Drew DeSilver

Yahoo! today confirmed that it’s buying 6-year-old blogging service Tumblr for $1.1 billion in cash. Who uses Tumblr? We consulted the recent report on social media demographics from the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project to find out: Only 6% of Internet users surveyed in late 2012 reported using Tumblr, versus two-thirds for Facebook. Three […]

Nearly one in five Americans mis-identified Syria as Turkey on a map of the Middle East.

Nearly one in five Americans mis-identified Syria as Turkey on a map of the Middle East.

As Turkey’s Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan meets with President Obama today, his calls for more Western aid to Syrian rebels put him at odds with Turkish public opinion. A Pew Research survey conducted earlier this spring found that 68% of Turks opposed Western countries sending weapons and other supplies to anti-government rebels in Syria — […]

Four in 10 Americans say they have an unfavorable view of the IRS.

The Internal Revenue Service, now under intense scrutiny for singling out conservative groups seeking tax-exempt status for special review, is one of the least-popular federal agencies — but not quite at the bottom. In a 2010 Pew Research survey, 47% of people said they had a “very” or “mostly” favorable opinion of the IRS. That […]

Popularity is no protection against budget cuts: The parts of government that Americans like the most — state, cities and counties, and the U.S. Postal Service — are also the ones shedding workers the fastest. The most recent nonfarm payroll figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the public sector continues to be a drag on […]

College is a pretty pricey proposition, even after grants and scholarships are factored in. And the millions of students graduating this spring will soon learn just how expensive their degrees were when they start getting student-loan bills. As a Pew Research Center analysis noted last year, nearly one in five U.S. households (19%) owed money […]

52.9% of women aged 15-44, or about 32.5 million, were mothers in 2010, according to the Census Bureau. The U.S. birth rate dipped in 2011 to the lowest ever recorded, led by a plunge in births to immigrant women since the onset of the Great Recession. Today’s mothers have more education than ever before, according […]

With the stock market hitting new highs and home prices marking their strongest gains since before the bubble burst, it’s starting to feel like a real economic recovery. But which is the better investment over time? That depends largely on your definition of “long term.” As the accompanying charts show, since the formal end of the […]