Tag Archives: The Atlantic

Real estate should be treated as consumption, not investment.

By Jerusalem Demsas, December 20, 2022

[Editor’s Note: I’m not sure on this one; perhaps…]

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an American in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a mortgage. I don’t know if you should buy a house. Nor am I inclined to give you personal financial advice. But I do think you should be wary of the mythos that accompanies the American institution of homeownership, and of a political environment that touts its advantages while ignoring its many drawbacks.

Renting is for the young or financially irresponsible—or so they say. Homeownership is a guarantee against a lost job, against rising rents, against a medical emergency. It is a promise to your children that you can pay for college or a wedding or that you can help them one day join you in the vaunted halls of the ownership society. In America, homeownership is not just owning a dwelling and the land it resides on; it is a piggy bank, where the bottom 50 percent of the country (by wealth distribution) stores most of its wealth. And it is not a natural market phenomenon. It is propped up by numerous government interventions, including the 30-year fixed-rate mortgage. America has put a lot of weight on this one institution’s shoulders. Too much.

Source: The Homeownership Society Was a Mistake – The Atlantic

Current Affairs, Politics, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing

The Dark Heart of the Republican Party – The Atlantic

November 4, 2022 DrWeb

Embracing the politics of sadism, the GOP base hits a new low.

By Tom Nichols, November 1, 2022

*Nancy Pelosi with her husband, Paul Pelosi, in 2019 in Washington, DC. (Zach Gibson / Getty)*

A Spreading Cancer

It might seem late in the game to point to any one event as a final or conclusive moment in the decline of the Republican Party. And I have no doubt that if the GOP returns to power this winter, its worst members will find new ways to appall decent people while gamboling about in jester’s bells for its base. (As my Atlantic colleague Adam Serwer has put it so well, “The cruelty is the point.”)

But the reaction among Republican elected officials and their conservative-media life-support system to the beating of Paul Pelosi—by a man named David DePape, who was charged with attempting to kidnap Speaker Nancy Pelosi and admitted to planning to torture her—feels different.

I am not alone; my friend Mona Charen, among others, also senses that this event marks a new level of depravity in the GOP. I have struggled for a few days to decide why, exactly, this moment seems like an inflection point.

In terms of actual damage, January 6 was far worse than one violent crime in San Francisco. Republican leaders—and here I will leave aside Donald Trump, who is in a class of hideousness all by himself—have said far worse things over the past five years. But a parade of Republicans somehow think that an unhinged, hammer-wielding intruder putting an old man in the ICU is funny.

Source: The Dark Heart of the Republican Party – The Atlantic

Books & Reading, Love & Relationships, Pleasures, Science & Health

What Do Dogs Know About Us? – The Atlantic

September 18, 2022 DrWeb

Man’s best friend is surprisingly skilled at getting inside your head.

By Alexandra Horowitz, September 16, 2022

Quid and I have struck a deal. Every morning she flies up the stairs, leaps onto our bed, and attacks my nose with her sharp little teeth. And I am awakened.

Oh wait, no; we don’t have a deal. She just does that. It is vexing and charming at once. Just at the moment of nose-attack I can smell the sleep collected on her breath and fur. It mingles with the odor of the other dogs in the room and is beginning to smell, to me, like home. It has been six months since she left her natal litter of 10 siblings and joined our family of three humans, two dogs, and one cat.

*This article has been excerpted from Alexandra Horowitz’s forthcoming book, *The Year of the Puppy: How Dogs Become Themselves* (Viking)*

And it has been a few months since she went from being a very young puppy to an adolescent, her brain trailing her body in development. Recently, she has become more interested in contact of any sort with us. She minds where we are, beating a hasty path after us if we rise from a chair to leave the room, sometimes licking our ankles as we go. She lies next to me on the couch, her body contorted to maximize body-to-body contact.

Source: https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2022/09/what-dogs-know-about-people/671454/

Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Love & Relationships, Memories & History, Politics, Science & Health, Times They Are A-Changing

How to Get Men to Share the Mental Load – The Atlantic

July 3, 2022 DrWeb

In many households, men think like helpers and women think like managers. A gender expert’s new book suggests ways for couples to escape that dynamic.

By Joe Pinsker, June 28, 2022

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.

One of the exasperating features of everyday gender inequality is that couples can be aware of imbalances in doing housework, state a dislike of them, and yet fall right into them anyway.

