Group items tagged

Binge drinking among adults aged 35 to 50 occurred at record prevalence in 202

A new study found that nearly 30 percent of people in this age group reported binge drinking in 2022, continuing a consistent upward trend in the behavior. In 2012, 23 percent of such adults reported binge drinking.

Use of marijuana in this group also reached historic levels, with 28 percent reporting the behavior, up from 13 percent in 2012

Millennials, as a group, are not broke—they are, in fact, thriving economically. That wasn’t true a decade ago, and prosperity within the generation today is not evenly shared. But since the mid-2010s, Millennials on the whole have made a breathtaking financial comeback.

he belief that Millennials have been excluded from the implicit promises that America makes to its people—a house for most, middle-class security, a better life than your parents had—remains predominant in society and, to go by surveys and the tenor of social media, among Millennials themselves.

That prompts a question with implications for the cultural and political future of the United States, a country premised, to a large extent, on the idea of material progress: What if the American dream is still alive, but no one believes it to be?

ZAKARIA: Yes. I think I’ve always been intellectually very curious. I don’t think I’m the smartest person in the world, but I am very intellectually curious. I get fascinated by ideas and why things are some way. Even when I was very young, I remember I would read much more broadly than my peers.

I think I looked this up once, but Henry Kissinger’s memoirs came out when I was 14, I think. I remember reading them because I remember my mom — at that point, she was working at the Times of India. They excerpted it. I remember telling her that they had chosen some of the wrong excerpts, that there were other parts that would have been better. I must have read enough of it to have had an opinion.

The Bengali intelligentsia was the great intelligentsia of India, probably the most literate, the most learned. I think it’s because they’re very clever. One of the things I’ve always noticed is that people who are very clever political elites tend to think that they should run the economy because they can do it better than the market.

there is a meaningful chance that 2016 could begin a retreat of the United States from the mix of economic policies and the global engagement that U.S. businesses have regarded for decades as central to their success — unless business leaders can move decisively to redefine their goals as harmonious with those of working- and middle-class families.

The key question is how we rise up in more muscular defense of the interests of U.S. workers and industries without doing permanent damage to our economy. We must also demonstrate that government can function and that business can be a constructive partner to it.

every generation, we seem to witness an election that startles us, triggering tectonic shocks that change our politics and policies for decades to come. This could be one of those elections. Very much like the realignment revealed by the vote in Britain to leave the European Union, U.S. politics might be transforming into a debate less between right and left and more between those voters who are advantaged by globalization and those who are not.

This go-it-alone mentality works against the ways that, historically, workers have improved their lot. It encourages workers to see unions and government as flawed institutions that coddle the undeserving, rather than as useful, if imperfect, means of raising the relative prospects of all workers.

It also makes it more likely that white workers will direct their frustration toward racial and ethnic minorities, economic scapegoats who are dismissed as freeloaders unworthy of help—in a recent survey, 64 percent of Trump voters (not all of whom, of course, are part of the white working class) agreed that “average Americans” had gotten less they they deserved, but this figure dropped to 12 percent when that phrase was replaced with “blacks.” (Among Clinton voters, the figure stayed steady at 57 percent for both phrases.

This is one reason that enacting good policies is, while important, not enough to address economic inequality. What’s needed as well is a broader revision of a culture that makes those who struggle feel like losers.

When King Salman became Saudi Arabia’s ruler this year, few people expected much change. He was 79 and reputedly in ill health

But since taking the throne in January, Salman has shaken up Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy and the royal family’s succession plans.

He has launched a bombing campaign against Shiite rebels in Yemen and increased support for rebels in Syria, signaling a more assertive role for an oil-rich kingdom that traditionally relied on the United States for security. Salman’s goal, analysts say, is to guard Sunni Muslims against what he sees as the growing influence of Shiite Iran.

it is now obvious that income and wealth are more concentrated at the very top than they have been since the Gilded Age — and the trend shows no sign of letting up.

