From the twitter feed today, “Cast Idris Elba as James Bond Already” from The Daily Beast. Oddly, this was an article from over a year ago; I suppose it’s a slow news day and they’re recycling content, perhaps inspired by today’s reports that Daniel Craig has signed on for another Bond film. The article reports that Craig had rejected playing the character in any more Bond films, and a red carpet’s worth of Britain’s most genetically blessed males are more... Read more
(Warning! Spoilers ahead!) I tried. My kids, the high-schooler and the incoming high-schooler, brought home a couple of the books from which they could choose for their summer reading list. One of them, All the Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr, historical fiction around World War II, sounded interesting, so I started reading. And it has racked up some major awards, and 26,838 reviews on Amazon, with an average 4.6 out of 5 stars. So it’s a Good Book,... Read more
So I went to the Renaissance Fair (or “Faire”) in Bristol, Wisconsin, on Saturday, just my youngest son (10 years old) and I as the big boys (my husband included) are all away right now. We had a really nice time — we didn’t do any of the carnival games or buy any of the merchandise, but mostly people-watched and watched the performances — a comedic sword-fighting show, a jousting tournament, a couple (again, comedic) demonstrations of weaponry, the Queen’s... Read more
One meme that Glenn Reynolds and others favored for quite a while consisted of listing the length of Democratic tenures in the various troubled big cities in America. In fact, he apparently re-shared this only this past Friday, and I didn’t notice it at the time but only found it via a search just now, in order to share this with you: The image has “National Review” plastered on it, so presumably that’s it’s original source. But there’s one way... Read more
In the news last week: “The U.S. fertility rate just hit a historic low. Why some demographers are freaking out.” The United States is in the midst of what some worry is a baby crisis. The number of women giving birth has been declining for years and just hit a historic low. If the trend continues — and experts disagree on whether it will — the country could face economic and cultural turmoil. According to provisional 2016 population data released... Read more
Again, from the Detroit News: “Michigan judge extends freeze on private school aid.” A Michigan judge on Wednesday extended her temporary freeze on state funding for private schools as she continues to consider a request for a longer injunction. . . . The American Civil Liberties Union of Michigan is among a handful of groups who sued the state in March seeking to block a $2.5 million budget appropriation designed to reimburse private schools for state mandates, including immunization and... Read more
In Seattle, the data is now in, and the net effect of the minimum wage has been to reduce the total weekly wages of minimum wage workers, because employers reduced those employees’ hours to such a degree that the higher hourly wage didn’t make up for the lower work-hours. Read more
So here’s how I spent the 4th of July: I spent the morning being lazy, ultimately getting around to the overdue bill-paying, then, in the afternoon, logged on and put in some work hours while my youngest son was playing at a friend’s house (the older two and my husband are away on a Boy Scout trip), and in the evening watched Chess in Concert (that is, the DVD from the library) – great music, muddled plot – and just... Read more
My son will be applying to college next year, which means that stories of college students protesting America as a vile, unjust place are particularly likely to catch my eye. And at the same time, in the run-up to Independence Day, Jake Tapper is tweeting out photographs of American soldiers submitted by followers. (As it happens, my dad is a vet, though his time in the military was spent happily in Germany, in-between Korea and Vietnam; he was commissioned as... Read more
That’s the premise of a new book, Dream Hoarders, by Richard Reeves, being promoted by Brookings. (I’ve put this on hold at the library, but it’s going to be a while so this is based on other descriptions of the content.) As described in The Atlantic, Reeves agrees that the 20 percent are not the one percent: The higher you go up the income or wealth distribution, the bigger the gains made in the past three or four decades. Still,... Read more
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