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In the nearly 100 years that Americans have been driving cars, the inflation-adjusted price of gasoline has drifted steadily downward, save for two sharp spikes up.

Any nation with more passenger vehicles than licensed drivers has a pretty serious love affair with the automobile. But the romance seems to be cooling off a bit -- a casualty of its own intensity.

America departs from a reported worldwide trend toward an increasing number of female migrants. The continued predominance of male migrants into the United States is explained by the relatively large proportion of illegal entrants among their numbers.

Reflecting broad changes in their social and economic status, women around the world have been migrating more in recent decades and as a result have constituted an increasing share of migrant populations almost everywhere.

Just 4% of adults in this country rate soccer as their favorite sport to watch, compared with 34% who say this about football, 14% about basketball and 13% about baseball.

Hispanics in general, and recent immigrants in particular, are more inclined than blacks or whites to take an upbeat view about one of the most enduring tenets of the American dream -- that each generation will do better in life than the one that preceded it.

A modest backlash in attitudes towards legalized gambling has taken hold among an American public that spends more money on more forms of legal gambling now than at any time in the nation's history.

The start of the summer blockbuster movie season has Hollywood hoping for the usual stampede to the theaters, but now more than ever, the place that most Americans would rather watch movies is under their own roof.

The idea that each generation of children will grow up to be better off than the one that preceded it has always been a part of the American dream.

Text of a speech Carroll, the former editor of the Los Angeles Times, gave at the 2006 ASNE Convention in Seattle, Washington, on April 26, 2006.