Here’s a moderate-to-conservative think-tank-based view of poverty and poverty policies:

It would increase the productivity and reduce the heat of the Washington debate on poverty and opportunity if all sides agreed to base their understanding of poverty and mobility on the basic facts laid out above, all from reliable sources. Here is a summary of these facts:

• Government spending on poor and low-income families has increased almost every year for five decades; since 1980 spending has tripled as measured on a per person in poverty basis in constant dollars
• An improved measure of poverty shows that government spending focused on poor and low-income households cuts the poverty rate by about half; government spending on these programs and the Unemployment Compensation program prevented poverty from increasing during the most severe recession since the Great Depression
• A CBO analysis shows that when government benefits are counted at their full value, households all along in income distribution, including those in the bottom 20 percent, enjoyed increased income between 1979 and 2007
• The same CBO report shows that because income increased more the higher up we look in the income distribution between 1979 and 2007, income inequality has also increased since 1979; by far the biggest increase in inequality is between the top and the rest of the distribution
• Several studies show that claims that intergenerational income mobility has slowed down in the U.S. are false; the U.S. has less income mobility that many European nations, but mobility has remained constant over the past four decades or so; nonetheless, children whose parents were in the bottom 20 percent of the income distribution have more than a 40 percent chance of staying in the bottom themselves.

https://www.brookings.edu/testimonies/poverty-and-opportunity-begin-with-facts/

In-depth article on what Obama’s priorities and choices are like now.

Barack Obama was six months into his post–White House life when Donald Trump found a new way to grab his attention. It was a Tuesday morning deep in the mid-Atlantic summer, and, feeling a world away from the Pennsylvania Avenue grind, the former president was reading the New York Times on his iPad.

The previous evening, Trump had visited West Virginia, where he spoke at the annual Boy Scout Jamboree. Addressing a crowd of roughly 40,000, who were expecting the usual talk about citizenship and service, the president uncorked a political diatribe packed with jabs at Obama, Hillary Clinton, and the Washington, D.C., “cesspool”; reminders about the importance of saying “Merry Christmas”; and reminiscences of Election Night 2016 and the pundits he embarrassed. “You remember that incredible night with the maps, and the Republicans are red and the Democrats are blue, and that map was so red it was unbelievable. And they didn’t know what to say,” Trump told the Scouts. They seemed bewildered at first but before long broke into chants of “USA!” Adult observers were openly horrified. Three days later, the Boy Scouts’ leader would apologize for Trump’s speech.

In Washington, where the former president still works and lives with his wife, Michelle, and his younger daughter, Sasha, Obama stewed. Ever since the shocking election, he had resisted condemning his successor directly. Early on, he would muse to senior aides in private about what it meant that the country had chosen Trump, bouncing between writing off the election as a freak accident and considering it a rejection of his own vision of America. In the months after the inauguration, Obama referred publicly to the new president only sparingly — but still more than he expected to. He issued careful statements defending the Affordable Care Actand supporting the Paris climate-change agreement, avoided mentioning Trump by name, and largely let the resistance speak for itself. But the Boy Scouts speech really troubled him. Kids their age are the most impressionable group there is, Obama reminded friends at the time, likening them to sponges. If the president shoves a divisive political argument at them, that’s what they will absorb.

It was a very Barack Obama thing to get agitated about. Throughout his entire political career, he has attached an unusual degree of significance to storytelling, and he has often spoken of the importance of modeling what it means to be a good citizen. He had recently concluded a two-month stretch full of international travel and was just starting to settle into his post-presidency, and that week was a busy one in Washington — Republicans were zeroing in on a vote to repeal the Affordable Care Act. The Boy Scouts speech was relatively unimportant (mostly improvised, probably something Trump would forget about within a week), but perhaps it presented an opportunity. One of the most potent tools in Obama’s arsenal, as a retired president, is rhetoric. Even if he no longer enjoyed the bully pulpit, he could, if he wanted, fill the vacuum of moral leadership Trump had created and offer, to not only the Scouts but the entire country, a lesson in civics that no other Democrat is positioned to give.

