That college radio has endured over many decades is no small feat. The constant struggles are what should it be, who should it serve, and what is the point. All this and more is deeply explored in Live from the Underground by Fitchburg State University history professor Katherine Rye Jewell. Even at just 10 watts, these non-commercial, educational stations are…
Coming to Grips with Inequality
When you grow up with as little as Gary Stevenson (b. 1986) did, you have to claw to get ahead in life. Given the rules in advance to something called The Trading Game, he leveraged the chance to participate in the competition and destroyed his fellow participants, winning a plum internship at Citibank. Stevenson bares his soul in this memoir…
It’s Not the Journey, It’s the Destination
If I asked you (as I’m about to) to guess how many parking spaces Los Angeles County added on average daily between 1950 and 1980, what would sound like a wacky answer? A dozen? A hundred? Remember, this is every day for thirty years. It was 850. Slate writer Henry Grabar shares that lil’ nugget in the introduction to his…
Punch the Clock
“Work generally shares three formal characteristics: it is purposeful, effortful, and recognized by society as work – which often, though not always, means it’s worth getting paid for.” So say Christopher Wong Michaelson and Jennifer Tosti-Kharas in their new book, Is Your Work Worth It?. He’s a philosopher, she an organizational psychologist, and both are well-regarded professors skilled in challenging…
How Many Yachts Can You Water Ski Behind?
Theft. That’s the running theme throughout Dana Mattioli’s The Everything War, an ass-reaming if ever there was one about an anti-competitive conglomerate. Her target is Amazon which she’s been covering for The Wall Street Journal since 2019. Jeff Bezos started the company more than 20 years prior built upon the problematic concept of “customer obsession.” You see, when you claim…