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Category: Society

The failed personal, social, and economic promise of Silicon Valley

The failed personal, social, and economic promise of Silicon Valley

Kim Phillips-Fein writes: For many years, Silicon Valley and the machines that came out of it were presented as personally, economically, and socially transformative, agents of revolution at both the level of the individual and the whole social order. They were democratizing, uncontrolled, anarchic, and new. Most of all, they were supposed to be fun—to open up a space of play and freedom. How is it, then, that just a few decades in, we find ourselves trapped in a dreary…

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Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since census started tracking it, data shows

Income inequality in America is the highest it’s been since census started tracking it, data shows

The Washington Post reports: Last year, income inequality in the United States reached its highest level since the Census Bureau started tracking it in 1967, according to federal data released Thursday. In the midst of the longest economic expansion the United States has ever seen, with poverty and unemployment rates at historic lows, the separation between rich and poor from 2017 and 2018 was greater than it has ever been, federal data show. Nine states saw spikes in that divide:…

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Mass migration begins as Florida faces the biggest threat from climate-driven flooding

Mass migration begins as Florida faces the biggest threat from climate-driven flooding

Bloomberg reports: Lori Rittel is stuck in her Florida Keys home, living in the wreckage left by Hurricane Irma two years ago, unable to rebuild or repair. Now her best hope for escape is to sell the little white bungalow to the government to knock down. Her bedroom is still a no-go zone so she sleeps in the living room with her cat and three dogs. She just installed a sink in the bathroom, which is missing a wall, so…

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Across generations, Americans suffer from, and die of, new levels of loneliness in an age of crumbling institutions

Across generations, Americans suffer from, and die of, new levels of loneliness in an age of crumbling institutions

Derek Thompson writes: In 1998, The Wall Street Journal and NBC News asked several hundred young Americans to name their most important values. Work ethic led the way—naturally. After that, large majorities picked patriotism, religion, and having children. Twenty-one years later, the same pollsters asked the same questions of today’s 18-to-38-year-olds—members of the Millennial and Z generations. The results, published last week in The Wall Street Journal, showed a major value shift among young adults. Today’s respondents were 10 percentage…

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53 people killed in mass shootings in August alone in the U.S.

53 people killed in mass shootings in August alone in the U.S.

The New York Times reports: The month of August ended as it began: with a shooting rampage and a significant death toll. Seven people were killed near Odessa, Tex., on Saturday as a gunman started shooting indiscriminately at cars, bringing the number of victims of mass killings by firearms to 53 for the month. The authorities on Sunday revised the death toll from the shooting in Odessa to seven from five, excluding the gunman. The term mass killings is defined…

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How did the U.S. go from being the most egalitarian country in the West to being one of the most unequal?

How did the U.S. go from being the most egalitarian country in the West to being one of the most unequal?

Liaquat Ahamed writes: In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville, at the age of twenty-five, was sent by France’s Ministry of Justice to study the American penal system. He spent ten months in the United States, dutifully visiting prisons and meeting hundreds of people, including President Andrew Jackson and his predecessor, John Quincy Adams. On his return to France, he wrote a book about his observations, “Democracy in America,” the first volume of which was published in 1835. Many of the observations…

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The American diet is the leading cause of mortality in the U.S.

The American diet is the leading cause of mortality in the U.S.

Dariush Mozaffarian and Dan Glickman write: Americans are sick — much sicker than many realize. More than 100 million adults — almost half the entire adult population — have pre-diabetes or diabetes. Cardiovascular disease afflicts about 122 million people and causes roughly 840,000 deaths each year, or about 2,300 deaths each day. Three in four adults are overweight or obese. More Americans are sick, in other words, than are healthy. Instead of debating who should pay for all this, no…

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The next recession will destroy Millennials

The next recession will destroy Millennials

Annie Lowrey writes: The Millennials graduated into the worst jobs market in 80 years. That did not just mean a few years of high unemployment, or a couple years living in their parents’ basements. It meant a full decade of lost wages. The generation unlucky enough to enter the labor market in a recession suffers “significant” earnings losses that take years and years to rebound, studies show, something that hard data now back up. As of 2014, Millennial men were…

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What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot

What does a traffic jam in Atlanta have to do with segregation? Quite a lot

Kevin M. Kruse writes: Atlanta has some of the worst traffic in the United States. Drivers there average two hours each week mired in gridlock, hung up at countless spots, from the constantly clogged Georgia 400 to a complicated cluster of overpasses at Tom Moreland Interchange, better known as “Spaghetti Junction.” The Downtown Connector — a 12-to-14-lane megahighway that in theory connects the city’s north to its south — regularly has three-mile-long traffic jams that last four hours or more….

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Seattle has figured out how to end the war on drugs

Seattle has figured out how to end the war on drugs

Nicholas Kristof writes: On gritty streets where heroin, fentanyl and meth stride like Death Eaters, where for decades both drugs and the war on drugs have wrecked lives, the city of Seattle is pioneering a bold approach to narcotics that should be a model for America. Anyone caught here with a small amount of drugs — even heroin — isn’t typically prosecuted. Instead, that person is steered toward social services to get help. This model is becoming the consensus preference…

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Black Americans have fought to make our democracy’s founding ideals true

Black Americans have fought to make our democracy’s founding ideals true

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Nikole Hannah-Jones writes: My dad always flew an American flag in our front yard. The blue paint on our two-story house was perennially chipping; the fence, or the rail by the stairs, or the front door, existed in a perpetual state of disrepair, but that flag always flew pristine. Our corner lot, which had been redlined by the federal government, was along the river that divided the black side from the white side of our Iowa town. At the edge…

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This is what Latinos think everyone got wrong about El Paso

This is what Latinos think everyone got wrong about El Paso

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Adrian Carrasquillo writes: As a reporter, I’ve talked to immigration activists for the better part of a decade. They don’t often cry, at least not in front of me. But all day on Sunday, the day after the shooting in El Paso, hardened advocates became emotional while explaining what it’s like to live in the United States after a killer drove 10 hours to kill Mexicans, Latinos and immigrants. The next day I still felt restless after a conversation with…

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When women are the enemy: The intersection of misogyny and white supremacy

When women are the enemy: The intersection of misogyny and white supremacy

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ABC News reports: Many questions remain in the motivations of the man who allegedly committed a mass shooting in Dayton, Ohio, last weekend, leaving nine dead before responding officers shot him to death. But officials briefed on the investigation told ABC News the suspected shooter demonstrated a misogyny that was far more extreme than any of his political leanings. In that, he follows a bleak pattern among mass shooters. “There are red flags,” Jacquelyn Campbell of the Johns Hopkins University…

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A common trait among mass killers: Hatred of women

A common trait among mass killers: Hatred of women

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The New York Times reports: A professed hatred of women is frequent among suspects in the long history of mass shootings in America. There was the massacre in 1991, when a man walked into Luby’s Cafeteria in Killeen, Tex., and fatally shot 22 people in what at the time was the worst mass shooting in modern United States history. The gunman had recently written a letter to his neighbors calling women in the area “vipers,” and eyewitnesses said he had…

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White nationalists have become the face of terrorism in America

White nationalists have become the face of terrorism in America

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Time reports: When you think of a terrorist, what do you see? For more than a generation, the image lurking in Americans’ nightmares has resembled the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks: an Islamic jihadist. Not a 21-year-old white supremacist from a prosperous Dallas suburb. But long before that young man drove to El Paso, Texas, on Aug. 3 and allegedly murdered at least 22 people at a Walmart crammed with back-to-school shoppers, it was clear that white nationalists have become…

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