Quotes from Annie Lowrey

Americans have become more atomized by education, income, and political leanings. That polarization has meant sharply increased antipathy toward people with different beliefs.

The country should not have to wonder whether politicians' stock trades were corrupt. It should not have to think about politicians' portfolios at all.

In general, more affordable housing correlates with lower income inequality.

Fighting recessions and building public infrastructure, including care, health, and educational infrastructure - this should not be the work of citizens. When it is, let's acknowledge that's a tragedy.

Conspiracy theories themselves are big business, of course, selling books, videos, conferences, and all kinds of merch. Then there is the economy that promotes conspiracy theories to sell goods such as supplements, survival gear, and yes, bunkers.

Fires in California and Oregon are incinerating homes, businesses, schools, power lines, and roads. Hurricanes in the Gulf Coast are swamping mobile homes and carrying away cars and livestock. The United States faces the potential task of relocating towns and cities and fortifying others, trapped in an endless cycle of destruction and rebuilding.

Millions of Millennials and Gen Zers were never exposed to the threats of the Soviet Union; they did not live through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the reforms of Mikhail Gorbachev; they do not remember the Mariel boatlift or the SALT treaties or the Cuban missile crisis.

The Paycheck Protection Program created in the CARES Act did help many small businesses keep employees on their books in the early days of the pandemic. But many small firms are ailing now; the hospitality industry has been decimated; and state and local governments are shedding workers.

The bunker business is just one instantiation, the grandest instantiation, of what you might think of as conspiracy capitalism.

Student loans are delaying retirements. They're suppressing the housing market. They're suffocating new business formation. They're even leading young people to delay getting married and having children.

Older people still see socialism and communism as dangerous, authoritarian political systems, whereas younger people are more likely to see them as economic systems, and to care far less one way or another.

Kids of the 1980s and 1990s have had a new, huge, financially catastrophic demand on their meager post-recession earnings, too: a trillion dollars of educational debt. About a quarter of Gen Xers who went to college took out loans to do so, compared with half of Millennials.

After moving to California, I went on a no-buy streak. I began refusing short plane trips, using public transit or walking whenever possible, and turning the air-conditioning down. I even started carrying around a water bottle or a mason jar.

Social networks, professional networks, offices, and schools help keep high earners in place.

At a personal level, there's ample evidence that being aware of your emotions and generous to yourself improves your physical and mental health, as well as your relationships with others.

An explosion of meat-replacement products has followed the path set by almond milk in the past few years, not just tempeh- or seitan- or soy-based products that taste nothing like meat, but meat simulacra.

Millennials are worth less on paper than members of older generations are, and are worth less on paper than members of older generations were at the same point in their lives.

In Opportunity Zones, as they are called, investors will receive huge tax breaks for building office parks, warehouses, housing, grocery stores, and the like, helping to ease poverty and end blight in distressed communities.

Making a paper straw requires growing a tree, cutting it down, and pulping and pressing it into a tube. Manufacturers then use fossil fuels to ship the straws to stores and cafes. Many paper straws on the market are not even compostable or recyclable, as promised.

The rise of populist movements and the shrinking of the middle class - with all the economic pain and political turbulence that comes with that - seems to have increased the appetite of both parties for dramatic proposals.

As smoking has disappeared from television screens, planes, bars and restaurants, and other public spaces, the smoking rate has dropped to a third of its peak of 45 percent in the mid-1950s.

Recessions are never good for anyone. A sputtering economy means miserable financial, emotional, and physical-health consequences for everyone from infants to retirees.

For animals, for humans, for the planet: It makes sense to curb meat consumption, and that is something vegans and omnivores agree on. Roughly two-thirds of Americans report reducing their meat consumption, and many are sensitive to the way their diet might be damaging the planet.

But for labor groups, there is no debate: Nafta hurt American jobs and household earnings.