Word: indexable
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...Harper's Index Book...
...started three years ago, when the editors of Harper's Magazine came up with a bright idea: to tell the story of modernity through its mundanity. Thus was born the Harper's Index, a monthly potpourri of pop trivia gleaned from the chroniclers and quantifiers of all things great and small. The result was a corps of diehards who didn't know they were interested in such micro-bytes of information as the percentage of Icelanders who believe in elves (5) or the diameter of the real-life "wheel of fortune" (8 feet, 6 inches...
...Index, with its acontextual presentation of pre-cooked information represents the ultimate reduction ad absurdum of fast-food culture. But its not a bland offering, as the biases of the editors are clear. When the hyper-trivial is left aside, the statistics in the Index take potent swipes at the American zeitgeist and all its hypocricy and self-indulgence...
...statistics attack American standards--sometimes literally, such as when it tells us of the 40 percent of Iowans who have a hard time singing "The Star-Spangled Banner. The Index, in fact, is unsparing in its depiction of the folkways of the Midwest. Nebraska, it turns out, has 376 one-room school houses. Half of first-time brides in Kentucky are teenagers. Turning its sights on the nation as a whole, the Index informs that every year 6312 postmen are bitten by dogs and that American's favorite meal is steak and potatoes...
...this is innocuous enough. Nevertheless, there is a grander message lurking beneath this madness--and it's a disturbing one. The picture of America that emerges Seurat-like from the Index is one of a nation suffering from what only can be termed malaise...