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August 21 - August 24, 2020
It is easy, when people feel frightened and abandoned, for a demagogue to exploit those feelings of despair for political gain. It is easy for that demagogue to translate fear into fanaticism, to shift extremism into the mainstream and market it under the guise of populism. By the time buyer’s remorse hits, a new and more brutal political culture has arisen. A gaslit nation becomes engulfed in flames.
The city is treated like a joke, and the people who live there and rescue women and make concise indictments of American race relations are turned into memes.
New York—and San Francisco, London, Paris, and other cities where the cost of living has skyrocketed—are no longer places where you go to be someone. They are places you live when you are born having arrived.
She cites academic studies indicating that people are biased against creative minds. They crave the success of the result, but shun the process that produces it: the experimentation that may yield to failure, the rejection of social norms that breeds rejection of the artist herself.
The mall has long been derided by those with the luxury of an alternative.
If you are thirty-five or younger—and quite often, older—the advice of the old economy does not apply to you. You live in the post-employment economy, where corporations have decided not to pay people. Profits are still high. The money is still there. But not for you. You will work without a pay raise, benefits, or job security. Survival is now a laudable aspiration.
But when you fall, know that millions are falling with you. Know that it is, to a large extent, out of your hands. And when you see someone else falling, reach out your hands to catch them.
Worst of all, unpaid internships in policy and human rights send the message that fighting poverty, inequality, and other issues of injustice is something that only rich people should do.
Journalist Mark Oppenheimer calls the elite Americans obsessed with locally grown and organic food “the new Puritans”—and like the old Puritans, they tend to have a Calvinist take on those less fortunate. “Most of the middle-class ‘liberal’ parents I know have allowed lifestyle decisions about what they wear, eat, and drive to entirely replace a more ambitious program for bettering society,” he writes. The plight of the McDonald’s worker, like McDonald’s itself, is seen as outside their purview.
Young Americans seeking full-time employment tend to find their options limited to two paths: one of low-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of poverty; another of high-status, low-paying temp jobs emblematic of wealth.
Like their counterparts in the service industry, these short-term prestige positions frequently offer no benefits, no health care, and in the case of the intern, no salary. They require that you have the money to move to switch jobs year after year—impossible for many, but easy for those with cash to spare.
Teaching, nursing, social work, child care, and other “pink collar” professions do not pay poorly because, as Slate’s Hanna Rosin argues, women “flock to less prestigious jobs,” but because jobs are considered less prestigious when they are worked by women.
Today the 1990s feel like a dream only because the nightmare they created became ordinary.
See also: the Bush years.
When wealth is passed off as merit, bad luck is seen as bad character. This is how ideologues justify punishing the sick and the poor. But poverty is neither a crime nor a character flaw. Stigmatize those who let people die, not those who struggle to live.
Charity, as a supplement to justice, should be applauded. But charity as a substitute for justice is neither charity nor justice. It is cruelty.
No tzedekah without tzedek!
Fiscal stability that relies on gifts is not stability. It is a guarantee of insecurity: income based not on work but on whim. Capricious generosity is not a replacement for a living wage, nor is it a basis for a functioning society. Charity is no substitute for justice.
In 1968, when Faust graduated from Bryn Mawr, tuition and board at a four-year private university cost an average of $2,545.
It's a good thing I wasn't drinking anything because I would have just spit it out
It is rare to hear the phrase “the Christian world” used in the English-language media, because doing so would generalize about the motives of over 2 billion people. No such respect applies to the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims.
What I did not understand is that academic publishing is not about sharing ideas. It is about removing oneself from public scrutiny while scrambling for professional security.
Only 3.8 percent of American families make more than $200,000 per year. But at Harvard University, 45.6 percent of incoming freshmen come from families making $200,000 or more. A mere 4 percent of Harvard students come from a family in the bottom quintile of U.S. incomes, and only 17.8 percent come from the bottom three quintiles.
In the American media, white people debate whether race matters, rich people debate whether poverty matters, and men debate whether gender matters. People for whom these problems must matter—for they structure the limitations of their lives—are locked out of the discussion.
Hiding behind a computer screen seems an effective way to dodge gender bias. Sometimes the reader bypasses your byline and accidentally respects you, culminating in an email of praise.
You begin to have nostalgia for disappointment, because at least that means you had expectations.
All social movements are dismissed at some point as complaining. Over time, they are recognized as speaking truth to power.
