1. Why Single-Payer Health Care Saves Money
“The total cost of providing health coverage under the single-payer approach is actually substantially lower than under the current system in the United States. It is a bedrock economic principle that if we can find a way to do something more efficiently, it’s possible for everyone to come out ahead.”
2. Rooftop Solar Dims Under Pressure From Utility Lobbyists
“The decline has also coincided with a concerted and well-funded lobbying campaign by traditional utilities, which have been working in state capitals across the country to reverse incentives for homeowners to install solar panels.”
3. Racism Is Everywhere, So Why Not Move South?
“To me it’s beginning to seem that black millennial culture — the center of black life — and the idea of black hope and opportunity are now squarely located in the South.”
4. What to Do With the Swastika in the Attic?
“It is actually pretty difficult to offload a swastika.”
5. What Gucci Can Teach the Democrats
“Consumers of clothing began to make choices dictated not by what was expected of them or what had been prescribed for them from head to toe by a brand whose value system they inherited, but by whatever fit them best — whatever felt most tailored to them individually — at that moment.”
6. What Do We Think Poverty Looks Like?
“In America, ‘real’ poverty is not about a lack of work, but a lack of compensation.”
7. One Thing Silicon Valley Can’t Seem to Fix
“The built environment of the Valley does not reflect the innovation that’s driving the region’s stratospheric growth; it looks instead like the 1950s.”
“Even the most remote marine ecosystems in the Central Pacific and the North Atlantic and around Antarctica are being radically altered as oceans warm and become more acidic.”
9. The West and What Comes After
“They were Western-educated Francophones who read deeply in the European canon, who believed in the ‘miracle of Greek civilization,’ who drew on Plato and Virgil and Pascal and Goethe. At the same time, they argued for their own race’s civilizational genius, for a negritude that turned a derogatory label into a celebration of African cultural distinctiveness.”
10. Tiptoeing (and Tweeting) Through the Tulips With DJ Khaled
“People say, ‘Respect your mother.’ I say, ‘Respect Mother Nature.’”
11. Laugh and the World Laughs With You. Type ‘Ha,’ Not So Much.
“These days, a HAHAHA versus a ha in a text can indicate the difference between ‘I’m dying laughing’ and ‘I literally never want to see you again.’”
12. Airlines Try Biometric Identification for Boarding and Bags
“Fliers who choose to try it out step up to a camera at the boarding gate for a quick photo. This image is matched with passport, visa or immigration photos in the Customs and Border Protection database, and once flight details and identity are confirmed, a check mark appears on the camera and fliers can board the plane.”
13. The History of the London Zoo
“Close to 90 percent of the animals now in large modern zoos are not snatched from their native habitat; they are the offspring of other zoo animals. They get excellent medical care and the right diet, but still what they experience is incarceration.”
14. America’s Top Prosecutors Used to Go After Top Executives. What Changed?
“Why was virtually no one prosecuted for causing the 2008 financial crisis, which devastated the global economy and cost the United States almost nine million jobs? Some people think the fix is in: Bankers control the government, so they can get away with anything. Others claim that the banks did nothing wrong to begin with — or, alternatively, that there was insufficient evidence to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that anyone in particular committed a crime. In this new book, the ProPublica reporter Jesse Eisinger tells a different story: Since the turn of the century, changes in the political landscape, the defense bar, the courts and most important the Justice Department have undermined both the ability and the resolve of America’s top prosecutors to go after corporations or their executives.”
15. Thoreau’s Wilderness Legacy, Beyond the Shores of Walden Pond
“In wildness is the preservation of the world.”
16. A New History of the Donner Party and the Dark Side of Manifest Destiny
“Here were a group of westward pioneers, the very picture of courage, resourcefulness and pluck, who ended up reduced to a level of squalor and barbarism almost beyond words.”
17. Do Grants, Professorships and Other Forms of Institutional Support Help Writers but Hurt Writing?
“There is an ever greater expansion of the bureaucratic demands made by institutions on writers in exchange for a salary as well as an insistent pressure to professionalize.”
18. Finding a More Inclusive Vision of Fitness in Our Feeds
“The fitness universe on Instagram is almost incomprehensibly vast — there are hundreds of millions of photographs with hashtags like #fitness, #workout, #fitfam, #fitnessjourney or #fitlife, featuring people in various states of undress, lifting weights, making and drinking shakes, demonstrating techniques and documenting inches and pounds lost, all alongside messages about staying motivated to hit the gym and eat right. It’s as inspiring and vapid as anything else on social media — and somehow manages to invoke awe and envy at the same time.”
19. How the Death of a MuslimRecruit Revealed a Culture of Brutality in the Marines
“‘Making’ Marines, as the corps calls recruit training, is a three-part process, with boot camp being the first and most grueling test. Its purpose, unlike Army boot camp, is not to train war-fighters; for Marines, that comes in the second and third phases of training. Boot camp is meant to create the ‘warrior spirit,’ as the corps puts it, over three months of group indoctrination intended to strip recruits of individuality and, through repeated exposure to pain and physical challenge, condition them to accept and perform violence.”
20. The Art at the End of the World
“Time turns metaphors into things.”
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