My Facebook newsfeed has been overtaken by a photo of a USA Today sidebar listing the top and bottom 10 in this ranking. Big thanks to Michael McCrea for seeing the story and sharing a photo.

Gallup and Healthways interviewed 1,000 people a day over the course of last year to collect this data. Every person they interviewed is given a composite score of well-being, which is based on factors in six categories:

1. Life evaluation
2. Emotional health
3. Physical health
4. Healthy behavior
5. Work environment
6. Basic access

Together, these six categories contain 55 individual factors. A breakdown is available on the project’s methodology page.

In the case of Lancaster County, they interviewed 781 individuals, or 0.15% of our population. They then used the composite scores of those individuals to create a composite score for Lancaster County. (Read the overview report in PDF format.)

Metropolitan Statistical Areas are often not apples-to-apples comparisons. Lancaster County is a rarity among the country’s 361 MSAs in that the Lancaster MSA and Lancaster County are the same thing. York County for instance, is bundled with Adams County. The Philadelphia MSA includes both Camden, NJ and Wilmington, DE.

As an alternate way of breaking down the data, the 2011 Well-Being Index report also ranks the results by U.S. congressional district. By that measure, Lancaster ranks 7th. (Chester County must be dragging us down!)

What I find most impressive is that Lancaster managed to reach the #1 slot while being surrounded by bad influences. The 2009 version of this same study revealed that the York-Hanover MSA was the 4th most obese in the nation, and that area shares a large border with the Lancaster MSA. (The obesity statistics for 2011 have not yet been released.)

In fact, while Lancaster ranks at the very top of the list for the overall Well-Being Index, York-Hanover is down at 120th. Allentown-Bethlehem is 169th. Harrisburg-Carlisle and Reading look better, at 49th and 56th, respectively. (That info is found in the Pennsylvania-specific report, also a PDF.)

It is worth noting that compared to the year prior, Lancaster’s Well-Being numbers improved in each of the 6 categories listed above, except one:

That’s right: healthy behavior. The bad news is it appears our behavior isn’t as healthy as it should be. The good news is that our behavior is the thing we have the greatest ability to change.

I’m sure our local business champions will be proud of the fact that our best-performing category is work environment.

For those interested, here are  the top ten MSAs on the 2011 Well-Being Index:

1. Lancaster, PA
2. Charlottesville, VA
3. Ann Arbor, MI
4. Provo-Orem, UT
5. Boulder, CO
6. Honolulu, HI
7. Santa Barbara-Santa Maria-Goleta, CA
8. San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA
9. Fort Collins-Loveland, CO
10. Appleton, WI

What are your thoughts and reactions?

I want to monitor them remotely over the Web, to get a sense of what is going on in those cities that might inspire us here in Lancaster, or cause us to think differently about ourselves.

What cities do you consider to be comparable to Lacaster? Ideal cities will be of similar size, age, and climate.

I think there are a fair number of people in Lancaster with a sense of what is going on in Philadelphia, New York, and even more distant cultural centers like Los Angeles and Austin. Those people are thinking about how some of the things that are done in those cities might be done here.

I would like to contribute to the conversation by looking at what is going on in less well-known cities that are more similar to ours. Any suggestions of towns to use as that sort of benchmark?

The entire front page is an editorial. It stands up for the thousands of Penn State alumni and supporters who live in Central Pennsylvania. It stands up for the rule of law. And it stands up for children who are the victims of sexual crimes.

To the editorial board of the Patriot-News, bravo.

Highlight sentences:

The most famous coach in college football history must be held to a higher standard.

…

A man who has spoken with such affection for 46 years about “his kids” failed real kids when they needed him most.

…

It might always be honor with an asterisk, admiration with a shake of the head. Joe will have to live with that.

The Patriot-News wasn’t alone. The newspapers of Central Pennsylvania stepped up today. They put their communities, and their responsibilities to them, first. They collectively mounted the kind of pressure necessary to oust an iconic figure who long ago aged past his ability to control his organization, his staff, and his team.

The York Daily Record reminds us all that whenever anyone even suspects that a child is being abused, “…the first call, the most important call, must be to the authorities.”

