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What Is Middle Class in Manhattan? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...middle-class-in-manhattan.html middle-class NYC income social class
shared by Javier E on 21 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • middle-class neighborhoods do not really exist in Manhattan
  • “When we got here, I didn’t feel so out of place, I didn’t have this awareness of being middle class,” she said. But in the last 5 or 10 years an array of high-rises brought “uberwealthy” neighbors, she said, the kind of people who discuss winter trips to St. Barts at the dog run, and buy $700 Moncler ski jackets for their children.
  • Even the local restaurants give Ms. Azeez the sense that she is now living as an economic minority in her own neighborhood. “There’s McDonald’s, Mexican and Nobu,” she said, and nothing in between.
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  • In a city like New York, where everything is superlative, who exactly is middle class?
  • “My niece just bought a home in Atlanta for $85,000,” she said. “I almost spend that on rent and utilities in a year.
  • “Housing has always been one of the ways the middle class has defined itself, by the ability to own your own home. But in New York, you didn’t have to own.” There is no stigma, he said, to renting a place you can afford only because it is rent-regulated; such a situation is even considered enviable.
  • “It’s overwhelmingly housing — that’s the big distortion relative to other places,” said Frank Braconi, the chief economist in the New York City comptroller’s office. “Virtually everything costs more, but not to the degree that housing does.”
  • The average Manhattan apartment, at $3,973 a month, costs almost $2,800 more than the average rental nationwide. The average sale price of a home in Manhattan last year was $1.46 million, according to a recent Douglas Elliman report, while the average sale price for a new home in the United States was just under $230,000.
  • New Yorkers also live in a notably unequal place. Household incomes in Manhattan are about as evenly distributed as they are in Bolivia or Sierra Leone — the wealthiest fifth of Manhattanites make 40 times more than the lowest fifth, according to 2010 census data.
  • There is no single, formal definition of class status in this country. Statisticians and demographers all use slightly different methods to divvy up the great American whole into quintiles and median ranges. Complicating things, most people like to think of themselves as middle class. It feels good, after all, and more egalitarian than proclaiming yourself to be rich or poor. A $70,000 annual income is middle class for a family of four, according to the median response in a recent Pew Research Center survey, and yet people at a wide range of income levels, including those making less than $30,000 and more than $100,000 a year, said they, too, belonged to the middle.
  • “You could still go into a bar in Manhattan and virtually everyone will tell you they’re middle class,” said Daniel J. Walkowitz, an urban historian at New York University.
  • The price tag for life’s basic necessities — everything from milk to haircuts to Lipitor to electricity, and especially housing — is more than twice the national average.
  • If the money you live on is coming from any kind of investment or dividend, you are probably not middle class, according to Mr. Braconi.
  • Without the clear badge of middle-class membership — a home mortgage — it is hard to say where a person fits on the class continuum. So let’s consider the definition of “middle class” through five different lenses.
  • If you live in Manhattan and you are making more than $790,000 a year, then congratulations, you are the 1 percent.
  • “Understanding who is middle class, in New York, but especially Manhattan, is all about when you got into the real estate market,” he said. “If you bought an apartment prior to 2000, or have long been in a rent-stabilized apartment, you could probably be a teacher in Manhattan and be solidly middle class. But if you bought or started renting in a market-rate apartment over the last 5 or 10 years, you could probably be a management consultant and barely have any savings.”
  • By the same formula — measuring by who sits in the middle of the income spectrum — Manhattan’s middle class exists somewhere between $45,000 and $134,000.
  • But if you are defining middle class by lifestyle, to accommodate the cost of living in Manhattan, that salary would have to fall between $80,000 and $235,000. This means someone making $70,000 a year in other parts of the country would need to make $166,000 in Manhattan to enjoy the same purchasing power.
  • Using the rule of thumb that buyers should expect to spend two and a half times their annual salary on a home purchase, the properties in Manhattan that could be said to be middle class would run between $200,000 and $588,000.
  • On the low end, the pickings are slim. The least expensive properties are mostly uptown, in neighborhoods like Yorkville, Washington Heights and Inwood. The most pleasing options in this range, however, are one-bedroom apartments not designed for children or families.
  • “There’s no room for the earlier version of the middle class,” Mr. Walkowitz said. Firefighter, police officer, teacher and manufacturing worker all used to be professions that could lift a family into its ranks. But those kinds of jobs have long left people unable to keep up with soaring real estate prices.
  • Positions that would nudge a family into the upper class elsewhere — say, vice president or director of strategy — and professions like psychologist are solidly middle class in Manhattan.
  • The same holds true for jobs in higher education, a growth sector for the city. The average tenured university professor at New York University or Columbia makes more than $180,000 a year, according to a 2012 survey by The Chronicle of Higher Education. Sweetening the deal for those looking to buy, N.Y.U. has offered mortgage assistance and discounted loans, while qualified Columbia faculty are eligible for a subsidy of up to $40,000 a year. Some faculty members benefit from university housing that rents well below the market rate, in prime locations on the Upper West Side and in Greenwich Village.
  • Because her building is owned by Columbia, her rent, about $1,800 a month, is manageable on an associate professor’s salary, which averages about $125,000. A similar market-rate apartment on the Upper West Side costs about $6,000 a month,
  • One way to stay in Manhattan as a member of the middle class is to be in a relationship. Couples can split the cost of a one-bedroom apartment, along with utilities and takeout meals. But adding small roommates, especially the kind that do not contribute to rent, creates perhaps the single greatest obstacle to staying in the city.
  • Only 17 percent of Manhattan households have children, according to census data. That is almost half the national average, making little ones the ultimate deal-breaker for otherwise die-hard middle-class Manhattanites.
