“There often is a ‘tone’ in writing about the poor. There is a presumption that people of a certain class are mired in misery.”
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Posted inNonfiction, Reading List
Loneliness and Solitude: A Reading List
When I moved from a small town in Northern California to Brooklyn, New York in the summer of 2010, I felt the pang of an inarticulable loneliness. Unable to string together words to describe this complicated feeling, I found Olivia Laing’s Aeon essay, “Me, Myself and I,” to be a starting point that began to […]
Posted inNonfiction, Quotes
The Gentrification of San Francisco, Circa 1985
Stories about San Francisco’s latest wave of gentrification—perhaps exemplified by the tech bus battles—have been everywhere as of late. But this isn’t the first time critics have mourned the end of San Francisco-as-bohemian-enclave. From “Gentrification’s Price: Yuppies In, the Poor Out” which appeared in the Los Angeles Times on April 3, 1985: In short, San Francisco has become perhaps the most gentrified […]
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
Planet Money Makes a T-Shirt
A multimedia report on how the global economy works, from the perspective of the people making a T-shirt for NPR: In the case of the Planet Money T-shirt, the buyer is Jockey. The company told us that the pattern of pulling out when wages rise may be coming to an end for now, because there’s […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Riders on the Storm
An examination of Colorado’s mental health care system after the Aurora theater shooting. The state passed a $25 million initiative to restructure its crisis system for mentally ill patients, but still has a lot of work to do: Colorado has underfunded mental health care for decades. Exactly how much is uncertain because there are at […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
The 40-Year Slump
A bleak picture of working in the United States. Meyerson points to 1974 as the pivotal year in which worker pay stopped rising in accordance with productivity, and traces all the changes have since wiped out the American middle class: All the factors that had slowly been eroding Americans’ economic lives over the preceding three […]
Posted inEditor's Pick
Wall Street Isn’t Worth It
Who’s providing the real value in our economy? Quiggin argues that we shouldn’t be ready to dismiss the idea of dramatically shrinking the financial sector, which now makes up more than 20 percent of the U.S. GDP: I’d like to look at a specific question raised by the discussion of private returns and social value, […]
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 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 […]
