What We’re Reading
When the federal moratorium on evictions ended in August, many feared that hundreds of thousands of tenants would soon be out on the streets. More than six weeks later, that hasn’t happened.
Instead, a more modest uptick in evictions reflects how renter protections at the city and state levels still remain in parts of the country, housing attorneys and advocates said. Landlords, meanwhile, say the risk of an eviction epidemic was always overstated and that most building owners have been willing to work with cash-strapped tenants.
As soon as Edward Jenner introduced the first smallpox vaccine in 1798, posters appeared in England showing humans who had been vaccinated “sprouting horns and hooves,” Dr. Snowden said.
“In 19th-century Britain, the largest single movement was the anti-vaccine movement,” he added. And with vaccine resisters holding out, diseases that should have been tamed persisted.
“Quits,” as the Bureau of Labor Statistics calls them, are rising in almost every industry. For those in leisure and hospitality, especially, the workplace must feel like one giant revolving door. Nearly 7 percent of employees in the “accommodations and food services” sector left their job in August. That means one in 14 hotel clerks, restaurant servers, and barbacks said sayonara in a single month. Thanks to several pandemic-relief checks, a rent moratorium, and student-loan forgiveness, everybody, particularly if they are young and have a low income, has more freedom to quit jobs they hate and hop to something else.
“The other side of that is - I was telling someone the other day - if Paul hadn’t been in the band, we’d probably have made two albums because we were lazy buggers.
“But Paul’s a workaholic. John and I would be sitting in the garden taking in the color green from the tree, and the phone would ring, and we would know, ‘Hey lads, you want to come in? Let’s go in the studio!’
“So I’ve told Paul this, he knows this story, we made three times more music than we ever would without him because he’s the workaholic and he loves to get going. Once we got there, we loved it, of course, but, ‘Oh no, not again!’”
One possible explanation is just how extra-terrestrial they seem, with unreasonable numbers of eyes – up to 12 – too many legs and toothless fangs. Their behaviour is also strikingly different to that of most mammals – building webs to trap unwary passersby, then mummifying them and sucking out their insides, or eating their mates and casually producing whole swarms of offspring.
“And so their unfamiliarity binds with a kind of commonness so that they’re – I think the technical term is we find them creepy,” says Lockwood.
Have a good weekend.