  • By one measure, in cities like Houston or Phoenix — places considered by statisticians to be more typical of average United States incomes than New York — a solidly middle-class life can be had for wages that fall between $33,000 and $100,000 a year.
  • “The only artists I know now who are still in Manhattan,” she said, “either made it big and bought, or are still in the rent-controlled studios they landed in 1976, and will leave in a coffin.”
  • People define class as much by association and culture as they do by raw numbers — a sense, more than anything, of baseline financial security garnished by an occasional luxury like a vacation, and a belief that things can get better through hard work and determination.
  • In the last decade, the percentage of people who are paying “unaffordable rents” (defined as more than 30 percent of their income) has increased significantly, according to a report issued in September by the city’s comptroller.
  • The only young people she sees moving in around her are often buoyed by parental support, given an apartment at graduation the way she was given a Seiko watch. As her own friends and neighbors age or die out, she wonders, “who is going to take our place?”
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Dürer's Devil Within by Andrew Butterfield | NYRblog | The New York Review of... - 0 views

www.nybooks.com/...durer-devil-within Dürer medieval religion death history europe
shared by Javier E on 26 May 13 - No Cached
  • Like so many of his contemporaries, Dürer was haunted by death and guilt and the fear of damnation. He had good reason to be. Death was everywhere. Dürer had seventeen siblings, and only two made it to adulthood. Both his trips across the Alps to Italy—in 1494 and 1505–1507—were partly inspired by the desire to flee outbreaks of the plague in his home town, Nuremberg. “Anyone who is among us today,” Dürer wrote in one poem, “may be buried tomorrow.” This was not a poetic conceit. It was the brutal truth.
  • The prospect of death also held a special fear, since according to Catholic doctrine death was not the end but merely a new beginning of one’s suffering. The damned burned forever in hell, and even the good had to undergo an extremely long time in purgatory, enduring torments far worse than anything experienced in life. It is no wonder that Dürer worried for the salvation of his father’s soul, even years after the man’s passing in 1502; or that watching his mother’s painful and terrifying demise in 1514—the opposite of the “good death” everyone hoped for—seems to have thrown Dürer into a spiritual and psychological crisis.
  • A troubled existence such as Dürer’s was the common lot in early-sixteenth-century Germany. Anxiety and despair form the intimate, the subjective, background of the Reformation
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  • To overcome the inborn tendency to evil, Dürer appears to have believed there were three things you could do, if you received the grace to do them. One was to mortify the flesh. It may sound morbid to us, but mortification was a common part of religious practice then. It is even recommended in the third of Luther’s Ninety-Five Theses: “penitence is null unless it produces outward signs in various mortifications of the flesh.”
  • The second was to throw yourself onto the mercy of God. His writings are full of sayings such as “Always seek grace, as if you might die any moment” and “No help could have reached us save through the incarnation of the son of God.”
  • The third was to work without ceasing. Never stop. The counsel of despair was Satanic and it was everywhere
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Should America Bag the Plastic Bag? - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...erica-bag-the-plastic-bag.html recycling plastic environment
shared by Javier E on 19 May 13 - No Cached
  • Many countries and a handful of American cities have more or less done away with this supposed convenience item, by discouraging its use through plastic-bag taxes at checkout counters or outright bans. Walk down the streets of Dublin or Seattle or San Francisco and there is barely a bag in sight. Life continues.
  • But in much of America we seem more addicted than ever. On a recent shopping trip to Target in Chicago for some dorm supplies while visiting my son, I emerged with what seemed to be more bags than socks or rolls of toilet paper (only a slight exaggeration). At my local supermarket, plastic bags are applied layer upon layer around purchases, like Russian nesting dolls.
  • “Plastic shopping bags are an enormous problem for New York City,” said Ron Gonen, the deputy commissioner of sanitation for recycling and waste reduction, noting that the city pays $10 million annually to send 100,000 tons of plastic bags that are tossed in the general trash to landfills
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  • experience shows that even environmentally conscious people need prodding and incentives to change their behavior permanently.
  • All across the country, plastic bags are the bane of recycling programs. When carelessly placed into recycling bins for general plastic — which they often are — the bags jam and damage expensive sorting machines, which cost huge amounts to repair.
  • most experts believe it will take a stiff stick to break a habit as ingrained as this one is in the United States. (In many European countries, like France and Italy, the plastic bag thing never fully caught on.)
  • Where they exist, bans and charges or taxes (when set high enough) have been extremely successful and often raise revenue for other environmental projects. Unfortunately, these tactics are deeply unpopular in most of the nation.
  • an economist at University College, Dublin, who has studied the effects of Ireland’s 10-year-old bag tax — the first in the world — is skeptical: “As regards the plastic bag issue, whatever is done has to be mandatory,” he said. “The New York model is designed to fail.”
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In Michigan, A Conservative Governor Takes Careful Aim at Unions | TIME.com - 0 views

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shared by James Flanagan on 17 Dec 12 - No Cached
  • When he ran for governor of Michigan in 2010, Rick Snyder adopted an endearingly dweebish slogan: “One Tough Nerd.” The moniker, which was cooked up by the eccentric Republican adman Fred Davis and still serves as Snyder’s Twitter handle, sought to make a virtue out of the candidate’s colorless persona. In a state where ineffectual leadership in both the public and private sectors has exacerbated a dizzying economic tailspin, Snyder’s C-suite resume helped him win.
  • While fellow Midwestern governors Scott Walker and John Kasich led assaults on collective-bargaining rights in neighboring Wisconsin and Ohio, Snyder carefully slalomed around the issue, calling it “divisive.” And no wonder: Michigan, the birthplace of the United Auto Workers and a cradle of organized labor, has an unmatched organized-labor tradition.
