littlelazer's tumblog

What’s becoming clear is that a three-year span of weakness in the labor market is much much much worse for society than a one-year span of weakness. A normal recession disrupts people’s lives, but a long recession destroys them. You lose output, prosperity, family stability, self-esteem, and many other qualities on what looks to be a semi-permanent basis. But instead of recognizing an urgent need to develop a politically tractable strategy for the next time, policymakers seem largely focused on congratulating themselves for having avoided a situation as severe as the Great Depression.

Disheartening.

Despite being founded in 1519, Panama is really only 13 years old, Mr. Fábrega argued, its birthday being Dec. 31, 1999, the day the United States gave the Panama Canal and its surrounding land back to the Panamanians. For the first time in a century the country was whole and independent. “My generation inherited this blank canvas,” said Mr. Fábrega, his salt-and-pepper hair fluttering slightly in the Audi’s air-conditioning. “Now we have the chance to make it our own.” Today, that canvas is far from blank, however. Over the past 13 years, Panama City has been racing to become a world-class metropolis, and for travelers, the changes have been enormous. In 1997 there were perhaps 1,400 hotel rooms in Panama City. Now there are more than 15,000 with another 4,582 rooms in the pipeline, according to STR Global, a London-based agency that tracks hotel markets. In the last two years alone, Trump, Starwood, Waldorf-Astoria, Westin and Hard Rock have opened hotels here. A new biodiversity museum designed by Frank Gehry is nearly complete. The country’s first modern dance festival unfolded last year, the same year Panama held its first international film festival. The Panama Jazz Festival is going strong after 10 years. The country even has its own year-old microbrewery.

If you’re planning a vacation soon you should think about Panama. And this is just what’s in Panama City. The rest of the country is great too.

So truthful that it almost brought me to tears.

Without question, winning an NBA title is a distinguished accomplishment, irrespective of any ill-gotten personnel windfall enabled by GM friendships or melodramatic wheelchair scares. But the Celtics are not an epochal team; one title does not define an era, particularly when set against other, better decorated contemporaries. This is all fine—the Celtics get to keep the rings, and the moments they authored that year will endure on their own. The plain story is important, though, because Boston has stumbled at various playoff stages since 2008, devolving from championship standard bearers to grandiose neighborhood bullies.

Parenting in a pathologically competitive, information-saturated city can make anyone crazy, even those parents lucky enough to be worried about fennel burgers in school lunches. And while Avenues offers its students every imaginable educational benefit — a 9-to-1 student-to-teacher ratio, a Harvard-designed “World Course” — it has also tapped into an even deeper, more complicated parental anxiety: the anxiety of wanting their kids to have every advantage, but ensuring that all those advantages don’t turn them into privileged jerks. As Manhattan, and particularly downtown, is transformed by a staggering infusion of wealth, there is a growing market for creating emotionally intelligent future global leaders who, as a result of their emotional intelligence, have a little humility. In fact, when the nearby Grace Church School was researching whether to start its own high school, it asked top college-admission officers what was lacking in New York City applicants. The answers coalesced around the idea of values, civic engagement, inclusiveness and diversity — in a word, humility.

So much to quote in this that will make your stomach turn. You have to just read it. I guess my question is, how do I become a parent someday without being as detestable as these.