Stream of Reading (Prepare to be Forwarded) – An Archive of What I'm Reading
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…
Buy Photo Reporters interview Gov. Mike Pence.(Photo: Charlie Nye / The Star)Buy Photo Soon after Gov. Mike Pence signed the religious freedom bill into law Thursday, Salesforce.com founder and CEO Marc Benioff announced on Twitter that he would no longer send employees or customers to Indiana. “Today we are canceling all programs that require our…
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…
Employees of Amtrak, the publically-funded railroad service, earned themselves a round of bonuses because their agency only lost $214 million last year. A second set of bonuses was scrapped after Amtrak fell far short of its customer satisfaction goals, according to the agency’s inspector general. RELATED: Why we’re not going to get Northeast Corridor high-speed…
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…
gallery js end gallery js start of gallery code Even big companies are getting screwed by NYC’s skyrocketing rents: Toys R Us will be leaving its enormous Times Square home next year. Commercial Observer broke the news, speaking with Cushman & Wakefield’s Brad Mendelson, who is marketing the 110,000 square foot space at Broadway between…
It’s not only the just-released University of Michigan consumer confidence report and February retail sales on Thursday that surprised economists and investors with another dose of underwhelming news. Overall, U.S. economic data have been falling short of prognosticators’ expectations by the most in six years. The Bloomberg ECO U.S. Surprise Index, which measures whether data beat or miss forecasts, fell…
Iceland sent a letter to the president of the European Union on Thursday, formally withdrawing plans to join the bloc. The letter (pdf) will have come as no surprise. Iceland had terminated negotiations aimed at bringing itself into union in 2013, when a new government came to power. One divisive issue that kept the two sides from reaching an…