Economy

I spent the weekend in a cabin just south of Breckenridge that appeared to be constructed with Lincoln Logs. It was a gumdrop surrounded by towering fir trees, the lighting soft and warm. Aspens tore peels of shimmering gold into the mountainside. Exploring the cabin’s cozy insides, I felt like one of the claymation figures […]

“Let me tell you about the very rich. They are different from you and me.” —F. Scott Fitzgerald in The Rich Boy, 1926 “You know how people who come into money suddenly look better?” I texted my friend the other day as I breached the threshold of the grocery store’s automatic doors. “How does that […]

In June, Harvard University’s Joint Center for Housing Studies released a report that confirmed the obvious but unbearable reality that most aspiring homeowners recognized long ago: The median income cannot afford the median life. To meet traditional lending criteria for the middle-of-the-road home today, a prospective buyer would need to reliably pull down at least […]

For a few hours on the Fourth of July, I did the most patriotic thing I could imagine: joining local Safeway workers on the picket line as they continued a sweaty, weeks-long strike to protest unfair labor practices. The company had been using illegal bargaining tactics (“surveilling, threatening”) during contract negotiations, and the union—UFCW Local […]