Browsing PBH By Articles

Life Before Air Conditioning

Posted on July 8, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Before Air Conditioning by Arthur Miller in The New Yorker.

The Text: EExactly what year it was I can no longer recall—probably 1927 or ’28—there was an extraordinarily hot September, which hung on even after school had started and we were back from our Rockaway Beach bungalow. Every window in New York was open, and on the streets venders manning little carts chopped ice and sprinkled colored sugar over mounds of it for a couple of pennies. We kids would jump onto the back steps of the slow-moving, horse-drawn ice wagons and steal a chip or two; the ice smelled vaguely of manure but cooled palm and tongue.

People on West 110th Street, where I lived, were a little too bourgeois to sit out on their fire escapes, but around the corner on 111th and farther uptown mattresses were put out as night fell, and whole families lay on those iron balconies in their underwear.

Even through the nights, the pall of heat never broke. With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th to the Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake. I can recall only white people spread out on the grass; Harlem began above 116th Street then.

The Great Leisure Gap

Posted on July 7, 2012 in Articles

The Article: The Leisure Gap by Claude S. Fischer in The Boston Review.

The Text: Folks are sprucing up RVs, parents are packing kids’ camp gear, airlines are adding flights, and hotels are raising prices. The summer vacationers are coming.

What seems like a flood to us, however, is a trickle compared to the tsunami of holidaymakers in Europe, as anyone who has been sardined into a European train, plane, or lane at the beginning of July and August knows. On a recent summer day in Dubrovnik, I’ve been told, five cruise ships’ worth of tour groups created such a pedestrian gridlock that police had to unknot the crowd.

Americans just don’t vacation like other people do. Western European laws require at least ten and usually more than twenty days. And it’s not just the slacker Mediterranean countries. The nose-to-the-grindstone Germans and Austrians require employers to grant at least twenty paid vacation days a year. In the United States, some of us don’t get any vacation at all. Most American workers do get paid vacations from their bosses, but only twelve days on average, much less than the state-guaranteed European minimum. And even when they get vacation time, Americans often don’t use it.

The Perks Of Being A Lawmaker

Posted on July 6, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Lawmakers reworked financial portfolios after talks with Fed, Treasury officials by Kimberly Kindy, Scott Higham, David S. Fallis and Dan Keating in The Washington Post.

The Text: In January 2008, President George W. Bush was scrambling to bolster the American economy. The subprime mortgage industry was collapsing, and the Dow Jones industrial average had lost more than 2,000 points in less than three months.

House Minority Leader John A. Boehner became the Bush administration’s point person on Capitol Hill to negotiate a $150 billion stimulus package.

In the days that followed, Treasury Secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. made frequent phone calls and visits to Boehner. Neither Paulson nor Boehner would publicly discuss the progress of their negotiations to shore up the nation’s financial portfolio.

America’s Shameful Human Rights Record

Posted on July 5, 2012 in Articles

The Article: A Cruel And Unusual Record by Jimmy Carter in The New York Times.

The Text: The United States is abandoning its role as the global champion of human rights.

Revelations that top officials are targeting people to be assassinated abroad, including American citizens, are only the most recent, disturbing proof of how far our nation’s violation of human rights has extended. This development began after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and has been sanctioned and escalated by bipartisan executive and legislative actions, without dissent from the general public. As a result, our country can no longer speak with moral authority on these critical issues.

While the country has made mistakes in the past, the widespread abuse of human rights over the last decade has been a dramatic change from the past. With leadership from the United States, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was adopted in 1948 as “the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world.” This was a bold and clear commitment that power would no longer serve as a cover to oppress or injure people, and it established equal rights of all people to life, liberty, security of person, equal protection of the law and freedom from torture, arbitrary detention or forced exile.

Solving The I.D. Problem In The 21st Century

Posted on July 4, 2012 in Articles

The Article: Solving The Identification Problem In The 21st Century by Savannah Cox in The Speckled Axe.

The Text: Tunni Rai is a 65-year-old man living in Patna, India. Decades of manual labor have etched deep lines in his face, but he continues to do so because he must support his family. Though the already backbreaking task is made that much more difficult when, in the eyes of the Indian government, he does not exist. At least until recently.

Born in 1947 (or so Rai thinks; he never received a birth certificate from his parents and the voter identification card eventually administered to him was full of errors), Rai has spent his entire life without an official identity. The toll has been absolutely devastating: when Rai took his grandson to the hospital after he had been bitten by a stray dog, doctors refused to treat the boy since Rai could not provide proof of his own identity. On another occasion, a wire thief was electrocuted on Rai’s farm and police authorities soon accused Rai of murder. When he sought legal counsel, he had yet another door slammed in his face due to a lack of identity. Consequently, Rai had no representation during the trial and was subsequently sent to jail.

So at the age of 62, Rai had to rebuild himself entirely. The pride he once took in farming was ripped from his hands and in its place now rests a menial $92 a month security guard job. A job that still leaves him greatly indebted to others, but one that he has thanks only to the benevolence of a relative who didn’t ask for proof of identity before hiring him.