In The News (10)

Are Cities Our Greatest Invention?  the cities that spread across the Indus Valley in today’s Pakistan were watery Edens: They had no temples or palaces but granaries, assembly halls and systems for sewage and water that may instead have been the sacred centers of the communities’ lives. ................. Hell was Babylon, or what it stood for — the “original Sin City,” rife with the unsavory aspects of urbanity decried since at least 2000 B.C. A line from the Hebrew Bible might easily have appeared in a recent political ad: “Woe to the city of blood, full of lies, full of plunder, never without victims!” Ditto the 18th-century writing of Jean-Jacques Rousseau describing the city as “depraved by sloth, inactivity, the love of pleasure.” .............. Dinocrates of Rhodes imposed a grid of streets on the anarchy of the Greek public space, making Alexandria encyclopedic; irregular Athens, by contrast, was “spontaneous and experimental.” When Romans conquered the world, they brought their built environment with them, like a subdivision to the wilderness. Bathing, Wilson argues, made the barbarous clean, Roman and urban. ..................  The author links Baghdad’s messier, more organic development with a dynamism that generated some of the ideas it took Europe centuries to comprehend. .........  Into the 1600s, Amsterdam made a kind of meta-trade of urbanization, with the government connecting corporations, banks and merchants to create the world’s first securities market and its attendant financial devices. Forwards and futures, hedges and margin-buying were inventions Amsterdamers classified as windhandel, or trading in the wind, as opposed to trading something tangible. .................   Friedrich Engels called Manchester’s poor neighborhood “Hell upon Earth.” Ideologues that came to be known as the Manchester School believed their free trade policies would lead to a world harmony that — spoiler alert! — has yet to arrive. ......................   Tenochtitlan, bigger than Paris in the 1500s ............... Crucial to Lisbon’s conquest of land and bodies were the papal bulls that granted Portugal the right to, in 1455, take slaves and then, in 1493, to “discover” land — lay claim, in other words, to territory inhabited by non-Christians. .................  in a chapter titled “Annihilation,” which compares Hitler’s destruction of Warsaw to the American bombing of Tokyo. In landscapes of horrific violence, the most damaged communities find creative ways to survive.   

Abby Phillip Is Next-Gen CNN In an election dominated by fast-talking policy dudes, her deliberate commentary and context stood out. ..........  And while “Donald Trump’s political career began with the racist birther lie,” she continued, “it may very well end with a Black woman in the White House.” ............ and asked Mr. Trump if he hoped Mr. Whitaker would tamp down on the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation. “What a stupid question that is,” he said. “What a stupid question. I watch you a lot, you ask a lot of stupid questions.” ............. “He insults a lot of people and a lot of the time, the insults aren’t true.” 

The Post-Presidency of a Con Man Out of office, Trump might seem a lot less formidable.  .......... It’s hard to tell whether Donald Trump is attempting a coup or throwing a tantrum. ...........  most of the money is actually going to a PAC, Save America, that “will be used to underwrite Mr. Trump’s post-presidential activities.” ........ Trump is considering starting a digital media company to undermine Fox News, which he now regards as disloyal. ............ and will be a favorite for the party’s nomination in 2024. ........ “If he runs in 2024, he’ll certainly be the front-runner, and then he’ll probably be the nominee.” ........... he’s personally on the hook for $421 million in debt, most of it coming due in the next four years. If a long fight with the I.R.S. goes against him, he could owe at least $100 million more. ...........  There are several examples of once-formidable right-wing leaders reduced to footnotes after leaving office.

Trump Floats Improbable Survival Scenarios as He Ponders His Future There is no grand strategy. President Trump is simply trying to survive from one news cycle to the next. 

‘Women’s Work’ Can No Longer Be Taken for Granted New Zealand is pursuing a century-old idea to close the gender pay gap: not equal pay for equal work, but equal pay for work of equal value. ......... Instead of “equal pay for equal work,” supporters of pay equity call for “equal pay for work of equal value,” or “comparable worth.” They ask us to consider whether a female-dominated occupation such as nursing home aide, for instance, is really so different from a male-dominated one, such as corrections officer, when both are physically exhausting, emotionally demanding, and stressful — and if not, why is the nursing home aide paid so much less? ................ the gender pay gap remains a feature of nearly every economy on earth. ............. caring for elderly people was just as demanding and dangerous as better-paid jobs mostly performed by men, including, notably, prison guards .......... other female-dominated occupations, including midwives, social workers and school support staff ........... Economics 101 says wages are set by the intersection of a supply curve and a demand curve — if demand for say, data scientists is high, and there aren’t enough of them to fill the available roles, data scientists will have more pricing power over their wages. But in the real world (and, sometimes, in Economics 201), most people recognize that wages encapsulate a host of other factors: monopoly and monopsony (buyer’s monopoly) power, the quirks of a given firm or institution, and, most relevant to pay equity, social beliefs about the relative value of a job. These social beliefs inevitably intersect with biases like racism and sexism, which then manifest in ways both formal and informal. ............... Most job evaluation methodologies ignored what the sociologist Arlie Hochschild called “emotional labor” — adjusting one’s feelings in order to competently perform a job ................ pay equity, when done properly, challenges us to think deeply and objectively about a job and its components. This can be a messy process, one that requires unlearning decades of bias about gender and work, as well as political good will and a spirit of collaboration. ............  What skills are being deployed to, say, deal with someone who is angry and doesn’t want to be there, and several hours later, with someone who is needy and crying, all while maintaining meaningful boundaries? To describe this capacity to navigate “these emotionally complex situations — how to be both emotionally present but not emotionally enmeshed,” as Ms. Ross put it, the group eventually came up with the term “emotional dexterity.” .............  hesitated to classify “listening” as a skill, arguing that anyone can listen ..............  active listening entails not just hearing, but also picking up on what goes unsaid, the way things are said and what that means in context .............. air traffic controllers, for example, “operate within a highly codified environment,” which reduces the need for interpersonal skills.) ..................  problem-solving skills, physical demands, interpersonal skills and emotional demands .................  many social workers found the analysis of their work “more valuable” than the pay raise itself ................ Several New Zealanders pointed to the unanimous vote on the pay equity law as an important sign of where the public had moved on the issue. .......... The thing that so many of today’s most underpaid and essential workers have in common is simply that they are women. ............   New Zealand’s experience in the coming years will serve as an experiment in what happens when an entire society, led by a feminist prime minister, decides, in effect, to say yes.