2.28 Derek Thompson in The Atlantic: In 1980, the highest-earning men actually worked fewer hours per week than middle-class and low-income men, according to a survey by the Minneapolis Fed. But that’s changed. By 2005, the richest 10 percent of married men had the longest average workweek. In that same time, college-educated men reduced their leisure time more than any other group. Today, it is fair to say that elite American men have transformed themselves into the world’s premier workaholics, toiling longer hours than both poorer men in the U.S. and rich men in similarly rich countries. . . “We’ve created this idea that the meaning of life should be found in work,” says Oren Cass, the author of the book The Once and Future Worker. “We tell young people that their work should be their passion. ‘Don’t give up until you find a job that you love!’ we say. ‘You should be changing the world!’ we tell them. That is the message in commencement addresses, in pop culture, and frankly, in media, including The Atlantic.” But our desks were never meant to be our altars. The modern labor force evolved to serve the needs of consumers and capitalists, not to satisfy tens of millions of people seeking transcendence at the office. It’s hard to self-actualize on the job if you’re a cashier—one of the most common occupations in the U.S.—and even the best white-collar roles have long periods of stasis, boredom, or busywork. This mismatch between expectations and reality is a recipe for severe disappointment, if not outright misery, and it might explain why rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S. are “substantially higher” than they were in the 1980s, according to a 2014 study.
2.28 The World Bank examined 35 indicators of legal equality in 187 countries, covering everything from property ownership and inheritance laws to job protections and pension policies, along with rules governing marriage, movement and travel, pay, and personal safety. It found that men and women are completely equal, legally speaking, in just six countries: Belgium, Denmark, France, Latvia, Luxembourg, and Sweden, up from none a decade ago.
2.28 From UCLA’s Anderson School of Management: Free time correlates with happiness. Working people are happiest when they have 2.5 hours of time a day to themselves.
2.28 Subtract the stress of struggling to pay bills from the equation, and the presence of children tends to bring parents happiness. “It’s not that children make you unhappy,” says Dartmouth College economist David Blanchflower. “It’s the fact that they bring lots of expenses and difficulties.
2.28 The Philadelphia Phillies signed free-agent rightfielder Bryce Harper had reportedly signed the most lucrative contract in American sports history, agreeing to pay him $330 million for 13 years.
2.28 Trump walked away from a nuclear deal with Kim Jong Un
2.27 Prior to Cohen‘s testimony, Florida Gongresman Matt Gaetz sent a threatening tweet: “Hey [Michael Cohen] – Do your wife & father-in-law know about your girlfriends?” he asked in the since-deleted post. Maybe tonight would be a good time for that chat. I wonder if she’ll remain faithful when you’re in prison. She’s about to learn a lot .”
2.28 Washington Post: Michael Cohen’s Wednesday hearing before the House Oversight Committee was explosive not for what was new — but, depressingly, what was not new to anyone watching this administration with clear eyes. The takeaway: President Trump is a liar with a defective character — and, possibly, a criminal.
2.27 Responding to Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.), who had introduced a black woman who had formerly worked for President Trump to show that Trump is not racist, Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) said “It is insensitive … the fact that someone would actually use a prop, a black woman in this chamber, in this committee, is alone racist in itself.” The next day they hugged it out
2.27 Corroborating allegations previously revealed in court documents, Cohen said Mr. Trump was deeply involved in the felony campaign finance violation to which Mr. Cohen pleaded guilty in a Manhattan courtroom. Mr. Cohen said Mr. Trump asked him to pay adult-film star Stormy Daniels $130,000 shortly before the 2016 election to keep her silent about an alleged affair. Mr. Cohen provided a copy of a check, signed by the president, reimbursing him for the illegal payoff. “I am going to jail in part because of my decision to help Mr. Trump hide that payment from the American people before they voted a few days later,” Mr. Cohen said. “He knew about everything.”
2.27 Charles Pierce in Esquire: “This was a vivid look into the chronic ward of the prion disease that has eaten away the higher functions of American conservatism—and, thus, those of the Republican Party as well—since Ronald Reagan first served up the monkey brains almost 40 years ago. These are the complete creatures of the talk-show culture, the perfect products of two and three generations of gerrymandered in-breeding. These are the monsters from inside The Bubble. You could see this moment coming during the Obama years, in which the country returned the two worst Congresses in American history, full to the gunwales with Bible-banging crazy people. Sooner or later, this was going to be all that was left, and it was going to have to confront a serious crisis with unserious people. That’s what Wednesday was about.”
2.27 In testimony before Congress, Michael Cohen casts Trump as a ‘racist’ and ‘con man, says he knew in advance about WikiLeaks email dump
2.26 After a 65-hour, 2,500-mile train journey from Pyongyang to the Dong Dang train station at Vietnam’s border with China, North Korean leader Kim Jong Un disembarked from his personal armored train ahead of his summit with President Trump.
2.25 Michael Gerson in the Post: A friend on a long car trip took the opportunity of listening to conservative talk radio along the way. He reported: “Right-wing talk radio is using language that can’t get much more apocalyptic. It’s all about coups, and Mueller as a Soviet-style prosecutor, and the left wanting to destroy America, and off-the-charts rage at the media.” The ruling ideology of the Trump era, it seems, is not populism but catastrophism. Trump’s intellectual vanguard, though puny in number, makes up for it in hyperventilation.
