Over at The Awl, Molly Osberg examines the service economy and recounts her experience working as a barista at various coffeehouses.
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Posted inEditor's Pick
For Love & Money
Same-sex marriages could add $43 million in wedding spending to Wisconsin’s economy in three years if they were legal. But the real economic impact goes far deeper than veils, venues and vows. On a day in late December 2013, Roger and Indy Arteaga-Derenne sat, marriage license in hand, waiting for a 12:15 p.m. appointment with […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The End of Illth: In Search of an Economy That Won’t Kill Us
The writer looks at a network of worker-owned businesses in Cleveland called Evergreen Cooperatives, which has created environmentally sustainable jobs in low-income neighborhoods and a work environment that gives workers real input into company decisions and a share of the profits: “While about 11,000 U.S. companies offer some form of employee stock ownership, far fewer […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction
The Art of Running from the Police
A young man concerned that the police will take him into custody comes to see danger and risk in the mundane doings of everyday life. To survive outside prison, he learns to hesitate when others walk casually forward, to see what others fail to notice, to fear what others trust or take for granted.
Posted inNonfiction
The Gothic Life and Times of Horace Walpole
Two-hundred and fifty years ago, Horace Walpole published ‘The Castle of Otranto,’ a strange, campy book that’s widely considered to be the first Gothic novel. In real life, Walpole’s family was beset by tragedy and his life’s obsession was a Gothic castle called Strawberry Hill.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Vagabonds, Crafty Bauds, and the Loyal Huzza: A History of London at Night
In the 16th & 17th centuries, “nightwalking” was a transgressive act in a city still on the brink of total nighttime illumination, but with complex implications depending on your social status.
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
'It Will Change the Way We Think About Society and the Way We Do Economics'
Paul Krugman, in the New York Review of Books, on Capital in the Twenty-First Century, the new book from Thomas Piketty, professor at the Paris School of Economics: It therefore came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Fixing the Digital Economy
On the hidden costs of giving our data away to the “Siren Servers,” and how we can make changes to help the Internet support a middle class: “Siren Servers drive apart our identities as consumers and workers. In some cases, causality is apparent: free music downloads are great but throw musicians out of work. Free […]
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
The Missing History of Ravensbrück, The Nazi Concentration Camp for Women
The story of the Nazis’ only concentration camp for women has long been obscured—partly by chance, but also by historians’ apathy towards women’s history. Sarah Helm writes about the camp, where the “cream of Europe’s women” were interned alongside its prostitutes, and members of the French resistance perished alongside Red Army prisoners of war.
Posted inBooks, Nonfiction, Story
Slavery and Freedom in New York City
The story of slavery in New York, the messy path to abolition, and a shameful history with which America has yet to come to terms.
