Starring Basement Jaxx.
Monday, August 12, 2013
A Tale of Two Cities.
WORDS.
"...rather than being on a collision course, these two Washington have become curiously symbiotic. The Tea Party makes sure there’s no shortage of political ranting to fill the cable channels. Young congressional staffers, meanwhile, see profitable futures at lobbying firms after a few years on government salaries. By a magical process of acculturation, Washington transforms true believers into members of the stay-and-get-rich club. One-half of former senators, and nearly as large a share of former House members, stay on as lobbyists after leaving office.
What drives this process, to which both parties are subject, is the dazzling amount of money to be made in the neighborhood of politics if you don’t work for the government. The biggest change in Washington over the past 30 years is that social status there used to depend more on proximity to power than upon wealth. This wasn’t necessarily a superior value system, but it did create a distinctive culture in which the city’s richest people weren’t treated as its most important people. Now Washington is America’s wealthiest city and has same value system as every other.
Leibovich and Draper offer little by way of ideas how to fix the metropolis they depict so damningly. It’s not clear there is any way to fix it. Official Washington’s problem is primarily structural: State-level gerrymandering produces 30-sided congressional districts that favor extremists over moderates. Unofficial Washington’s problem is ethical: An older conception of public service has given way to the pursuit of wealth and personal advantage. The result is a double knot of dysfunction that won’t be untangled anytime soon."
SLATE: The Two Washingtons
Sunday, August 11, 2013
Friday, August 09, 2013
BEEZUS.
words.
"Beyoncé is special, an eternal exception. In a climate that favors disaffection and antagonism, where many cultural products are either ironic or meant to be enjoyed ironically, she is one thing we’re allowed to unreservedly love. Cities full of hipsters bow down at her name. Grown people—like Mindy Kaling—cry at her concerts. Drake writes infatuated raps about her. Serena Williams tweets love letters. She posts a photo of herself in a hot tub with Blue Ivy and America’s moms don’t even get that mad about it.
Perhaps, unlike Demi Lovato, who you imagine journaling with at a sleepover, or Pink, who you imagine teaching you to pole dance, Beyoncé has baked diva worship into her image: Interacting with Bey means bowing down (bitches); there is no other way. Or maybe her hardworking, goal-oriented façade aligns with our values. (“If you don’t like her, you respect her,” offered a co-worker.) Maybe the push-pull between her discipline and her art gives us a rich psychological puzzle to mull over. (In the definitive Beyoncé think-piece of 2013, Nitsuh Adebe calls the star’s oeuvre an “examination of how it feels when drive and discipline really are your organic personality, and your feelings fight against layers of self-control and pragmatism, and the documentary you make about yourself shows you working hard to relax and experience your own emotions.") Perhaps there’s something safe and unchallenging in Knowles’ perfection—a megawatt blandness that makes her easy to love..."
SLATE: Beyoncé Cuts Her Hair and You Better Love It
A Moment of Clarity.
WORDS.
"As a former teacher, what saddens me is that the sides draw battle lines where there need not be any. There is a sense that we are continually facing two doors: Address poverty factors or address school factors. Support standards or support teachers. Care about academic outcomes or care about the whole child. The ad nauseam this-or-that creates a house of mirrors that leaves us all turned around.
In each and every one of these cases, the answer is to do both. Helping children grow up in a low-stress, healthy environment directly affects their perseverance, empathy and academic success. Sending those children into the hands of caring, competent teachers who have high expectations and who challenge them to pursue their aspirations also directly aids their success and life choices. Take away either, and the road becomes all too familiar: tough, littered with dropout statistics and gravestones.
Teaching should be among the most respected professions. Teachers should be paid extremely well, and they should have tremendous amounts of support, resources and quality professional development. Teachers should bring out the creative spark in children. Teachers should help students gain high levels of rigorous knowledge and skills. And teachers should be held to high standards that look at how they and their students perform on a variety of measures, year after year. These “shoulds” build on one another; they do not tear one another down..."
THE WASHINGTON POST: Losers in the education wars
"As a former teacher, what saddens me is that the sides draw battle lines where there need not be any. There is a sense that we are continually facing two doors: Address poverty factors or address school factors. Support standards or support teachers. Care about academic outcomes or care about the whole child. The ad nauseam this-or-that creates a house of mirrors that leaves us all turned around.
In each and every one of these cases, the answer is to do both. Helping children grow up in a low-stress, healthy environment directly affects their perseverance, empathy and academic success. Sending those children into the hands of caring, competent teachers who have high expectations and who challenge them to pursue their aspirations also directly aids their success and life choices. Take away either, and the road becomes all too familiar: tough, littered with dropout statistics and gravestones.
