Web Reads: What do famous people and dogs do all day?

The daily grind. This interactive infographic shows the daily routines of famous writers and artists. The color-coded layout shows at a glance who was working at night (Kafka, Flaubert, Picasso, Mozart), who exercised the most (Milton, Hugo, Dickens), and who had a day job (Vonnegut, Darwin, Le Corbusier). Information for the chart came from the Daily Routines blog.

Dog trivia. Here’s an 8-minute video jammed with non-stop facts and trivia about dogs, including Toto from The Wizard of Oz. Did you know the Beatles inserted a dog whistle in the song “A Day in the Life” on the Sergeant Pepper album?

America’s dog? Bad news about pit bulls, which Tom Junod in Esquire calls the American dog: “There is no other dog that figures as often in the national narrative—no other dog as vilified on the evening news, no other dog as defended on television programs, no other dog as mythologized by both its enemies and its advocates, no other dog as discriminated against, no other dog as wantonly bred, no other dog as frequently abused, no other dog as promiscuously abandoned, no other dog as likely to end up in an animal shelter, no other dog as likely to be rescued, no other dog as likely to be killed.”

Economic converts. Good news from northeastern Cambodia, which is seeing many converts from animism to Christianity. One reason is the high cost of appeasing all the local gods: “Tradition mandates elaborate ceremonies involving sacrifice of chickens, pigs, and even buffaloes. But with access to food and forest products shrinking, such rituals are becoming rapidly untenable.”

Dwindling conservatives? Michael Lind describes a future in which conservatives, especially social conservatives, comprise a dwindling share of the U.S. population. That doesn’t mean a move away from lifestyle political issues because the “liberals” who remain will still be divided by class and differ on policies ranging from taxes to welfare. On New Geography, Howard Ahmanson examines Lind’s thesis and sees at least one flaw: Pro-life sentiment among millennials remains high.