You really want to supplement Piketty-style analysis with a global view, and when you do, I’d argue, you get a better sense of the good, the bad and the potentially very ugly of the world we live in.

Income growth in emerging nations has produced huge gains in human welfare, lifting hundreds of millions of people out of desperate poverty and giving them a chance for a better life.

The omnibus bill also funded sanctuary cities, illegal alien tax credits, and changed federal law to allow for a massive increase in low-skilled H-2B workers– an immigration expansion opposed by more than nine in ten GOP voters.

Yet neither John Boehner nor Eric Cantor joined Barack Obama to expand Muslim immigration in to the United States– a distinction which is uniquely Paul Ryan’s

After years of poisonous relationships, disgust and recriminations, something bizarre happened here: House Republicans found happiness. It’s too early to tell if it’s momentary or permanent, but House Republicans feel good about Speaker Paul Ryan’s push to develop new policies.

Maybe the question that we should be asking is not what killed liberalism, but rather, what can we learn from liberalism’s long story of persistence—and how can we apply those insights in order to help liberalism write a new story for our own time.

Liberalism is not a doctrine founded on a sacred text, like Communism. It is something more like a set of predispositions—a faith in individuals and their capacity for growth, a tempered optimism that expects progress but recoils before utopian dreams, a belief in open debate and the possibility of persuasion, an insistence upon secularism in the public realm, an orientation towards civil rights and civil liberties.

liberalism has a core, and that is the right of the individual to stand apart

Trade has become an increasingly important part of China’s overall economy, and it has been a significant tool used for economic modernization.

In 1965 China’s trade with other socialist countries made up only about one-third of the total.

The principal efforts were made in Asia—especially to Indonesia, Burma (Myanmar), Pakistan, and Ceylon (Sri Lanka)—but large loans were also granted in Africa (Ghana, Algeria, Tanzania) and in the Middle East (Egypt).

One morning in May, I rolled out of bed to find that my hip flexors were at it again. Dragging my rolled-up yoga mat to the middle of the floor to arrange my body into the now-familiar contortion—one leg straight back, the other forward and bent against the floor, then switch—I tried to piece together what was going on. Like most Americans, I hadn’t been on an airplane since February. I had been sitting at home virtually all the time, a situation of relative comfort and incredible luck. But in the weeks that followed, I folded my body into pigeon pose again and again, with minimal returns. As I lost hip flexibility, I also gained other problems, which accumulated over the next several months—low-grade headaches, sore shoulders, a stiff neck, dry skin.Recommended ReadingHow Your Laptop Ruined Your LifeAmanda MullAfter the Pandemic, the Office Dress Code Should Never Come BackAmanda MullAmericans Got Tired of Looking Bad on ZoomAmanda MullRecommended ReadingHow Your Laptop Ruined Your LifeAmanda MullArticleRecirc_itemMedia__1z

And people aren’t just working in more challenging physical circumstances; they’re also spending more time doing it. “In the office, people work for eight or nine hours, but now they find themselves working 10 or 12 hours at home just because there’s no commute time,” Natalia Ruiz, a physical therapist at NYU Langone Orthopedic Center, told me of her patients. “Expectations of productivity have increased because you’re working from home.” In her practice, she’s seen more complaints of back and neck pain, but also more “repetitive strain” injuries such as carpal tunnel syndrome, tendinitis in the hands and forearms, and pinched nerves in the elbows.

For people who aren’t of working age, the orthopedic concerns are a little different. Elderly people, who are at the highest risk from the virus itself, have also experienced some of the worst physical consequences of isolation. “The elderly are not taking their walks and are getting weaker in their legs,” Singh said. “They are losing confidence in their gait, which causes further weakness, and they enter a vicious cycle.” Many people have sharply reduced their exercise this year as gyms have closed, or they fear catching the coronavirus at those that have reopened, but for younger adults, who are generally more physically fit and less prone to injury, regaining some movement in creative ways is easier, and novel, unsupervised exercise is less risky (although Singh noted that he has seen some injuries from people who have used their new Pelotons vigorously but incorrectly).

