The rollout of Google Buzz has raised serious privacy concerns, as well as serious concerns about the company’s pervasiveness and our dependency on it, as Nancy Scola wrote for TAP recently. Now, some of those concerns have led to a class-action lawsuit against the company in California, according to the Christian Science Monitor. A woman […]
Monica Potts
Monica Potts is a former senior writer at The American Prospect. She is working on a book about low-income women in her rural Arkansas hometown. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, New York, Vogue.com, The Daily Beast, The Trace, and Democracy.
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Getting Students Through High School.
Eight states will start allowing students to go to community college after they finish 10th grade, as long as they pass certain tests, reports the New York Times. The plan would allow students who want to stay to prepare for more selective schools in the 11th and 12th grades, and students who fail get opportunities […]
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What Matters on the Economy.
The New York Times has two stories today on the stimulus package, now a year old. One is an analysis from David Leonhardt on how the stimulus has actually worked pretty well. It’s just hard for the average American to tell because President Obama oversold it a tad — how else would he get Congress […]
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Arguing Against the Facts.
Megan McArdle has been questioning the benefits of health insurance and has been attacked for some pretty lazy reasoning. The basis of her argument is that one study showed there wasn’t a big difference in mortality when 64-year-olds go on Medicare — and that somehow shows having health insurance doesn’t provide much benefit. Now, after […]
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How Much Does Bayh Matter?
Not only did Evan Bayh rob Democrats of a sure election bet for Indiana, but he did it in such a way they’ll have a hard time recovering: The senator announced his resignation days away from a deadline to qualify for the primary ballot and without informing senior Democratic leadership. Nate Silver points out how […]
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How Much Should a Government Employee Make?
Sen. Scott Brown is the latest to mount an attack on “lavish” federal wages. It’s yet another version of the conservative attack on government.
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Funding Teacher Training.
Teach for America is poised to lose its dedicated $18 million grant from the federal government and will instead have to compete for a bigger pool of money with other organizations that train teachers, reports the Washington Post today. The Department of Education presents the proposal as a good thing for the nonprofit, since they […]
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Paying Too Well?
ProPublica shouldn’t pay so well. At least, that’s the argument it sounds like Felix Salmon is trying to make over at Reuters today regarding a ProPublica advertisement for an intern to make $700 per week. He extrapolates that salary rate for the 12-week internship into what it would mean annually, about $36,000. The problem with […]
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Feeding the Poor.
The number of people on food stamps has been increasing nationwide, reports The New York Times. The growth comes not just through increased need but also through government outreach and promotion of the nutrition program on behalf of states. And the trend began way before the recent downturn: The revival began a decade ago, after […]
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Being Poor in the Suburbs.
Last month, Brookings released a report that showed poverty on the rise in suburbs, especially in the Midwest — now, suburbs have the largest share of the nation’s poor. Suburbs often don’t have the same same level of services that many cities do, and the absence of things like good public transportation alongside the collapse […]
