The online media star, who sits on the board of the ride-sharing app company, says Uber doesn’t just suffer from a culture of sexism. It’s also burnout — and bad sleep.
country: United States
Stay updated with comprehensive news on the United States from Worldcrunch. Discover insights on American politics, economic strategies, societal issues, and cultural landmarks with translations from top international sources. Highlights include Washington D.C., New York, Los Angeles, and cultural events.
WASHINGTON — As former FBI Director James Comey held the political world in thrall Thursday from inside a packed Senate hearing room, House Speaker Paul Ryan walked into an unusually empty press briefing across the Capitol. Before Comey’s testimony about his private interactions with President Donald Trump had even concluded, Ryan joined an effort already underway among GOP lawmakers to place it in the best possible light for Trump. “Of course there needs to be a degree of independence” between federal law enforcement and the White House, Ryan said. But, he added, “The president’s new at this. He’s new to […]
Is the unnamed, faceless author the true superstar of the 21st century? A new book explores the history of anonymity in pop culture, and beyond.
-Editorial- PARIS — The world is witnessing an unprecedented diplomatic event. America is retreating as the world faces one of the most serious issues of our time — climate change. It’s deciding not to exert its leadership. It will be neither model nor guide. This continent-sized country is shrinking and retreating into itself, as it […]
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump has made a colossal mistake in deciding to withdraw from the Paris climate agreement. There is simply no case for withdrawal, other than a desire to double down on an ill-informed campaign promise, while the case for staying in is overwhelming. But damaging as it is, this decision is not the beginning of the end for efforts to contain climate change. The world decided in Paris to confront the climate threat, and it is not turning back. Around the world, climate change is a metastasizing danger, for some countries even an existential threat. It was […]
PARIS — Monsanto, the multinational producer of pesticides and genetically-engineered crops, has sought to discredit virtually anything that stands in the way of its business, reports leading French daily Le Monde in a multi-part investigative series that began Thursday. Among the targets of the U.S.-based agro-chemical giant are scientists, regulators and even the World Health […]
U.S. President Trump has changed from a candidate concerned with the economic plight of ordinary Americans, to an imperialist president fascinated by military power.
WASHINGTON — In 1965, not long after his assertion that adopting Medicare would mark the death of freedom, Ronald Reagan, that great sunny-side optimist of the American right, explained the apocalyptic, anti-democratic impulse that animated the far right of his day, and which now permeates the Republican Party. “A democracy cannot exist as a permanent form of government. It can only exist until the voters discover they can vote themselves largesse out of the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority … always votes for the candidate promising the most benefits from the treasury with the result that democracy […]
WASHINGTON — President Trump arrived in Jerusalem this week with a most curious bit of information for Israeli President Reuven Rivlin. “We just got back from the Middle East,” Trump announced. “We just got back from Saudi Arabia.” At this, the Israeli ambassador to Washington, Ron Dermer, put his forehead in his palm. Did Trump not know Israel is in the Middle East? Did he not know he was in Israel? There was little time to contemplate this mystery, because Trump was moving on to generate more puzzlement at his meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister. Americans by […]
SEATTLE — Strolling through the bustling construction zone of Amazon’s urban campus in Seattle, you instantly recognize the charm offensive the company has aimed at its hometown. “Banistas’ at two outdoor stands offer bananas to employees and passers-by — a visual cue to Amazon’s smiley logo. Most American cities would do back flips to have a jobs juggernaut like Amazon.com Inc. in their midst. After all, the company will soon fill more than 10 million square feet of office space in a place where it now employs more than 30,000 people. But Seattle is not like other places. Locals resent […]
-OpEd- WASHINGTON — Ten days ago, Donald Trump’s rocky presidency was in relatively calm waters. He’d helped push a health-care bill through the House and was spending the weekend at his Trump-brand property in Bedminster, N.J. After that, the deluge: Sally Yates’s testimony on Capitol Hill, the firing of FBI Director James B. Comey, the private meeting with Russia’s foreign minister, the revelation that the Comey firing was spurred at least partly by the Russia investigation, the threat to release tapes of his conversation with Comey and, on Monday, The Washington Post”s revelation that Trump had shared classified information with […]
NEW YORK CITY — The 19th-century French sociologist Gabriel Tarde defined the marketplace as a war between buyers and sellers. He called price “a truce” obtained by haggling. It was because of that “war” mentality, he explained in his Selected Papers, that authorities in Europe began fixing prices on goods and services. The goal was […]
President Trump’s hard line on immigration is spurring a surge of high-tech investment, as farmers scramble for new ways of coping with labor shortages and slumping profits.
