Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Charity worker Maria Karra talks to an elderly man who lives on the streets of Athens. Maria Karra can’t believe her eyes. The founder of an Athens charity for the homeless says the hardship she sees daily on the city’s streets reminds her of crises in much poorer countries. “I used to do this in…
[Rendering via VisualHouse.] There are a lot of really, really expensive apartments poised to enter the market in the next few years (we’re lookin’ at you, 220 Central Park South and Nordstrom Tower) that will join the ranks of the city’s already-inundated luxury market. A few questions have been floating around for a while: when’s…
On her first campaign stop in Iowa in April, Hillary Clinton struck a decisively populist tone, declaring that “the deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top.” Later, she sharpened her rhetoric on income inequality by comparing the salaries of America’s richest hedge fund managers with kindergarten teachers. Clinton isn’t alone….
Black cab drivers gum up a London street to protest against Uber. Photo by Chem Squier. This article originally appeared on VICE UK. It was seven o’clock on a cold January evening when Orhan, a taxi driver for Uber, first realized he had a problem. Well into his second shift of the day, he tried…
Editor’s note: This is the third in a series of articles about the effects of software and automation on the economy. You can read the other stories here and here. The way Hod Lipson describes his Creative Machines Lab captures his ambitions: “We are interested in robots that create and are creative.” Lipson, an engineering…
Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images According to a new report, minorities who work in retail earn less and are less likely to be promoted than their white counterparts. The study, released yesterday by the NAACP and public-policy group Demos, found that retailers pay black and Latino full-time salespeople about 75 percent of what they pay…
Yesterday, Iceland’s prime minister, Sigmundur Gunnlaugsson, announced a plan that will essentially close the books on his country’s approach to handling the financial crisis — an approach that deviated greatly from the preferences of global financial elites and succeeded quite well. Instead of embracing the orthodoxy of bank bailouts, austerity, and low inflation, Iceland did just…
As has been widely observed, we are living in a period of economic inequality that has not been seen since the first “gilded age” of the early 20th century. Not even the people who benefit from it think that it can last. The Swiss bank UBS is a world leader in managing the financial assets…
(Charles McQuillan/Getty Images) In Sunday’s New York Times, Wednesday Martin claims to blow the lid off a certain set of fashionable, hedge-fund dependent Upper East Side wives with children. It’s a group with whom she spent six years socializing at the playground and in other casual settings—an experience Martin, who holds a BA in anthropology,…
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…