Tag: long term
15 Readers on How They’re Cutting Costs
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Last week I asked readers for their best tips on cutting costs in times of economic strain—and, looking back on their lives, what they might consider to have been their most wasteful spending.
Denise leads us off this week as
How J. Edgar Hoover Took Down the KKK
In 1964, during a phone call with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover about setting up the new FBI office in Mississippi, President Lyndon B. Johnson broached the idea of really doing something about the Klan. He had been up late reading the bureau’s reports on the Communist Party, with their jaw-dropping inside details. What if the Bureau, seizing on the momentum provided by the Civil Rights Act, could do the same thing to the Klan? he wondered aloud to
A New Formula for Happiness
We often follow a misguided formula for happiness—pushing us toward material wealth and other worldly successes. But when our expectations set us down the wrong path, it may be time to reorient ourselves around something new: universal happiness principles we can practice at any age.
In our finale episode of this season, a conversation with psychiatrist Robert Waldinger provides a scientific insight into key elements for happy living, whatever your age.
This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is
There Are No ‘Five Stages’ of Grief
It was early springtime here in Australia when my son died. I took jasmine and dark-red sweet peas from my garden to his funeral and laid them carefully beside him, wondering how I could even keep breathing through the pain.
His name was Adam. He was 38, and more than six feet tall, but he was still my baby. His birth, as my first child, brought me to the most joyous life turn I’ve ever gone through; his death,
Why Do I Only Appreciate My Health After I’ve Been Sick?
A few months ago, I got food poisoning. The sequence of events that led to my downfall began with a carton of discounted grocery-store sushi purchased and consumed on a Thursday, which led to me waking up a little queasy on a Friday, which devolved into a 12-hour stretch of me vomiting and holding myself in a fetal position, until my legs ached from dehydration. On Saturday the smell of my partner cooking breakfast still made me gag; I sipped
Seriously, What Are You Supposed to Do With Old Clothes?
In February, I ran out of hangers. The occasion was not exactly unforeseen—for at least a year, I had been rearranging the deck chairs on my personal-storage Titanic in an attempt to forestall the inevitable. I loaded two or three tank tops or summer dresses onto a single hanger. I carefully refolded everything in my dresser drawers to max out their capacity. I left the things I wore most frequently on a bedroom chair instead of wedging them into my
Simple Steps to Forgive Yourself and Overcome Regret
When we regret our past, it can feel like we’re incapable of changing our future. But it may be our past “mistakes” that help us realize there is room to evolve.
In the finale episode of How to Start Over, we explore how regret can be a catalyst of change, what holds us back from self-forgiveness, and how to reconcile our past mistakes—and move forward for good. Conversations with Shai Davidai, an assistant professor at the Columbia Business School, and
There May Be a Blunt-Force Fix for Inflation
This is an edition of Up for Debate, a newsletter by Conor Friedersdorf. On Wednesdays, he rounds up timely conversations and solicits reader responses to one thought-provoking question. Later, he publishes some thoughtful replies. Sign up for the newsletter here.
Question of the Week
Pick your poison: high inflation or a recession. Which would you prefer and why?
Send responses to [email protected] or reply to this email.
Conversations of Note
What if the Fed raised interest rates by 2 percentage
You Are Going to Get COVID Again … And Again … And Again
Two and a half years and billions of estimated infections into this pandemic, SARS-CoV-2’s visit has clearly turned into a permanent stay. Experts knew from early on that, for almost everyone, infection with this coronavirus would be inevitable. As James Hamblin memorably put it back in February 2020, “You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus.” By this point, in fact, most Americans have. But now, as wave after wave continues to pummel the globe, a grimmer reality is playing out. You’re
The World Has One Big Chance to Eliminate Plastic Pollution
Plastics have always been global—even before science began tracking the peregrinations of microplastics across meridians, into rain, through the human placenta. At the industry’s outset, Civil War–era rubber goods were fashioned with latex extracted from the Amazon and later through Belgium’s brutal regime in the Democratic Republic of Congo. England imported gutta-percha from Southeast Asia for undersea telegraphy wires. Celluloid depended on Taiwanese camphor as a solvent and plasticizer. Today, tankers ferry hydrocarbons siphoned from beneath Appalachia’s shale basin to