Nathan Meyers in The Conversation:
America has never been richer. But the gains are so lopsided that the top 10% controls 69% of all wealth in the country, while the bottom half controls just 3%. Meanwhile, surging corporate profits have mostly benefited investors, not the broader public.
This divide is expected to widen after President Donald Trump’s sweeping new spending bill drastically cuts Medicaid and food aid, programs that stabilize the economy and subsidize low-wage employers.
Moreover, the tax cuts at the heart of the bill will deliver tens of billions of dollars in benefits to the wealthiest households while disproportionately burdening low-income households, according to analyses by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and Joint Committee on Taxation. By 2033, the bottom 20% will pay more in taxes while the top 0.1% receive $43 billion in cuts.
I am a sociologist who studies economic inequality, and my research demonstrates that the class-based inequalities exacerbated by the Trump bill are not new. Rather, they are part of a 50-year trend linked to social cleavages, political corruption and a declining belief in the common good.
More here.
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“I suspect that the real moral thinkers end up, wherever they may start, in botany,” the essayist Annie Dillard mused in 1974. “We know nothing for certain, but we seem to see that the world turns upon growing.” The work of the British nature writer Richard Mabey is proof of Dillard’s wisdom. He has been thinking about botany since the 1970s, when he published “Food for Free,” his classic guide to edible plants, and his interest in vegetable life has always yielded a corresponding interest in human obligations. For him, botany is both a science and an ethics, and its primary tenet is that plants are — or ought to be — our equals.
In the late summer of 1832, England was set aflame with wonder — a glimpse of something wild and flamboyant, shimmering with the lush firstness of a world untrammeled by the boot of civilization.
I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT what struck me as odd, at first, about Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, when it dawned on me: it isn’t odd. The book, that is. Formally and in terms of genre, a Dyer book almost always represents a novel (so to speak) hybrid. His scholarly projects have a way of turning into memoirs and novels. Out of Sheer Rage began as an attempt to produce a study of D. H. Lawrence but became a book about his own inability to do so (even as it remained, in the words of The Guardian, a “very strange, sort-of study of D. H. Lawrence”). But Beautiful was conceived as a work of nonfiction jazz appreciation but became, in Dyer’s own description, “as much imaginative criticism as fiction.” His works of ostensibly pure fiction, meanwhile, have tended toward the auto-fictional, to such a degree that a reader could easily forget, at least for spans of pages, that they aren’t memoir. Take, for instance, the indelibly titled Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, concerning the adventures of “Junket Jeff,” a Dyer-like avatar who moves through the world of freelance-writer assignments and celebrity art profiles (the auto-fiction gets meta-meta when you encounter a distorted-mirror story involving a character named: Geoff). Dyer has written two essayistic travelogues: Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It and White Sands, each of which involves, again in his own unapologetic words, “a mixture of fiction and nonfiction.” There are also two books about movies, each having to do with an individual picture—Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (on Tarkovsky’s metaphysical masterpiece Stalker) and Broadsword Calling Danny Boy (on the World War II action flick Where Eagles Dare)—both of which are so essayistic and at the same time hyper-focused, consisting entirely of Dyer’s digressive and ultra-personal responses to those films’ every scene, that they resemble neither “cinema studies” nor general-interest film crit. One could go on. James Wood put it well, writing about Dyer in The New Yorker, when he described the books as “so different from one another, so peculiar to their author, and so inimitable that each founded its own, immediately self-dissolving genre.”
Allison Rosen
Last year,
It was an anxious summer. The American elections loomed, the sitting president had just been unmasked as an egomaniacal member of the walking undead, and here on the continent, across the Atlantic, Europe was about to elect the most right-wing parliament in the history of the European Union. The streets were plastered with campaign posters. In Germany, high over the boulevards, a well-known comedian gripped an enormous toothbrush and flashed her pearly whites. “Wählen ist wie Zähneputzen. Machst du’s nicht, wird’s braun!” read the accompanying text, or, “Voting is like brushing your teeth: don’t do it, and things’ll go brown.” The joke is that the Nazis wore brownshirts. To “go brown” is to go Nazi. In essence, the suggested defense against such a future was “Brush your teeth for democracy.” Or worse: “We are the guardians of oral and political hygiene—be more like us.” You slobs. It wasn’t a message endorsed by the Democratic Party or its handpicked candidate, Kamala Harris, who spent the final weeks of her abbreviated but competent campaign warning against the dangers of fascism. But it could have been.
“Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody who almost went out with Ted Bundy.”
Consider this straightforward calculation: (10100) + 1 – (10100)
In a city well-known for political theater, the show at Stone Nest, a performance venue in the heart of London’s West End, took the concept to a new level. For the last month, audiences have been reenacting the events of Jan. 6, 2021, when a pro-Trump mob stormed the U.S. Capitol in one of the most violent and divisive days of modern American democracy. But instead of sitting in stately silence, legs crammed into velvet chairs, attendees at “Fight for America” were active participants — singing, chanting, rolling dice, and maneuvering tiny figurines around a model of the Capitol.