Where this may have the greatest impact is with teens who once bought illicit magazines, and then acquired videos. Now they have access through the Web. Just put something in your Web browser as obvious as “www.sex.com,” and see what happens. Pictures young people could never have gotten their hands on without a lot of trouble are instantly available to everyone, with no credit card or ID necessary. The age at which American youth first have sex is declining—down to 16 now—and the easy access to pictures and unlimited information about sex could be one reason why.

  But the real “aha” here is for women. The mainstreaming of porn is like a silent hulking presence—a phenomenon known to men, but often overlooked by women. And when women realize it, will it change the way they view their colleagues, bosses, husbands, and boyfriends? Or do women ignore it on purpose? Do they agree with Jimmy Carter that a little lust is normal, as long as their men stay loyal?

  Women are more than a quarter of those who visit porn sites. And more and more women are now living alone. So if there is a trend within a trend, it’s that more women are taking the attitude that if you can’t beat them, join them.

  THE INTERNATIONAL PICTURE

  Americans are hardly alone in their passion for porn. TopTenReviews.com claims that the global sex industry is worth some $81 billion per year, with Internet-based porn taking in $3.5 billion. Internet porn pages have grown at a rate of 1,800 percent worldwide over the last five years, and out of the 68 million search engine requests per day around the world, 25 percent are for porn sites. So if you’re jumping to cover up the naked people on your screen as the boss walks by, you’re probably not alone—someone in the Netherlands is likely doing the same thing.

  How popular is porn, really? According to the 2004 Global Sex Survey by Durex (the condom makers), 35 percent of porn-watchers watch it with their partner. Globally speaking, South Africans are the most likely to admit watching porn (60 percent), while Indians (22 percent) and Chinese (24 percent) are the least likely.

  Folks around the world get their porn in about the same ways—mainly, through the Internet, telephone, and magazines. But in Europe, the new craze is porn by cell phone. Europeans have spent the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars on cell-phone-compatible porn; in 2004, PhoneErotica.com experienced more than 75 million hits per week. In America, cell phone carriers have been slower to catch on, fearing a public backlash. Nonetheless, researchers say that graphic porn on your cell phone (presumably, right there next to your work e-mail and your digital pictures of the family) will be a $200 million business in the U.S. by 2009.

  Naturally, porn is not just for adults. Thailand’s The Nation reported that in 2002, some 71 percent of its young people (aged 12–25) have visited pornographic Web sites. Forty-five percent are site regulars. One-third of boys aged 13–14 from Alberta, Canada, said they have viewed pornography “too many times to count.”

  Japan has a particular distinction in the porn field, as a prolific producer of both adult and child pornography. In 1998, the International Criminal Police Organization estimated that up to 80 percent of child porn Internet sites originated in Japan.

  Who’s got the largest number of registered pornography pages? Germany, at some 10 million. And a tiny country in Africa, São Tomé, lays claim to some 307,000 pages, almost double the size of its population.

  It’s the biggest, worst-kept secret in the world.

  Video Game Grown-ups

  Video games in America bring to mind pimply teenage boys, huddled over consoles in dim arcades on sunny days. “Gamers” are antisocial adolescents sitting for hours on end in each other’s basements—no fresh air, exercise, or conversation required.

  But while old stereotypes die hard, statistics reveal a very different picture. As of 2006, the average video/computer-game-player was 33 years old, up from age 24 just four years before. And not only is he older than you thought, he has apparently been playing for an average of only 12 years—which means that the average gamer didn’t even start playing until he was old enough to buy alcohol. Video games have become the biggest pastime of adults, not children.

  Source: Entertainment Software Association, 2006

  According to the Entertainment Software Association, gamers under age 18 actually make up fewer than one-third of all players, and people over 50 make up 25 percent. Hard to believe, I know. Along with Bill Cosby and Elton John, one of the star attractions at AARP’s 2006 National Convention was Nintendo.

  Even adult women—at 30 percent of the video and computer game market—substantially outnumber boys 17 or younger, who make up only 23 percent of the market.

  Look out, boys, Mom and Dad are coming down to the basement. But they’re not going to take away your video games and make you play outside. They want to join you.

  What is going on?

  In part, it’s the aging of the 30-somethings, who were the first generation to be reared on computers. Whereas “entertainment” to their parents meant buying a ticket to a show, play, movie, or ball game and watching the story unfold, this generation is more comfortable with entertainment that involves clicks, controllers, and interactive narrative.

  Second, because they’re not threatened by video games, today’s parents are actually embracing them as a way to bond with their children. According to the Entertainment Software Association, 35 percent of parents are gamers, and 80 percent of gaming parents play with their kids. Hence the Dance Dance Revolution games, in which kids (and their obesity-conscious parents) break a sweat trying to follow along with the video’s fancy footwork. And whereas adults and children used to flee from each other at parties, now they can actually have some of the same fun, like having Guitar Hero contests together. It works across generations.

