Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Sept. 25, 2015 11:25 a.m. ET Go back, for a moment, nearly 30 years. In March 1987, Margaret Thatcher visited Mikhail Gorbachev, the reforming leader of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, in Moscow. Sitting in the Kremlin, the two argued for hours. At one point, Mr. Gorbachev accused Mrs. Thatcher of leading the…
A café that specializes in novelty breakfast cereals has been targeted in protests against the gentrification of London’s East End. Paint was thrown at the windows of Brick Lane’s Cereal Killer Café, and “SCUM” was written across the window. A nearby real estate agent was also attacked. Customers were locked inside to protect them from the demonstrators. Several…
(bigstockphoto) Over 100 years ago in America — before Social Security, before IRAs, corporate pensions and 401(k)s — there was a ludicrously popular (and somewhat sleazy) retirement scheme called the tontine. At their peak, around the turn of the century, tontines represented nearly two-thirds of the American insurance market, holding about 7.5 percent of national…
On the opening day of Trump Plaza in Atlantic City in 1984, Donald Trump stood in a dark topcoat on the casino floor celebrating his new investment as the “finest building in the city and possibly the nation.” Thirty years later, the Trump Plaza folded, leaving some 1,000 employees without jobs. Trump, meanwhile, was on…
In court papers filed on Thursday, city lawyers claim the family of a college student murdered in 2013 at an East Harlem housing project don’t deserve a settlement from the city because she should have known the “risks” of being there, the New York Post reports. Olivia Brown’s mother, Crystal, filed a wrongful-death lawsuit against…
You may love your job. You may love your boss. But if your boss has a problem with you getting the money you deserve, then the friendly boss is not your friend. At the University of Washington, a group of professors is seeking to unionize the faculty. Their aim, the Seattle Times reports, is not…
New York University’s commencement ceremony in 2012. (Melanie Stetson Freeman/The Christian Science Monitor via Getty) New York University is among the country’s wealthiest schools. Backed by its $3.5 billion endowment, the school has built campuses in Abu Dhabi and Shanghai, invested billions in SoHo real estate, and given its star faculty loans to buy…
When you picture the CEO of a major company, you think tact, professionalism, and intelligence. Sure, you occasionally get someone who’s eccentric for the sake of being eccentric, but most of the time you can expect that someone with enough level-headedness to run a company will be of relatively sound mind all around. In the…
To understand the feeling of crisis that many see in higher education right now, it’s useful to start with some figures from 40 years ago. In 1974, the median American family earned just under $13,000 a year. A new home could be had for $36,000, an average new car for $4,400. Attending a four-year private…
Yeah, it’s not the real Labor Day, but we’re still offering discounted subscriptions with this link today. Support our work and subscribe, or get a friend a gift subscription. At the end of the nineteenth century, the American labor movement was among the most militant in the world. From the stockyards of Chicago to the…