Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
An armed guard stands at the entrance of the Survival Condo Project, a former missile silo north of Wichita, Kansas, that has been converted into luxury apartments for people worried about the crackup of civilization.CreditPhotograph by Dan Winters for The New Yorker Barrier Status: ‘none’ Steve Huffman, the thirty-three-year-old co-founder and C.E.O. of Reddit,…
There is a reason we live in a golden age of dystopian science fiction: Increasingly, it feels like it is coming true. From “The Hunger Games” to “Elysium,” stories depict a world in which the trend of growing wealth and income inequality continues to its logical conclusion. This narrative seems inevitable because it has occurred…
Image: Getty Amazon is a very rich company, with a market cap of $361 billion and stock price of over $750 a share. But as we’ve seen, the fortune of huge tech companies don’t often translate down to its employees. In some cases, it leaves them living in squalor. Take the blight of Amazon’s warehouse…
The American dream hinges on the idea that future generations will do better than the ones that preceded them. But a new study (pdf) from a team of economists and sociologists at Harvard, Stanford, and the University of California is bad news for a whole generation: Only half of American 30-year-olds today earn more money…
It is increasingly common for governments to give poor people money. Rather than grant services or particular goods to those in poverty, such as food or housing, governments have found that it is more effective and efficient to simply hand out cash. In some cases, these cash transfers are conditional on doing something the government…
We’ve long understood that there’s something fundamentally broken about the United States’ modern economy, from the uneven distribution of net household wealth to the growing disparities in incomes between the 1 percent and everyone else. But new research from three top economists paints an even grimmer picture, by putting to bed one of the biggest myths about…
(Dani Reyes Mozeson / Flickr) More than half of all New Yorkers don’t have enough money saved to cover them in the event of a lost job, medical emergency, or other disaster, according to a new report by the Association for Neighborhood & Housing Development. Nearly 60 percent of New Yorkers lack the emergency…
They will blame James Comey and the FBI. They will blame voter suppression and racism. They will blame Bernie or bust and misogyny. They will blame third parties and independent candidates. They will blame the corporate media for giving him the platform, social media for being a bullhorn, and WikiLeaks for airing the laundry. But…
close story-meta Photo Credit Karyn Lee/Pratt Institute Cambridge, Mass. — I’ve been at Harvard University for 17 years, but I’ve never been in a classroom here. I’m a cook in the dining halls. I work in the cafeteria at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where every day I serve amazing students studying medicine,…
Social mobility, the amount that a typical American moves up or down the economic ladder from where their parents and grandparents stood, has became a major focus of political discussion, academic research and popular outrage in the years since the global financial crisis. While Americans have traditionally seen their country as a place where anyone can make through…