  • On Dec. 11, the state passed a pair of sweeping bills designed to cripple unions by barring the requirement that workers pay dues as a condition of employment. The freshman governor signed the controversial bills the evening of Dec. 12, making Michigan the 24th state to adopt so-called “right-to-work” laws.
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  • In 2010, union workers made an average of 28% more per week than non-unionized workers, according to a study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.
  • The term “right to work,” coined by foes of union influence, is somewhat misleading. It has little to do with whether workers are eligible for employment. Instead, it restricts unions’ ability to require employees to pay union dues if they work for a unionized employer. Unions argue that anyone who benefits from union representation should foot his or her share of the cost, while proponents of right-to-work legislation counter that right-to-work laws mitigate costs for employers, boosting the state’s ability to lure potential business and create jobs.
  • . Across the Rust Belt, unions’ clout has been crumbling — even in Michigan, where a referendum to enshrine collective-bargaining rights in the state’s constitution was soundly defeated in November. Anti-union forces sensed weakness, and the state’s Republican-controlled legislature pushed a package of right-to-work bills.
  • On a trip to a Detroit factory on Monday, Barack Obama told autoworkers that right-to-work was a political tactic masquerading as economics. “What they’re really talking about is giving you the right to work for less money,” Obama said.
  • . More than 10,000 people thronged the capital in Lansing on Tuesday, brandishing signs like “Kill the Bill” and “One Term Nerd” and locking arms in a tense standoff with baton-wielding police decked out in riot gear. According to reports, pepper spray and tear gas were deployed against a handful of protesters, some of whom tore down a tent outside the capitol belonging to the Koch-funded conservative organization Americans for Prosperity
  • “I think it’s important to make a distinction with Wisconsin and Ohio,” Snyder told MSNBC on Tuesday. “That was about collective bargaining. That was about the relationship between employers and unions. This has nothing to do with that. Right-to-work has to do with the relationship between unions and workers.” And while the Badger and Buckeye State bills targeting public-sector unions, Michigan’s legislation deals with both.
  • As the backlash builds, Michigan is about to find out how tough their nerd can be.
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U.K. to Send Formidable Force to Eastern Europe - WSJ - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...e-to-eastern-europe-1477440062 crisis europe us
shared by ethanmoser on 26 Oct 16 - No Cached
  • The U.K. said it would deploy tanks and drones alongside 800 troops in Eastern Europe, the first of several expected moves by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization to help counter growing fears about Russia in the region.
  • “This is about two things: reassurance, and that needs to be done with some formidable presence, and deterrence,” Mr. Fallon said. “This is not simply a trip-wire….This is a serious military presence.”
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Barack Obama and Bryan Cranston on the Roles of a Lifetime - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...-cranston-table-for-three.html obama presidency reflection politics
shared by Javier E on 07 May 16 - No Cached
  • BO: There’s a wonderful quote that I thought was L.B.J.’s, but I could never verify it: “Every man is either trying to live up to his father’s expectations or make up for his father’s mistakes.
  • I had the benefit of a great relationship with my mom, and she taught me the essential elements of parenting: unconditional love and explaining your values to your kids, having high expectations.
  • I live above the store. We’ve been able to schedule, pretty religiously, dinner at 6:30 every night for the last eight years. If I had a trip, I might be gone for a few days. But as busy as I was, I was able to go upstairs, have dinner. They don’t want you for more than an hour once they hit teenage.
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  • The one thing I never lost, in a way that somebody like L.B.J. might have — who was hungry for the office in a way that I wasn’t — is my confidence that, with my last breath, what I will remember will be some moment with my girls, not signing the health care law or giving a speech at the U.N.
  • What’s felt like a burden is seeing how politics has changed in ways that make it harder for Washington to work. There are a set of traditions, a constitutional design that allows someone like L.B.J. or F.D.R. to govern. And when those norms break down, the machinery grinds to a halt. That’s when you feel burdened
  • if you had to choose a moment in human history to live — even if you didn’t know what gender or race, what nationality or sexual orientation you’d be — you’d choose now. There’s power in nostalgia, but the fact is the world is wealthier, healthier, better educated, less violent, more tolerant, more socially conscious and more attentive to the vulnerable than it has ever bee
  • I’m old enough to remember the ’70s, when we were still getting out of Vietnam, and we had lost tens of thousands of young soldiers. And when they came back home, they were completely abandoned. We left an entire swath of Southeast Asia in chaos. In Cambodia, two million people were slaughtered — about four times the number of people who have been killed in Syria during this conflict. But we don’t remember that.
  • it’s true that the political landscape has changed in ways that are really unhealthy. But there are fewer lubricants to get things done. L.B.J. did great things, but he also relied on bagmen and giving them favors for which I would be in jail or impeached. People are surprised when I say that Congress is less corrupt now than it’s ever been.
  • my optimism springs from the fact that ordinary people are less narrow-minded, more open to difference, more thoughtful than they were during L.B.J.’s time. The question for me is how do I grab hold of that goodness that’s out there and drag it into the political process? I think it requires some new institutional structure for more citizen participation than we’ve had in the past.
  • The one area that I do feel confident about is the notion of an inclusive nation, that everybody is part of this story. That’s a running theme I’ve been faithful to throughout my presidency.
  • never underrate the power of stories. Lyndon Johnson got the Civil Rights Act done because of the stories he told and the ones [Martin Luther] King told. When L.B.J. says, “We shall overcome” in the chamber of the House of Representatives, he is telling the nation who we are. Culture is vital in shaping our politics. Part of what I’ve always been interested in as president, and what I will continue to be interested in as an ex-president, is telling better stories about how we can work together.
