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…
TIME World Greece Greece Seeks $305 Billion in WWII Reparations From Germany Louisa Gouliamaki—AFP/Getty Images Greek Finance Minister Yanis Varoufakis arrives to present his ministry’s new secretaries at a press conference in Athens on March 4, 2015. Amid a continuing negotiation over debt relief from the European Union bailout Greece released its first quantifiable demand…
The actual contents of a Rhode Island woman’s cupboard after two shopping trips paid for with food stamps. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post) Poverty looks pretty great if you’re not living in it. The government gives you free money to spend on steak and lobster, on tattoos and spa days, on — why not? —…
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…
The Internal Revenue Service Headquarters in Washington, D.C. The number of IRS-related phone scams is on the rise. J. David Ake/AP hide caption itoggle caption J. David Ake/AP True story: The other day, I attended a speech by IRS Commissioner John Koskinen, who said phone scammers are swarming the country in the run-up to April…
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;…