The Philadelphia Inquirer wants Paterno to step down at the end of this season, too, saying his “oft-discussed retirement would be timelier than ever – even though leaving amid this scandal will provide a sad coda to an otherwise stellar career for the man who, until now, served as the reassuring public face of Penn State.”

The Williamsport Sun-Gazette underscores that no one did the right thing: “It’s clear no one at the university acted aggressively enough as they were being informed of these allegations. There was one call to be made when they were informed. Immediately. To state police.”

The Scranton Times-Tribune echoed the point that “Penn State’s obligation hardly ends with the legal process.”

There are a couple exceptions to this set of newspapers who stepped up and addressed our state’s highest and mightiest public university, though—as of this writing, there’s not a peep about PSU amongst the editorials in the Lancaster or Reading newspapers.

If you so much as suspect that a Pennsylvania child is being abused, call ChildLine at 800-932-0313.

More about Penn State football on LancasterPaBlog.com:
In the Middle of College Football Season, Injustices of the NCAA Revealed

And it’s on this site.

It’s powered by event organizers.

When you create a Facebook Event, invite the Facebook user Lancaster Event-Calendar.

Voila! Your event is now listed on this public Lancaster events calendar.

Your event should be open to the public and take place within Lancaster County. That’s all I ask.

If you’re an event goer looking for something to do, bookmark the events calendar on this site.

And if you’re an event organizer, jump on Facebook and send a friend request to Lancaster Event-Calendar then invite “him” to your upcoming Lancaster County events.

I expect this calendar to get a little cluttered and chaotic, since it’s aim is to be easy and democratic. If you’d like something with a little bit of curation to it, the MOOSE/JSID/DID calendar is a good resource.

Where’d this event calendar idea come from?

On my personal Facebook account, I receive around three event invitations a day. Most of them are to really cool things going on right here in Lancaster County.

I say no to nearly all of them, and I feel bad doing it. I feel like I’m saying, “Not only can I not come, but I don’t support what you’re doing, and I’m OK with all the other people you’ve invited and all my friends seeing that I’ve personally decided not to attend your event.”

That’s the opposite of the message I want to send.

So instead of RSVPing “Yes” or “Maybe” to tons of events I have no intention of being a part of, and instead of complaining about getting invited to every last event taking place, I decided to try something new.

It struck me that when seen as a whole, the list of my pending invitations on Facebook looked like a pretty full community events calendar. I thought about all the event organizers who spend a couple hours for each event making sure all the right people, websites, and publications get the information about their event.

The rest was straightforward. Facebook creates a feed of all your events. Google Calendar displays such feeds, and lets you embed a calendar on a website. I have a website.

I don’t plan on policing or curating the calendar very much, and I hope I won’t have to. If push comes to shove, I expect that unfriending anyone who takes advantage of this resource (by inviting Lancaster Event-Calendar to every last silly event) will keep this calendar useful and relevant.

I’d love to hear your reactions, advice, or questions in the comments.

• The other week I spent a buck something on a fountain soda at a Turkey Hill Minit Market. The plastic cup I chose sported the Penn State Nittany Lion logo and the football team’s season schedule. From that purchase, a few cents went to Penn State University in the way of a licensing fee.
• Yesterday I watched the Penn State vs. Temple football game on ESPN 3, via XBox LIVE at my house and then on cable at a friend’s house. I watched most of the commercials. ESPN paid the NCAA big money for the right to broadcast that game. Corporations, in turn, paid big money to target me with those advertisements.

In the end, none of that money went to the people who actually earned it—the athletes on the field who make the very idea of Penn State football so exciting, and the event of a Penn State football game so much fun.

There is no doubt in my mind that Lancaster County residents easily put more than $1 million in the coffers of Penn State University and the NCAA each year. Factor in Pitt, Temple, Villanova, and the other Division 1 schools in Pennsylvania, and that number climbs. Factor in schools outside of Pennsylvania (there’s more than one Notre Dame fan in Lancaster County), and the number becomes absurd.

Stop for a second and take a guess—how much profit does Penn State football generate each year? Several hundred thousand? A couple million? Try tens of millions—“in between $40 million and $80 million in profits a year,” as reported in a scathing indictment of the NCAA and participating universities in the current issue of The Atlantic.