The discrepancy shows up most obviously in the amount of time men and women spend on tasks such as cleaning and caregiving, including when both work full-time.

Yet even many couples who pride themselves on a fair distribution of duties aren’t so balanced when it comes to carrying the harder-to-quantify “mental load,” the taxing work of managing a household and anticipating its many needs.

(Same-sex couples tend to be more egalitarian, but can end up in lopsided arrangements as well.)

Today, men in different-sex relationships contribute more than they did in the 1960s and ’70s (a low bar), but often take on a “helper” role under the “manager” role of their female partner, who’s saddled with noticing what must be done.

The job of noticing is a recurring theme of Equal Partners: Improving Gender Equality at Home, a new book by Kate Mangino, a gender expert who works with international nonprofits. Mangino is aware of how American society could be made more equitable among genders—say, with paid parental leave and universally affordable child care. But she recognizes that individual couples have households to oversee now, and offers tactics for couples to bust out of that irksome helper/manager dynamic.

Source: How to Get Men to Share t he Mental Load – The Atlantic

Arts & Humanities, Books & Reading, Current Affairs, Libraries, Memories & History, Pleasures

The Organization of Your Bookshelves Tells Its Own Story – The Atlantic

June 20, 2022 DrWeb

The complexity of the human heart can be expressed in the arrangement of one’s books.

By Leslie Kendall Dye, June 19, 2022, 7 AM ET

My father loved books more than anything else in the world. He owned about 11,000 of them at the time of his death, in March of 2021, at 83 years old.

There were books in his living room and bedroom, books in the hallways and closets and kitchen. Sometimes I stop in the center of my own home like a bird arrested in flight, entranced by the books that line my walls. I live in a small Manhattan apartment, and I, too, have books in the living room, the bedroom, the hallway, the closets.

Often, I stare at them because I’m puzzling over their geography. I wonder if I’ve placed any book in the wrong spot, according to an emotional map I’ve made of my bookshelves. As I gaze at the titles, the associations come tumbling out.

Tennessee Williams’s Memoirs is next to a biography of Patrick Dennis called Uncle Mame, because Williams and Dennis had many things in common: Pathos. Cruel fathers. Spectacular female characters. A Dictionary of Yiddish Slang & Idioms is next to Heartburn because, however secular Nora Ephron was, her humor comes from deep within her Jewishness.

The Lord of the Rings is between Time and Again and Rosemary’s Baby because I like how they form a triumvirate of fantasy stories that have nothing in common save my personal opinion that they are the finest of their genre. (Many would argue that Rosemary’s Baby belongs in horror, not fantasy, but my system allows for the blurring of these lines.)

Source: The Organization of Your Bookshelves Tells Its Own Story – The Atlantic

Memories & History, Politics, Times They Are A-Changing

The Real Villain in the Gentrification Story – The Atlantic

June 18, 2022 DrWeb

It’s not young, upwardly mobile college grads.

By Jerusalem Demsas, June 16, 2022

*Photo by Nicolas Economou / NurPhoto / Getty*

About the author: Jerusalem Demsas is a staff writer at The Atlantic.

One of the worst labels that can be applied to an upwardly mobile urban dweller is that of gentrifier. The word implies a lot—for one, that culpability in the broad phenomenon of neighborhood change can be assigned to individuals.

But given that the insult is often slung back and forth among members of the same yuppie class living in the same formerly affordable neighborhoods, it sometimes serves less to suggest that one’s housing choices have led to displacement of minority or low-income residents, and more to insinuate that one is insufficiently progressive.

On Twitter recently, quips by a couple of large accounts about how San Francisco had been ruined by tech millionaires spiraled into a fight among people of various shades of political opinion, from “extremely left wing” all the way to “very liberal,” about the evils of gentrification.

Inevitably, it devolved into a familiar argument over who really gets to speak for low-income people of color.

Source: The Real Villain in the Gentrification Story – The Atlantic

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Real estate should be treated as consumption, not investment.

For Sharing

Embracing the politics of sadism, the GOP base hits a new low.

For Sharing

Man’s best friend is surprisingly skilled at getting inside your head.

For Sharing

In many households, men think like helpers and women think like managers. A gender expert’s new book suggests ways for couples to escape that dynamic.

For Sharing

The complexity of the human heart can be expressed in the arrangement of one’s books.

For Sharing

It’s not young, upwardly mobile college grads.

For Sharing

all things library and life.. from a librarian