2.25 Gabriel Zucman, Berkeley economist quoted in Post: “ What the data show is that wealth concentration in the United States has returned to the level of 1920. Forty percent of total household wealth belongs to the top 1 percent. About 20 percent belongs to the top 0.1 percent, which is about the same as the bottom 90 percent’s wealth share. What’s happening in the United States is pretty unique among developed countries. . . . The growing realization that wealth concentration has returned to Gilded Age levels is the primary reason why we see these proposals for increased tax progressivity, and why we’re finally having a debate about wealth taxation.
2.25 Steve Coll writes in The New Yorker Nearly half the 700,000 people held in 3,000 U.S. jails — usually awaiting bail — suffer from some kind of mental illness,
2.25 Jennifer Rubin on Kamala Harris: let’s face it, she has some of that “it” — the smile, the joyous laugh, the ability to intersperse inspiration with policy responses.
2.25 Alva Johnson, a former staffer on Donald Trump’s presidential campaign, says he kissed her without her consent outside a rally in Florida in August 2016, “I immediately felt violated because I wasn’t expecting it or wanting it. I can still see his lips coming straight for my face.” Trump grabbed Johnson’s hand and tried to kiss her on the lips as he exited an RV outside a rally in Tampa
2.25 Olivia Colman: “My kids, if you’re home and watching — well, if not, well done. But I sort of hope you are. This is not going to happen again.”
2.25 Javier Bardem: “There are no borders or walls that can restrain ingenuity and talent”
2.25 Green Book wins Best Picture. Rami Malek, Olivia Colman, Regina King and Mahershala Ali get acting awards. Highlights: Queen’s opening, Gaga-Cooper duet, Fey/Pohler/Rudolph jokes, Melissa McCarthy- Brian Tyree Henry costume presentation
2.23 Jussie Smollett placed under arrest
2.23 Mueller calls Manafort “a hardened criminal”
2.23 Khloe, Kendall and Kourtney Kardashian, via TMZ
2.23 Albany
2.22 Albany
2.22 Patriots owner Robert Kraft was charged in Jupiter, Fla., on two counts of soliciting prostitution. Kraft is charged in connection to a recent investigation in Florida massage parlors that were used for prostitution and human trafficking. Several other massage parlors were raided by police on Tuesday as part of an investigation over the past six months. The spa’s owner, Hua Zhang, was also among those arrested. Kraft is one of 25 people who will face charges. Police said video evidence shows Kraft involved in sex acts at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa.
2.22 Charles Barkley on TNT: “America, let me just tell you something. Do not commit crimes with checks. If you’re gonna break the law, do not write a check. … Get cash, man. Do not write checks when you commit illegal activity.”
2.18 Axios: American women are more educated than ever, But in a surprising twist, the workforce participation rate for women has plateaued and even fallen over the past few years,
2.18 The Economist: “Socialism is storming back because it has formed an incisive critique of what has gone wrong in Western societies. Whereas politicians on the right have all too often given up the battle of ideas and retreated towards chauvinism and nostalgia, the left has focused on inequality, the environment, and how to vest power in citizens rather than elites.”
2.16 HuffPost: Demolition followed after the Diocese of Scranton was unable to sell the historic, century-old St. Joseph’s Church in Nanticoke, once a popular worship site for Slovak families who had come to work the mines
2.15 Trump soins funding bill, averts a second shutdown, declares an emergency in order to build the wall.
2.15 Max Boot in the Post: These are the unspoken assumptions about what a president is and is not supposed to do. It was never thought necessary to write down that the president should behave in a dignified manner, avoid conflicts of interest or not misuse his emergency powers for political purposes. But Trump is colossally ignorant and contemptuous of the way his predecessors have acted. Unconstrained by morality or tradition, he is systematically redefining the presidency in a style that owes more to Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban than to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. Some of the norms he is violating appear minor, but their collective impact is substantial. Until two years ago, for example, there was an expectation that presidents would work hard and pay serious attention to their intelligence briefings. Trump, by contrast, routinely blocks off 8 a.m. to 11 a.m. as “executive time,” and “rarely if ever reads the President’s Daily Brief” prepared by the intelligence community.
2.14 Washington Post: Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, has found a precipitous decline in romantic interest among young people in what she calls “iGen,” the post-millennial generation growing up since just before the turn of the century. She notes in her research that while 85 percent of Generation X and baby boomers went on dates as high school seniors, the percentage of high school seniors who went on dates in 2015 had fallen to 56 percent. I asked my son, a junior in college, if this matched his experience. His matter-of-fact reply: “No one dates.” It’s not just iGen; millennials are living more loveless lives as well. According to the General Social Survey, from 1989 to 2016, the percentage of married people in their 20s fell from 32 percent to 19 percent. And lest you think they are forgoing marriage but not sex, note that the percentage of 20-somethings who had no sex in the past year rose by half over the same period, from 12 percent to 18 percent. Not surprisingly, Valentine’s Day celebrations reflect the change. According to a 2015 survey from the pet health company VetIQ, 69 percent of American pet owners reported planning to give their pets a Valentine’s Day gift. In contrast, only 61 percent planned to give a gift to a spouse or significant other.
2.14 Congress passes funding compromise
2.13 Amazon pulls out of New York deal
2.9 In 2017, 39% of U.S. heterosexual relationships and 65% of same-sex relationships began online, according to Stanford research.