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BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and team expelled from North Korea - BBC News - 0 views

www.bbc.com/...world-asia-36244994 politics north korea
shared by sarahbalick on 09 May 16 - No Cached
  • BBC's Rupert Wingfield-Hayes and team expelled from North Korea
  • Wingfield-Hayes was questioned for eight hours by North Korean officials and made to sign a statement.
  • Our correspondent, producer Maria Byrne and cameraman Matthew Goddard were stopped by officials on Friday as they were about to leave North Korea.
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  • The BBC team was in North Korea ahead of the Workers' Party Congress, accompanying a delegation of Nobel prize laureates conducting a research trip.
  • "Four BBC staff, who were invited to cover the Workers Party Congress, remain in North Korea and we expect them to be allowed to continue their reporting."
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Ahmad Rahami: Fixture in Family's Business and, Lately, a 'Completely Different Person'... - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...an-rahami-bombing-suspect.html new york US culture bombing
shared by Megan Flanagan on 20 Sep 16 - No Cached
  • some friends noticed a marked change in his personality and religious devotion after what they believed was a trip to Afghanistan,
  • traveled to Pakistan, for three months in 2011
  • had a fractious relationship with neighbors and the police in Elizabeth, N.J.
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  • to Quetta, for nearly a year
  • the elder Rahami was dubious of the Taliban and detested ISIS.
  • “Muslims make too much trouble in this country.”
  • Mohammad Rahami told him he was from Kandahar and had been part of the mujahedeen in Afghanistan that fought the Soviet Army
  • he had become more religious and had taken to wearing Muslim robes
  • He used to wear Western-style clothing, and customers said he gave little indication of his heritage.
  • “It’s like he was a completely different person,” Mr. Jones said. “He got serious and completely closed off.”
  • “Where did he really go and what did he do overseas that a kid who lived a normal New Jersey life came back as a sophisticated bomb maker and terrorist?”
  • Rahami family’s filing a lawsuit in 2011 against the city and its Police Department
  • Collisions between those worlds sometimes led to rifts with his father, who was more religious and traditional.
  • Both of those cities’ reputations have become entwined with the militant groups who have sheltered there:
  • He was arrested in 2014 on weapons and aggravated assault charges for allegedly stabbing a relative in the leg in a domestic incident
  • In June 2010, two of Ahmad Rahami’s brothers, Mohammad K. and Mohammad Q., were arrested after an altercation with police officers who had shown up after 10 to tell them to close down for the night.
  • The Rahamis said Mr. McDermott told them that “Muslims make too much trouble in this country” and “Muslims should not have businesses here.”
  • “It was neighbor complaints; it had nothing to do with his ethnicity or religion. It had to do with noise and people congregating on the streets.”
  • Sept. 16, 2011, said that Mr. Rahami had been hospitalized and that his family was in Afghanistan “but returning over the next few days.
  • At 10:30 on Sunday night, the bombs having gone off and the hunt for the perpetrator well underway, Junior Robinson, 19, stopped in at First American Fried Chicken for some drumsticks and fries.
  • Mohammad Rahami served him.
  • Ahmad Rahami was not there. Mr. Robinson gave that no thought.
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Taiwan's President Meets With Ted Cruz in the U.S., and China Objects - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...taiwan-ted-cruz-china.html
shared by davisem on 09 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • President Tsai Ing-wen of Taiwan met with Senator Ted Cruz of Texas in Houston and then flew off to visit leaders in Latin America, seeking to promote her island’s cause as it gets positive signals from President-elect Donald J. Trump.
  • Ms. Tsai was looking to expand her ties to the Republican Party as it takes control of the White House and keeps its grip on Congress.
  • “We discussed our mutual opportunity to upgrade the stature of our bilateral relations in a wide-ranging discussion that addressed arms sales, diplomatic exchanges and economic relations.”
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  • “The People’s Republic of China needs to understand that in America we make decisions about meeting with visitors for ourselves,” Mr. Cruz said.
  • The United States does not maintain official diplomatic relations with Taiwan as a result of negotiations with Beijing that led to Washington’s recognition of the People’s Republic of China in 1979.
  • China has warned Mr. Trump against making changes to the One China policy after he takes office on Jan. 20. The warning came in response to a phone call between Ms. Tsai and Mr. Trump after his November election victory, the highest-level exchange between American and Taiwanese leaders since the end of diplomatic relations
  • “Cruz is influential above and beyond many senators, given his performance in the last election campaign. It makes sense to add Cruz, whatever his relationship is going to be with the Trump administration.”
  • Beijing’s influence in Latin America and the Caribbean is growing, and it is expected to achieve recognition from more countries, as China is the wealthier benefactor.
  • We will continue to meet with anyone, including the Taiwanese, as we see fit.”
  • While American leaders have vowed to defend Taiwan from attack, the United States is not legally bound to do so, despite what Mr. Cruz said. Advertisement Continue reading the main story
  • Beijing opposed any contact between Taiwan’s leader and “anyone from the U.S. government,” saying it threatens to hurt ties between Beijing and Washington.
  • “The U.S. is Taiwan’s most important ally and friend, and it occupies a special place in the hearts of the Chinese people,”
  • neither Mr. Trump nor anyone on his transition team would be meeting with Ms. Tsai.
  • “In general, it raises Tsai’s national and international stature to be going on trips like this,”
  • davisem on 09 Jan 17
     
    Ms. Tsai's stop in Houston preceded visits to El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and Nicaragua, four of the 20 countries, along with the Vatican, that maintain diplomatic relations with Taiwan rather than China. Last month, São Tomé and Príncipe, an island nation off the west coast of Africa, severed diplomatic ties with Taiwan.
