Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Back in college, while my friends mostly held down jobs in retail, worked at restaurants, or picked up random gigs through temp agencies, I worked as a nanny. And while a lot of those friends hated their jobs, I was kind of obsessed with mine. I spent my days and evenings with two fiercely smart,…
A couple of weeks ago President Obama mocked Republicans who are “down on America,” and reinforced his message by doing a pretty good Grumpy Cat impression. He had a point: With job growth at rates not seen since the 1990s, with the percentage of Americans covered by health insurance hitting record highs, the doom-and-gloom predictions…
Australian Essena O’Neill caused a stir when she quit her Instagram modeling career and lambasted the vainglorious “industry.” Even compared to the horror stories about abuse and exploitation in traditional modeling, this sounds exhausting and thankless. And yet it’s typical for New Media and for industries that have been “disrupted” by tech. I found Essena…
The mayor joined elected and city officials and the developers for a ceremonial dirt toss at the Beach Channel Senior Apartments site. View Full Caption DNAinfo/Katie Honan FAR ROCKAWAY — More than two thirds of the new affordable housing planned for Queens will be built on the Rockaway peninsula, a flood zone still…
Shakespeare said that all the world’s a stage, but the sociologist Erving Goffman added that most of the interesting stuff lies behind the scenes, in what he called the “backstage” areas of everyday life. Having spent the past eight years doing research on the international wealth-management profession, I have to agree with Goffman: The most…
CREDIT: AP Photo/Brian Bohannon YUM Brands CEO David Novak, who has the biggest retirement nest egg The pay gap between what CEOs make and what they pay their workers is pretty well known. A new report released on Wednesday illuminates a different gap: that between what CEOs have stashed away for retirement and what…
A new study suggests that programs like food stamps and housing vouchers cut poverty by almost twice as much as we thought they did. According to standard census numbers, the poverty rate in New York from 2008 to 2011 was 13.6 percent, before taking these programs into account. The programs the study examines — food stamps (a.k.a….
Back in 1999, a quarter of all 25-year-olds lived with their parents. By 2013 this number has doubled, and currently half of young adults live in their parents home. While the troubling implications for the economy from this startling increase are self-evident, and have been extensively discussed both here and elsewhere (and are among the…
High fees are eroding the retirement savings of millions of Americans, but employers who shop around can often find much better options for their employees’ 401(k) plans. Annette Elizabeth Allen/NPR hide caption itoggle caption Annette Elizabeth Allen/NPR High fees are eroding the retirement savings of millions of Americans, but employers who shop around…
Submitted by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog, We just got more evidence that the middle class in America is dying. According to brand new numbers that were just released by the Social Security Administration, 51 percent of all workers in the United States make less than $30,000 a year. Let…