Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
BOULDER, Colo. — ONCE upon a time in America, baby boomers paid for college with the money they made from their summer jobs. Then, over the course of the next few decades, public funding for higher education was slashed. These radical cuts forced universities to raise tuition year after year, which in turn forced the…
It started out well enough. Tens of thousands of people gathered in Montreal’s Victoria Square, the heart of what’s left of its financial heft, waving banners, shouting slogans, hugging, smiling, high-fiving, smoking weed, all with the intent of sticking it to Quebec’s Liberal premier, Philippe Couillard, and his austerity budget. Thursday’s march was the apex…
Nonfarm U.S. payrolls added only 126,000 jobs in March, more than 100,000 less than economists predicted. The U.S. economy created only half of the jobs that experts projected it would create in March, the weakest showing in payroll additions 15 months. The economy added 126,000 new nonfarm jobs last month, the smallest gain since December…
Several weeks ago we revealed the “The Mystery Of America’s Missing Wage Growth” in which we showed why matter how hard the Fed tries to push the S&P 500 higher (and it has certainly done an admirable job of manipulating the market to record highs), it has over the past 7 years failed to trickle…
Barney Frank (Credit: AP/J. Scott Applewhite) Barney Frank has a new autobiography out. He’s long been one of the nation’s most quotable politicians. And Washington lives in perpetual longing for intra-party conflict. So why has a critical revelation from Frank’s book, one that implicates the most powerful Democrat in the nation, been entirely expunged from…
Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. By Robert Putnam. Simon & Schuster; 386 pages; $28 and £18.99. THE most important divide in America today is class, not race, and the place where it matters most is in the home. Conservatives have been banging on about family breakdown for decades. Now one of the nation’s…
What frustrates Hanna Newberg about her life right now isn’t just that she’s working as a waitress at a chain restaurant or renting a small apartment in western Massachusetts. The problem, Newberg says, is that she did everything she was told she was supposed to do — went to college, went to graduate school —…
How Much (Or Little) The Middle Class Makes, In 30 U.S. Cities “My family’s household income is $250,000 a year, but I promise you I am middle class.” That’s from a recent article in a college newspaper by a student who grew up in Silicon Valley. And it’s the kind of thing you hear pretty…
Story highlights David Wheeler: Silicon Valley doesn’t create jobs; it’s wiping out middle-class jobs Young college graduates are struggling with lack of jobs, yet many still idolize Silicon Valley Silicon Valley is tossing millennials aside like yesterday’s laptop. The commonly held belief is that with hard work and a good education, a young person in…
Continue reading the main story Slide Show close media-action-overlay close image Assembling Micro-apartments CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times Continue reading the main story Continue reading the main story Enter neighborhood, city, zip or address Select minimum price Min Price100,000 150,000 200,000 250,000 300,000 350,000 400,000 450,000 500,000 550,000 600,000 650,000 700,000 750,000 800,000 850,000…