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Phony Oppositions and Score Settling - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...oppositions-and-score-settling politics Democratic party policy history trump
shared by Javier E on 16 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • I believe there is a good likelihood, probably even a probability, that if the Russian subversion campaign had never happened and James Comey had never released his letter, Hillary Clinton would be prepping to become our new President. My own guess is that Comey's letter had the bigger impact. These were both profoundly damaging events in the race and Clinton lost by very tight margins in most of the newly (hopefully temporarily) red states. I see little way to challenge this assertion.
  • But the tiny margins are only one side of the story. Let's take Wisconsin. The final tally puts Trump ahead by .8%, or 22,748 votes. That's a tiny margin. Any number of things could have shifted the balance. Spending the final week of the campaign talking about a new investigation of Clinton's emails was more than enough to tip the balance. Spending not just a single trip but more concerted time in the state could have too.
  • But now look at the shift from 2012. The shift in the direction of the GOP was 7.7%. That is a huge shift over four years. Huge. There's no getting around that. If you step back from Wisconsin to the larger Upper Midwest region and indeed the United States you see something more fundamental. Donald Trump did what we all remember Barack Obama doing in 2008: He changed the shape of the electorate.
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  • What all of this comes down to is that something very big happened in this election that was quite separate from Comey and Putin
  • If you believe in the integrity of our elections, American sovereignty and - yes, let's say it - the importance of the legitimacy of the Trump presidency, the Russian sabotage and influence campaign is hugely important. But if you can't distinguish between let's say the 1 or 2 percentage point shift caused by Russia and Comey, from the 5 or 6 or 7 percentage point shift that made that small shift so consequential, I really don't know how to help you. They're both extremely important, but for very different reasons.
  • My own sense is that this is mainly internecine score settling.
  • The truth is it shouldn't have been close enough for these outside interventions to have allowed Trump to win. But it was.
  • Was that because Clinton was a terrible candidate and Sanders should have been the nominee? Maybe. But I doubt it. At a minimum I don't think it is so clear as to be treated as a given
  • While I believe Democrats have many good economic policies, I don't believe they have an adequate and overarching theory of the problem of wage stagnation or ever-increasing economic insecurity (a interlocked series of economic and political problems) or a set of policies and a politics to address it. That doesn't mean they're ignoring it. That doesn't mean anyone else has a better set. But what Democrats have is not enough
  • Holding the presidency for eight years combined with a still accurate belief that their constituencies are growing while the other party's is shrinking has led to a deep deficit of political organizing in all fifty states. Democrats had this as recently as a decade ago. But it atrophied. As much as anything there is a revolt against the increasingly urban and non-white America symbolized by the 'Obama coalition', one that combines racial backlash, economic decline and cultural marginalization. There is something there that goes far beyond anything that can be addressed by a more class based politics alone.
  • My point here isn't to offer that critique or to pose a solution. My aim here is simply to highlight that fact that multiple things produced the November 8th result. Some are enduring and will be there in 2018 and 2020. Some are contingent events that will likely never happen again or at least not in any predictable way. They all happened. They're all important. They get addressed, dealt with in different ways. But standing them up against each other, shouting one down in favor of the other has far more to do with the self-destructive score settling which the bitterness of defeat brings in its wake than anything that is productive of building a different, better future.
  • I don't have any unified theory of the problem. I also see no point in exaggerating the problems. But I can also see a list of 4 or 5 things that need working on right now. Getting to work on those seems more important than any grand unified theory.
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Shinzo Abe to Become First Japanese Leader to Visit Pearl Harbor - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...zo-abe-pearl-harbor-japan.html new york times pearl harbor japanese leader
shared by draneka on 07 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said on Monday that he would visit Pearl Harbor, becoming the first sitting Japanese leader to go to the site of Japan’s attack 75 years ago
  • By visiting Pearl Harbor, Mr. Abe will in effect be reciprocating a historic trip Mr. Obama made in May to Hiroshima
  • “We must never repeat the horror of war,” Mr. Abe said on Monday. “I want to express that determination as we look to the future, and at the same time send a message about the value of U.S.-Japanese reconciliation.” Advertisement Continue reading the main story
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  • For decades, politicians have been reluctant to make any statement resembling an apology for the attack
  • “Is it imperative that Prime Minister Abe say, ‘We are sorry’? I don’t think so,” said Tony Cordero
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A Soviet-Era Mind-Set at the Market - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...ra-mind-set-at-the-market.html Soviet History Market Opinion
shared by maddieireland334 on 29 May 16 - No Cached
  • Communism ended in 1989, with the fall of the Soviet empire, when I was 10, but the changes were slow at first.
  • The bookstore that never changed its window display was no longer limited to selling titles approved by the government. A statue of the Virgin Mary, forbidden under communism, went up in the central square.
  • Restaurants and cafes, once a rarity, began to appear in the brick-­and-­cobblestone downtown
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  • Although privately owned, the shop was set up like an old Soviet-­style store, where you wait in line and ask an attendant for what you need.
  • Each time we passed that shop during the rest of the trip, I refused to go in. I felt ashamed for not speaking up. I knew that in America, others would have supported me for saying something
  • From childhood, I was taught never to question anyone in authority, from teachers and doctors to shopkeepers. Now I was 6 years old again, in a panic that I forgot the assignment of taking a toothbrush to school.
  • We could all see that the onion was bad; the outer layers were moldy and brown. Still, no one said anything. One woman nodded as if in agreement. My mother and I just exchanged looks.
  • Until then, we had all been holding private conversations. Now we were silent, waiting for the tirade we knew was coming.