-OpEd- I’m a Donald Trump supporter. I voted for him and — 112 days in — I’d vote for him again. As a former member of Congress, I found his call to “drain the swamp” in Washington particularly appealing. D.C. needs a kick in the rear and I see Trump as the boot. But I’m not here to be a cheerleader for President Trump, and I’m not on his payroll. When he does something wrong, it’s my duty as a talk-show host, and as a citizen, to call him out. I always have and always will, so let me be […]
A party is united behind an aging New York playboy with no fixed principles but an insatiable urge to be on the front page every single day.
WASHINGTON, D.C. — During his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump boasted that “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” On the 100th day of his presidency, Trump invited Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, who has said that he used to roam the streets on a motorcycle looking for criminals to kill, to the White House. A Duterte state visit to Washington or Mar-a-Lago would be a ghastly spectacle, given the way the Philippines have pursued a war on drugs even more literal than the one in the United […]
-Analysis- WASHINGTON (Indiana) — This city of 11,000, nestled among a handful of low hills rising from table-flat Hoosier farm fields, is 680 miles from the other Washington, but the cultural and political divide may be even greater than the geographical distance. Solidly red Indiana backed Donald Trump by 57% to Hillary Clinton’s 37%. Voters here in Daviess County went for Trump over Clinton by 79% to 16%, more than the 74 % who voted for Mitt Romney in 2012 and the 67% who supported John McCain in 2008. Indeed, Daviess, tucked into the state’s southwestern toe between Illinois and […]
WASHINGTON, D.C. — As he nears his 100th day in office, President Donald Trump’s efforts to appear decisive and unequivocal in his responses to fast-moving global crises have been undercut by a series of confusing and conflicting messages from within his administration. Over the past two weeks, policy pronouncements from senior Trump aides have often been at odds with one another — such as whether Syrian President Bashar Assad must leave power as part of a negotiated resolution to end that nation’s civil war. In other cases, formal White House written statements have conflicted with those from government agencies, even […]
WASHINGTON — For the past year and a half, Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton have been ringing the alarm about rising mortality among middle-aged white Americans. The pair have attracted a bit of controversy for pointing out these facts. Recently, Pacific Standard’s Malcolm Harris suggested that their research, and the way it was presented, put too much emphasis on white mortality – when black mortality has always been worse. “American white privilege is still very much in effect, and no statistical tomfoolery can change that,” he wrote. Sam Fulwood III, a fellow at the left-leaning Center for American […]
NEW YORK — If you’re a middle-class American baby boomer or Gen Xer, you might have spent much of the past decade wondering what went wrong. If you’re a boomer, there’s a good chance you’re still working well after you thought you’d retire. And if you’re part of Generation X, you’re probably less wealthy than your parents were at the same age. Meanwhile, all across the U.S., pension funds are underfunded and will almost certainly have to default on some of their obligations to retirees. It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, middle-class […]
WASHINGTON — It is either a turning point or a welcome aberration that President Trump found the cruelly extinguished lives of Syrian children to be compelling (or at least contributory) in his decision to use force in Syria. The nerve gas attack by the Bashar al-Assad regime, he said, “crossed a lot of lines for me . . . innocent children, innocent babies — babies, little babies.” Much of Trump’s appeal during his presidential campaign was based on dehumanization — the characterization of migrants as criminals and refugees as terrorist threats. This is the first instance I can recall of Trump showing […]
WASHINGTON — The name of the gathering almost sounded like an oxymoron: the “Humanist Clergy Collaboratory.” A meeting to organize religious leaders — for people who don’t believe in organized religion? “Well,” Amanda Poppei joked, “some people would say we’re not that organized.” But the humanist clergy — spiritual leaders for people who don’t like to talk about God but do like to gather for a moral purpose — are trying to get a lot more organized. The “collaboratory,” which Poppei hosted at Washington Ethical Society, the 73-year-old humanist congregation that she leads in Northwest Washington, brought together about 40 […]
Fascism fears were greatly exaggerated in a system that puts limits on any individual’s power.
It’s a looming question for any reader of the news and follower of current events:Time magazine’s “Is Truth Dead?” cover this week does well to capture the zeitgeist of public discourse in the early months of Donald Trump’s presidency. The central article travels through the place of truth in American public life, all the way […]
Apple CEO Tim Cook is betting on AR, which he sees as potentially as groundbreaking as the smartphone.
