Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
A small rebellion against the American higher education system is gaining steam. On Tuesday, a group of strikers and organizers who call themselves “the Corinthian 100” met with officials from the U.S. Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, the Department of Education and the Department of Treasury to demand that their federal student loans be forgiven. The…
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…
Silicon Valley investors recently bet $50 million on a luxury sock company. And the most surprising part was how normal it seemed. Venture capital investment is at its highest point since the late 1990s. Funders are flying close to the sun. The stable of privately backed “unicorn” tech companies—those valued at more than $1 billion before their initial public…
In San Francisco’s “culture war,” both sides espouse oddly similar-sounding values. Credit Illustration by Christian Gralingen In the spiritual geography of San Francisco, Davies Symphony Hall—a glass-and-concrete half rotunda much resembling R2-D2’s neckline—sits between hills steep with layered mansions and the urban basin where the city’s gritty elements now rest. John Adams’s “Harmonielehre” premièred here;…
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…
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…