  • But in Slovakia, for all the changes, I knew that I couldn’t count on people to stand with me, that for those who experienced communism, there is still an underlying fear we cannot shake.
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America's Lost Boys | Samuel D. James | First Things - 0 views

www.firstthings.com/...americas-lost-boys boys adolescence stimulation culture masculine porn video game crisis
shared by Javier E on 05 Aug 16 - No Cached
  • research indicates that young men with less than a four-year degree (according to virtually all data, that’s an increasing number) are spending their days unemployed and unmarried, but not un-amused. “The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one-for-one with leisure time,”
  • “Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games. The average low-skilled, unemployed man in this group plays video games an average of twelve, and sometimes upwards of thirty hours per week.”
  • Twenty- and thirtysomething men who are living at home, working part-time or not at all, are unlikely to be preparing for marriage. Hurst’s research says that these men are single, unoccupied, and fine with that—because their happiness doesn’t depend on whether they are growing up and living life.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • if Hurst’s research is accurate (and profit margins from the video-game industry suggest that it is), then the issue becomes much bigger than video games themselves.
  • The portrait that emerges of the young American male indicates an isolated, entertainment-absorbed existence, with only the most childlike social ties (such as with parents and “bros”) playing a meaningful role.
  • the time these young men spend on Xbox and Playstation does not offer them relief from the stress of joblessness and existential inertia. On the contrary, for them it’s part of Living the Dream.
  • This prolonged delay of marriage and relational commitment often means a perpetual adolescence in other areas of life. Love and sex are arguably the best incentives for men to assert their adulthood. But in the comfort of their parents’ homes and their gaming systems, young men get to live out their fantasies without the frictions of reality.
  • Could it be that one reason that millions of young American men feel satisfied with their perpetual adolescence is that their sexual appetites are sated by a steady diet of internet porn? No woman they could meet at the coffee shop or on the church camping trip could possibly compete with these perfectly toned, perfectly undemanding models. The mild embarrassment a man might feel at looking real girls in the eye after days of masturbatory absorption in fantasy perfection is avoidable, if he simply doesn’t get out.
  • Between the Xbox and the X-rating, a young man can oscillate from the primal thrills of conquest to the orgasmic comfort of faux-intimacy.
  • the prospect that an entire generation’s potential should be wasted on an addiction to stimulation is deeply sad. Sin is always double-edged like that—it’s a matter not only of doing what one ought not do, but also of neglecting to do what one ought. What might these millions of young men be doing, if they were not doing this?
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Tillerson crosses the border to rebuild ties with Mexico - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...tillerson-kelly-trip-to-mexico politics us
shared by marleymorton on 23 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • marleymorton on 23 Feb 17
     
    President Donald Trump's rhetoric and policies have cranked up the tension in US-Mexico relations to a high not seen in decades. He's blamed the country for sending rapists into the US, castigated undocumented immigrants from across the border and blasted Mexico for what he says are unfair trade practices.
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Trump's Supreme Court nominee Gorsuch headed to first meetings with GOP senators - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-80c2-30e57e57e05d_story.html
shared by davisem on 02 Feb 17 - No Cached
  • davisem on 02 Feb 17
     
    Judge Neil Gorsuch will make his first trip to Capitol Hill as President Trump's nominee for the Supreme Court Wednesday morning, where a sharply divided Senate will decide his fate in the coming months. Accompanied by Vice President Pence, Gorsuch will meet with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.).
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German guilt over war crimes has been a consensus for decades. Until now. - 0 views

www.wsj.com/...ys-historical-guilt-1488467995
shared by ecfruchtman on 03 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • ecfruchtman on 03 Mar 17
     
    KARLSRUHE, Germany-The draft budget for Baden-Württemberg state set aside $69,000 this year for educational trips to "memorials of National Socialist injustice." The Alternative for Germany party submitted a motion to strike the reference to the Nazi Party and instead use the money for visits to "significant German historic sites." "We...
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Why Not in Vegas? - NYTimes.com - 1 views

www.nytimes.com/...friedman-why-not-in-vegas.html israel us policy republican palestine
shared by Javier E on 01 Aug 12 - No Cached
  • Much of what is wrong with the U.S.-Israel relationship today can be found in that Romney trip. In recent years, the Republican Party has decided to make Israel a wedge issue. In order to garner more Jewish (and evangelical) votes and money, the G.O.P. decided to “out-pro-Israel” the Democrats by being even more unquestioning of Israel. This arms race has pulled the Democratic Party to the right on the Middle East and has basically forced the Obama team to shut down the peace process and drop any demands that Israel freeze settlements. This, in turn, has created a culture in Washington where State Department officials, not to mention politicians, are reluctant to even state publicly what is U.S. policy — that settlements are “an obstacle to peace” — for fear of being denounced as anti-Israel.
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Confessions of a Tiger Couple - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...essions-of-a-tiger-couple.html tiger mother cultural values
shared by Javier E on 03 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, who is cited in “The Triple Package,” hadn’t yet read the book, but said he hoped that Chua and Rubenfeld were aware that they’re flirting with a Typhoid Mary. “I’m all for culture,” Patterson said, but “culture is a tricky concept. It has tripped up a lot of anthropologists and sociologists.”
  • “The Triple Package” is full of qualifications, earnest settings-of-the-terms, explicit attempts to head off misinterpretations at the pass. “This point is so important we’re going to repeat it,” they write in a section about Appalachian poverty, which they argue was caused by geography and industrial decline, rather than by any lack of triple-package values.
  • Chua remained optimistic.“I feel like it should be a book that if you approach it with an open mind, it actually shouldn’t be controversial. It should be thought-provoking.”
