Cross-posted from TAPPED. Bloggers and columnists, in the flurry of predictions that come at the start of any new year, are wondering how we’ll consume media in 2010. What will be the new Twitter? Will any of it will be enough to save old media outlets? These questions are important, but it’s worth remembering that Read More
Burns, Simon, Pelecanos. Um, how many ways does this essay fall into our bailiwick? So how come we missed it? David Simon, Ed Burns, and George Pelecanos launched a salvo at America’s misbegotten drug policy, penning an essay in Time asking people serving on juries to vote to acquit any suspect charged with a nonviolent Read More
Sooner Haven in Oklahoma City.* Kim Henderson and Corean Brothers are good friends who live in Sooner Haven, housing projects plopped into northeast Oklahoma City. They are — for lack of a better adjective — amazing. Kim Henderson was the rare young woman in her world who made it to her twenties with no children. Read More
We have a rough (if slightly problematic) idea of what is generally used to define poverty for statistical purposes. Sociologists tend to define the middle class largely in terms of rough lifestyle — access to credit, property ownership, higher education (or the realistic expectation of it), savings accounts, etc. But, off the top of your Read More
Barbara Ehrenreich penned an influential and oft-cited 2001 book called Nickel and Dimed, in which she decides to shed some of the privileges of her middle class life (author, college professor, etc.) to see if it was really possible to live in the U.S. on the minimum wage. Her experiment went on for a year, Read More
The increasingly fervent folks over at Jack & Jill have decided they were through with New York Times columnist and Princeton economist Paul Krugman for his criticism of Barack Obama. Didactic as he can be sometimes (and what columnist isn’t?), he is often very, very right. America’s failure to make progress in reducing poverty, especially Read More
10,000 Men, a volunteer organization of black men who pledged to police their Philadelphia neighborhoods in order to dent the city’s intractable murder rate, got tons of press coverage last fall when its legions were set to hit the streets. But since then, the group has been bogged down, and enthusiastic volunteers have been left Read More
As the cost of oil around the world continues to climb, the price of food has increased to the point where many Haitians (where most people make less than $2 a day) have begun eating cookies and pies made of dirt and mud. Carrying buckets of dirt and water up ladders to the roof of Read More
