avert your eyes! My Sunday morning examine incompetence, corruption and political failures:
• The Military Recruitment Crisis: Even Veterans Don’t Want Their Children to Join Them: Pentagon scrambles to keep mainline pipeline for new service members as disillusioned families drive youngsters away. (the wall street journal)
• Central America’s ‘catastrophic loop’ Working from home is crushing downtowns across the Midwest (Business Intern) see also St. Louis is the struggling downtown you’ve never heard of — and right-wing politics are making it worse. Empty storefronts dot most of the blocks in my downtown neighborhood these days and have overtaken some. Once a bustling destination for shoppers and diners, today the city center often seems deserted, its visitors presumably repelled by reports of violent crime, homelessness and plagues. Upstairs offices, once filled with white-collar workers eager to hit the bars when quitting, are now mostly empty. The comforting sounds of diners on the sidewalk and live music that buzzed with traffic on summer nights were replaced by sirens or silence. (New York Times)
• The low-tech, high-stakes world of benefits recipients: The technology that secures EBT cards is woefully outdated, allowing criminals to drain millions of dollars from accounts before those most in need see a dime. (business week)
• The Acceleration of the Age of the Idiot: The main question the story will ask about us is: how did it all get so stupid and so fast? (Eudaimonia)
• How plastics are poisoning us: They both release and attract toxic chemicals and appear everywhere, from human placentas to sinkholes thirty-six thousand feet under the sea. Will we ever be rid of them? (New Yorker)
• Right-wingers say “pink-haired liberals” are killing New York pizza. Here’s what’s really going on: That’s the lie fueling the latest cycle of right-wing outrage, in a twisted account of a common-sense clean air rule passed in New York City seven years ago. In fact, the rule, which will soon go into effect, requires a handful of pizzerias to reduce exhaust fumes that could harm neighbors, using a small air filter like those required at other restaurants in New York, which were used by pizzerias in Italy. for decades. (The Guardian)
• The Perils and Promise of Penis Enlargement Surgery: A doctor’s Promethean quest to grow the male member leaves some men desperate and disfigured. (New Yorker)
• How a graduate student discovered the largest known slave auction in the United States. Lauren Davila made a startling discovery while a graduate student at the College of Charleston: an advertisement for a larger slave auction than any historian had yet identified. The discovery gives 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. Almost 20 years later, I have to ask: what happened? . (MSNBC) see also Alito in the hot seat during trips to Alaska and Rome, he accepted groups and individuals who lobby the Supreme Court: Concerns about ethics and transparency at the Supreme Court were reignited this week after Justice Samuel Alito admitted to attending a luxury fishing trip on a conservative hedge fund manager’s private jet. (CNN)
• Nearly half of America’s bee colonies died last year. American bee hives just hit the second-highest death rate on record, with beekeepers losing nearly half of their managed colonies, according to an annual bee survey. (PA)
Be sure to check out our Masters in Business interview with Ilana Weinstein, Founder and CEO of IDW Group, the leading recruiter of fund managers and traders for many of the biggest hedge funds. She previously worked at Goldman Sachs and Boston Consulting Group, and is a graduate of 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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