Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Politicians and pundits love to talk about the character-building experience of working your way through college. But how realistic is that ideal? As one way of answering that question, here’s a thought experiment: Let’s say you’re planning to attend your state’s best-known public university (at the in-state rate, naturally) and you’re hoping a minimum-wage job…
Our future workplaces are increasingly managed by apps and algorithms. Is technology empowering workers, or making them ever more helpless cogs in a corporate profit machine? When we talk about the “on-demand economy”, we are really talking about two things: the ability of a consumer to summon a vehicle, their lunch, or their groceries with…
Photo “Universities frequently compete, but this is a space we can find a reason to collaborate,” said Richard A. Matasar, a New York University vice president. Credit Christopher Gregory for The New York Times A MONTH before turning 60, Helen White received her master’s degree in sport management at George Washington University, and now teaches…
Katrina bus tours go all over New Orleans, but it’s illegal for them to go into the Lower 9th Ward, the area that’s been the slowest to rebuild. This week we go around talking to residents there about what matters the most to them (and what doesn’t) ten years after the hurricane. The episode we…
Somehow this is supposed to turn people *against* a higher minimum wage? http://t.co/KTRsXlMp4n pic.twitter.com/ff8qddakYc — Jody Avirgan (@jodyavirgan) August 26, 2015 On Monday, a billboard went up over Times Square ridiculing the call for a $15-an-hour minimum wage for fast-food workers. The billboard depicts a doofy good-for-nothing millenial shrugging his way toward a…
Some Photoshop concepts, no matter how ill-conceived, must be seen to the bitter end Things are reaching a boiling point in the sleepy crime-riddled hamlet of The Hamptons, USA. There have been Uber shortages, LIRR restriction, helicopter bans, and fornicating yupster Bros aplenty. Dr. NY Times is here to diagnose the problems, which they…
Pavlina Tcherneva’s chart showing the distribution of income gains during periods of economic expansion is burning up the economics internet over the past 24 hours and for good reason. The trend it depicts is shocking: (Pavlina Tcherneva) For a long time, most of the gains from economic growth went to the bottom 90 percent of…
‘Bring a map of New Orleans.’’ That was all that Alden J. McDonald Jr., president and chief executive of Liberty Bank and Trust Company, said when I first asked to meet him. It was the summer of 2005, less than two weeks after the city’s flood-protection system failed to keep out the storm surge created…
Entry Text Living in America has taught Matt Taibbi that we as a society have “a profound hatred of the weak and the poor.” That’s one claim the former Rolling Stone writer makes in his new book, “The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap.” Taibbi defended this statement in a HuffPost…
In October 2011, I was rounding out a year and a half of service in a Whole Foods bakery when I finally stopped to read the text that was on the side of our pie boxes. This was a revelatory moment in my relationship with the company, which wants its employees not just to drink…