I think the heat-drunk garter snake living in our mail box is an omen. As I lower the battered cover and reach gingerly inside to get our mail, I wonder if the battered mailbox itself isn’t an artifact of a bygone era. The iconic US Postal system is bankrupt. Its valiant history calls up the pony express, postmen and women bearing parcels trudging through knee-deep Christmas snows, country stores with mailboxes on the wall. Could this all be history? Should it be? It makes little sense for thousands of postal workers to drive cars or vans, or push handcarts to every doorstep in America six days a week to deliver a handful of catalogs, magazines, credit card offers, sale flyers …
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There are many events in our lives that forge us as human beings, but in general, childhood play, early work, and exposure to death are among the most important. As a new grandfather, I’ve been thinking a lot about child-rearing, how it has changed and professionalized in a way that leaves many of our young adults pasteurized and ill-prepared for the germ warfare that is life on earth. We are prepared for life not so much by how we are raised, but by the examples our parents set for us, and by the risks we are encouraged to manage ourselves. The professionalization of child-rearing: the blogs, the books, the child-proofing specialists all ensure that our children will survive childhood, but …
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Labor Day is the last, long weekend of summer and a signal that it’s time to get back to work….that is if one has work, which takes us to the real meaning of Labor Day. Labor Day began unofficially in 1882 and was formally recognized as a federal holiday in 1894. It was a conciliatory outreach to organized labor after the lethal Pullman Strike in which federal marshals killed more than a dozen workers. We have little overt labor violence today , but labor’s once strong role in capitalism is now diminished. Official unemployment stands at 9%. Actual unemployment is almost double that according to the Washington Post. Other sources put the number broadly at one in five unemployed. There …
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At a dinner party several years ago, a woman of a certain age introduced herself to me and initiated an artful flirtation that eventuated in a warm friendship, not just with me but with my wife. The age-old art of flirting is at grave risk in this new age of accelerated “hooking up” and “friends with benefits.” In fact, we may be losing the underlying allure of healthy eroticism. A friend of ours, a former photographic editor of New York Magazine, recently produced a coffee table book that posed this question somewhat differently but effectively. It’s a collection of porn film stars standing nude on the left page and posed elegantly clothed on the right. Without making the question explicit, …
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Question… should political candidates take ideological pledges? If they do, don’t they then compromise their future leadership options? Leadership, after all, is about the agility of decision-making in real time in the face of real and often unpredictable trends, events or crises. Two oaths or pledges in current fashion are the Pro-Life Leadership Presidential Pledge retailed by the Susan B. Anthony List, a group that raises money for anti-abortion candidates. Then there is the Grover Norquist – led Americans for Tax Reform whose anti-tax pledge that punishes GOP legislators who either take the pledge and then renege or waffle or who fail to take the pledge at all. The Pro Life pledge commits signers ” to select only pro-life appointees …
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According to The Washington Post and other sources, executive compensation at the nation’s largest firms has quadrupled in real terms since the 1970’s even as pay for 90% of Americans has been flat. In 1975, the top tenth of one percent earned 2.5% of the nation’s income, including capital gains. By 2008, that share had quadrupled and stood at more than ten percent. To bring this home, executives at Dean Foods earn ten times what they earned in 1970 while their average workers earn 9% less for the same period. Meanwhile, Vermont farmers who supply the Dean enterprise have, until recently, been selling their milk for less than the price of production. Executive compensation in America is an international embarrassment. …
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Many of society’s future creative endeavors will have no physical medium, raising questions about how those among us who choose some artform as a vocation will make a living. Let’s look at what has happened in just a few decades. The brave new world of cloud-sourced media will be better for the planet as it eliminates media manufacturing and preserves resources used to create and transport media. The book industry traditionally pulps 50% of what it manufactures, a model of manufacturing inefficiency. But what will be the impact of all this change on creative endeavor? Prior to the 20th century, music was performed and enjoyed only in live performance. Then came the cylinder, 78 RPM, 45, LP, and CD. Of …
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Picture this…..Vermont abandons many of its under-funded, often poorly conceived fix-it initiatives in favor of a single strategic one. Investments largely wasted on economic development, various consumer and business subsidies, some tourism marketing, childcare, workforce training, over-incarceration and the like would be diverted to building the finest post-natal through post-graduate educational system in the world. Such a commitment would lay the groundwork for durable economic prosperity through increased in-migration, technology transfer, entrepreneurial startups, reduced economic crime, fuller employment and salary growth. The move from childcare to early education, already in progress, would ready children for a demanding educational system and workplace. We already have a jump on most states. Our educational outcomes are indeed better, though still far below those …
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