The Guardian Longreads: Super-tall, super-skinny, super-expensive: the 'pencil towers' of New York's super-rich

The results range from the sublime to the ridiculous, or even both at once. There is 432 Park Avenue, a surreal square tube of white concrete that appears to shoot twice as high as anything around it, its endless Cartesian grid of windows framing worlds of solid marble bathtubs and climate-controlled wine cellars within. It is the most elegant of the new towers, recalling the minimalist sculptures of Sol LeWitt, although its architect, Raphael Viñoly, says it was inspired by a trash can. He can clearly turn garbage into gold, given the penthouse sold for $95m (£72m). [...]

Standing right across the street, 220 Central Park South aims to be the gentleman of the bunch. A neo-art deco tower clad in silvery Alabama limestone, with set-back terraces and ornamental metalwork, it is the work of Robert AM Stern, expedient purveyor of whatever style his client wants, from Spanish revival to Qing dynasty. “Architecture is a banquet,” Stern tells me, “and most architects are starving to death.” He says that “unlike some of its neighbours now under development”, his design “will belong to the family of buildings that have framed Central Park for generations”. The dapper costume has paid off: some apartments in his tower have gone for more than $10,000 per square foot. The penthouse was recently acquired by a hedge-fund billionaire for $238m, making it the most expensive home ever sold in the US. [...]

The revamped laws also introduced the curious notion of transferable development rights (TDRs), also known as “air rights” – a mechanism that allows landowners to buy the unused air space of their neighbours and add it on to their own lot. It is the ultimate free-market planning clause: if your neighbour is not exploiting their potential to go skywards, you can buy it off them and make your building even taller. It seems fitting that in the cut-throat capital of capitalism, even the air is for sale.[...]

But these negotiations pale in comparison to what has happened over the last decade. The parade of poles that have sprouted along 57th Street (AKA Billionaires’ Row) on the southern edge of Central Park, represent some of the most fiendishly complex and aggressively litigious dealing the city has ever seen. Gary Barnett, founder of Extell Development Corporation, took 15 years to assemble the property and air rights for One 57, one of the first of the new generation of super-tall residential towers, a garish blue-speckled shaft designed by Christian de Portzamparc, completed in 2014. He took another decade negotiating nearly a dozen further acquisitions to put together the 1.2m square feet of development rights he needed to build Central Park Tower. It was probably time well spent: the project will reportedly have a total sales value of $4.4bn, making it the most expensive residential building in New York’s history. “Our strength is assembling land,” says Barnett. “On that, we’re Number One.”

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The Guardian Longreads: The class pay gap: why it pays to be privileged – podcast

This idea of a “following wind”, a gust of privilege, gets to the heart of what we call the class ceiling. It neatly captures the propulsive power provided by an advantaged class background – how it acts as an energy-saving device that allows some to get further with less effort – deftly shaping career trajectories, delineating what courses of action are possible, what kind of support is available, and how one’s “merits” are perceived by others. Equally, the metaphor also describes the experience of the upwardly mobile who, very often, have the wind against them. It is not that such individuals cannot move forward, or never reach the top; just that, generally, it takes longer, happens less frequently and often represents a markedly more labour-intensive, even exhausting experience. [...]

Still, it is important that we don’t fixate on this issue of access. Most academics, policymakers, charities and businesses have tended to make this mistake in the past, implicitly suggesting that the baggage of our class origins somehow disappears once we enter the workplace. We wanted to shift the debate – from getting in to getting on. And what we found was striking. In contemporary Britain, it quite literally pays to be privileged. Even when those from working-class backgrounds are successful in entering the country’s elite occupations, they go on to earn, on average, £6,400 less than colleagues whose parents did “middle-class” professional or managerial jobs – a nearly 16% class pay gap. This is exacerbated for women, people with disabilities, and most ethnic minorities. Each face a distinct double disadvantage. Women from working-class backgrounds, for example, earn on average £19,000 a year less in elite occupations than men from privileged backgrounds, and the figure is even higher for non-white women. [...]