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  • “Battle Hymn” was written at a time when Chua’s sister was ill and Lulu, then 13, was going “public with her insurgency” against her mother’s oppressive methods. After a showdown in a Russian restaurant (yelling, smashed glass), Chua admits that she pushed her younger daughter too hard. But that doesn’t mean she thinks she shouldn’t have been pushing at all. For all of her claims about the book’s satire and hyperbole, she expresses a deep conviction about how she raised her daughters: “There is nothing I’m prouder of.”
  • Yale Law School prides itself on being a kind of oasis for the country’s brightest students, the ones who scored highest on the LSAT and got the best grades and have done something ambitious already — volunteered in an African refugee camp, say, or worked as a C.E.O. It’s among the most selective law schools, and unlike the bigger ones, it doesn’t grade on a curve. Incoming students are told they’re “off the treadmill.” They can take some time to figure out what it is that they really want to do.
  • In “The Triple Package,” Rubenfeld and Chua write that this is the point of striving: to get to a place where you can break out of the straitjacket of conventional success and pursue the life you really want to live
  • “The Triple Package” conveys a message familiar from self-help books: Adopt these values and you too can take control of your life. But you have only to step outside of Yale’s campus to see that the world doesn’t operate according to the same principles of effort and reward
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» The End of Higher Education's Golden Age Clay Shirky - 0 views

www.shirky.com/...g-adults-the-way-were-doing-it highered economics history crisis university
shared by Javier E on 01 Feb 14 - No Cached
  • The biggest threat those of us working in colleges and universities face isn’t video lectures or online tests. It’s the fact that we live in institutions perfectly adapted to an environment that no longer exists.
  • Decades of rising revenue meant we could simultaneously become the research arm of government and industry, the training ground for a rapidly professionalizing workforce, and the preservers of the liberal arts tradition. Even better, we could do all of this while increasing faculty ranks and reducing the time senior professors spent in the classroom. This was the Golden Age of American academia.
  • Rising costs and falling subsidies have driven average tuition up over 1000% since the 1970s.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • For 30 wonderful years, we had been unusually flush, and we got used to it, re-designing our institutions to assume unending increases in subsidized demand. This did not happen. The year it started not happening was 1975. Every year since, we tweaked our finances, hiking tuition a bit, taking in a few more students, making large lectures a little larger, hiring a few more adjuncts.
  • Over the decades, though, we’ve behaved like an embezzler who starts by taking only what he means to replace, but ends up extracting so much that embezzlement becomes the system. There is no longer enough income to support a full-time faculty and provide students a reasonably priced education of acceptable quality at most colleges or universities in this country.
  • Of the twenty million or so students in the US, only about one in ten lives on a campus. The remaining eighteen million—the ones who don’t have the grades for Swarthmore, or tens of thousands of dollars in free cash flow, or four years free of adult responsibility—are relying on education after high school not as a voyage of self-discovery but as a way to acquire training and a certificate of hireability.
  • Though the landscape of higher education in the U.S., spread across forty-six hundred institutions, hosts considerable variation, a few commonalities emerge: the bulk of students today are in their mid-20s or older, enrolled at a community or commuter school, and working towards a degree they will take too long to complete. One in three won’t complete, ever. Of the rest, two in three will leave in debt. The median member of this new student majority is just keeping her head above water financially. The bottom quintile is drowning.
  • One obvious way to improve life for the new student majority is to raise the quality of the education without raising the price. This is clearly the ideal, whose principal obstacle is not conceptual but practical: no one knows how. The value of our core product—the Bachelor’s degree—has fallen in every year since 2000, while tuition continues to increase faster than inflation.
  • The metaphor my colleagues often use invokes religion. In Wannabe U, the author describes the process of trying to turn UConn into a nationally competitive school as the faculty being ‘dechurched’. In this metaphor, we are a separate estate of society that has putative access to its resources, as well as the right to reject democratic oversight, managerial imperatives, and market discipline. We answer to no one but ourselves.
  • When the economic support from the Golden Age began to crack, we tenured faculty couldn’t be forced to share much of the pain. Our jobs were secure, so rather than forgo raises or return to our old teaching loads, we either allowed or encouraged those short-term fixes—rising tuition, larger student bodies, huge introductory lectures.
  • All that was minor, though, compared to our willingness to rely on contingent hires, including our own graduate students, ideal cheap labor. The proportion of part-time and non-tenure track teachers went from less than half of total faculty, before 1975, to over two-thirds now
  • In the same period, the proportion of jobs that might someday lead to tenure collapsed, from one in five to one in ten. The result is the bifurcation we have today: People who have tenure can’t lose it. People who don’t mostly can’t get it.
  • If we can’t keep raising costs for students (we can’t) and if no one is coming to save us (they aren’t), then the only remaining way to help these students is to make a cheaper version of higher education for the new student majority.
  • The number of high-school graduates underserved or unserved by higher education today dwarfs the number of people for whom that system works well. The reason to bet on the spread of large-scale low-cost education isn’t the increased supply of new technologies. It’s the massive demand for education, which our existing institutions are increasingly unable to handle. That demand will go somewhere.
  • why is not part of the answer a secondary education certification scheme that is serious and ideally nation-wide. The British GCSE/A-levels is something that seems to work. Herding the cats that would be necessary to implement something like that is, I grant, a monstrous task, but perhaps no more difficult than revising the university system. As things stand now, the lack of standards in most high schools means wasted opportunities of academic development for a very large part of our reasonably gifted teenage population. A revised university system would still leave in place the distinctly inadequate high school system we have now.
  • The other way to help these students would be to dramatically reduce the price or time required to get an education of acceptable quality (and for acceptable read “enabling the student to get a better job”, their commonest goal.) This is a worse option in every respect except one, which is that it may be possible.
