History Readings

The left-wing opposition scuttled an accord between the German and Swiss governments that would have offered amnesty to people like Mr. Hoeness in exchange for back taxes. Instead of the chance to anonymously pay what he owes, he has become the poster boy for an economic system believed to be rigged against the little guy.

In a poll released last year by the Pew Research Center, two-thirds of Americans agreed that there were “strong conflicts between the rich and poor” — up substantially from when the question was asked in 2009

Americans are increasingly worried about the gap between rich and poor, but are hesitant to have the government do anything about it.

Our work identified a possible explanation for this seeming disconnect, and it is a sad one: the more people focused on inequality, the less they trusted the government.

The massive study on the well-being of children in 29 developed, Western countries looked at, among many other things, the frequency with which children ages 11, 13 and 15 reported they “had been drunk at least twice” in their short lifetimes.

American kids, who otherwise appeared to under-perform their European peers in the study, are the least likely to have gotten drunk

Maybe that lends a bit of credence to the U.S.’s relatively late and well-enforced drinking age, unusual in the Western world

“I’d say our reaction is less about narcissism than a collective form of PTSD stemming from 9/11.” Any “collective form of PTSD” from 9/11 is, itself, a symptom of the narcissism Perlstein is describing.  There are people for whom PTSD from that event is perfectly reasonable and to be expected.  But in a country of 300 million, they are a tiny, tiny fraction. For the overwhelming majority of Americans who say things like “9/11 changed everything,” Perlstein is absolutely right.

Even with the loss of 2500 lives and the spectacular nature of the attack itself, 9/11 was an extremely small, extremely localized event for a country as large (in every sense) and powerful as the U.S.  There’s absolutely no reason it should have caused anything resembling “a collective form of PTSD.”  There’s absolutely no reason it should have “changed everything.”

In fact, it didn’t.  We ”changed everything,” and we did it because too many of us overdramatized our own experience of an event that, had we not heard about it on the news, would not have caused so much as a ripple in 95% of Americans’ lives.

Rod explains why he is not a Republican

When I was in college, and first became a conservative, it was the liberals who had a reputation as rigid, doctrinaire, snide, and off-putting. I’m generalizing, but in those days, liberals were the ones who were far more likely to be brittle, who weren’t willing to look around and adjust their prescriptions to changing circumstances, who seemed disconnected from the world as it was. It seemed to me that liberals had emotional and ideological touchstones in a bygone political and cultural era, and they dealt with changing times by insisting on greater ideological purity in the ranks. Whatever else 1980s liberalism wasn’t, it wasn’t attractive. It seemed outdated and exhausted, both in terms of substantive policies and in terms of the way it presented itself to the public.

there is no creative ferment on the Right, no breathing space, few places where new ideas can emerge. All the energy on the Right seems aimed at hunting down the heretics within. That, and making life as hard as possible for the opposition, not because they have something better in mind, but as an end in itself. 

According to a Unicef report issued last week — “Child Well-Being in Rich Countries” — the United States once again ranked among the worst wealthy countries for children, coming in 26th place of 29 countries included. Only Lithuania, Latvia and Romania placed lower, and those were among the poorest countries assessed in the study.

let’s start with the good news, or what little there is to glean from the report: the United States has one of the lowest rates of children reporting that they smoke regularly or have been drunk at least twice, and our children are among the most likely to exercise daily. We also have one of the lowest levels of air pollution.

the United States has the second highest share of children living under the relative poverty line, defined as 50 percent of each country’s median income, and the second largest “child poverty gap” (the distance between the poverty line and the median incomes of those below the line).

More than half of samples of ground turkey, pork chops and ground beef collected from supermarkets for testing by the federal government contained a bacteria resistant to antibiotics, according to a new report

Many animals grown for meat are fed diets containing antibiotics to promote growth and reduce costs, as well as to prevent and control illness. Public health officials in the United States and in Europe, however, are warning that the consumption of meat containing antibiotics contributes to resistance in humans. A growing public awareness of the problem has led to increased sales of antibiotic-free meat.

The federal researchers tested for the enterococcus bacteria, which is an indication of fecal contamination. Enterococcus also easily develops resistance to antibiotics, and it easily can pass that resistance on to other bacteria. Two species of the bacteria, Enterococcus faecalis and Enterococcus faecium, are the third-leading cause of infections in the intensive care units of United States hospitals.

we will have a platform that others can build upon. All the data will be licensed under CC0 -- that's really a public domain declaration. It means that we're giving away all this data for free for people to use in whatever way they want. And we will have an API -- a very powerful API -- that third-party developers will be able to use to create innovative apps based on the contents of the DPLA. So if you're a developer of a mobile app, maybe one for a local walking tour of a city, you can take the material you already have and mix it up with all the great content from the DPLA for that particular location.

