Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The actual contents of a Rhode Island woman’s cupboard after two shopping trips paid for with food stamps. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post) Poverty looks pretty great if you’re not living in it. The government gives you free money to spend on steak and lobster, on tattoos and spa days, on — why not? —…
As the 2016 election approaches, the debate among the intelligentsia appears like it will center around the question of inequality. While income is distributed unequally in the country, what few people know is how much more unequally wealth, financial assets and inheritances are distributed. As the chart below shows, income is only part of the…
BOULDER, Colo. — ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the…
It started out well enough. Tens of thousands of people gathered in Montreal’s Victoria Square, the heart of what’s left of its financial heft, waving banners, shouting slogans, hugging, smiling, high-fiving, smoking weed, all with the intent of sticking it to Quebec’s Liberal premier, Philippe Couillard, and his austerity budget. Thursday’s march was the apex…
Nonfarm U.S. payrolls added only 126,000 jobs in March, more than 100,000 less than economists predicted. The U.S. economy created only half of the jobs that experts projected it would create in March, the weakest showing in payroll additions 15 months. The economy added 126,000 new nonfarm jobs last month, the smallest gain since December…
Several weeks ago we revealed the “The Mystery Of America’s Missing Wage Growth” in which we showed why matter how hard the Fed tries to push the S&P 500 higher (and it has certainly done an admirable job of manipulating the market to record highs), it has over the past 7 years failed to trickle…
Barney Frank (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite) Barney Frank has a new autobiography out. He’s long been one of the nation’s most quotable politicians. And Washington lives in perpetual longing for intra-party conflict. So why has a critical revelation from Frank’s book, one that implicates the most powerful Democrat in the nation, been entirely expunged from…
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. By Robert Putnam. Simon & Schuster; 386 pages; $28 and £18.99. THE most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s…
BANGKOK, Thailand — No one expects to find paradise inside a Cambodian sweatshop. But a new Human Rights Watch report reveals that conditions at the poor nation’s garment factories aren’t merely bad. They’re often criminally abusive. Americans have reason to cringe over the sad conditions forced on Cambodian clothing makers. The United States is the…
When they startedSoulCycle in 2006, the wellness industry had not yet reached its apex. Yoga wasn’t something you did over lunch with a business associate; there wasn’t a juice bar on every corner. Many have credited Cutler and Rice for helping kickstart the boutique fitness craze, amassing a cult following happy to “follow [their] soul”…