History Readings

“Anything that you do that’s not fast food is terrific; cooking once a week is far better than not cooking at all,

“It’s the same argument as exercise: more is better than less and some is a lot better than none.”

The core problem is that cooking is defined as work, and fast food is both a pleasure and a crutch. “People really are stressed out with all that they have to do, and they don’t want to cook,”

The newspaper interviewed 20 people who worked in an Amazon warehouse in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania. They described, and the newspaper verified, temperatures of more than 100 degrees Fahrenheit, or 37 degrees Celsius, in the warehouse, causing several employees to faint and fall ill and the company to maintain ambulances outside. Employees were hounded to “make rate,” meaning to pick or pack 120, 125, 150 pieces an hour, the rates rising with tenure. Tenure, though, wasn’t long, because the work force was largely temps from an agency. Permanent jobs were a mirage that seldom came. And so workers toiled even when injured to avoid being fired. A woman who left to have breast cancer surgery returned a week later to find that her job had been “terminated.”

Far beyond official Washington, we would seem to be witnessing a fraying of the bonds of empathy, decency, common purpose. It is becoming a country in which people more than disagree. They fail to see each other. They think in types about others, and assume the worst of types not their own.

The more I travel, the more I observe that Americans are becoming foreigners to each other. People in Texas speak of people in New York the way certain Sunnis speak of Shiites, and vice versa in New York. Many liberals I know take for granted that anyone conservative is either racist or under-informed. People who run companies like Amazon operate as though it never occurred to them that it could have been them crawling through the aisles. And the people who run labor unions possess little empathy for how difficult and risky and remarkable it is to build something like Amazon.

between 1979 and 2005 the inflation-adjusted income of families in the middle of the income distribution rose 21 percent. That’s growth, but it’s slow, especially compared with the 100 percent rise in median income over a generation after World War II.

over the same period, the income of the very rich, the top 100th of 1 percent of the income distribution, rose by 480 percent

there has been a major shift of taxation away from wealth and toward work: tax rates on corporate profits, capital gains and dividends have all fallen, while the payroll tax — the main tax paid by most workers — has gone up.

The census says that 5.9 million Americans ages 25 to 34 are living with their parents, an increase of 25 percent from before the recession. Men are now twice as likely as young women to live with their parents.

they do start families, but typically out of wedlock, meaning the mother likely faces a life of poverty. One in four families is headed by a single parent, a record high,

the share of young adults 18 to 34 making long-distance moves last year fell to a post-World War II low.

More than half of the admissions officers at public research universities, and more than a third at four-year colleges said that they had been working harder in the past year to recruit students who need no financial aid and can pay full price, according to the survey of 462 admissions directors and enrollment managers conducted in August

we’re seeing a fundamental change in the admissions process,

“Where many of the older admissions professionals came in through the institution and saw it as an ethically centered counseling role, there’s now a different dynamic that places a lot more emphasis on marketing.”

Do you know how many slaves work on your behalf? Enlarge This Image Michel Filho/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images Textile workers in Brazil demonstrate against slavery. While many people may assume the answer to that provocative and unsettling question is zero, the creators of a new Web site want to demonstrate how forced labor, especially overseas, is tantamount to slavery. A nonprofit group, with funding from the State Department, will unveil the new site, www.slaveryfootprint.org, on Thursday in an effort to show that forced laborers are tied to all kinds of everyday products, from electronics and jewelry to the shirt on your back. Ideally, they hope to get consumers engaged enough in the issue to do something about it, primarily hoping people demand that companies carefully audit supply chains to ensure, as best as they can determine, that no “slave labor” was used to manufacture its products.

The article reviews the copious psychological literature behind the value of adversity in building success. It isn't as new as it seems. It's recently been invoked by luminaries from Steve Jobs to J. K. Rowling. Centuries earlier, grit and systematic, conscientious planning was a major theme of the archetypical American self-made genius, Benjamin Franklin, and the other Founders also displayed it, as I suggested here.

suggests that inner-city charter schools may have an advantage over expensive private ones like Riverdale, if only because teachers consider themselves responsible primarily to the community rather than to parents

Mr. Tough also observes that the virtues of self-advancement aren't necessarily those of service to others. In fact, grit may work against compassion

when I became a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, my wife and I decided that we wanted to immerse them in life abroad. No international schools where the instruction is in English. Ours would go to a local one, with real Russians.

Bogin added courses like antimanipulation, which was intended to give children tools to decipher commercial or political messages.

He taught a required class called myshleniye, which means “thinking,” as in critical thinking. It was based in part on the work of a dissident Soviet educational philosopher named Georgy Shchedrovitsky, who argued that there were three ways of thinking: abstract, verbal and representational. To comprehend the meaning of something, you had to use all three. When I asked Bogin to explain Shchedrovitsky, he asked a question. “Does 2 + 2 = 4? No! Because two cats plus two sausages is what? Two cats. Two drops of water plus two drops of water? One drop of water.”

71 percent of Republicans in the poll agree that President Obama is a socialist. But 75 percent of them don’t think that the government should end Social Security. 78 percent think that ending Medicare would be a bad idea. And 61 percent say the same about Medicaid (health care for the poor).

Perry’s famously stated that Social Security is a “ponzi sceme,” and has consistently defended that assessment. But only 33 percent of those polled thought was an accurate description of the program, versus 53 percent who didn’t. That means there is significant group, a 16 percent gap, between people who agree the program is a crime (ponzi sceme) but support eliminating it, which was the position of only 17 percent. In other words, despite the fact that Social Security is a federal offense, we should keep it anyway.

on the fight between the science and anti-science sets of the Republican party, 27 percent think that global warming exists, but 27 percent also believe that natural disasters are caused by God, as Michele Bachmann “joked” at a campaign apparence.