The article is compelling reading, long and full of detail and varying perspectives. It makes one conclusion abundantly clear, though: Given where college sports are today, the ideal of the amateur student-athlete is in many cases fairy tale mumbo-jumbo used to justify universities’ practice of treating adults (college students who are mostly black and mostly poor) as free labor to generate billions of dollars of revenue annually.

Here are several highlights from the article.

Three independent commissions have been assembled to review problems within the NCAA structure and make recommendations to the organization and its member schools. At one of the hearings, there was testimony from a man who has spent the last few decades negotiating hugely profitable deals between college athletics departments and multinational corporations. Here’s how part of the exchange went down:

“Why,” asked Bryce Jordan, the president emeritus of Penn State, “should a university be an advertising medium for your industry?”

[Sonny] Vaccaro did not blink. “They shouldn’t, sir,” he replied. “You sold your souls, and you’re going to continue selling them. You can be very moral and righteous in asking me that question, sir,” Vaccaro added with irrepressible good cheer, “but there’s not one of you in this room that’s going to turn down any of our money. You’re going to take it. I can only offer it.”

William Friday, a former president of North Carolina’s university system, still winces at the memory. “Boy, the silence that fell in that room,” he recalled recently. “I never will forget it.”

When we think of scandal in college athletics, we think of scandals involving the players (or their parents) taking payments that are against the rules. Consider this, though:

For all the outrage, the real scandal is not that students are getting illegally paid or recruited, it’s that two of the noble principles on which the NCAA justifies its existence—“amateurism” and the “student-athlete”—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes. The tragedy at the heart of college sports is not that some college athletes are getting paid, but that more of them are not.

NCAA schools refuse to recognize their athletes as employees, but why do we let them fool us? Who makes more money for the universities—student workers in the library, or athletes on the field? Are the athletes volunteers? (Not in Division 1 schools, where scholarships are an expectation.) Do the athletes get to choose where and when to work, what to wear, and how to perform their tasks, as independent contractors do? (Of course not.) And yet by refusing to recognize athletes as employees, schools and the NCAA avoid workers comp claims when one of them is permanently injured on the field. Take an example:

Using the “student-athlete” defense, colleges have compiled a string of victories in liability cases. On the afternoon of October 26, 1974, the Texas Christian University Horned Frogs were playing the Alabama Crimson Tide in Birmingham, Alabama. Kent Waldrep, a TCU running back, carried the ball on a “Red Right 28” sweep toward the Crimson Tide’s sideline, where he was met by a swarm of tacklers. When Waldrep regained consciousness, Bear Bryant, the storied Crimson Tide coach, was standing over his hospital bed. “It was like talking to God, if you’re a young football player,” Waldrep recalled.

Waldrep was paralyzed: he had lost all movement and feeling below his neck. After nine months of paying his medical bills, Texas Christian refused to pay any more, so the Waldrep family coped for years on dwindling charity.

Through the 1990s, from his wheelchair, Waldrep pressed a lawsuit for workers’ compensation. (He also, through heroic rehabilitation efforts, recovered feeling in his arms, and eventually learned to drive a specially rigged van. “I can brush my teeth,” he told me last year, “but I still need help to bathe and dress.”) His attorneys haggled with TCU and the state worker-compensation fund over what constituted employment. Clearly, TCU had provided football players with equipment for the job, as a typical employer would—but did the university pay wages, withhold income taxes on his financial aid, or control work conditions and performance? The appeals court finally rejected Waldrep’s claim in June of 2000, ruling that he was not an employee because he had not paid taxes on financial aid that he could have kept even if he quit football. (Waldrep told me school officials “said they recruited me as a student, not an athlete,” which he says was absurd.)

It’s not just physical injuries we’re talking about. The very idea that athletic scholarships are a way for young adults to pay for college has only a flimsy basis in reality.

“When you dream about playing in college,” Joseph Agnew told me not long ago, “you don’t ever think about being in a lawsuit.” Agnew, a student at Rice University in Houston, had been cut from the football team and had his scholarship revoked by Rice before his senior year, meaning that he faced at least $35,000 in tuition and other bills if he wanted to complete his degree in sociology. … Agnew was struck by … scholarship data on players from top Division I basketball teams, which showed that 22 percent were not renewed from 2008 to 2009—the same fate he had suffered. … The NCAA contended that an athletic scholarship was a “merit award” that should be reviewed annually, presumably because the degree of “merit” could change. … The one-year rule effectively allows colleges to cut underperforming “student-athletes,” just as pro sports teams cut their players. “Plenty of them don’t stay in school,” said one of Agnew’s lawyers, Stuart Paynter. “They’re just gone. You might as well shoot them in the head.” … [Agnew's story makes] a sham of the NCAA’s claim that its highest priority is protecting education.