We act as the top-level aggregator of all this great material, and the service hubs do an amazing job of normalizing the metadata and bringing in this content from thousands of sites across the United States.

act as a very strong advocate for public options for reading and research in the 21st century. We really want to work to expand the realm of publicly available materials. So, obviously, a big part of that is working with non-profit groups like libraries, archives, and museums to get that stuff online and out to the public, but there will also be a component here where I'm going to push, along with my colleagues at the DPLA, to see how we can get other materials into the DPLA and out to the public. It very much has that spirit of the public library. We want to make the maximal amount of content available in a maximally open way.

The Greek economy is in free-fall, having shrunk by 20 percent in the past five years. Unemployment is more than 27 percent, the highest in Europe, and 6 of 10 job seekers say they have not worked in more than a year

Last year, an estimated 10 percent of Greek elementary- and middle-school students suffered from what public health professionals call “food insecurity,” meaning they faced hunger or the risk of it, said Dr. Athena Linos, a professor at the University of Athens Medical School who also heads a food assistance program at Prolepsis, a nongovernmental public health group that has studied the situation. “When it comes to food insecurity, Greece has now fallen to the level of some African countries,” she said.

, several of Evangelia’s classmates are frequently hungry, she said, and one boy recently fainted. Some children were starting to steal for food, she added. While she did not excuse it, she understood their plight. “Those who are well fed will never understand those who are not,” she said.

A nonpartisan, independent review of interrogation and detention programs in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks concludes that “it is indisputable that the United States engaged in the practice of torture” and that the nation’s highest officials bore ultimate responsibility for it.

U.S. Practiced Torture After 9/11, Nonpartisan Review Concludes

there never before had been “the kind of considered and detailed discussions that occurred after 9/11 directly involving a president and his top advisers on the wisdom, propriety and legality of inflicting pain and torment on some detainees in our custody.”

President François Hollande on Wednesday announced the creation of a position of special prosecutor to pursue cases of corruption and tax fraud, and vowed to eradicate tax havens “in Europe and the world.”

one of those tax havens, Luxembourg, announced that it would bow to pressure from its European allies and begin forwarding the details of its foreign clients’ accounts to their home governments. Luxembourg, with only half a million people and a banking sector more than 20 times the size of its gross domestic product, is one of Europe’s largest financial centers and has been compared to Cyprus

Luxembourg’s announcement came a day after five of the biggest European countries — Britain, France, Germany, Italy and Spain — agreed to exchange banking data and create their own automatic tax data exchange. That mechanism would be modeled on the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, passed by Congress in 2010 to track the overseas assets of Americans who might be dodging taxes.

While Pyongyang's warlike rhetoric has to reach a certain decibel-level for the rest of the world to take note, North Koreans are weaned on a relentless, daily propaganda formula almost from birth.

Problems like food shortages are the fault of unfair, punitive sanctions aimed at weakening the North which must therefore focus all its resources on national defence for a final, decisive battle that could come at any time.

"The regime can no longer fire up people with any coherent or credible vision of a socialist future, so it tries to cast the entire workforce... as an adjunct to the military,"

As I thought more about this and the challenges that might be encountered by those trying to break into college admissions later in their career, I developed the following recommendations for those seeking to enter the field.

Justice Breyer joins a very small line of American members dating to Thomas Jefferson. Other foreign members include the former Pope Benedict XVI, Prince Charles of Britain, King Juan Carlos of Spain and the novelist Ismail Kadare. Vaclav Havel was a member until his death, as was Ronald Reagan.

, rich and poor neighborhoods like these house a growing proportion of Americans, up to 31 percent compared with 15 percent in 1970, according to a recent study by Sean F. Reardon and Kendra Bischoff. Meanwhile, iconic middle-income suburbs are shrinking in numbers and prospects.

another truth about suburban places: their tendency to sustain and reinforce inequality. Bradbury and Azusa have maintained their spots in the top and bottom tiers of the Los Angeles suburbs for decades. The sociologist John Logan described this “stratifying” feature long ago, noting that localities held on to social advantages and disadvantages over time. Patterns are established, and successive waves of pressure — fiscal, political, social — tend to keep things moving in the same direction.

Some of this is obvious. High property values support high-achieving schools, which in turn increase property values and personal wealth. Racial redlining holds property values down, limiting investment in schools and preventing families from building equity, disadvantages that pass to the next generation like a negative inheritance. The point is not simply that rich and poor people live in different places through a kind of class sorting in the marketplace. The places themselves help to create wealth and poverty. Because of this power of places to fix inequity over time, current patterns are likely to outlive their residents.

the global electronic marketplace is rapidly depleting authors’ income streams. It seems almost every player — publishers, search engines, libraries, pirates and even some scholars — is vying for position at authors’ expense.

Authors practice one of the few professions directly protected in the Constitution

a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can’t be threatened, is essential to democracy.

If 37 percent of American adults aren't in the labor force, what are they doing?

More 19inShare Email Print The share of American adults who are either working or actively looking for work -- i.e.: the labor force participation rate -- fell to its lowest point since 1979

The reason the labor force's share of the country is shrinking has to do with both economics and demographics. We're becoming an older country