Shadow Work and the Rise of Middle-Class Serfdom →

"In the modern age, we have the same 24 hours a day that every human has enjoyed for thousands of years. But when you look around, you might be forgiven for thinking that time has somehow sped up and that our days have grown shorter. People seem harried and worn out. If you ask them how they’re doing, “Busy, busy, busy!” is often the answer.
40% of Americans say they’re overworked, half feel there are too many tasks to complete each week, two-thirds feel they don’t have enough time for themselves or their spouses, and three-fourths say they don’t get to spend as much time with their kids as they’d like. And as far as the other parts of life, well, they can’t be bothered with them at all.
...
o explain what’s behind this apparent time crunch, the instinctive hypothesis is that we’re all simply working more — that jobs these days require us to toil for more hours than they used to.
Yet perception is not reality. Since the 1960s, work hours have actually decreased by almost eight hours a week, while leisure time has gone up by almost seven hours. Many will likely find this hard to believe, and that’s partly due to the fact that people routinely overestimate how much they really work by 5-10%. We also greatly underestimate our available leisure time; Americans think they have, at the most, about 16.5 hours of it a week. In actuality, nearly all of us have anywhere from 30-40 hours of leisure time at our disposal. And this includes both men and women, singles and marrieds, those with children and those without, and the rich and poor alike; in fact, lower income Americans have more leisure time than higher earners.
So what exactly is going on? What accounts for the gap between how our lives feel and how they’re actually structured?
How is it possible that we ostensibly have 40 hours of leisure time each week, and yet most of us feel we can’t even spare 20 minutes a day to read a book or meditate?

About Those Rising Murder Rates: Not So Fast →

I linked to this article yesterday. [Thankfully] Beware the hype:

In just a few hours, I was able to locate publically available data to support similar analyses for 16 of the 20 most populous cities, and the results, summarized below, suggest a much less pervasive increase than one might infer from the Times analysis.
...
Of course, the lack of compelling evidence of a broad-based increase does not prove that no such increase is occurring. Trends in homicide rates (and crime rates generally) are extremely important topics that warrant further investigation. But before we begin to speculate about causes and potential remedies, we need a more comprehensive understanding of the prevalence and location of increases in homicide rates that actually depart from normal fluctuations. This suggests a need for analyses that span several years, for as many medium- and large-sized jurisdictions as possible. It would also be useful to undertake such analyses for related crimes, such as non-fatal shootings, non-fatal stabbings, and aggravated assaults, since the difference between those and homicides may often be a matter of random luck, the type of weapon readily available, or the distance to the nearest emergency room.
Only then will we be in a position to undertake rigorous efforts to explain the problem and explore potential remedies.

The believer: How an introvert became the leader of the Islamic State →

Since Baghdadi’s sudden emergence from obscurity in 2014 as the monster who ordered and broadcast on YouTube the beheading and even burning alive of those he deemed his enemies, news articles and books have traced his radicalization back to the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. Although the American invasion fed the fire and enabled it to spread, in fact, his radicalization began much earlier, ignited by an unlikely but highly volatile mixture of fundamentalism, Saddam Hussein’s secular totalitarianism, and his own need to control others.
...If Baghdadi’s life is a cautionary tale, it is about the danger of creating the chaos that allows men like him to flourish.

Can the Evangelical Left Rise Again? →

Fascinating history. I'd love to see a resurgent Evangelical "left." I like to think that would ease political polarization and growing tensions between religious and irreligious.

The turnabout in Evangelical political orientation was preceded by a long history of Evangelical political activity on the left. Balmer points out that Evangelicals were particularly active in the Antebellum South, though northern Evangelicals also maintained a political presence, advocating for public schools, prison reform, women’s rights, and the abolition of slavery. By the twentieth century, he says, the dominance of Evangelical progressives had been somewhat reduced by immigration and other political shifts; nonetheless, they busied themselves with campaigns for social justice and women’s suffrage. Progressive Evangelicals were also active in the labor movement, supplying spiritual vigor to the early growth of unions, as Valparaiso University historian Heath Carter points out in Union Made: Working People and the Rise of Social Christianity in Chicago. (It is Professor Carter I quote in the remainder of this article, not the former president.)

By the seventies, this tradition had germinated into a thriving branch of Evangelical protestantism. These left Evangelicals were anti-war, pro-civil rights, and deeply concerned with people on the margins of society. Progressive Evangelicalism comprised a variety of different strands, from the hippie-esque “Jesus People” who viewed Christ as a counter-cultural figure (think Godspell) to the politically serious social justice advocates who founded Sojourners magazine. “The people at the center of the Evangelical left in the seventies were young, white Evangelicals,” Carter says, “but they were networked with black peers who were pushing them on issues of race, and they were in turn running with that.” Jimmy Carter, with his devotion to racial justice and commitment to alleviating the ravages of poverty, rode this wave of progressive Evangelical sentiment all the way to the White House.

Murder Rates Rising Sharply in Many U.S. Cities →

MILWAUKEE — Cities across the nation are seeing a startling rise in murders after years of declines, and few places have witnessed a shift as precipitous as this city. With the summer not yet over, 104 people have been killed this year — after 86 homicides in all of 2014.
More than 30 other cities have also reported increases in violence from a year ago...
Law enforcement experts say disparate factors are at play in different cities, though no one is claiming to know for sure why murder rates are climbing...

Four wars and counting: Making sense of the anti-IS struggle →

The rise of so-called Islamic State (IS), which controls a swathe of territory in Syria and Iraq, has prompted the creation of a large, multinational coalition including the US, Turkey, and Washington's Gulf allies, all intent on its destruction.
So too of course is Iran and, not surprisingly, Israel. This has resulted, for example, in pro-Iranian militias in Iraq appearing to be on the same side as the US.
The struggle against IS in Syria has prompted even more contradictions - with Gulf states suspected of supporting Sunni groups linked to al-Qaeda - while al-Qaeda affiliates like Jabhat-al-Nusrah have battled US-trained moderate Syrian militias.

SAT scores at lowest level in 10 years, fueling worries about high schools →

The average score for the Class of 2015 was 1490 out of a maximum 2400, the College Board reported Thursday. That was down 7 points from the previous class’s mark and was the lowest composite score of the past decade. There were declines of at least 2 points on all three sections of the test — critical reading, math and writing.
...The test results show that gains in reading and math in elementary grades haven’t led to broad improvement in high schools, experts say...
It is difficult to pinpoint a reason for the decline in SAT scores, but educators cite a host of enduring challenges in the quest to lift high school achievement. Among them are poverty, language barriers, low levels of parental education and social ills that plague many urban neighborhoods.