Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
Image by Jim Cooke/ GMG Blue blazers. Blue checked shirts. Collar open. No tie. Brown shoes. Black shoes. Or Nike shoes. New, new, all new. Soft leather satchels with bold brass zippers. Good cufflinks. Good watches. Better than you know. Hundred dollar haircuts. Straight razored shaves. Shaped cuticles. Manicured nails. Clean, soft, tailored. New. Talking…
It is time for polite, respectable, rational people to start saying what has become painfully obvious: It is time to stop respecting the rich, and start stealing from them. In earnest. Inequality is eating America alive. It has been growing for decades. To say that “the American dream is dead” is no longer a poetic…
Why millennials are facing the scariest financial future of any generation since the Great Depression. Like everyone in my generation, I am finding it increasingly difficult not to be scared about the future and angry about the past. I am 35 years old—the oldest millennial, the first millennial—and for a decade now, I’ve been waiting…
close byline-meta close extended-byline close story-meta-footer close story-meta Photo Credit Spencer Platt/Getty Images On a Friday night last month, I moderated a debate in Manhattan about whether we should scrap capitalism. It was organized by the socialist magazine Jacobin; defending capitalism were editors from the libertarian publication Reason. Tickets for all available 450 seats sold…
Imagine that you live in a city of villains. Your city has a billionaire playboy. He lives on top of the hill. You don’t know much about him, other than what you read in the papers about his romantic exploits and elaborate black-tie parties. You had a gig once offloading decorative antique suits of armor…
About 8 percent of U.S. adults earn money by doing contract work through so-called “gig economy” employers like Uber, Favor, or Amazon Mechanical Turk, according to the Pew Research Center; if the trend continues, one-third of Americans will support themselves this way by 2027. The gig economy is growing rapidly, but it’s also changing how…
Credit Matt Chase Over lunch in a downtown restaurant, Beatrice, a New Yorker in her late 30s, told me about two decisions she and her husband were considering. They were thinking about where to buy a second home and whether their young children should go to private school. Then she made a confession: She took…
“Meh. There’s always Death to look forward to,” my dad would say whenever I would air my frustrations with a world that was at odds with the one I had conjured in my mind. Though I found his blatant disregard for my artful misery frustrating in my youth, I later found myself boomeranging the exact…
By RICHARD D. KAHLENBERGAUG. 3, 2017 close story-meta-footer close story-meta Photo Credit Golden Cosmos ONE hundred years ago, in a major advance for human dignity, the Supreme Court struck down a racial zoning law in Louisville, Ky., that prohibited nonwhites from moving into homes in majority-white areas. Laws like these, which existed in numerous cities…
WEST BRANCH, Mich.—When she graduated from high school, Taylor Tibbetts was a bright star in this small Northern Michigan town. She won an $18,000-a-year swimming scholarship to Converse College in Spartanburg, S.C., and departed for her freshman year with high hopes. Once on campus, however, she felt overwhelmed by her courses and scared and isolated…