The Atlantic

The ubiquity of phones is giving casual bettors the tools to become compulsive wagerers—a not-so-innocent cultural shift, Christine Emba writes:

Summer gigs as camp counselors, ice cream scoopers, cashiers, pencil-pushers (I myself spent one delightfully air-conditioned but very boring summer as an aide in a local office) are a classic part of American youth. But for decades, especially after the Great Recession, teen jobs had been on the decline. That all changed when the frenzied labor market of 2021 meant that many businesses were scrambling to find workers---even inexperienced high schoolers---to fill openings. Demand for summer workers has stayed high, and teens are heeding the call: Earlier this year, about 38 percent of teenagers were working or looking for work. That's the highest rate since the summer of 2009. The opportunities are not always distributed equally: White teens tend to see higher rates of employment, even as their Black and Hispanic peers have also been looking for work. And general demand for corporate summer internships is flagging. Still, one economist told me, the recent surge in teens working is evidence of his riff on the "Field of Dreams" principle: “Raise the wages; they will come.” I wrote about the new teen job for The Atlantic:

Joe Biden’s best dignity-preserving option is to run in an open convention this summer, Graeme Wood argues. https://lnkd.in/ei24cJvQ Biden has secured enough delegates to officially get the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in August, and now he has sole authority to release them and let them choose another nominee at or before the convention. “He would have to give a speech to explain this choice. It might go something like this: ‘You saw me looking old. For the next month you’ll see much younger Democrats and Republicans eating my dust. And if in August, my party thinks this old man is ready for retirement, I’ll be thrilled to finish my term, support the nominee, and work on my golf handicap come January,’” Wood suggests. “Only one cognitive test really matters, and that is the test administered by voters over the course of a campaign, and scored by them in the booth after seeing a candidate dominate or falter. Biden’s decline seems either to have been hidden from the public or to have come relatively quickly, too fast for the primary season to reveal it in full,” Wood continues. But by running in an open convention, Biden would be offering voters, “through their party proxies, a second chance to stress-test his frontal lobes.” “The alleged downside of this option, or any option that leads to an open convention, is that the Democrats would waste time and money fighting one another when they could be fighting Donald Trump,” Wood writes. But “competition is healthy, and what sounds to naive ears like a death match is an essential step in the propagation and survival of the party.” The Democratic Party, Wood writes, “would benefit from a season of intense open auditions—to figure out which junior talent deserves promotion, which senior talent deserves retirement, which policies animate the party’s supporters, and which policies should go. The candidates who emerge with the most support from this compressed process—which would be the most-watched gladiatorial match in American political history—will be the party’s future.” And, Wood continues, “Biden will either continue or conclude his career with a fight.” 📸: Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty

The joint venture between a legacy giant and an EV startup will be a fascinating test of the industry’s effort to embrace technological change, James Surowiecki writes.

Getting a seat at the most sought-after restaurants, especially in major cities, has become hellish, Saahil Desai writes: “It has never been easier to book a table, and it’s never been harder to actually find one.” https://lnkd.in/ehXygQ6C Apps such as Resy, Tock, and OpenTable make finding restaurants easy. But table openings at in-demand spots are also disappearing before you even have time to click and confirm a reservation. Now credit cards are complicating matters even more: “A card isn’t just for paying the bill,” Desai writes. “It’s something like an entry ticket in its own right.” Having the right credit card can give people a better shot at a reservation. Resy, which is owned by American Express, holds certain tables open for people with Platinum cards, and leapfrogs cardholders to the front of waiting lists. “Reservations, once free, have been financialized,” Desai continues. And Amex isn’t alone: JPMorgan Chase and Capital One both have their own exclusive restaurant offerings for certain cardholders. “When it works, parlaying a card into a reservation can feel great, like a cheat code,” Desai writes. “But eventually, the reservation wars will make losers of us all.” Demand for reservations is starting to outpace the exclusive offerings that certain cardholders are granted: Even the owners of an Amex Black card, with its $10,000 initial charge and $5,000 annual fee, don’t always have a shot at a table. “The same process plays out again and again,” Desai continues. “Reservations to the cool spots quickly disappear on the apps, which makes them more desirable, which makes the next batch of slots disappear even quicker.” “Trying and failing to nab a reservation is literally a champagne problem,” Desai writes—but “must every aspect of life be subject to some form of digital arbitrage?” Dating apps are now full of schemes to make users pay. Airbnb has become just as expensive and corporatized as hotels. Amazon searches prompt reams of sponsored listings. “Even restaurant reservations are a commodity—vacuumed up by bots and scalpers looking to sell,” Desai continues. 🎨: Matteo Giuseppe Pani. Source: Getty.

If you haven't touched grass recently, it may not be a coincidence that you might be feeling lonely, Hannah Seo writes. Our relationship to nature and our relationships with one another are both parallel and related. "A life without nature, it seems, is a lonely life—and vice versa." (From 2023)

"In a life of busyness and ambushes on our attention, dog walks air out the brain. Sometimes they might seem like an inconvenience, but only in the way G. K. Chesterton defined 'inconvenience'—an adventure wrongly considered. Considered correctly, the daily dog walks are a regimen of escape and pause. They enlarge our sympathies and sweeten our disposition. They pry open the day when it balls up into a little fist," John Dickerson writes. (From 2021)

America’s Founders knew that the pursuit of happiness involved personal liberation, Arthur C. Brooks writes. https://lnkd.in/ejyZFWkS The Declaration of Independence asserts that there is an “unalienable right” to the “pursuit of happiness,” Brooks writes. “As a happiness specialist, I have always been puzzled by something about this early-American happiness advice … As wise as they were, the Founders were mixing up getting happier with minimizing the sources of unhappiness.” It’s fair to say that their philosophy was not about learning how to enjoy life, Brooks writes, but “about clearing away the self-imposed sources of misery that make pursuing happiness difficult or impossible.” The Founders believed that successful self-government relies on personal self-government, and in their writings, the Founders explained how one can go about it. First, curb your appetites. As Brooks interprets the advice from Benjamin Franklin’s autobiography, “Poor health due to excess and poverty from wasteful spending are avoidable sources of misery.” A second lesson to take from the Founders is the benefits of humility. “The Founders would definitely disapprove of our cult of self-esteem,” Brooks writes—and according to research, learning from others and acknowledging one’s limitations “strongly predicts lower levels of anxiety and depression.” Another piece of advice Brooks takes from the Founders is to avoid idleness. Thomas Jefferson, for example, wrote in 1787 that “a mind always employed is always happy.” There is a danger in overcompensating and making ourselves too busy, “but staying occupied with meaningful tasks is a guard against misery,” Brooks writes. Finally, shun the limelight. “Alexander Hamilton called the desire for recognition “the ruling passion of the noblest minds.” “But a miserable passion it is, leading to frustration,” Brooks notes. https://lnkd.in/ejyZFWkS 🎨:: Jan Buchczik

Arthur C. Brooks on the trap of staying on too long:

Many people chase achievement, assuming it will lead to well-being. They should reverse that order of operations, Arthur Brooks writes. (From 2022)