5 Signs America’s Super Rich Are Losing Their Minds

The Article: by Lynn Stuart Parramore in Salon.

The Text: Is it us, or have America’s ultrawealthy been sounding increasingly unhinged lately? Despite the fact that the wealth of the 1 percent jumped 31 percent from 2009 to 2012 while the other 99 percent of America saw a gain of only 0.4 percent, the rich are very upset, and they need to tell us about it. Maybe it’s all the talk about income inequality that’s gotten them so stirred up. Whatever it is, here are five signs that the zillionaires seem to be losing it.

1. The rich are mouthing off in epic rants.

They’re going on talk shows, writing editorials, bitching and moaning, and taking every opportunity to tell us just how fed up they are.

Wealthy upper-eastsiders in New York are screaming that progressive Mayor de Blasio is punishing them by not plowing their streets of snow. Billionaire Home Depot founder Ken Langone warned Pope Francis that if he doesn’t shut it about income inequality, the charitable contribution spigot will be turned off. Nutcase venture capitalist Thomas Perkins just claimed that there is a war on the rich comparable to the Holocaust and that the wealthy deserve more votes. Bill O’Reilly warned, ”Every affluent person in America is in danger. Every one.” He asks you to pray for them.

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ADHD Does Not Exist

The Article: ADHD Does Not Exist by Richard Saul in The New Republic.

The Text: ou might be saying to yourself, okay, ADHD is probably overdiagnosed. And yes, some people who are on a stimulant probably shouldn’t be, like the college student struggling to focus on a boring lecture or the kid who’s fidgeting a bit too much for his teacher’s liking. But how can it be that among the millions of people diagnosed—over 4 percent of adults and 11 percent of children in the U.S.—not one of them actually has ADHD? Because we’ve all encountered someone with severe attention or hyperactivity issues—the boy who is always daydreaming, the girl who gets out of her seat to run around the room while her classmates sit calmly, the woman who consistently asks questions that have just been answered. Surely at least some of these people have ADHD! Actually, not one of them does. Let me be clear: In my view, not a single individual—not even the person who finds it close to impossible to pay attention or sit still—is afflicted by the disorder called ADHD as we define it today.

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Bret Easton Ellis On “Generation Wuss”

The Article: BRET EASTON ELLIS SAYS WE’RE ALL A BUNCH OF CRY-BABIES by Nathalie Olah in VICE.

The Text: Bret Easton Ellis has only got to open his mouth for the cry-babies of the world to crawl out and start berating him for being a morally depraved chancer. Back in the 80s and 90s, you could sympathise with people getting offended by his books if they hadn’t spent much time around hedge-fund managers or fashion world dickheads. If they had, they’d realise that American Psycho and Glamorama are in essence works of journalism – dressed up in Valentino and splattered with blood, yes, but documentaries of a certain moment in history all the same. “The six or seven books add up as a sort of autobiography,” he says. “When I look at them I think, ‘Oh, that’s where I was in ’91. That’s where I was in ’88. Okay, I got it.’”

Now he has moved into film, as well as writing screenplays for TV and delivering his own weekly podcast. Which, among other highlights, has featured Kanye West and Marilyn Manson. Yet still he has repeatedly faced accusations of “douchery” from bloggers and a general outcry every time he criticises anything on Twitter.

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Why Now’s The Time To Be A Ruthless Dictator

The Article: Why it’s a good time to be a dictator like Kim Jong-un by Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian.

The Text: In the early 1990s, when I was in my infancy as a reporter, the dominant international story was the war in the Balkans. Several of my peers made their names covering that war and were deeply affected by it. What motivated at least a few of them was not the desire simply to be on the front page or lead the evening news, but a passionate urge to let the world know what was happening. Several believed that, if only the world could see what they could see in Bosnia, then it would act.

Perhaps the authors of the latest UN report into human rights in North Korea felt a similar motivation. They can be satisfied that, thanks to their 372-page study, no one now can claim to be ignorant of the horrors committed in that place. They are laid out in stomach-turning detail: the torture, the deliberate starvation, the executions committed in a network of secret prison camps. The individual cases break the heart: the seven-year-old girl beaten to death over a few extra grains of food; the boy whose finger was chopped off for accidentally dropping a sewing machine in the factory where he was forced to work; and, most shocking of all, the mother forced to drown her just-born baby in a bowl of water.

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What We Mean When We Say Hello

The Article: What We Mean When We Say Hello by Deborah Fallows in The Atlantic.

The Text: Last week I wrote about conversation starters that follow “Hello” and “How do you do.” Many dozens of you have written in and generously included your comments and interpretations of what you think people actually mean when they say something like “Where do you live?” or “Where are you from?”

Here is what you’ve said so far:

The most popular suggestion is some version of “Where do you live?” But as you describe, you are really after an answer offering some social-economic-cultural hints about a person’s life.

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