Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
The wealth gap between blacks and whites in America will take hundreds of years to close — if ever. If current trends persist, it will take 228 years for black families to accumulate the same amount of wealth as whites, according to a report released this week from the Corporation for Economic Development and the…
Where poor people live: Flickr Who gives the best advice? You, the idiots slacking off at your stupid job, reading Gawker. One wealthy mom desperately needs your help! This question was posted today on UrbanBaby.com, the best website on the internet, full of advice-seeking wealthy parents, some of whom are real. We have taken the…
Occupy Wall Street protestors. Photo via Flickr user Paul Stein It’s not news to anyone that the economy fucking sucks for pretty much everyone in the world who isn’t a Koch. Since the financial meltdown of 2008, discussions about the 99 percent, wealth inequality, and the many related economic and social issues have been prominent….
I wrote last week about the new nonfiction book Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and a Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance, the Yale Law School graduate who grew up in the poverty and chaos of an Appalachian clan. The book is an American classic, an extraordinary testimony to the brokenness of the…
Pour scorn elsewhere. / Joanna Slodownik Late capitalism is like your love life: it looks a lot less bleak through an Instagram filter. The slow collapse of the social contract is the backdrop for a modern mania for clean eating, healthy living, personal productivity, and “radical self-love”—the insistence that, in spite of all evidence to the…
The top 1% of Americans are finally recovering from the great recession. A new analysis of IRS data revealed that the average income of the top 1% of income earners grew by 7.7% in 2015, reaching $1.36m. Report author Emmanuel Saez, an economics professor at the University of California-Berkeley, calculated earlier this year that the…
While the algos have long forgotten about today’s job report whose headline was good enough to unleash an epic buying spree which has pushed the S&P to the highest level since July 2015, a quick read between the lines reveals a continuation of some recent troubling trends, namely that all job gains in recent years…
Three years ago, TIME magazine published a cover story called “The Me Me Me Generation—Millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents.” It was the print version of clickbait, designed to be devoured by TIME’s Baby Boomer base, or perhaps flipped through angrily by millennials killing time at TIME’s most reliable subscriber,…
All photos via PropertySex.com You’re an on-site landlord, and also a horny straight dude. Yesterday, you kicked out some obnoxious tenants and want to fill that vacancy as quickly as possible, but you also realize you’ve got a desirable space in a nice area, which, in the words of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich, is…
Nearly half of unemployed Americans have quit looking for work, and the numbers are even worse for the long-term jobless, according to a poll released Wednesday that paints a grim picture of the labor market. Some 59 percent of those who have been out of work for two years or more say they have stopped…