By Arthur Kauffman

Motoko Rich:

Many now wonder about a more profound shift among future buyers. Matt Byford, a 24-year-old litigation consultant in Chicago, acknowledges that low interest rates and low prices favor buying. But he says he is renting and in no hurry to buy, because he doesn’t expect much to change soon.

Brad Forrester, chief executive of the ConAm Group, which manages about 50,000 apartments in the western United States, says, “I think it’s going to be interesting to see whether there’s been a fundamental sociological shift in that 20- to 35-year-old cohort, where they literally say ‘this American dream just doesn’t work for me.’ ”

Shocking.

Pamela Rodríguez:

Mobile Internet usage is on the rise, and the world of Web design continues to evolve—so designers must learn to accomodate [sic] mobile devices. Thinking “Oh, my users won’t visit my website on a mobile device” is the worst mistake of all.

No one can stop mobile usage from increasing, and the odds are that every website will receive visitors on mobile devices. So, the best strategy is to be as prepared as possible.

Consider this a followup to my link Monday that showed the increased use of mobile devices on Talking Points Memo’s site. Designing for the mobile web, a landscape dominated by iOS devices, is not so different from designing for anything else. The same things are still important: simplicity, utility, functionality.

New site design from 500px optimized for larger screens and big photos. Crisp, clean design that includes a new ‘Market’ feature, where photographers will be able to directly buy and sell photographs.

Charles Duhigg:

Take a fictional Target shopper named Jenny Ward, who is 23, lives in Atlanta and in March bought cocoa-butter lotion, a purse large enough to double as a diaper bag, zinc and magnesium supplements and a bright blue rug. There’s, say, an 87 percent chance that she’s pregnant and that her delivery date is sometime in late August. What’s more, because of the data attached to her Guest ID number, Target knows how to trigger Jenny’s habits. They know that if she receives a coupon via e-mail, it will most likely cue her to buy online. They know that if she receives an ad in the mail on Friday, she frequently uses it on a weekend trip to the store. And they know that if they reward her with a printed receipt that entitles her to a free cup of Starbucks coffee, she’ll use it when she comes back again.

Extensive and pain-staking research on why companies want your data and how they can use it. Journalism at its finest.

Josh Marshall:

Sometime in the next couple weeks, visits from mobile devices will hit 20% of the total visits to TPM. The percentage has more than doubled in the last year. But as you can see from the chart below, the speed is accelerating. The percentage is now growing at more than 1% a month.

iPads and iPhones make up more than 70% of those mobile device visits.

Eric Li:

The West’s current competition with China is therefore not a face-off between democracy and authoritarianism, but rather the clash of two fundamentally different political outlooks. The modern West sees democracy and human rights as the pinnacle of human development. It is a belief premised on an absolute faith.

China is on a different path. Its leaders are prepared to allow greater popular participation in political decisions if and when it is conducive to economic development and favorable to the country’s national interests, as they have done in the past 10 years.

Li’s argument is one that I heard many forms of in a recent trip to China—China’s success comes from its stability, and its stability comes from political rights not outrunning the political climate. In other words, Li and others regard the Tiananmen Square rebellion and similar movements as destabilizing forces that, had they been successful, would have had hugely negative effects on the pace of democratic reforms in China. The reason for this fundamental difference in thought processes from the East to the West? The West’s faith that human rights are God-given.

Oh boy.

Phil Yu:

It’s good to know that she recognizes — albeit after the fact — what an awful, harmful commercial this is. But honestly, it still leaves me with about a thousand questions. How did she get involved with this job in the first place? What did she know going into it? What was her reaction when she saw the finished ad? What was her reaction to the reaction?

Of course the onus is still on Pete Hoekstra for (presumably) authorizing the ad buy, but I share Yu’s questions about Chan’s role in all this. How does a “recent college grad” get wrapped up in one of the biggest race-baiting debacles of the century?