Teaching should be among the most respected professions. Teachers should be paid extremely well, and they should have tremendous amounts of support, resources and quality professional development. Teachers should bring out the creative spark in children. Teachers should help students gain high levels of rigorous knowledge and skills. And teachers should be held to high standards that look at how they and their students perform on a variety of measures, year after year. These “shoulds” build on one another; they do not tear one another down..."
THE WASHINGTON POST: Losers in the education wars
Thursday, August 08, 2013
The Book of JOB(s).
An Ongoing Discussion/Moment of Clarity.
WORDS.
"Historically, low-wage work tended to be done either by the young or by women looking for part-time jobs to supplement family income. As the historian Bethany Moreton has shown, Walmart in its early days sought explicitly to hire underemployed married women. Fast-food workforces, meanwhile, were dominated by teen-agers. Now, though, plenty of family breadwinners are stuck in these jobs. That’s because, over the past three decades, the U.S. economy has done a poor job of creating good middle-class jobs; five of the six fastest-growing job categories today pay less than the median wage. That’s why, as a recent study by the economists John Schmitt and Janelle Jones has shown, low-wage workers are older and better educated than ever. More important, more of them are relying on their paychecks not for pin money or to pay for Friday-night dates but, rather, to support families. Forty years ago, there was no expectation that fast-food or discount-retail jobs would provide a living wage, because these were not jobs that, in the main, adult heads of household did. Today, low-wage workers provide forty-six per cent of their family’s income. It is that change which is driving the demand for higher pay.
...This complicates things, in part because of the nature of these businesses. They make plenty of money, but most have slim profit margins: Walmart and Target earn between three and four cents on the dollar; a typical McDonald’s franchise restaurant earns around six cents on the dollar before taxes, according to an analysis from Janney Capital Markets. In fact, the combined profits of all the major retailers, restaurant chains, and supermarkets in the Fortune 500 are smaller than the profits of Apple alone. Yet Apple employs just seventy-six thousand people, while the retailers, supermarkets, and restaurant chains employ 5.6 million. The grim truth of those numbers is that low wages are a big part of why these companies are able to stay profitable while offering low prices. Congress is currently considering a bill increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 over the next three years. That’s an increase that the companies can easily tolerate, and it would make a significant difference in the lives of low-wage workers. But that’s still a long way from turning these jobs into the kind of employment that can support a middle-class family. If you want to accomplish that, you have to change the entire way these companies do business. Above all, you have to get consumers to accept significantly higher, and steadily rising, prices. After decades in which we’ve grown used to cheap stuff, that won’t be easy..."
THE NEW YORKER: The Pay Is Too Damn Low
...
WORDS.
"Historically, low-wage work tended to be done either by the young or by women looking for part-time jobs to supplement family income. As the historian Bethany Moreton has shown, Walmart in its early days sought explicitly to hire underemployed married women. Fast-food workforces, meanwhile, were dominated by teen-agers. Now, though, plenty of family breadwinners are stuck in these jobs. That’s because, over the past three decades, the U.S. economy has done a poor job of creating good middle-class jobs; five of the six fastest-growing job categories today pay less than the median wage. That’s why, as a recent study by the economists John Schmitt and Janelle Jones has shown, low-wage workers are older and better educated than ever. More important, more of them are relying on their paychecks not for pin money or to pay for Friday-night dates but, rather, to support families. Forty years ago, there was no expectation that fast-food or discount-retail jobs would provide a living wage, because these were not jobs that, in the main, adult heads of household did. Today, low-wage workers provide forty-six per cent of their family’s income. It is that change which is driving the demand for higher pay.
...This complicates things, in part because of the nature of these businesses. They make plenty of money, but most have slim profit margins: Walmart and Target earn between three and four cents on the dollar; a typical McDonald’s franchise restaurant earns around six cents on the dollar before taxes, according to an analysis from Janney Capital Markets. In fact, the combined profits of all the major retailers, restaurant chains, and supermarkets in the Fortune 500 are smaller than the profits of Apple alone. Yet Apple employs just seventy-six thousand people, while the retailers, supermarkets, and restaurant chains employ 5.6 million. The grim truth of those numbers is that low wages are a big part of why these companies are able to stay profitable while offering low prices. Congress is currently considering a bill increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 over the next three years. That’s an increase that the companies can easily tolerate, and it would make a significant difference in the lives of low-wage workers. But that’s still a long way from turning these jobs into the kind of employment that can support a middle-class family. If you want to accomplish that, you have to change the entire way these companies do business. Above all, you have to get consumers to accept significantly higher, and steadily rising, prices. After decades in which we’ve grown used to cheap stuff, that won’t be easy..."
