Jennifer Ludden, Marisa Peñaloza, Would you live next to co-workers for the right price? This company is betting yes: [Ed.: Signs of a housing crisis #147]:
When Cook [Medical] announced a year ago that it would build hundreds of homes to sell to employees at below-market prices, [Tommie] Jones was among the first to sign up… Cook’s move isn’t purely philanthropic. As rents and home prices across the U.S. have skyrocketed, more companies are finding it harder to recruit and retain middle-income workers. Record-high job openings and low unemployment have made the competition worse, fueling staff shortages. So a growing number of employers around the country have decided to build their own housing for workers, mostly for them to rent but sometimes to buy…. Cook is offering these homes to employees at below-market prices. It’s an incredible opportunity for Jones, who has been with the company nearly four years and — with extra pay for the swing shift and her work as a trainer — makes just over $20 an hour.
Helen Lewis, The Only Way Out of the Child-Gender Culture War:
In the U.S., you must be 21 to buy alcohol in a bar. Can it really be taboo to say that 16 is too young for a mastectomy—or 14, or even 12? And yet somehow it is.
Freddie DeBoer, That One Side Would Like to Utterly Destroy the Other Side Seems Significant, To Me:
The popularism debate is a perfect example of how progressives simply can’t have the debates they need to have when the boundaries of the debate are hemmed in by the fear of vindictive reprisals. Should the party moderate? Should the party push left? How should it accomplish either? These issues involve everyone in the Democratic coalition. The rules of the game, though, tell us that some people have to mind their Ps and Qs while others get to engage angrily, vengefully, jokingly, and immaturely, as for some bizarre reason we have carved out a total exemption to basic rules of conduct in argument within left-of-center spaces for those who claim to speak from the standpoint of “the marginalized.”
Bill McKibben, A Christian’s Thoughts on the Problem of Christian Nationalism:
In 1958, according to the religious historian Mark Silk, “52 out of every 100 Americans were affiliated with a mainline Protestant denomination.” That same year, President Dwight Eisenhower, who had been baptized as a Presbyterian less than two weeks after taking office, laid the cornerstone for the Interchurch Center in Manhattan, not far from Grant’s Tomb…. The mainline Protestants who, in the nineteen-sixties, made up more than half of Americans don’t have anything like that kind of influence now, but they haven’t disappeared…
Mainline [Protestant] leaders do have unique credibility for a different task: taking on Christian nationalism from a Christian perspective…. They are insiders who can say that the current incarnation of Christian power is not, in fact, particularly Christian—who can, among other things, scoff at their brethren’s sense of victimization and point out that they are not, in fact, the targets of discrimination.
Engineering Explained, Everything You Need to Know About Electric Car Tires [Ed.: Very informative. When it came time to replace the original tires on my hybrid I choose conventional ones. Handling on wet roads is much better and breaking distance is significantly reduced but range on the battery has dropped about 15%. Now I understand why.]
Christine Valters Paintner, Holy Pausing:
In the monastic tradition, statio is the practice of stopping one thing before beginning another. It is the acknowledgment that in the space of transition and threshold is a sacred dimension, a holy pause full of possibility. This place between is a place of stillness, where we let go of what came before and prepare ourselves to enter fully into what comes next.
When we pause between activities or spaces or moments in our days, we open ourselves to the possibility of discovering a new kind of presence to the darkness of in-between times. When we rush from one thing to another, we skim over the surface of life, losing the sacred attentiveness that brings forth revelations in the most ordinary of moments.
Reis Thebault, Melina Mara, and Alice Li, Bloom or Bust:
During the depths of California’s latest drought, much of the Golden State was brown. But hidden beneath the parched, cracked — and sometimes charred — earth, life was waiting to emerge.
The torrents of rain that cascaded across California this winter broke records, flooded fields and washed over hillsides. That same water also seeped into underground seed banks, nourishing long-dormant flora. The result: epic, statewide “super blooms.”