The underlying theme of capitalism is the use of wealth to create more wealth.

With the rapid development of European trade and prosperity in the 13th century, cities in Italy and the Netherlands witness a creation of wealth which is capitalist in kind - because any merchant is in essence a capitalist, risking his pot of money each time he buys in one place to sell in another

Florence in the 14th century demonstrates more familiar indications of capitalism. It has its great banking families, engaging in transactions across the breadth of Europe.

the history of the modern Republican Party is the history of paradigm shifts.

If you came of age with conservative values and around Republican politics in the 1980s and 1990s, you lived within a certain Ronald Reagan-Margaret Thatcher paradigm. It was about limiting government, spreading democracy abroad, building dynamic free markets at home and cultivating people with vigorous virtues — people who are energetic, upright, entrepreneurial, independent-minded, loyal to friends and strong against foes.

For decades conservatives were happy to live in that paradigm. But as years went by many came to see its limits.

A classic example of this dynamic is the advent of the chain saw. A person with a chain saw can cut 10 times as many trees in the same time as a person using older methods. Logging companies did not use this invention, however, to shorten the workweek by 90 percent. They used it to cut 10 times more trees than they otherwise would have. “Lashed by the growth imperative, technology is used not to do the same amount of stuff in less time, but rather to do more stuff in the same amount of time,”

The problem, Hickel argues, is explained by the “paradox” first observed by the nineteenth-century economist William Stanley Jevons: In a growth system, gains in efficiency do not translate to higher wages, greater equality, more leisure, or lower emissions; they are plowed right back into the growth cycle

Increasing outputs of wind, solar, and other renewables are not leading to a drop in the use of fossil fuels. Instead, renewables and fossil fuels are used to satisfy rising global energy demand. “New fuels aren’t replacing the older ones,” Hickel writes. “They are being added on top of them.”

what parents today are picking up on is that a shrinking number of kids are reading widely and voraciously for fun.

The ubiquity and allure of screens surely play a large part in this—most American children have smartphones by the age of 11—as does learning loss during the pandemic. But this isn’t the whole story.

A survey just before the pandemic by the National Assessment of Educational Progress showed that the percentages of 9- and 13-year-olds who said they read daily for fun had dropped by double digits since 1984

A second great factor in the passing of the Middle Ages was the rise of new towns

In 2004, the influential political scientist Samuel Huntington published Who Are We?, his manifesto on the tumultuous future of the American identity. The growth of black and Hispanic minorities, he predicted, would provoke a backlash among whites: The various forces challenging the core American culture and creed could generate a move by native white Americans to revive the discarded and discredited racial and ethnic concepts of American identity and to create an America that would exclude, expel, or suppress people of other racial, ethnic, and cultural groups. Historical and contemporary experience suggest that this is a highly probable reaction from a once dominant ethnic-racial group that feels threatened by the rise of other groups. It could produce a racially intolerant country with high levels of intergroup conflict.

in the last half-century, several events have pushed conservative white American middle-class men to conflate their majoritarian, economic, and cultural decline

Economic anxiety and racial resentment are not entirely separate things, but rather like buttresses in an arch, supporting each other in the creation of something larger—Donald Trump.

James Waterson introduces the slave warriors of medieval Islam who overthrew their masters, defeated the Mongols and the Crusaders and established a dynasty that lasted 300 years.

They destroyed the Crusader kingdoms of Outremer, and saved Syria, Egypt and the holy places of Islam from the Mongols. They made Cairo the dominant city of the Islamic world in the later Middle Ages, and under these apparently unlettered soldier-statesmens’ rule, craftsmanship, architecture and scholarship flourished. Yet the dynasty remains virtually unknown to many in the West.

The Mamluks’ opportunity to overthrow their masters came at the end of the 1240s, a time when the Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty, set up by Saladin in the 1170s, had reached a modus vivendi with the Crusader states; skirmishing, rather than outright war, was the order of the day in Syria and the Holy Land.