May 2011
“Loud groups of disaffected whites get all the press and attention from politicians, while minority households — who have faced even higher costs due to the recession — have received little notice.”
—
To harp:
This kind of opining is hollow and only leads to dubious policy recommendations. And now that I have an economist in my corner, I can drive to the hoop.
What, exactly, are the “alarm bells” ringing? That distressed white workers are pessimistic? Well, yes. The economy is not really improving. But the only logical jump from here is an elimination of affirmative action. Naturally, some commenters went there.
And, way things are going, I wouldn’t be surprised if Washington does too.
“Presumably there will be other places for people of the current generation. Maybe there are places like this in, I don’t know, Williamsburg in Brooklyn or even remoter parts of Brooklyn of which I have never been.”
—
Gay Talese, on the closing of Elaine’s (via peterfeld)
Actually, that appears to be Lewis Lapham.
Of course, Talese said something equally writerly:
But New York is a city of rebirth, so there is certainly not going to be the end of anything in New York, because everything in New York that you think is dead revives by sunshine.
Hey, Ron Brownstein
Could you square this?
But for minorities, that squeeze has been partially offset by the sense that possibilities closed to their parents are becoming available to them as discrimination wanes.
With this?
Though the reported job growth is encouraging, the recovery is leaving a large segment of the workforce behind: unemployment rates remain disproportionately high for workers of color, particularly Blacks and Latinos. While the unemployment rate was 8 percent for whites in April 2011, Blacks and Latinos experienced much higher rates of unemployment at 16.1 percent and 11.8 percent, respectively. This is the first time in approximately 6 months (since November 2010) that Black unemployment has reached 16 percent.
Please? I mean, I’m all into the “angry, blue-collar white man” narrative. But, c’mon.
“The creeping havoc of global warming, as fantastical as it is made to seem in Congress and on cable, is very real in cities. Chicago is bracing its Big (concrete) Shoulders for a climate akin to the Deep South. A private risk assessor predicts future impacts ‘like an urban disaster film minus Godzilla.’”
—This, and my ongoing attempt to get n+1 to PAY ATTENTION TO ME!
“But there is nothing in West’s volley about how the lack of public option will ultimately hurt poor black people. There no real attempt to argue that the Dodd-Frank won’t actually end the problem of too big too fail. There’s no detailed critique of how Obama’s willingness to see Planned Parenthood defunded in local Washington D.C. ultimately hurts black women. There are no hot words for an Obama-led Democratic Party failing to deliver congressional representation to Washington, D.C. despite holding the House, Senate and the presidency. There is no serious assessment of the Office of Urban Policy.”
—Ta-Nehisi Coates > Cornel West.
ELIZABETHWARRNOHSNAP.GIF
Look! I made an animated GIF of Elizabeth Warren! From today’s hearings when she was accused of lying!
Things By My Sister, Who Is Older Today, In No Particular Order
And can you tell me, he said with his mouth full of ceviche or whatever the hell it was he had ordered, can you tell me what you were responsible for?
White trucks came by, and zoo workers shoveled the unicorns in. They buckled and kicked a little, but mostly just lay there like giant white balloons.
The Last Book I Loved, The Interrogative Mood:
I was sucked in by the charm of the narrator. He’s very gracious.
Ten-year-olds don’t take naps, his dad said, but he had taken a nap anyway on the grass outside and now he was floating around in tinfoil like an alien, probably going to throw up in T-minus three, two, one. False alarm. His head was just sloshing back and forth. He was a water balloon with applesauce guts. He was an airplane, all wings and tilt. He couldn’t see anything through the foil even though he pressed his head against it and pushed with his fingers till the grey went white and it wasn’t really the best idea to pop it, probably, so he lay down.
For years I was a gum addict, he told me. My wife made me choose between her and the gum. No lie, she did. She did.
Sometime around the year 2200 we will forget how to talk.
“Daley will announce Tuesday morning his forthcoming appointment at the University of Chicago to “help foster policy discussions at the University’s Harris School of Public Policy Studies,” according to a statement.”
—This is where I go to school. This is strange.
“I support Israel….do you?
Obama is an un-experienced young communist, what is your excuse for being anti-Israeli?
A-hole!
take care.
Robert” —take care.
Obama is an un-experienced young communist, what is your excuse for being anti-Israeli?
A-hole!
take care.
Robert” —take care.
“Why all the fuss? It’s merely a bit of hanky-panky with the help,” said Jean-François Kahn, the crusading editor of the Left-wing Marianne weekly. Jack Lang, a law don famous for having been François Mitterrand’s high-profile, graffiti-loving, diversity-fostering Culture Minister, dismissed it all rather infelicitously as an “overblown” affair: “Really, nobody died in that hotel room.”
—
Anne-Elisabeth Moutet despairs of French men, even post-DSK.
Dominique Strauss-Kahn: why French women put up with it - Telegraph
(via felixsalmon)
Rapture
Antony and the Johnsons
Meant to post yesterday. But, still.
“Daniels’ spokeswoman, Jane Jankowski, said Daniels ‘uttered a creative expletive’ when the accident happened.”
—Fungdark!
“To have one group of morons question your citizenship while others question your blackness.”
—
“For the past 3500 years of the Western world, the effects of media — whether it’s speech, writing, printing, photography, radio or television — have been systematically overlooked by social observers. Even in today’s revolutionary electronic age, scholars evidence few signs of modifying this traditional stance of ostrichlike disregard.”
—Marshall McLuhan, Playboy, 1969.
Ben Stein, 1992: I have been taking prescription tranquilizers since... →
felixsalmon.tumblr.com
I have been taking prescription tranquilizers since 1966. I have used almost every kind imaginable: phenothiazines, chlorpromazines and others I cannot recall. But Halcion, a chemical firstcousin to the tranquilizer Xanax, is in a class by itself for mind-altering side…
Tops.
