Although the culture seems driven by faddishness and over-the-top consumerism, national polls report that 19 out of 20 Americans affirm a belief in God, and 4 in 10 say they attend a house of worship regularly.
And unlike Time and Newsweek, Slate would not — he resolved at the start — abandon its mandate in favor of "features, consumerism, photographs, investigative reporting, health, sex".
A few years ago when I was writing a piece for U.S.News & World Report on consumerism, I found some research on the psychology behind our perennial desire for the next new thing.
Is this how the "Minority Report" version of consumerism — ubiquitous, completely inescapable — is going to slip into every corner of our culture?
Consumerism was the American answer to Britain's Beveridge Report which symbolized the hope for a better world to be achieved through the creation of a welfare state.
These angel books all encapsulate a kind of religion-lite, well-suited to credit-crunched times when pollsters report that many, disillusioned by the promises of consumerism, are seeking a new, reassuring philosophy of life.
These reports confirm widespread notions of the media as consumerism's most loyal and rewarding handmaiden, used by "brokers of consumption to construct the everyday reality of consumers" [ 54].
One study from the USA provides evidence that consumerism is related to smoking, alcohol and cannabis use in 14 to 18-year-olds, 15 and another reports an association with alcohol use in 10 to 18-year-olds.
You travel widely in the film - Vietnam, France, Iceland, Beirut, San Francisco, Yorkshire, the world's oceans - to report both on the problems and potential solutions associated with wasteful consumerism.
It can be very tempting to link the high prevalence of overweight and obesity in Bucharest's school children and adolescents to higher levels of consumerism and a higher income than other cities of Romania, but similar values were reported in other regions of Romania, and a higher prevalence of obesity was also reported in rural areas associated with lower incomes [ 13].
