Posts published in November 2014

According to new research by Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, the richest one-hundredth of one percent of Americans now hold eleven per cent of the nation’s total wealth. That is a higher share than the top .01 percent held in 1929, just prior to the stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. And keep in mind we are speaking of the reported wealth of the top .01 percent, which is very likely a small fraction of the wealth they have secreted offshore.

It’s now over three and a half years since the earthquake-triggered nuclear disaster in Japan, and concerns regarding the impacts continue. In Japan itself, the impacts have been huge and disastrous indeed, depending on location…

Each day in Florence begins simply enough. After the breakfast dishes and setting out washing to dry on the terrace (dryers are still not in common use by most Florentine citizens), we walk down to…

Lucky and Cherry lived on the second floor of an old two family house in Newark, New Jersey. Above them was the unfinished attic with its casement windows, which would be blown open by strong…