Thankfully, there are students and alumni beginning to seriously stand up for themselves, and the NCAA is facing large threats in the courtroom and from its member schools.

Naturally, as they have become more of a profit center for the NCAA, some of the vaunted “student-athletes” have begun to clamor that they deserve a share of those profits. You “see everybody getting richer and richer,” Desmond Howard, who won the 1991 Heisman Trophy while playing for the Michigan Wolverines, told USA Today recently. “And you walk around and you can’t put gas in your car? You can’t even fly home to see your parents?”

When you look at the rules and how they are being applied, it’s ridiculous. Two examples:

At the start of the 2010 football season, A. J. Green, a wide receiver at Georgia, confessed that he’d sold his own jersey from the Independence Bowl the year before, to raise cash for a spring-break vacation. The NCAA sentenced Green to a four-game suspension for violating his amateur status with the illicit profit generated by selling the shirt off his own back. While he served the suspension, the Georgia Bulldogs store continued legally selling replicas of Green’s No. 8 jersey for $39.95 and up.

A different NCAA committee promulgated a rule banning symbols and messages in players’ eyeblack—reportedly aimed at Pryor’s controversial gesture of support for the pro quarterback Michael Vick, and at Bible verses inscribed in the eyeblack of the former Florida quarterback Tim Tebow.

The moral logic is hard to fathom: the NCAA bans personal messages on the bodies of the players, and penalizes players for trading their celebrity status for discounted tattoos—but it codifies precisely how and where commercial insignia from multinational corporations can be displayed on college players, for the financial benefit of the colleges. Last season, while the NCAA investigated him and his father for the recruiting fees they’d allegedly sought, Cam Newton compliantly wore at least 15 corporate logos—one on his jersey, four on his helmet visor, one on each wristband, one on his pants, six on his shoes, and one on the headband he wears under his helmet—as part of Auburn’s $10.6 million deal with Under Armour.

Scandal, corruption, injustice… it’s all here. And warm-and-fuzzy sentiment hardens us to it.

Related reading: Your Study Guide To The Atlantic’s Massive, Withering Story About The Wretchedness Of The NCAA on Deadspin

As you can see, the Latino population of Lancaster city has increased from 21 percent to 39 percent over the course of two decades.

What does this mean? Look to the Lancaster County Workforce Investment Board’s Latinos in Lancaster County Initiative for lots of great insight from researchers and from our community’s Latino leaders.

For those (like me) interested in the local angle, Brooks commented frequently on F&M, and how as a liberal arts college it is a strong example of educating the “whole self,” including reason, emotions, and even parts of the mind we are just beginning to understand scientifically. He didn’t mention Lancaster itself, though he did note in the Q&A that earlier in his career he was in favor of suburbanization but since shifted his views as he became convinced of the value of living in denser proximity to others.

His talk was an expanded version of his TED talk, which I’ve embedded below. Watch it and you’ll get the gist of what he said on Saturday.

The first wonderful argument Martin delivers is that while many describe our generation as apathetic, we’re actually overwhelmed. We were raised to have ambitions of saving the world, and we’ve discovered we don’t know how to begin.

So how do we begin? The most important thing we can do with our lives, Martin says, is to be a humanizing force in the systems we’re a part of. How do we sustain ourselves and avoid burning out? By functioning on two levels:

1. “We really go after changing these broken systems of which we find ourselves a part.”
2. “We root our self-esteem in the daily acts of trying to make one person’s day more kind, more just, et cetera.”

In many ways, she says, addressing our generation, life is about “acting in the face of overwhelm.”

What are the systems at work in Lancaster County where you can be a humanizing force, acting out of love and care even though the problems are overwhelming?

Listen to Courtney Martin’s talk

The in-depth report comes at a time when the number of Marcellus Shale wells in Pennsylvania are expected to increase from 6,400 today to no fewer than 50,000 in 2031.