WASHINGTON — In blocking the administration’s second attempt at a travel ban from terror-prone countries, a federal judge in Hawaii laid the blame squarely on President Donald Trump and his advisers, who had suggested the policy was aimed at barring Muslims. A different politician might have expressed disappointment and moved on. But Trump, taking the stage barely an hour later at a rally Wednesday night in Nashville, let loose on the “terrible ruling” – and doubled down on the sentiments that got the policy into trouble in the first place. “The order blocked was a watered-down version of the first […]
The ACLU is spending millions on a new ‘People Power’ campaign. The civil rights group’s push is the largest piece of a sprawling ‘resistance’ moving faster than Democratic Party leaders can think.
The new U.S. president might want to think twice about taking a business-world approach to international affairs.
Talent is distributed around the globe, opportunity is not. Visit to a finance-sponsored ‘datathon’ to find the next generation of quantative wizards.
WASHINGTON — When President Barack Obama delivered State of the Union addresses without a full and detailed discussion of foreign policy, conservatives justifiably complained. We are a country at war, with rising, big power threats in an increasingly unstable world. All true. And yet when President Donald Trump said virtually nothing of substance Tuesday night on national security, conservatives by and large gave him a pass. Trump’s highlighting of the widow of slain Navy SEAL William “Ryan” Owens obscured the lack of substance on the cause for which Trump correctly said Owens gave his life. Repeating that we will eradicate […]
President Donald Trump’s address to Congress marked a change in tone, but his ambitious agenda will bring conflict with lawmakers down the road.
WASHINGTON — Back in October, Shannon Coulter was doing some late-night browsing on the Nordstrom website. Before long, the small-business owner had a nagging feeling about the department store’s line-up of Ivanka Trump apparel and shoes — a brand she couldn’t help but see in a different light amid the unfolding events of the presidential campaign. Just days earlier, news had broken of the explosive Access Hollywood footage in which Donald Trump bragged about groping women without their consent. “Something changed for me when the Trump tapes came out,” Coulter recalled in an interview. “Those words were just ringing in […]
Beyond his media attacks and over-the-top reality TV performances, Donald Trump’s lack of command of the issues is what should worry us.
WASHINGTON — With President Donald Trump in his fourth full week in office, the upheaval inside the administration that West Wing officials had optimistically dismissed as growing pains is now cementing itself as standard operating procedure. Trump — distracted by political brushfires often of his own making — has failed to fill such key posts as White House communications director, while sub-Cabinet positions across agencies and scores of ambassadorships around the globe still sit empty. Upset about damaging leaks of his calls with world leaders and other national security information, Trump has ordered an internal investigation to find the leakers. […]
WASHINGTON — The world seems to be stepping into a new era — literally. As if, all of a sudden, the Gregorian calendar is no longer valid and the world needs to start counting from the beginning. On January 20 of the year 2017, according to the old calendar, the new Trumpian calendar will start […]
-Analysis- NEW YORK — Investors are ignoring Donald Trump’s trade rhetoric at their own peril. That’s the warning coming from a rising cohort of erstwhile Trump bulls who’ve gone weak in the knees as the president turns his sights on allies from Mexico to Japan and Australia. It isn’t enough, they say, that the post-election rally that added more than $3.5 trillion to global equities and sent high-yield debt to the best start to a year since 2012 has stalled. According to them, the administration’s pledges to protect U.S. industry and redefine currency relationships could ignite a trade war with […]
Austin, Texas may be the first of many ‘sanctuary cities’ that disobey President Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policy.
WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s elevation of his chief political strategist to a major role in national security policy, and a White House order banning refugees from certain Muslim-majority countries from U.S. entry, appeared to come together as cause and effect over the weekend. Stephen Bannon — whose nationalist convictions and hard-line oppositional view of globalism have long guided Trump — was directly involved in shaping the controversial immigration mandate, according to several people familiar with the drafting who requested anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The order, which has ignited sweeping domestic and international backlash, came […]
-OpEd- When Donald Trump spoke at his inauguration on Jan. 20, there wasn’t even a hint of trying to be magnanimous. Instead, he called for the most narrow-minded form of nationalism. It’s tempting to see this as one of the many personal shortcomings of the new president of the United States. But that’s not the […]
WASHINGTON — Donald Trump, having propelled his presidential campaign to victory while often disregarding the truth, now is testing the proposition that he can govern the country that way. In the first five days of his presidency, Trump has put the enormous power of the nation’s highest office behind spurious — and easily disproved — claims. He began with trivial falsehoods about the size of the crowds at his inauguration but has since escalated a more grave claim that undermines the trustworthiness of the nation’s electoral system. In a White House reception Monday night for congressional leaders, Trump alleged that […]