Exploring elite workplaces showed us that the class pay gap is less about those from working-class backgrounds getting paid less for doing the same work and more about the kind of workplace segregation implied by Dave’s comment. And he was right. Only 7% of those in commissioning – the most prestigious and high-paying department – were from working-class backgrounds. The figure in HR was 22%. And even more significantly, this segregation was also vertical: only 2.5% of the executive team were from working-class backgrounds. Here, as in most of our case studies, there was a distinct class ceiling. [...]

Of course, the performance and recognition of merit is not just affected by a person’s class background. On the contrary, we find strong quantitative evidence – the first we know of – that upwardly mobile women and members of (certain) minority ethnic groups face a double earnings disadvantage in elite occupations. Our interview data sheds some light on these intersectional inequalities, particularly the way gender and ethnicity can magnify the visibility of class difference, and increase the scrutiny placed on these individuals in their execution of dominant behavioural codes. It is telling, for example, that no female equivalent exists of the heroic tale of the working-class boy made good. Instead, stereotypes of upwardly mobile women tend to be especially stigmatising, emphasising pretentiousness and pushiness.

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99 Percent Invisible: Beneath the Ballpark

But a lot of the reason why they were so independent was that they had to be. In the early 1900s, racial covenants limited where people of color could actually purchase property. From the 1910s throughout the 40s, Chavez Ravine was one of the few places in Los Angeles that non-white people could actually own a home. [...]

The city selected Chavez Ravine to be the site for 3,600 new units because the City Housing Authority had determined it was a “slum.” The CHA claimed that it was infested with rats, homes lacked electricity and toilets and argued it was actually in everyone’s best interest that the community be outfit with newer, more modern housing. Most former residents disagree with this characterization. “We had flushing toilets everywhere. We had some lights … and we had a lot of things that would not mark us as slums,” argues Carol Jacques. [...]

At the same time, though, a lot of people were opposed to the deal for reasons that had nothing to do with Chavez Ravine. Not everyone in L.A. was excited about the city subsidizing a private business, even if that business was baseball. The opposition was so intense that the city decided to put the deal up for a referendum. This meant that the contract would be placed on a ballot and the citizens would get the chance to vote on the new stadium. In the end, voters came out in the Dodgers’ favor, but just barely. The Dodger contract passed by a narrow margin of about 52% percent out of almost 700,000 votes. [...]

These images were all over the front pages of newspapers at the time. They dredged up memories not just of the failed housing project years earlier, but of an entire history of racial discrimination that Latino and Chicano Americans had been experiencing in Los Angeles for decades. Mexican American history in the United States is full of stories of conquest and land dispossession, and seeing this scene broadcast on television hit a nerve.

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The Art of Manliness: Hiking With Nietzsche

My guest today has spent much of both his personal and professional life tracking down those insights. At the age of 19 and then again at age 37, he traveled to the Swiss town where Nietzsche wrote his famous work, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and learned something different on each trip from the mustachioed philosopher about living a life of meaning and significance. His name is John Kaag, and he’s a professor of philosophy and the author of Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are.

In this compelling conversation, John discusses what he learned about life hiking the same mountain Nietzsche hiked, including the role that walking itself played in Nietzsche’s approach to thinking. We begin with the biggest misconceptions about the philosopher, including what he really meant when he said “God is dead.” John then walks us through Nietzsche’s idea of the will to power, how this impulse should be balanced with amor fati — the love of fate — in order to achieve Nietzsche’s ideal of becoming who you are, and the different things his philosophy can mean to a young man and to one approaching middle age.

