What we’re reading (8/1)
“Vast New Study Shows A Key To Reducing Poverty: More Friendships Between Rich And Poor” (New York Times). “Over the last four decades, the financial circumstances into which children have been born have increasingly determined where they have ended up as adults. But an expansive new study, based on billions of social media connections, has uncovered a powerful exception to that pattern that helps explain why certain places offer a path out of poverty. For poor children, living in an area where people have more friendships that cut across class lines significantly increases how much they earn in adulthood, the new research found. The study, published Monday in Nature, analyzed the Facebook friendships of 72 million people, amounting to 84 percent of U.S. adults aged 25 to 44.”
“The Legal Onslaught Facing Credit Card Companies” (DealBook). “This weekend, Judge Cormac J. Carney of the U.S. District Court of central California refused Visa’s request to be dismissed from a case that claims it conspired to help MindGeek, parent company of the website Pornhub, profit from images of child sexual abuse.”
“Facing Labor Shortages, Pella Reinvents The Company Town In Rural Iowa” (Wall Street Journal). “The company and its controlling shareholders—members of the founding Kuyper family and its descendants…have spent tens of millions of dollars in the past three years on housing, child-care centers, restaurants and an indoor entertainment center, among other things, to retain and attract new workers. More spending is on the way.”
“The Evolution Of Malls” (City Journal). “‘People love to be in public with other people.’ For the suburbs, malls offered this experience in the way that parks and town squares had in the past. Like railway stations and hotels before them, malls created a zone of public-private space: private property, yet open to the public to use within certain bounds. They are enjoyed by groups as diverse as white-haired walking groups, teenage truants, and representatives of fringe religions scouting for recruits.”
“A Ransomware Attack Cost This Entrepreneur A Year Of His Life And Almost Wrecked His Business” (Los Angeles Times). “When ransomware bandits struck his business last June, encrypting all his data and operational software and sending him a skull-and-crossbones image and an email address to learn the price he would have to pay to restore it all, Fran Finnegan thought it would take him weeks to restore everything to its pre-hack condition. It took him more than a year.”