  Third, the entertainment software industry is slowly recognizing its more mature audiences. Along with guns, Goths, and Grand Theft Auto, now there are increasingly life-oriented games like The Sims, in which players guide fictitious family members through the course of their regular day. In 2005, The Sims was the best-selling PC game in North America—and it’s wildly popular among women. One of the fastest-growing groups of video-gamers is Moms over 45, whose kids are off to school and who have a fair amount of time, but not a ton of money. They spend more time watching TV than any other group of gamers, and rank second in gaming time. Unlike the reclusive teen geeks of the past, this group wants their games to be easy to play, and more social rather than less. It’s a whole new world of gamers.

  The most popular form of gaming is online cards, enjoyed by 2 out of 3 gaming adults, or probably 35 million people. And for the more-than-casual gamer, there are “MMOGs”—Massively Multiplayer Online Games—in which people interact as fictional characters in a virtual world that constantly evolves, even as the players step away. Nearly 1 in 5 gaming adults, or close to 10 million people, do these. One of the most popular MMOGs, Second Life—with over 5 million registrants—allows adults to create virtual characters and have them interact with others in real estate deals, group activities, workplaces, and general social life. Kids aren’t even allowed (they have their own version, Teen Second Life).

  I have to admit that I am an adult PC-gamer. For years, I have played the Command and Conquer series of war strategy games in which you control armies with a range of different skills. What I learned is that there is always a way to victory—you just have to keep playing until you find it. Lately I’m shifting to more online Scrabble, but if you notice what people are doing on planes today, it is either watching a DVD or playing a video game. People who use their laptops for work while flying are actually in the minority.

  The bottom line is: What used to be a fringe hobby for teen geeks and freaks is now an utterly mainstream activity for American grown-ups. Nearly 100 million adults are considered “active gamers.” Video game sales in the U.S. are bigger than movie sales worldwide. Something like 100 U.S. colleges and universities teach courses in how to design and produce video games.

  Video Game Grown-ups are a big deal—first for the industry itself. Grown-up Gamers mean a booming industry for “mature” rated games, already the fastest-growing segment, at nearly 15 percent; and a wide-open market for games geared to women. There is also a growing segment of seniors, aka “Gray Gamers.” In 2006, Nintendo introduced Brain Age, a touch-focused computer game that challenges seniors to a series of on-screen logic puzzles and then tells them how “young” their brain is. Nursing home residents spar to score “Age 50,” or “40,” while keeping their minds active and maybe staving off Alzheimer’s. (Remember how popular Nintendo was at the AARP convention?) This market will only grow as future seniors come to old age with more and more computer literacy.

  But even among adults in their 30s and 40s, the market for video games is vastly underserved—just look at the Circuit City displays and the offbeat and grotesque creatures on most of the video game covers. These games could make a serious dent in sales if they had more serious covers, more interesting topics, and new game experiences. There is not a single major game on investing and making money—even though one of the biggest board games of all time was Monopoly. The games all focus on taking over worlds, dating, or killing. But what most 33-year-old men want is to make a killing in the market, or if they want to knock someone off, it’s their boss and his corner office. Their female counterparts have just had their first or second baby, and are dealing with child development and sibling rivalry. The untapped marketplaces of human experiences out there are vast, and yet the game-creators still seem lost with the pimply teenagers, and a little oblivious to the lifestyles of their new customers.

  Video Game Grown-ups are also a big deal to advertisers. At $10 billion and growing, the video game industry is a serious new marketing venue. While entertainment software is still a small venue compared to TV, Nielsen, whose TV ratings system has for decades helped set the price of commercials on TV, announced in 2006 that it would develop a system of measurements to standardize the market for buying and selling video game ads. As the marketing catches up with reality, look for video game ads not just for cell phones and DVDs, but also home mortgage loans and minivans.

  And at a broader level, Grown-up Gamers represent one more blur in the distinction between adults and children. Sure, kids have sex younger than they used to, and call adults by their first names—but increasingly, it is grown-ups who watch cartoons (The Simpsons, King of the Hill, South Park), go to grown-up Chuck E. Cheeses, and now play video games. In all these extra hours that adults are playing video games, they are not working, reading, volunteering, or pursuing other community-bettering activities that used to be the hallmark of adult citizenship. Indeed, they are living in imaginary communities. Is that isolation, or mega-connection?

  My sense is that, on balance, Video Game Grown-ups will do more good than harm, and the reason is that all this adult comfort with video games is moving beyond entertainment and into education—for them. Gaming is the new frontier of the kind of skill-building and training that adults need to handle some of the world’s most serious problems. Dubbed “serious games” by the Woodrow Wilson International Center of Scholars, the next stage of video game technology is game-based learning and simulation, already being developed in areas like disease prevention, terrorism response, and the peaceful removal of dictators. Firefighters are using it to prepare for biochemical disasters. University administrators are using it to reinvent higher education. Military services are using it to prepare for battle. When the stakes are high and the choices fast-paced and complex, gaming out the options in real time can provide substantial competitive advantage. But it’s only as mainstream adults get comfortable with the tools and techniques of gaming—largely in their leisure time—that institutions like schools, universities, and governments will start to mine it for all it’s worth.

