A Variety of Issues From My Writer's Notebook

#Joshua Hunt, "Eviction Inc.," The Nation, February 17, 2020.
"Cabello's company,Quick Evic, is on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, amid four neighborhoods where housing is increasingly precarious. In Brownsville, where [Cabello] grew up, 40 percent of the population lives in poverty; in east New York where Quick Evic does most of its business, the poverty rate is 25 percent, and one-third of tenants live in severely rent-burdened households, spending more than half their income on housing..."

"In 2018, researchers at New York University found that people from low-income households, once evicted, face an increased risk of homelessness, and are more likely to end up in the emergency room. And the problem is not limited to large cities like New York. Across the US, there are nearly a million evictions every year."

#Kiera Butler, "Of Two Kinds," Mother Jones, March/April 2020.
"The number of same-sex public schools has exploded over the last two decades, up from a handful in the early 2000s to a few hundred today." "Cutting edge neuroscience has cast doubt on the idea of consistent and meaningful  brain differences between girls and boys, and education  researchers have found that sex-differential teaching doesn't guarantee academic progress." "So far, the ACLU has challenged same-sex schooling in 15 states, resulting in the closure of 36 programs."

"A 2017 'Education Week' report found that single-sex public schools are composed of a disproportionate number of students of color -- of about 90 percent..." "In 2014, ;in a meta-analysis published by the American Psychological Association, researchers combed through 184 studies of 1.6 million students around the world; they could find 'little or no advantage of single-sex schools over coed ones, noting that this undercut assumption about biological differences between boys and girls."

#Jill Lepore, "In Every Dark Hour," The New Yorker, February 3, 2020.
Walter Lippman said: "The present century is the century of authority, a century of the Right, a Fascist  century." Jill Lepore has picked up on Lippman: "Starting in about 2005, the number of democracies around the world began to fall, as it had in the nineteen-thirties. All the same, measured not against its past, but against its contemporaries, American democracy in the twenty-first century is withering. True, the United States still doesn't have a Rome or a Berlin to march on. That hasn't saved the nation from misinformation, tribalism, domestic terrorism, human rights abuses, political intolerance, social media excesses, mob violence, white nationalism, a criminal Presidency,the   hobbling of Congress, a corrupt Presidential Administration, assaults on the press, crippling polarization, the undermining of elections, an epistemological chaos that is the only air that totalitarianism can breathe." "New Dealers were trying to save the economy; they ended up saving democracy. T,hey built a new America; they told a new American story."

#The Trump Organization is charging the Secret Service $157,000 more than what was previously known. The Washington "Post" has documents showing that the Trump Organization has charged the Secret Service more than $628,000 since Trump took office in 2017.

#The District of  Columbia Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 that the Department of Justice must hand over materials from former special counsel Mueller's investigation to Congress. In short, the ruling said that it is the "the district court, not the Executive or the Department that controls access to the grand jury materials." It was Judge Neomi Ray, a Trump nominee, who voted no.

#Vera Bergengruen, "John Bolton tests the GOP's fealty to Trump," TIME, February 10, 2020.
"In the arc of the Trump presidency, Bolton now represents the high-water mark in loyalty tests for Trump's followers in Congress." "These documents which the White House refused to hand over, could prove what more than a dozen officials, Bolton now among them, has said for months: that Trump leveraged the economic and military might of the U.S. to aid his own re-election."

#Justin Worland, "The world of finance..." TIME, February 10, 2020.
" 'For decades, banks have given fossil-fuel companies the financing to mine and drill; meanwhile, governments have provided seemingly bottomless subsidies, some $5 trillion annually,' the IMF said last year." "Microsoft pledged to go carbon-negative in a decade and remove by 2050 a sum of carbon equivalent to all that the company has ever emitted."

ADDENDUMS:
*Trump's SOTU speech drew roughly 37.3% of Americans, the smallest live-TV audience for a presidential address to Congress since Obama's valedictory speech in 2016.  It was a 20% decline since Trump's SOTU speech last year, and well below the audience for his speeches in 2017 and 2018.

*Trump said of Roger Stone's prosecutors: "They hit the road very quickly." "They treated Roger Stone very badly."

*Trump said Democrats are "vicious as Hell" in his impeachment victory speech.

*Trump has said he has "legal rights" to intervene in Justice Department handling of criminal  cases. "This doesn't mean that I do not have as President the legal right to do so, but I have so far chosen not to do so."