Big Oil Ain't In The Ice Cream Business! Tabs, Tues., Oct. 3, 2023
Come and get your Tabs!
Have you gotten your COVID-19 booster yet? The government isn’t helping. (Washington Post)
Donald Trump is a straight-up stochastic terrorist. (Mother Jones)
Former White House Chief of Staff John Kelly confirms on the record that Trump mocked the war dead. (CNN)
Big oil CEOs are cranky. (CNBC)
This article almost seems to grasp America’s income inequality but not quite. Also, I think most folks contributing to the “experience economy” can afford a down payment on a house and have retirement savings. (Wall Street Journal)
Interest rates are up. Inflation remains high. Pandemic savings have shrunk. And the labor market is cooling.
Yet household spending, the primary driver of the nation’s economic growth, remains robust. Americans spent 5.8% more in August than a year earlier, well outstripping less than 4% inflation. And the experience economy boomed this summer, with Delta Air Lines reporting record revenue in the second quarter and Ticketmaster selling over 295 million event tickets in the first six months of 2023, up nearly 18% year-over-year.
Melania Trump has renegotiated her prenuptial agreement again. She probably wants to make sure she gets her fair share of whatever Yugoslavian pfennigs Trump has left once all his trials are over. (New York Magazine)
More than 41 percent of workers in a recent poll don’t negotiate their salaries, but on the upside, bosses tend to always have their employees’ best interests at heart. (Essence)
Can historically Black Atlantic Beach, South Carolina, resist gentrification? (Black Enterprise)
A touching piece about the death of Brooks Robinson by Leslie Gray Streeter. (Baltimore Banner)
Photographer Barbara Mensch documents the changing southern tip of Manhattan over the past 40 years. (The New Yorker)
Mensch’s new book of black-and-white photographs, “A Falling-Off Place: The Transformation of Lower Manhattan,” documents the market and the southern tip of Manhattan across more than forty years, beginning in the early nineteen-eighties. Around the same time, Mensch moved into a fifth-floor loft in a nineteenth-century maritime warehouse on Water Street, where she still lives and works. Its windows on one side look out on the anchorage of the Brooklyn Bridge, just across the street. The enclave of her seaport neighborhood is pressed up against the East River and was once studded with piers and docks that served as landing places for the myriad fishing vessels that brought in thousands of pounds of seafood every day.
I assume Rep. Jamal Bowman will be summarily executed sometime this week for accidentally triggering a fire alarm. (NPR)
Is there enough money in the world to make the Atlanta airport less crappy? (AJC)
This might get you in trouble in North Carolina, but the United Nations acknowledges that racism exists in the US criminal justice system. (The Root)
Top schools probably won’t end legacy admissions any time soon. Those endowments won’t pay for themselves! (Washington Post)
The Michigan Republican Party is flat broke. (Detroit News)
Burien, Washington City Council banned sleeping outside in public places between 10 p.m. and 6 a.m. This should definitely solve homelessness. (PubliCOLA)
I am in fine with losing Target from downtown Portland, Oregon, in exchange for Din Tai Fung. (Willamette Week)
Here’s an informative and amusing breakdown of Bob Menendez’s alleged criminal hijinks.
Follow Stephen Robinson on Bluesky and Threads.
Subscribe to his YouTube channel for more fun content.
Catch SER on his podcast, The Play Typer Guy.
Today’s header takes a bit from a 1931 cartoon Marty the Monk. Find out more here: https://open.substack.com/pub/martiniambassador/p/marty-the-monk
Of course with one of the southern tip there needs to be photography book about the northern tip of Manhattan, I just happen to have a gazillion photos documenting it for the past 24 years. Any publishers out there?