Browsing PBH By Articles

What Guide Books Say About The United States

The Article: Welcome to America, Please Be On Time: What Guide Books Tell Foreign Visitors to the U.S. by Max Fisher in The Atlantic.

The Text: The United States is the second greatest tourist draw in the world, with 60-million-plus visitors in 2010 alone (France, number one, attracted almost 80 million). Flipping through a few of the many English-language tourist guides provides a fascinating, if non-scientific and narrow, window into how people from the outside world perceive America, Americans, and the surprises and pitfalls of spending time here.

Of the many pieces of advice proffered, four of the most common are: eat with your fingers (sometimes), arrive on time (always), don’t drink and drive (they take it seriously here!), and be careful about talking politics (unless you’ve got some time to spare). But they say more than that.

One of the first things you notice in picking up Lonely Planet USA or Rough Guides: The USA or reading WikiTravel’s United States of America page, as I did (traditional guides such as Fodor’s or Frommer’s are more circumspect and not nearly as interesting), is the surprising frankness in discussing the warts of American history and society. The destruction of native communities and slavery both get long sections, the latter usually including some comments on still-present racial sensitivities.

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One-Percenter Problems

The Article: The One Percent’s Problem by Joseph Stiglitz in Vanity Fair.

The Text: Let’s start by laying down the baseline premise: inequality in America has been widening for dec­ades. We’re all aware of the fact. Yes, there are some on the right who deny this reality, but serious analysts across the political spectrum take it for granted. I won’t run through all the evidence here, except to say that the gap between the 1 percent and the 99 percent is vast when looked at in terms of annual income, and even vaster when looked at in terms of wealth—that is, in terms of accumulated capital and other assets. Consider the Walton family: the six heirs to the Walmart empire possess a combined wealth of some $90 billion, which is equivalent to the wealth of the entire bottom 30 percent of U.S. society. (Many at the bottom have zero or negative net worth, especially after the housing debacle.) Warren Buffett put the matter correctly when he said, “There’s been class warfare going on for the last 20 years and my class has won.”

So, no: there’s little debate over the basic fact of widening inequality. The debate is over its meaning. From the right, you sometimes hear the argument made that inequality is basically a good thing: as the rich increasingly benefit, so does everyone else. This argument is false: while the rich have been growing richer, most Americans (and not just those at the bottom) have been unable to maintain their standard of living, let alone to keep pace. A typical full-time male worker receives the same income today he did a third of a century ago.

From the left, meanwhile, the widening inequality often elicits an appeal for simple justice: why should so few have so much when so many have so little? It’s not hard to see why, in a market-driven age where justice itself is a commodity to be bought and sold, some would dismiss that argument as the stuff of pious sentiment.

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What Law Schools Won’t Tell You

The Article: Law School Tuition Rises As Salaries Shrink And Other Things To Law Schools Won’t Tell You in Huffington Post Money.

The Text: 1. “Lawyers are a dime a dozen.”

After graduating from California Western School of Law in 2005, Kathryn Tokarska sent dozens of resumes to law firms. Prior to attending law school, she worked at investment firms, so she was hoping to land a job at a securities law firm or another related field that could use her experience. Instead, says Tokarska, the only position she was offered after graduating was a $10 per hour part-time clerkship. Knee deep in debt and unable to find a decent job, she opened her own law office in San Diego in 2008. “I thought if I got a higher degree, I’d have a better chance to get a job, but that’s not what happened,” she says.

Tokarska isn’t alone. This year, around 45,000 students are graduating law school — the highest number ever, according to the American Bar Association. But there are only about 28,000 positions for lawyers that are available, according to Economic Modeling Specialists, a labor market analysis firm. The latest survey data available by the National Association for Law Placement shows that about 88% of law students who graduated in 2010 were employed by February 2011 — the lowest rate since 1996 and down from a peak of 92% in 2007. And almost a third of the graduates known to be employed were not working in a legal position that required passing the Bar exam.

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No “Change” In Obama’s Drone Doctrine

The Article: Don’t Look For “Change” In Obama’s Drone Doctrine by Savannah Cox in The Speckled Axe.

The Text: We see it in the headlines every day: Obama will be on the right side of history. In the social stratosphere, he righted himself recently via “coming out” of his own moderate and pragmatic closet in favor of gay marriage (albeit at the state level). To justly associate himself with the “99%” majority, Obama aligned himself with aging plutocratic dissenter Warren Buffett while his wife Michelle sat next to Buffett’s now-famous secretary at the State of the Union Address. Meanwhile, his fumbling attempt at affordable healthcare—one whose roots can easily be traced to the work of none other than presidential hopeful Mitt Romney—awaits its fate this June. This is the hope and change that Shepard Fairey so colorfully promised back in 2008, right?

Not necessarily. Amid the flurry of Obama’s so-called “novel” policies and plays on the political chess board, many of the same strategies of fact manipulation, deceit and political posturing spring eternal. No, he’s not Bush—and thank God for that. But in terms of counter-terrorism, when the Obama administration’s strategies employ the same disregard for dehumanized civilians via drone strikes and the simultaneous generation of misleading nomenclature to soften the political blowback that would occur if, God forbid, Americans really knew how their tax dollars were being spent in the name of “freedom,” one has to wonder how different the two presidents actually are. Yes, we’re scheduled to exit Afghanistan and Iraq for good in the coming years, but when the administration’s drone war only emblazons the cause of the same groups against whom American troops fought extensively and expensively for nearly a decade, what have we really accomplished?

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Are You Addicted To Facebook?

The Article: Can These 6 Questions Tell You If You’re Clinically Addicted to Facebook? by Brian Fung in The Atlantic.

The Text: American medical discourse is chock full of addictions these days. There’s video game addiction. Porn addiction. Gambling addiction. Internet addiction.

And of course: Facebook addiction. At least, that’s according to Norwegian researcher Cecilie Schou Andreassen, who says people who can’t get enough of the social network show many of the same signs of withdrawal and mood swings associated with gambling junkies.

Although Facebook is not a chemical like alcohol or cocaine, she said in an email to The Atlantic, Facebook users can fit the criteria for addiction that are applied to other things.

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