Mine are he/him/his, but if someone included me in a sentence using the pronouns they/them/theirs, I would simply assume that they were either referring to my clan or perhaps one of my other dissociative (multiple personality) disorder identities other than the one writing this blog entry. In today’s Inequality Media email, Robert Reich explores how politicians’ use of pronouns reveals important things about them – Manchin, Sinema, Trump and others. Here’s the newsletter.
I enjoy learning about subjects in which I have no formal training. Economics is one of them. I’ve read a few books on Behavioral Economics and Personal Finance. But until this year, I had not delved into macroeconomics. If you are curious about the US economy and how it affects various segments of society, I invite you to watch at least the first couple of Robert Reich’s Berkley lectures on Wealth and Poverty. They’re completely free, and watching them feels like going back to college after all these decades, only without having to worry about being late to class, taking notes, or those dreaded exams.
Here is the first lecture, and here is the second. There are six more lectures, if you find these interesting.
Rubbernecking is a phenomenon that I most often associate with the roadside scenes of vehicular accidents. People have two distinct reactions to such scenes. One group of folks avert their eyes so that they do not have to witness the tragedy. Others rubberneck – staring intently at the scene so as to absorb as many of the details as they can. A third, small group, first responders, roll up their sleeves and enter the fray to do what they can.
I myself do not often watch local news. I get some of it in newsfeeds, but mostly I consume national and international news stories which, most often, resemble highway traffic accidents with high death tolls – figurative if not actual. Where I rubberneck, Susan averts her eyes.