Second Links — 8.23.10

In the most popular movies from 1991 to 2009, the amount of smoking peaked in 2005 and is now going down, with fewer than half the scenes with someone smoking now than in 2005.

Here is a way to visual Shakespeare’s plays .

The city of Philadelphia is demanding some bloggers pay $300 for a “business privilege license” (demonstrating a very dim sense of where wealth actually comes from), even if they made just $11 from their work.

“Upper-income Americans don’t give away as much of their money as they might and are particularly undistinguished as givers when compared with the poor, who are strikingly generous,” because the first “prioritized their own need,” reports the New York Times in an article on the “charitable giving divide” and the “compassion deficit” .

“The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there,” reports another NYT article, on why soldiers have been punished for avoiding a Christian rock concert in the “Commanding General’s Spiritual Fitness Concert Series.”

John Allen reports on “how Catholicism engages both the promise and perils of secularism in the 21st century ” through a report from Africa

Finally