What is behind this big shift toward income inequality in New York? Income trends in the city represent an amplified version of our national problems: low-wage jobs without benefits are replacing middle-wage jobs that could support families. Nationwide, middle-wage jobs constituted 60 percent of the jobs lost during the Great Recession and only 22 percent […]

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(Source: Too Much) The future just keeps getting brighter for Americans with unique specialties. Randy Stearns has one such specialty: “home-tech integration.” Stearns helps people install and maintain high-tech gadgets. But we’re not talking “geek squad” and hooking up home networks here. We’re talking rich people—and electronic toys that can cost more than houses. This […]

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(New “Mad Men” Sergey Brin and Larry Page | Source: Creative Commons) The British humorist Douglas Adams once summed up the trajectory of computers and the internet in four teleological sentences: “First, we thought the PC was a calculator. Then we found out how to turn numbers into letters with ASCII—and we thought it was […]

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(Source: Pew) The lobby is reeling. Reports from Capitol Hill reveal that AIPAC’s big lobbying day for war with Syria changed no votes. Not one. Meanwhile two of its closest allies, Sen. Ben Cardin and Rep. Henry Waxman changed their position on bombing from “yes” to undecided. Another, Rep. Alan Grayson, is the leader of […]

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The news of Steve Ballmer’s planned retirement next year, announced last month, brought the Microsoft CEO’s critics out of the woodwork. He was widely skewered as the beneficiary of “the luckiest dorm-room assignment in history”—down the hall from Bill Gates when both were Harvard undergrads. Vanity Fair business writer Kurt Eichenwald called Ballmer’s watch at […]

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