  So what started out as a habit for antisocial teenagers has become the newest way adults are thinking about counterterrorism, education, and war. We “game” not because we’re too antisocial to go out, but because we can imagine, plan, and practice for some of life’s biggest challenges through software scenarios.

  Neo-Classicals

  There are a couple groups in America who, every few decades, publicly bewail their demise. Grammarians. Jews. Major League Baseball. Their communal angst is genuine and heartfelt, and they can always point to quantitative data that back it up. But very often—and maybe it’s because some of that urgency spurs new devotees to action—these groups end up finding new and modern ways to survive.

  The latest comer to the I’m-Going-Extinct Party is classical music. Dozens of books, blogs, articles, and, of course, fund-raising drives have been devoted to the tearful lament that Debussy is dwindling and Puccini is perishing. The only reliable lovers of classical music, goes the dirge, are old people—so unless we take drastic measures, classical music, too, will die out within a generation.

  They point to some troubling data. Between 2005 and 2006, U.S. sales of classical music CDs dropped 15 percent. In city after city, classical radio stations and professional orchestras are shutting down. Orchestra season subscriptions are falling. School music programs are being slashed in half. And classical music on TV? Civilized countries like England still play it, but we don’t. We have seemingly 35 MTV channels—but if you want “classic” on TV, you have to mean movies. It’s a mournful state of affairs and may well signify our cultural decline.

  Alas, the requiem is premature. Classical music is growing in popularity, not shrinking. And in the coming years, we should expect it to grow even more.

  The reasons are empirical, demographic, and cultural. Empirically, the doomsayers are ignoring some key numbers. In 2000–01, there were over 32 million concert tickets sold, up more than 10 percent from a decade before. Whereas season subscriptions dropped—for example, by 5 percent in Baltimore—single-ticket sales in that city rose 46 percent at the same time. That suggests not only that classical music regulars, including retirees, have busier lives than ever, but also that more people than ever are dabbling in classical. Most industries would call that growth.

  In 2000, there were more than 36,000 classical music performances in the U.S.—up 10 percent from the prior year and up 45 percent from ten years before. Do 100 concerts a day in America suggest decline—when in the 1950s (the supposed heyday), orchestra seasons didn’t even last eight months?

  Orchestra revenues are up; private philanthropy is at record levels; and since 1992, the number of college students majoring in music has risen by more than half. In fact, in 2002, the National Center for Education Statistics had to add to its standard music majors (music, music history, music performance, and music theory) at least three new classical subspecialties: music pedagogy, conducting, and piano and organ.

  What did you say was dying out?

  Here’s my favorite counter-stat. According to Gallup surveys, the portion of U.S. households with a member who plays a musical instrument—54 percent—reached its highest point ever in 2003, the last year the study was conducted. And it may be that part of that growth was due to the fact that piano lessons aren’t just for fidgety kids anymore. According to the Music Teachers National Association, 25–55-year-olds are the fastest-growing group of new piano pupils.

  Even putting aside, for the moment, all the proof points that classical music is thriving and not withering, the big takeaway here is that the doomsayers’ key metrics—CD sales and presence on TV and radio—are completely irrelevant. Musically speaking, the Internet is the place to be. And apparently—even though the cliché classical music listener is stodgy and gray—classical music is more popular on the Internet than it was in stores. Whereas classical made up only 3 percent of CD sales in retail stores, it accounts for 12 percent of all sales on Apple’s iTunes.

  Classical music is not only surviving the death of Tower Records, it is actually now spawning a new breed of listener.

  The “classic” classical listener was white, elderly, well-educated, and steeped in musical training. While that group still makes up a big portion of classical activity online, a member survey conducted by www.classicalarchives.com reveals that nearly half of its subscribers are under 50, almost 1 in 5 did not finish college, and 1 in 3 have never played a musical instrument.

  When you think about it, it makes so much sense. The Internet is far friendlier to the casual classical fan than big-box stores ever were. When you can sample free tracks, or download just one track at a time and listen in the privacy of your iPod, classical music is suddenly not intimidating at all. An unintended consequence of the Internet is that it has opened up classical music to a younger, more diverse, and more adventurous brand of listener.

  And if you’re a music student—either one of the budding college types or a newbie adult studying piano—it turns out that being able to buy just the track you’re studying is a huge boon. Classical music was always so long—but now, if you don’t want to, you don’t have to buy the whole piece!

  Now for the demographic reasons that classical music is about to rise. In every generation, the getting-on-in-years wonder why teens, too, don’t lap it up. Well, the truth is, they almost never have. Classical music has always been an acquired taste, and in every generation, middle-aged people come to it for the first time. By that standard, looming U.S. demographics are a classical gold mine. Between 2000 and 2030, the number of Americans aged 55 or older will nearly double—from 60 million to about 110 million. The number of Americans aged 65 or older will more than double—from 35 million to over 71 million. And these seniors will be the healthiest, longest-lived, best educated, and most affluent seniors in history. Even if there were no Internet-enabled newbies coming to classical music, the industry should still be celebrating.