is the only show that typically appears on each groups top ten list; Seinfeld, one of the most popular sitcoms in history, never ranked in the top fifty among blacks.) They smoke different ciga- rettes. (Newports enjoy a 75 percent market share among black teen- agers versus 12 percent among whites; the white teenagers are mainly smoking Marlboros.) And black parents give their children names that are starkly different from white childrens. Fryer came to wonder: is distinctive black culture a cause of the economic disparity between blacks and whites or merely a reflection of it?     As with the ECLS study, Fryer went looking for the answer in a mountain of data: birth-certificate information for every child born in California since 1961. The data, covering more than sixteen mil- lion births, included standard items such as name, gender, race, birth- weight, and the parents marital status, as well as more telling factors about the parents: their zip code (which indicates socioeconomic sta- tus and a neighborhoods racial composition), their means of paying the hospital bill (again, an economic indicator), and their level of ed- ucation. The California data prove just how dissimilarly black and white parents name their children. White and Asian-American parents, meanwhile, give their children remarkably similar names; there is some disparity between white and Hispanic-American parents, but it is slim compared to the black-white naming gap. The data also show the black-white gap to be a recent phenome- non. Until the early 1970s, there was a great overlap between black and white names. The typical baby girl born in a black neighborhood in 1970 was given a name that was twice as common among blacks than whites. By 1980 she received a name that was twenty times more common among blacks. (Boys names moved in the same direction but less aggressively-probably because parents of all races are less ad-