT focuses on the political fallout of Sistani’s anti-militia statement: Sunnis worry that Sistani’s foray into politics could signal a more active role for the Shiite leader. The NYT and WP, which both stuff the story, emphasize the jockeying between Iraq’s major Shiite leaders. The prime minister-designate, Nouri Maliki, another Shiite, traveled yesterday to visit Sistani and another influential cleric, Moqtada al-Sadr. Sadr was “noncommittal” about the militias (unsurprising as he controls a vast militia himself), and now Maliki is stuck in the middle. Also in Iraq, the sister of one of Iraq’s vice presidents was assassinated. The same VP had a brother assassinated in April.
The Post has a colorful account of the visit to Iraq by Condoleezza Rice and Donald Rumsfeld. In contrast to the jovial show put on by Rice and her U.K. counterpart, Jack Straw, earlier this month, this duo was decidedly less dynamic. “During a joint meeting with reporters traveling with the secretaries, Rumsfeld frequently doodled with a black felt-tip pen or stared absent-mindedly at the ceiling when Rice spoke. Rice would occasionally cast a nervous glance at Rumsfeld as he prepared to respond to a question,” the Post reports.
President Bush disagrees with a Senate report that proposes the dismantling of FEMA, he said as he toured Gulf Coast areas hit by Katrina last year, the Post and LAT report. And he does plan to allow a Dubai-based firm to take control of nine U.S. military parts plants, the NYT writes in an apparent scoop.
The L.A. Times fronts news of a dirty war in Pakistan, where Taliban types are killing suspected spies for the United States53 in the last two years, according to a local human rights group, while residents say it’s closer to 150. The paper links the killings to its earlier reporting on the flash drives being sold in Afghanistan bazaars that included sensitive U.S. military data, including names of local U.S. spies, though it says none of the people killed are named in any of the drives it bought.
The Journal fronts an interesting look at Mexico’s changing demographics. The average Mexican woman in 1968 had just under seven children; the figure today is slightly more than two, similar to the United States. This could portend a rising middle class and much lower immigration to the United States in the coming decades.
In other immigration news, a Spanish-language version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” is set to be released today, the Post reports on the front page. Apparently the first stanza is fairly faithful to the original, but translators took some liberties with the second, which includes the phrase “we are equal, we are brothers.” Naturally, there are critics, who, as the Post puts it, “sketch a nightmare scenario of a Canada-like land with an anthem sung in two languages.” Curious to hear it? It’s scheduled to be played on Spanish-language radio across the country at 7 p.m. ET tonight.
Joshua Kucera is a freelance writer based in Washington, D.C.
NYC; Yankee Fans Only a Brewer Could Love
METROPOLITAN DESK
NYC; Yankee Fans Only a Brewer Could Love
By CLYDE HABERMAN (NYT) 723 words
Published: April 14, 2006
FOR the planned new Yankee Stadium, attention has focused mostly on concerns like gobbled-up parkland, parking garages, a Metro-North station and team spending in the Bronx. One matter has not been raised, not in public anyway, but it does seem worth mentioning.
It is called jail. How many holding cells will the new ballpark have to contain the hopelessly oafish fans who will inevitably be arrested through the course of the baseball season?
This is not an idle question. Unruly fan behavior, some of it going beyond merely crude to plainly criminal, is a constant worry at sporting events everywhere. It has been so for many years, and Yankee Stadium is no exception. Even if we accept that Yankee fans are not necessarily the worst in the major leagues — try Fenway Park in Boston, some say — they will do for loutishness.
That point was underlined in dozens of e-mail responses to an NYC column at the end of the 2005 season about the tendency of way too many stadiumgoers to be drunken bozos — foul-mouthed, hostile, misogynistic, spoiling for a fight.
Not all fans are that way, obviously. The Yankees drew a remarkable four million spectators last year; most arrived sober and stayed that way through nine innings. But on any given night, enough belligerent, beer-stewed men fill the stands that, as one letter writer put it, ”the joy is taken out” of going to the game.
That mid-October column drew an unusually large reader response. For sure, there were dissenters, including one fellow who thought that the appeal for more fan self-control qualified as ”neo-fascist.”
Another writer, Jesse Adelman, a musician living in Brooklyn, said of drinking fans, ”Maybe they cherish the opportunity to blow off some steam at the ballpark, which is possibly the only public space left where it’s acceptable for grown men to do so.” Bruce Schoenberg, the owner of day spas in Manhattan, wrote that he had in fact ”seen the behavior improve in the last several years.”
But they were a distinct minority. Overwhelmingly, readers who weighed in agreed that the Yankees, their security guards and the New York Police Department could all be doing more to rein in the unpleasant number of fans who believe that ballgames are where you go to get royally plastered, scream obscenities, pick fights and yell at women to take their tops off.
”I have traveled with my kids to Baltimore, Boston, Shea, both fields in Chicago and San Francisco, and we go to baseball games frequently,” wrote Arthur Lowenstein, a lawyer who lives in Hastings-on-Hudson. ”In my experience, there is no park anywhere that is as bad as Yankee Stadium in terms of safety and security.”
Philip Darrow, a New Jersey restaurateur, suggested that the Yankees’ successes over the last decade might have had the unfortunate side effect of feeding bad behavior. While they are clearly not a majority, ”these idiots actually feel entitled to win every year,” Mr. Darrow said, ”and when they don’t, they just can’t handle it, not unlike spoiled children throwing temper tantrums.”
SHORT of waving a magic wand, is there a way to ease the problem?
Jim McNamara, a university director of development, favored the potentially civilizing effect of showing ”great fielding plays by the other team” on the center field television screen — something that happens at Yankee Stadium about as often as Halley’s comet swings by. Don’t bet the ranch on change any time soon.