  • The metaphor I have come to prefer (influenced especially by Richard Rorty) is that we in the academy are workers, and our work is to make people smarter — ourselves, our peers, our students, which is a goal that has to be constantly negotiated among various constituencies.
  • When the military rationale for both the GI Bill and the Soviet struggle ended, so did overall American interest in the kind of funding that drove the Golden Age. There is not now and has never been a broad commitment to higher education as a social good in this country
  • ow you can say — and many of my colleagues do — that this is all just a matter of getting state governments to take on different concerns or convictions, or getting a more nationalized educational system. That was the song my parents, both educators, sang, and the song I grew up singing. But the period when the states really drove funding up lasted just 15 years — 1960 to 1975 — and has been in decline for 40 years since.
  • I can — barely — imagine some states increasing some subsidies to some campuses at a rate faster than inflation. Some of the schools in California, Virginia, Massachusetts, and Michigan are candidates for this. I cannot, however, imagine my tenured colleagues tolerating the situation that makes higher education broadly affordable in social democracies, which would require us earning less while teaching more.
  • I am done, in other words, thinking of myself and my peers on faculty as blameless, and I am done imagining that 40 years of evidence from the behavior of democratically elected legislatures is some sort of readily reversible blip. I do not believe that the caste system that has established itself at elite institutions can be funded at the rate which we insist we need, and I do not believe that we will willingly see any of our own benefits reduced to help our junior colleagues or our students.
  • Students feel compelled to acquire credentialing as a means of improving their economic positions. Unfortunately, along the way, “professional” training has taken precedence over education. The two have become conflated in the public mind.
  • Today it is not only that the PhD:s are abundant but also that in many areas peak knowledge is short lived. You might be competent when you graduate but five years later that competence is of yesteryear and the ones with the newest knowledge kick you out just like you kicked someone else out five years ago. We need a base to stand on but then we need to go in and out of education during our whole lives to keep up with development. This puts a strain on each end everyone of us as individuals but it also calls for a whole new role for academia
  • Change the game and lower the transaction costs: Instead of treating students as backseat passengers in a higher educational vehicle that’s geared towards the transmission of self-contained content, i.e., content produced by professors for the self-serving purpose of publication–put steering wheels in the hands of students, take them out on road trips, negotiate real problems–and they will become self-educating
  • Note that having a college degree only retains value right now because there isn’t a better (more predictive, and trusted) credential to be had for people who are seeking jobs.
  • the online versions of education have reduced the college experience down to what’s easy to implement and easy to measure: receiving lectures, and activities of the quiz-and-test variety. It’s not clear that the value of the traditional old-school college experience (and it’s accompanying degree) were the result of those particular aspects of the experience. Granting degrees based only on coursework runs the risk of diluting the perceived value of the degree.
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'The Blood Telegram,' by Gary J. Bass - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...d-telegram-by-gary-j-bass.html india pakistan bangladesh foreign policy Cold War kissinger
shared by Javier E on 29 Sep 13 - No Cached
  • Things came to a head in December 1970, when Sheik Mujib-ur-­Rahman, a pipe-smoking Bengali leader, and his party, the Awami League, won the elections on the promise of autonomy for East Pakistan.
  • Gen. Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan, egged on by Zulfiqar Ali Bhutto, the second-place finisher, arrested Rahman and ordered the army to crush the Bengalis. Dominated by Punjabis, the army moved brutally, shooting and detaining Bengali leaders, intellectuals and anyone who opposed them.
  • Yahya, its military leader, became Nixon’s secret liaison with the Chinese leader Zhou Enlai. Yahya helped lay the groundwork for the visits to China by Kissinger and then Nixon. It’s hard to overstate just how earth-changing Nixon and Kissinger regarded their trips to China — and how important they thought they were for bringing them about.
  • ...6 more annotations...
  • Bass has unearthed a series of conversations, most of them from the White House’s secret tapes, that reveal Nixon and Kissinger as breathtakingly vulgar and hateful, especially in their attitudes toward the Indians, whom they regarded as repulsive, shifty and, anyway, pro-Soviet — and especially in their opinion of Indira Gandhi. “The old bitch,” Nixon called her. “I don’t know why the hell anybody would reproduce in that damn country but they do,” he said.
  • this meant that Yahya — a vain, shallow mediocrity — was suddenly considered indispensable, free to do whatever he wished in East Pakistan. With the White House averting its eyes, the largely Muslim Pakistani Army killed at least 300,000 Bengalis, most of them Hindus, and forced 10 million to flee to India
  • The men in the White House, however, not only refused to condemn Yahya — in public or private — but they also declined to withhold American arms, ammunition and spare parts that kept Pakistan’s military machine humming. Indeed, Nixon regarded the dictator with genuine affection. “I understand the anguish you must have felt in making the difficult decisions you have faced,” he told Yahya.
  • what is most telling is what they reveal about Nixon’s and Kissinger’s strategic intelligence. At every step of the crisis, the two men appear to have been driven as much by their loathing of India — West Pakistan’s rival — as by any cool calculations of power
  • By failing to restrain West Pakistan, they allowed a blood bath to unfold, and then a regional war, which began when Gandhi finally decided that the only way to stop the tide of refugees was to stop the killing across the border. That, in turn, prompted West Pakistan to attack India.
  • the recklessness of Nixon and Kissinger only got worse. They dispatched ships from the Seventh Fleet into the Bay of Bengal, and even encouraged China to move troops to the Indian border, possibly for an attack — a maneuver that could have provoked the Soviet Union. Fortunately, the leaders of the two Communist countries proved more sober than those in the White House. The war ended quickly, when India crushed the Pakistani Army and East Pakistan declared independence.
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