Year: 2023

Recently I listened to the first episode of the podcast City of the Rails. About 30 minutes in, the author Danelle Morton interviews the historian Richard White about what actually happened when railroads were built across the North American continent in the 1860′ and ’70s. (opens the podcast at the interview) --->> read more -->>

I can’t seem to forgo comedians. Sometimes a laugh brings brief relief. Stumbled on this typical brief rant (3 minutes) from Lewis Black. A bit of context. This is shortly after the election of Obama. He had run against John McCain in 2008. These are the politicians he is referring --->> read more -->>

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Here is a book review I posted on markorton.com 3.24.2001 When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor – book review When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor Book Review: William Julius Wilson, When Work Disappears: The --->> read more -->>

Original posting – 3.6.2023 Matthew Desmond, author of Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City, has a new book Poverty, by America set to be released shortly. He has written a piece for the NYTimes, “Why Poverty Persists in America” that is worth a read. He poses this question --->> read more -->>

Today, March 14, 2023 is Equal Pay Day “This date symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year.” Women have to work a fifth of a year longer to make it to the same pay as men. The wage gap --->> read more -->>

Catching up on reading The New Yorker brought me to the January 16th issue and Jill Lepore’s “What the January 6th Report Is Missing”. As noted elsewhere here, I am somewhat possessed by the question of how we can explain that 74 million Americans voted for Trump in 2020 after --->> read more -->>

Just when I thought I could put this topic away for a while, I came across this video by John Oliver. As I have noted earlier, it continues to amaze me that some of the best commentaries come from comedians. The little note, nearly at the end, of EU efforts --->> read more -->>

“Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought.” Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts, and Jeffrey Watumull have weighed in on the ruckus about ChatGPT and its many brethren in the --->> read more -->>

Financialization is an awful word. It sounds clumsy in the mouth and refers to a process that has been underway for over 40 years but is nearly unknown to most of us. Before we get to Norfolk Southern, the railroad company, what is financialization? Basically, financialization is a nested set --->> read more -->>

Individualism and Libertarians Americans are renowned for their sense of individual identity and empowerment. de Tocqueville noted this back in the 1830s in his Democracy in America. Hollywood and mass media have mined it continuously. Politicians appeal to it frequently. In my lifetime the position of the individual has been --->> read more -->>

New Page – Introduction to AmericanDelusions Topics In order to make it a bit easier to get oriented to the various topics discussed at AmericanDelusions I’ve added a new page “Introduction to AD Topics“. This provides a quick overview of the 16 topics discussed on AD. It also introduces other --->> read more -->>