US Markets - Five Points
US markets are slightly stronger, don’t sell new highs.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that Zohran Mamdani delivered the defeat to the Democratic establishment that it deserved. I was going to write about his proposals and unintended consequences, but a local did it for me. These days, I follow a general rule: wait a year after an election before judging a politician too harshly. Still, it’s worth noting that Mamdani refuses to affirm Israel’s right to exist and won’t condemn calls to “globalize the intifada.” That bothers people, but this is America. You’re free to hold even the most foolish opinions, including defending regimes that would enslave the women in your family.
The Gini Coefficient measures income or wealth inequality on a scale from 0 (perfect equality) to 1 (perfect inequality). A higher value means greater inequality. In 1925, just four years after publishing his essay "The Measurement of Inequality," Corrado Gini signed the "Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals." His scientific work became so entwined with fascist governments that, after their collapse, he was put on trial for serving as a Fascist apologist.
Every summer, we send our kids away to single-sex camps in Maine. “It’s 8 weeks, you’re on your own, no social media, no cellphones, pick it up yourself, if you have a problem, you can write a letter, but no one is coming to save you.” Summer camps are training for children, but also for parents. My daughter has already left; this is her last year, and I shake my head at how fast our time has gone. The boy is going this weekend, but boys are easier. Anyway, outside of periodic trips to Maine, Long Island, and California, I’m free for most of July and August. If we know each other, hit me up and we will hang out.
Louise Norton, born in Grenada in 1900, met her husband, Earl Little, a Baptist minister, at a United Negro Improvement Association meeting in Philadelphia in 1917. In 1925, when the Littles were living in Omaha and Louise was pregnant with her son Malcolm and home alone with her three young children, mounted Klansmen came to their house, threatening to lynch the Reverend Little. Finding him not at home, they shattered all the windows. Driven out of Omaha, the Littles eventually settled in Lansing, Michigan, where vigilantes burned their home to the ground. In 1931, the Reverend Little was killed by a streetcar; much evidence suggests that his death was not an accident. After Little's death, the insurance company denied his widow his life insurance. For a while, Louise and the children lived on dandelions. In 1939, after giving birth to her eighth child, Louise Little was committed to an insane asylum at the Kalamazoo State Hospital. Her son Malcolm was moved into foster care and then a juvenile home, and eventually lived in Boston with his half-sister. He would one day change his name to Malcolm X.
If hard times widened some divisions, they narrowed others. People who were doing well one day could be reduced to indigence the next. Then, too, it was impossible not to bear witness. Unemployment had this side effect: people had more time on their hands to listen to the radio. One third of all movie theaters closed, but, between 1935 and 1941 alone, nearly three hundred new radio stations opened. By the end of the decade, the United States had more than half the world's radio sets, at a time when radio broadcasts chronicled and dramatized the suffering of the poor to a national audience, both in reporting and in the emerging genre of the radio drama, with a new vocabulary of sound effects, immediate and visceral.
