The World Beyond BetterMost > The Culture Tent
In the New Yorker...
serious crayons:
I'm a Meghan Daum fan, but I didn't make it through the whole essay.
serious crayons:
I started gong through my old New Yorkers tonight to recycle them. I didn't even make it through the whole pile, which contained issues as old as Sept. 2013.
I kept ripping out articles I wanted to read. Not all of them duty articles, either! Now I'll staple those and keep them in a pile and they'll just sit there gathering dust while I don't get around to reading them.
No -- somehow I vow to find time to read at least some of them! Some looked pretty good!
Jeff Wrangler:
I took an issue with me to read when I had dinner out Saturday night. Turned out my waiter is also a reader, and a big fan of Jill Lepore. :D
Jeff Wrangler:
I'm enjoying Peter Hessler's story (Oct. 13) about his trash collector in Cairo.
serious crayons:
--- Quote from: Jeff Wrangler on October 16, 2014, 10:56:45 pm ---I'm enjoying Peter Hessler's story (Oct. 13) about his trash collector in Cairo.
--- End quote ---
I need to go back and find this. At first glance, I dismissed it as a bit too "duty." (Sorry to sound so xenophobic, but "takes place on foreign soil" is one of the factors I associate with duty.) But I've heard it praised in several places now, so I will definitely give it a try.
I, meanwhile, am reading the article about fast-food workers trying to unionize, which is less duty than you might think. Their working conditions really are awful, and the ratio between the earnings of fast-food CEOs and the line workers is like 900-something to 1, which is outlandish even by American standards -- in the construction industry, for example, it's 90-something to 1. (I once read that Japanese CEOs consider it a mark of shame if they make more than maybe 30 times their employees, and even in the earlier days of the United States the ratio was something like 20 or 30 to 1.) $15 an hour may sound like a lot to earn for working at McDonald's, but in constant dollars it's about what fast-food workers made 30 years ago.
(All of the numbers in the above paragraph rely on my memory and are approximate at best.)
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