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The Politics of the “Non-Political”
Yibin Fan introduces a conceptual review, co-authored with Yufan Guo in Political Communication, of how researchers define the boundary between political and 'non-political' content as political information seeps into everyday life and media.
4 min · 959 words
How many shots are in the average movie today?
Film-data researcher Stephen Follows counts the shots in 8,770 feature films released between 1930 and 2025 using automatic shot-boundary detection, showing how many shots a typical film has now, how cutting pace has changed over a century, and how it varies by director, genre, runtime, budget and awards.
11 min · 2,614 words
Americans’ Social Activity Has Steeply Declined in the Past 30 Years
Data for Progress replicated 1995 DDB Needham survey questions with 1,098 U.S. adults and found double-digit declines in participation in many everyday social activities since 1995, with a few gains such as internet use, home video games and exercise classes, plus caveats about comparing different survey methods.
3 min · 725 words