Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Photo Going to school on the Upper East Side. Credit Erin Baiano for The New York Times A few weeks ago, a woman named Wednesday Martin, a hobby anthropologist whose graduate degree is in comparative literature, published an op-ed article in The New York Times outlining some of the observations she makes in her forthcoming…
CREDIT: Shutterstock Every three months, the government takes the temperature of the economy by releasing Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, figures. GDP goes up: the economy is supposedly healthy. GDP goes down: there’s a bug (or an all-out contagion, as during the Great Recession). But GDP — which adds up the value of work being…
There is no state in the union where a full-time, minimum-wage worker can afford to rent a one-bedroom apartment for less than 30 percent of his paycheck (which is a standard measure of housing affordability). That’s the depressing takeaway from a new report by the National Low-Income Housing Coalition. The paper includes this map tallying…
Yesterday, Gawker Media announced that we will be holding an election next week to vote on whether our editorial staffers want to form a union. The purpose of this post is to allow our writers to discuss how they’re voting, and why. The vote next week is to decide whether we want to agree to…
Work is getting in the way of much-needed vacations, according to the latest executive survey by recruitment and HR consulting firm Korn Ferry. Two-thirds (67%) of the more than 400 U.S. executives surveyed online earlier this month said they had postponed or canceled vacation plans in the past year due to demands at work. While 83%…
Release Date: May 27, 2015 sDate For release at 12:00 p.m. EDT The Federal Reserve Board’s latest survey of the financial and economic conditions of American households released Wednesday finds that individuals’ overall perceptions of financial well-being improved modestly between 2013 and 2014 but their optimism about future financial prospects increased significantly. The 2014 Survey…
The choices were stark: sack a third of our workforce or cut their wages by a third. After a short board meeting we cut their wages, assured they would survive and that, with a bit of cajoling, they would return to our sweatshop in Shenzhen after their two-week break. But that was only the start….
Photo Ada Colau, center, a leftist candidate, won a race for mayor of Barcelona, Spain’s second-largest city. Another left-leaning candidate, Manuela Carmena, is poised to become Madrid’s mayor. Credit Josep Lago/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images MADRID — Ada Colau, 41, was not even born when Manuela Carmena, 71, joined Spain’s underground Communist party and started…
La Razon, May 25, 2015 “Instability,” reads the Monday headline of conservative Madrid daily La Razon, after the strong showing of two upstart parties in Spain’s local and regional elections threatened the longstanding two-party duel between the Popular and Socialist parties. The conservative Popular party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy suffered its worst local results in a generation, losing some of its support in Sunday’s voting to…
Metropolitan hot dog vendor Ahmed Mohammed is in hot water—he’s been fired after he was found to be charging tourists $30 for a hot dog. So… when are they giving him the key to the city? DeBlasio? New York City, once reputed to be a gritty urban hellhole where “only the strong survive,” has now…