But then he did another very Barack Obama thing: He decided to stay quiet.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/06/where-is-barack-obama.html

Here’s a terrific, in-depth investigation of how arbitration clauses, often forbidding class-action suits, have tipped the scales of power dramatically toward corporations. Highly recommended. (2015-16, NYT)

On Page 5 of a credit card contract used by American Express, beneath an explainer on interest rates and late fees, past the details about annual membership, is a clause that most customers probably miss. If cardholders have a problem with their account, American Express explains, the company “may elect to resolve any claim by individual arbitration.”

Those nine words are at the center of a far-reaching power play orchestrated by American corporations, an investigation by The New York Times has found.

By inserting individual arbitration clauses into a soaring number of consumer and employment contracts, companies like American Express devised a way to circumvent the courts and bar people from joining together in class-action lawsuits, realistically the only tool citizens have to fight illegal or deceitful business practices.

Over the last few years, it has become increasingly difficult to apply for a credit card, use a cellphone, get cable or Internet service, or shop online without agreeing to private arbitration. The same applies to getting a job, renting a car or placing a relative in a nursing home.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/01/business/dealbook/arbitration-everywhere-stacking-the-deck-of-justice.html?_r=0

Thought-provoking. I’d like to have this in my life.

How is a Pocket Neighborhood different than a regular neighborhood?

A pocket neighborhood is not the wider neighborhood of several hundred households and network of streets, but a realm of a dozen or so neighbors who interact on a daily basis around a shared garden, quiet street or alley — a kind of secluded neighborhood within a neighborhood.

The wider neighborhood is where you might describe “the red house on the corner of Elm and Main Street”— a local landmark that helps define and give character to a neighborhood. You may know some of these neighbors, but likely not the hundreds that live there. In most neighborhoods, streets are public, yards and gardens are private, but protected semi-public spaces are unusual.

http://pocket-neighborhoods.net/whatisaPN.html

“When we started it was just about technology,” Pahlka said. “Now it’s really about the outcomes of the operations” — outcomes like reducing recidivism or increasing the percentage of people who are eligible for food stamps who actually receive them. And improving government can make tremendous change. “The math shows that at least in safety net services, being 10 percent more effective would be as impactful as doubling all philanthropic spending,” she said.

Pahlka wasn’t alone in her initial technological optimism. In Mark Zuckerberg’s 2012 letter describing Facebook’s IPO, he said the company’s tools for sharing “could lead to more direct empowerment of people, more accountability for officials and better solutions to some of the biggest problems of our time.” For most tech companies, that triumphalism continued all the way through the 2016 election, when revelations about misinformation and foreign meddling forced an industry-wide reckoning with its own power.

But it’s not as if digital tools and services have become less important in the broader world. Nor does the national political situation obviate the needs of people in local communities all across the country. Code for America now has about 75 full-time employees and 22,000 active volunteers, and in the areas where Code for America has dedicated the most resources, there is huge room for improvement.“If you are vulnerable to that cycle of poverty and incarceration, government services are awful to use and they don’t work very well,” Pahlka said. “It doesn’t have to work that way.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/06/civic-tech-in-a-time-of-technopessimism/563696/

http://www.thisiscolossal.com/2018/06/sculptural-portraits-by-yuanxing-liang/

…as much as this festival is a time and place to hear some great music, it’s also an opportunity for lots of folks—myself included—to dress up and see how others are presenting themselves. It’s a place to explore that means of expression.The profusion of wonderful looks has been well-documented; in my opinion it is really much of what this festival is about.