What the waste water looks like. Thumnail of the photo by Jessica Kourkounis.

The article, by Ian Urbina, reveals that, in a process that defies belief, radioactive waste water from the drilling process is being sold to municipalities in our state to use for de-icing roads, because the waste water is high in salts.

Natural gas is extracted from the Marcellus Shale formation in our state by injecting millions of gallons of water to break up rock and release the natural gas. The problem is that 10 to 40 percent of that water comes back to the surface within two weeks of its use. And at that point it is contaminated with salts and radioactive elements including barium and strontium.

One partial solution to this problem has been for drilling corporations to capture this waste water and reuse it at new drilling sites. This is a flawed solution, however, because it leads to waste water with even higher concentrations of contaminants, and the water is not reusable forever—it must eventually be disposed. Adding insult to injury, the New York Times reports that “the total amount of recycling in the state is nowhere near the 90 percent that the industry has been claiming over the past year.” It gets worse:

In the year and a half that ended in December 2010, well operators reported recycling at least 320 million gallons. But at least 260 million gallons of wastewater were sent to plants that discharge their treated waste into rivers, out of a total of more than 680 million gallons of wastewater produced, according to state data posted Tuesday. Those 260 million gallons would fill more than 28,800 tanker trucks, a line of which would stretch from about New York City to Richmond, Va.

On March 11, 2009, a meeting was held between natural gas drilling industry officials and “state regulators and officials from the governor’s office.” The subject of the meeting was a modest proposal requiring drilling corporations to track each load of waste water from the extraction site to the disposal point. Without that requirement, drillers could dump the waste water on the side of the road and no one would be the wiser. What happened during and after that meeting is horrifying:

After initially resisting, state officials agreed, adding that they would try to persuade the secretary of Pennsylvania’s Department of Environmental Protection to agree, according to the notes. In the end, the state’s proposed manifest system for tracking was not carried out.

Three of the top state officials in the meeting — K. Scott Roy, Barbara Sexton and J. Scott Roberts — have since left their posts for jobs in the natural-gas industry.

The article, “Wastewater Recycling No Cure-All in Gas Process,” is required reading for all Pennsylvanians.

Give it a read and leave your thoughts here.

(While I could not have anticipated the details of this ongoing disaster, I told you so.)

The situation has gotten serious over the past fifty years, as Robert Lieberman points out in the current issue of Foreign Affairs:

The wealthiest Americans, among them presumably the very titans of global finance whose misadventures brought about the financial meltdown, got richer. And not just a little bit richer; a lot richer. In 2009, the average income of the top five percent of earners went up, while on average everyone else’s income went down. This was not an anomaly but rather a continuation of a 40-year trend of ballooning incomes at the very top and stagnant incomes in the middle and at the bottom. The share of total income going to the top one percent has increased from roughly eight percent in the 1960s to more than 20 percent today.

When we talk about the income of the top one percent, we’re talking about individuals making more than $1.2 million a year.

It’s hard to comprehend those kind of numbers. One percent of people getting twenty percent of the income? It’s worse when you realize that’s only income, not wealth. As of 2007, ten percent of the U.S. population held eighty percent of all financial assets.

I think most of us automatically think of the richest people in America as abstractions. We’ll only see their faces if we see their photos in Forbes. But what if these financial elite are our neighbors? How many of the “richest of the rich” live in Lancaster County?

In my research so far, it’s impossible to tell. There’s really only one definitive statistic: at least five thousand Lancaster County households are among the richest five percent of American households, in terms of income.

The latest research on actual wealth (as opposed to just income) to come from the U.S. Census Bureau is dated 2004, and even then the numbers are only broken down to the state level, not into counties. We know that in 2004, there were 86,000 individuals in Pennsylvania with more than $1.5 million in financial assets. If those individuals were evenly distributed throughout the state population, in 2004 there would have been 3,464 of them in Lancaster County. Further, if we want to consider only individuals worth more than $20 million, in 2004 there would have been seventy-six such individuals in Lancaster County.

Does anyone have any better data on these questions? If not, do my very rough guesses pass the “sniff test” for you? Are there thousands of multimillionaires among the half-million residents of Lancaster County?