The October column raised the possibility of cutting off beer sales earlier than is done now, after the seventh inning. But many e-mail writers said we would see world peace before that happens.
With the oafs, wrote Marty Appel, a former Yankees public relations director, it may be that ”you just have to look the other way and pretend that they are not part of the show.”
But not everyone can turn a blind eye, especially when so many fans, even before passing through the ballpark turnstiles, have more sheets to the wind than a three-masted schooner. ”The answer is zero tolerance toward unruly behavior,” said Dr. Mark Horowitz of Brooklyn. ”Perhaps after the police eject and/or arrest unruly fans more promptly and more consistently, such behavior would be curtailed.”
Which brings us back to the original question. How many holding cells will the new ballpark have?
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
The Crony Fairy
Paul Krugman
April 28, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
The Crony Fairy
By PAUL KRUGMAN
The U.S. government is being stalked by an invisible bandit, the Crony Fairy, who visits key agencies by dead of night, snatches away qualified people and replaces them with unqualified political appointees. There’s no way to catch or stop the Crony Fairy, so our only hope is to change the agencies’ names. That way she might get confused, and leave our government able to function.
That, at least, is how I interpret the report on responses to Hurricane Katrina that was just released by the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs.
The report points out that the Federal Emergency Management Agency “had been operating at a more than 15 percent staff-vacancy rate for over a year before Katrina struck” that means many of the people who knew what they were doing had left. And it adds that “FEMA’s senior political appointees … had little or no prior relevant emergency-management experience.”
But the report says nothing about what caused the qualified people to leave and who appointed unqualified people to take their place. There’s no hint that, say, President Bush might have had any role. So those political appointees must have been installed by the Crony Fairy.
Rather than trying to fix FEMA, the report calls for replacing it with a new organization, the National Preparedness and Response Agency. As far as I can tell, the new agency would have exactly the same responsibilities as FEMA. But “senior N.P.R.A. officials would be selected from the ranks of professionals with experience in crisis management.” I guess it’s impossible to select qualified people to run FEMA; if you try, the Crony Fairy will spirit them away and replace them with Michael Brown. But she might not know her way to N.P.R.A.
O.K., enough sarcasm. Let’s talk about the history of FEMA.
In the early 1990′s, FEMA’s reputation was as bad as it is today. It was a dumping ground for political cronies, headed by a man whose only apparent qualification for the job was that he was a close friend of the first President Bush’s chief of staff. FEMA’s response to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 perfectly foreshadowed Katrina: the agency took three days to arrive on the scene, and when it did, it proved utterly incompetent.
Many people thought that FEMA was a lost cause. But Bill Clinton proved them wrong. He appointed qualified people to lead the agency and gave them leeway to hire other qualified people, and within a year FEMA’s morale and performance had soared. For the rest of the Clinton years, FEMA was among the most highly regarded agencies in the federal government.
What happened to that reputation? The answer, of course, is that the second President Bush returned to his father’s practices. Once again, FEMA became a dumping ground for cronies, and many of the good people who had come in during the Clinton years left. It took only a few years to transform one of the best agencies in the U.S. government into what Senator Susan Collins calls “a shambles and beyond repair.”
In other words, the Crony Fairy is named George W. Bush.
So what’s the point of creating a new agency to replace FEMA? The history of FEMA and other agencies during the Clinton years shows that a president who is serious about governing can rebuild effective government without renaming the boxes on the organizational chart.
On the other hand, the history of the Bush administration, from the botched reconstruction of Iraq to the botched start-up of the prescription drug program, shows that a president who isn’t serious about governing, who prizes loyalty and personal connections over competence, can quickly reduce the government of the world’s most powerful nation to third-world levels of ineffectiveness.
And bear in mind that Mr. Bush’s pattern of cronyism didn’t change after Katrina. For example, he appointed Julie Myers, the inexperienced niece of Gen. Richard Myers, to head Immigration and Customs Enforcement an agency that, like FEMA, is supposed to protect us against terrorism as well as other threats. Even at the C.I.A., the administration seems more interested in purging Democrats than in improving the quality of intelligence.
So let’s skip the name change for FEMA, O.K.? The United States will regain effective government if and when it gets a president who cares more about serving the nation than about rewarding his friends and scoring political points. That’s at least a thousand days away. Meanwhile, don’t count on FEMA, or on any other government agency, to do its job.
Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company
Online Activities
Online Dating: Americans who are seeking romance use the internet to help them in their search, but there is still widespread public concern about the safety of online dating
3/5/2006 |
Report | Mary Madden, Amanda Lenhart
There is now relatively broad public contact with the online dating world. Some 31% of American adults say they know someone who has used a dating website and 15% of American adults about 30 million people say they know someone who has been in a long-term relationship or married someone he or she met online.
Yet, dating websites are just one of many online avenues that can facilitate a romantic connection. Three out of four internet users who are single and looking for a romantic partner have done at least one dating-related activity onlineranging from using dating websites, to searching for information about prospective dates, to flirting via email and instant messaging, to browsing for information about the local singles scene.
Some 11% of all internet users and 37% of those who are single and looking say they have gone to dating websites. A majority of them say they have had positive experiences and believe their use of such sites helps them to find a better match. A notable number of these online daters have found firsthand that lasting romance can be forged online; 17% of them say they have entered long-term relationships or married someone they met through the services.
At the same time, while online dating is becoming more commonplace, there are still concerns in the wider public about the dangers of posting personal information on dating sites and about the honesty of those who pursue online dating.
View PDF of Report
View PDF of Questionnaire
Other Online Activities & Pursuits Resources
Memo | Surfing for Fun
Memo | About 25 million people have used the internet to sell something
Memo | Big jump in search engine use
Memo | Use of web cams
Memo | Online sports fantasy leagues