This dress up aspect is completely emergent—nothing has been dictated or suggested- audience members have been quoted as saying that their clothing and look choices are improvised and spontaneous, (skills the black community has in abundance, as evidenced by our shared popular music, dance, comedy, sport etc)….this attitude is inclusive and admits to everyone as a creator, and, in a purely visual and sartorial way, it announces that everyone is both proud and brave, yet also vulnerable (you’re really putting yourself out there when you dress like this). To have that bravery and that vulnerability be encouraged and accepted is as a tonic in these times… at ANY time. This is display of looks infers and implies a way of being- and it says as much and maybe more than any words—words are words, but this is about how one can BE. It shows rather than tells.

http://davidbyrne.com/journal/everyone-is-a-creator-afropunk-festival-2017

Attitudes are overwhelmingly cultural, says Sybil Kapoor, author of “Sight Smell Touch Taste Sound: A New Way to Cook”. Compare China and Japan with countries such as Britain and America. Texture is taken far more seriously in the former. According to one study, Americans use just 78 words to describe the texture of food. By contrast, there are more than 400 such terms in Japanese. Puri-puri describes the feel of biting into something like a prawn, bouncy, with a slight resistance; neba–neba, the slimy, viscous feel of foods such as natto, fermented soyabeans. Shuko Oda, head chef at Koya, an udon bar in London, says that only Japanese customers order it; the rest balk at the snot-like strings clinging to the beans.

In China, texture is part of the pleasure of food and people praise the feel as much as flavour, says Fuchsia Dunlop, a British writer on Chinese food. Ingredients are used for their mouth-feel alone. Birds’ nests and sharks’ fins don’t taste of much, but both contribute a gelatinous texture that is prized. For non-natives, the choicest textures can be puzzling, at best. At Sanxia Renjia, a Sichuan restaurant in London, shredded chicken doused in chilli and soy sauce makes sense to the British palate. The cool, translucent strips of jellyfish that accompany it are more challenging; they feel like a cross between a cucumber and a condom, rubbery but with a tendency to break apart with each bite. The flavour of chicken gizzards, fried and nestling amid wild chilli, is inoffensive. Bite down and appreciating them becomes harder. The tense little muscles once used to grind up food skid between your teeth, forcing you to work as hard to chew them as the gizzards themselves once did. Recipes from Westerners about how best to cook these gristly morsels seem designed to strip them of their texture, with directions to braise them for hours in order to melt the connective tissues before frying them to a crisp.

That misses the point. Dunlop says she ate the knobbly chicken feet and goose intestines set before her only because she had been brought up to be polite. But repeated exposure and experimentation have been transformative. She now relishes the gristle in a roast chicken, she says. The sea cucumber, a slithery yet crisp delicacy revolting to most non-Chinese, has become a beautiful thing to her.

https://www.1843magazine.com/food-drink/looks-good-enough-to-eat

For the past few weeks, I’m pretty sure I’ve been seeing another me. Wednesday afternoon I left my apartment to walk to the train and I saw her — me — crossing the intersection at the top of the hill, walking briskly. Then over the weekend I was washing dishes and staring out the window, just spacing out, and she was crossing the park, a shape appearing and disappearing among trees. I couldn’t get a good look.

I know you’re thinking it can’t be, that it must just be someone who looks like me. I’ll admit that none of the clothes I see her wearing are mine, but they’re similar — like when I saw her jogging near the gate at the foot of the hill in the park, she was wearing a fleece exactly like my mint one, but purple. In fact, when I saw her the first time, barely a speck in the distance boarding a bus, I thought: I’d buy that handbag. And then: oh my gosh, that’s me.

https://medium.com/s/story/the-soft-truth-b7c8639031f2

Across the country, cities are straining. Housing costs are exploding, transportation systems are overwhelmed, infrastructure is crumbling, and inequality is on the rise. Yet there’s little support from federal or state authorities — “infrastructure week” is a punch line in Washington, not a policy. Efforts to raise money for local projects are under siege from conservative activists, while measures to build more housing are halted by liberal ones.

Into this void march the techies, who come bearing money, jobs and promises of out-of-this-world innovation. But there’s a catch. Corporations are getting wide latitude in determining the future of cities. They are controlling more key services and winning important battles with once-indomitable city governments. Local officials find themselves at the mercy of tech: They can’t live without tech money, even if tech interests have a way of eclipsing every other civic priority.

How did tech companies become America’s most-powerful local power brokers?

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/20/technology/tech-companies-conquered-cities.html