Journal: News & Comment

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It's good not to care

Yesterday's New York Times features an article (free registration required) about how men and women use e-mail in radically different ways, just as we use different speech patterns.

The article is interesting enough, but I also noticed that -- going by their names at least -- two of the three couples it profiles (and possibly the third one as well) have partners of different races. More important for a publication from the U.S., where race is so often an issue, the article makes no mention of it when discussing the couples at all.

In university, I knew one of the women in the piece, and our hometown of Vancouver is a polyglot place. Interracial marriages are common here -- Douglas Coupland's latest book, City of Glass, cites that as a distinguishing characteristic of our city -- but they're still, perhaps surprisingly given our demographics, not the norm.

It's encouraging to see once-illegal partnerships now so accepted that they provoke no comment.

Except my comment, of course. Hmm.

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