THE NEW YORKER: The Pay Is Too Damn Low
...
Bad News Bears.
A Moment of Clarity.
words.
"The Hall electors have every reason to be angry with the players. But what about the writers themselves? Was there anyone closer to the action, to the players, than the game’s reporters? The use of performance-enhancing drugs, especially in the nineties, was hardly a subtle matter. When a player’s facial features morph, when his head grows two hat sizes larger, when a wiry first baseman begins to resemble a bodybuilder, one tends to notice these changes. Some beat reporters saw Mark McGwire in the clubhouse every day, season after season. As reporters, wasn’t it their job to investigate, to ask questions, to develop good sources? Instead of remaining skeptical, many scribes were, like all of us, dazzled by the home runs and the drama of witnessing new records, and caught up in following the sagas of duelling sluggers. In spinning the grand story, writers were given a taste of glory, and enjoyed some of the best sports copy since the days of Ruth and Aaron.
In 1961, writers had the privilege of reporting on Roger Maris’s doing the near impossible and breaking the Babe’s single-season record of sixty home runs. At the turn of the twentieth century, they got to see Ruth’s record surpassed six times, including McGwire’s truly impossible seventy, in 1998, and Bonds’s seventy-three, in 2001. It’s almost touching now to read the breathless, sort-of embarrassing “Special Commemorative Issue” that Sports Illustrated published in 1998 to honor the “Great Home Run Race” between the juicers McGwire and Sammy Sosa. The steroid era was a moment of deception but also of starry-eyed self-deception; if it was a breakdown of integrity on the part of baseball’s stars it was also, in some measure, a failure of sports journalism.
Because the steroid story usually takes the form of a blame game, there doesn’t seem to be much room for reflection on the role that they, the baseball writers—or, for that matter, any dedicated observer of the game—may have played as enablers of cheating. I wonder about this myself. I remember watching Mark McGwire transform into a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float version of himself and hit nine-thousand-foot home runs every other game and thinking that something was amiss. In that very same moment, I also somehow shelved my doubts so that I could enjoy the spectacle or, when I was feeling fancy, “witness history.” The sportswriting of that period, too, reveals a curious human talent for simultaneously knowing and not knowing..."
THE NEW YORKER: Baseball Scribes in the Time of Steroids
EARLIER:
Numbers on the Boards.
words.
"The Hall electors have every reason to be angry with the players. But what about the writers themselves? Was there anyone closer to the action, to the players, than the game’s reporters? The use of performance-enhancing drugs, especially in the nineties, was hardly a subtle matter. When a player’s facial features morph, when his head grows two hat sizes larger, when a wiry first baseman begins to resemble a bodybuilder, one tends to notice these changes. Some beat reporters saw Mark McGwire in the clubhouse every day, season after season. As reporters, wasn’t it their job to investigate, to ask questions, to develop good sources? Instead of remaining skeptical, many scribes were, like all of us, dazzled by the home runs and the drama of witnessing new records, and caught up in following the sagas of duelling sluggers. In spinning the grand story, writers were given a taste of glory, and enjoyed some of the best sports copy since the days of Ruth and Aaron.
In 1961, writers had the privilege of reporting on Roger Maris’s doing the near impossible and breaking the Babe’s single-season record of sixty home runs. At the turn of the twentieth century, they got to see Ruth’s record surpassed six times, including McGwire’s truly impossible seventy, in 1998, and Bonds’s seventy-three, in 2001. It’s almost touching now to read the breathless, sort-of embarrassing “Special Commemorative Issue” that Sports Illustrated published in 1998 to honor the “Great Home Run Race” between the juicers McGwire and Sammy Sosa. The steroid era was a moment of deception but also of starry-eyed self-deception; if it was a breakdown of integrity on the part of baseball’s stars it was also, in some measure, a failure of sports journalism.
Because the steroid story usually takes the form of a blame game, there doesn’t seem to be much room for reflection on the role that they, the baseball writers—or, for that matter, any dedicated observer of the game—may have played as enablers of cheating. I wonder about this myself. I remember watching Mark McGwire transform into a Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade float version of himself and hit nine-thousand-foot home runs every other game and thinking that something was amiss. In that very same moment, I also somehow shelved my doubts so that I could enjoy the spectacle or, when I was feeling fancy, “witness history.” The sportswriting of that period, too, reveals a curious human talent for simultaneously knowing and not knowing..."
THE NEW YORKER: Baseball Scribes in the Time of Steroids
EARLIER:
Numbers on the Boards.
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