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Radical Conversations: Phenomena of Trump and Modi are completely different says Arundhati Roy (Oct 14, 2017)

"Modi is a culmination of 100 years of Hindutva", says Arundhati Roy on May 3rd, 2017 in San Francisco

The New York Review of Books: Syria’s Monumental Loss

In May 2015, the world watched in horror as ISIS rolled into Tadmur, home to Palmyra’s magnificent Greco-Roman ruins. The ensuing destruction was widely denounced but the extremist group’s first act of vandalism in Palmyra drew condemnations only in Syria. Just a mile northeast of the Temple of Bel (founded 32 AD), stood the Tadmur Prison, one of the Baathist regime’s most notorious. Thousands of political prisoners were incarcerated there, suffering torture, humiliation, starvation, and death. In 1980, up to 1,000 detainees had been summarily executed there as retaliation for an attempt on the then-President Hafez al-Assad’s life. When ISIS blew up this prison, it erased a place of historical importance, a monument to a nation’s agony.[...]

The few people who appear in these photographs seem conjured from myth: a woman with a handsome face, fair hair, and intense gaze stands in a stony enclosure in a grimy calico dress, her eyes squinting in the mid-day sun; but what gives the photograph its pique is the depth of her tan and the incongruity of her refined features and rough hands. There is the portrait of a Bedouin with searching eyes and tattooed face. There is an old man in a thobe and keffiyeh casually resting with his bicycle before a magnificent Roman colonnade.

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Quartz: Happiness doesn’t change much in long marriages. But something else does (June 27, 2018)

To answer that question, sociologists Paul Amato from Pennsylvania State University and Spencer James of Brigham Young University examined data from 1,617 participants in the Marital Instability over the Life Course survey, a longitudinal study of marriage in the US conducted from 1980 to 2000. All respondents were married at the start of the survey; by the end, about half of them still were, the rest having divorced (19%), become widowed (5%), or dropped out of the study.[...]

To gauge happiness, the researchers asked respondents to rate their satisfaction with things like their spouse’s supportiveness, the affection in the marriage, and their sex life. Much like other researchers, the team found that happiness declines in the first years of marriage, as the flush of newlywed life gives way to day-to-day frustrations and realities. [...]

But what was more striking about the overall collective data of married people was that while happiness really didn’t sway that much over time, the relationships still changed markedly.

Conflict, for instance, declined dramatically and continuously over the course of a life together. After a dip in the first decades when work and family obligations consume a couple’s time, the frequency of shared activities increased. By the fourth decade of marriage, couples reported spending as much time dining, socializing, and having fun together as they did when they were newlyweds.

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The Atlantic: The Spotlight Effect: This Church Scandal Was Revealed by Outsiders

But it’s also an acknowledgment of how this conference would never be happening, and the dark secret of clerical sexual abuse and cover-up might never have come to light, if not for outsiders to the hierarchy: journalists, civil authorities, films, women who listened to the victims (or who were victims themselves). They helped reveal a pattern of concealment within the Church and drove a shift in the culture.[...]

To my mind, Archbishop Scicluna is the most powerful Vatican official with a full understanding of the scope of the crisis (although what changes he wants to see and whether he has the power to make them is another question). His words—albeit tailored to an audience of journalists, rather than members of the hierarchy—mark a shift for the Vatican, a way of saying not only that something horrible happened, but that it was outsiders who raised alarm bells. There’s less talk now of how the sexual revolution caused clergy to carry out abuse, or that children had somehow led priests into temptation, as there was back in 2002. Vatican officials no longer call media coverage of abuse cases “calumnious attacks” on the Church, as some did in the 2010 flare-up of the crisis under Francis’s predecessor, Benedict XIV.[...]

Huggins is also part of another group of outsiders to Church hierarchy that has become more and more vocal: women. In November, the organization representing the world’s Catholic women’s religious orders denounced the “culture of silence and secrecy” that contributed to abuse, and urged nuns to report abuse to law enforcement. This month, Francis acknowledged another Church scandal in which nuns had been sexually abused by priests for years, and said the Church was working to address the issue.

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