Across the Music

theatlantic: “ Can Uncle Sam Sell Marriage to Americans? “ Republicans have rediscovered the problem of poverty, and the party’s stars in Congress and the press have an idea for combating it: More marriages. “The truth is, the greatest tool to lift... View Larger

theatlantic:

Can Uncle Sam Sell Marriage to Americans?

Republicans have rediscovered the problem of poverty, and the party’s stars in Congress and the press have an idea for combating it: More marriages. 

“The truth is, the greatest tool to lift children and families from poverty is one that decreases the probability of child poverty by 82 percent,” Sen. Marco Rubio said in a speech last week. “But it isn’t a government spending program. It’s called marriage.” 

In The Wall Street Journal, former George W. Bush Press Secretary Ari Fleischer concurred. “‘Marriage inequality’ should be at the center of any discussion of why some Americans prosper and others don’t,” he wrote, before suggesting the government would better off pushing matrimony than bulking up the safety net.

It is true that Americans who get married and stay married are unlikely to end up poor. As Derek Thompson noted last week, just 6.2 percent of wedded couples live below the official poverty line, compared to 31 percent of single mothers. Spouses share the costs of raising children and keeping a home, so it’s easier for them stay financially afloat.  

But does that make marriage a great anti-poverty tool, on its own?

Read more. [Image: Wikimedia Commons]

Marco Rubio said some scary stuff in this article.

Reblogged 5 years ago from theatlantic 55 notes
Many nature writers send dispatches from their wooded homes with the brook babbling outside the ever-open window; they go on weeks- or months-long solitary rambles in remote places. They bring us along, in their writing, on these adventures and in the musings they inspire. And they DO inspire…But in making such experiences the core of out ‘connection to nature,’ we set up a chasm between our daily lives ('non-nature’) and wilder places ('true nature’), even though it is in out everyday lives, in our everyday homes, that we eat, consume energy, run the faucet, compost, flush, learn, and live. It is here, in our lives, that we must come to know our essential connection to the wilder earth, because it is here, in the activity of our daily lives, that we must surely affect this earth, for good or for ill.

— Lyanda Lynn Haupt, “Crow Planet: Essential Wisdom from the Urban Wilderness”

Posted 5 years ago 1 note

Careening Through the Multiverses →

thisisnotabookreview:

In this week’s edition of book exploring, I am going philosophical. I’m talking big picture questions, here. Maybe even the biggest picture questions. Like: Why are we here?

I’m going to come clean for a second. I’ve been reading this week’s book for months. Not weeks. Months. It’s not that I’ve…

Yeah, you should definitely take a mental breather after digesting this topic. The most heartbreaking/peaceful passage you quoted was, "There will be stretches that appear meaningful, that seem to harbor hidden messages and purposes. But each such local meaning/message/purpose will be contradicted by another local meaning/message/purpose elsewhere in the generic reality. So they will add up to cosmic meaninglessness.“ 

I mean, that’s rough - but it’s also reassuring, if you accept the theory. After reading a book like this, I don’t see how anyone goes into work the next day because I would imagine that the reader would feel obligated to navigate through all possibilities that the universe holds. Day-to-day shit doesn’t seem to make the cut when you’re trying to understand the unknown. This book sounds great, according to this review.

# book review why does the world exist jim holt thisisnotabookreview

Reblogged 5 years ago from thisisnotabookreview-blog 2 notes