Avert your eyes! My Sunday morning look at incompetency, corruption and policy failures:
• The Military Recruiting Crisis: Even Veterans Don’t Want Their Children to Join: Pentagon scrambles to retain the main pipeline for new service members as disillusioned families steer young people away. (Wall Street Journal)
• Middle America’s ‘doom loop’ Work from home is crushing Midwestern downtowns (Business Insider) see also St. Louis Is the Struggling Downtown You Haven’t Heard Of — and Right-Wing Policies Are Making Things Worse. Empty storefronts dot most of the blocks around my downtown neighborhood these days and have overtaken some of them. Once a buzzy destination for shoppers and diners, downtown today frequently looks deserted, its visitors presumably repelled by reports of violent crime, homelessness and blight. Upper-floor offices, once packed with white-collar workers eager to hit the bars at quitting time, now sit mostly empty. The comforting sounds of sidewalk diners and live music that used to hum along with the traffic on summer nights has been replaced by sirens, or silence. (New York Times)
• The Low-Tech, High-Stakes World of Ripping Off Benefits Recipients: The technology that secures EBT cards is woefully outdated, allowing criminals to drain millions of dollars from accounts before the neediest people see a dime. (Businessweek)
• The Acceleration of the Age of the Idiot: The Main Question History Will Ask About Us Is: How Did Everything Get So Stupid, So Fast? (Eudaimonia)
• How Plastics Are Poisoning Us: They both release and attract toxic chemicals, and appear everywhere from human placentas to chasms thirty-six thousand feet beneath the sea. Will we ever be rid of them? (New Yorker)
• Rightwingers say ‘pink-haired liberals’ are killing New York pizza. Here’s what’s really happening: That’s the lie fueling the latest rightwing outrage cycle, in a distorted account of a commonsense air quality rule passed in New York City seven years ago. In reality, the rule, which soon takes effect, requires a handful of pizzerias to reduce the exhaust fumes that could harm neighbors, using a small air filter like those required at other New York City restaurants, which have been used by pizza shops in Italy for decades. (The Guardian)
• The Perils and Promises of Penis-Enlargement Surgery: One doctor’s Promethean quest to grow the male member is leaving some men desperate and disfigured. (New Yorker)
• How a Grad Student Uncovered the Largest Known Slave Auction in the U.S. Lauren Davila made a stunning discovery as a graduate student at the College of Charleston: an ad for a slave auction larger than any historian had yet identified. The find yields a new understanding of the enormous harm of such a transaction. (ProPublica)
• I did Alito’s ethics prep for his confirmation hearing. His new excuses are nonsense. Nearly 20 years later, I must ask: What happened? . (MSNBC) see also Alito in the hot seat over trips to Alaska and Rome he accepted from groups and individuals who lobby the Supreme Court: Concerns about ethics and transparency at the Supreme Court have been reignited this week after Justice Samuel Alito acknowledged attending a luxury fishing trip on the private jet of a conservative hedge fund manager. (CNN)
• Nearly half of US honeybee colonies died last year. America’s honeybee hives just staggered through the second highest death rate on record, with beekeepers losing nearly half of their managed colonies, an annual bee survey found. (AP)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview with Ilana Weinstein, founder and chief executive officer of IDW Group, the top recruiter of fund managers and traders for many of the largest hedge funds. She previously worked at Goldman Sachs and Boston Consulting Group, and holds degrees from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Business School.
The impact of affirmative action at the University of California
Source: The Guardian
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