In the third quarter, real estate was one of the best-performing sectors in the stock market, second only to utilities. A year ago, few investors would have seen that coming.
Matt Argersinger is an advisor at The Motley Fool and heads up our Dividend Investor service. Mary Long caught up with him to discuss:
The revival of commercial real estate
A company that proves the importance of “location, location, location”
What’s needed to address the US housing supply shortage.
Israel attacked northern Lebanon for first time in year-long conflict. Strong job numbers recalibrate the U.S. economic outlook. Rescue efforts struggle to reach mountainous areas.
We speak to a Canadian family and an elderly UK woman about the joy of Adopt a Grandparent -- which tackles loneliness while sharing life experiences. Also: Alaska's Fat Bear Week; and dozens of whacky cars.
Chicago blues guitarist and singer Ronnie Baker Brooks, the son of the late blues legend Lonnie Brooks, is dropping a new record on Oct. 11. It’s called ‘Blues In My DNA.’
Reset sits down with the Chicago-born blues guitarist to talk about the album, his rich relationship with his late father and carrying on the legacy of Chicago blues music.
For a full archive of Reset interviews, head over to wbez.org/reset.
When Emily Oster was a kid in the 1980s in New Haven, Connecticut, she grew up on a block with a lot of other children. Every day after dinner, around 6:30, everyone emptied out of their houses and went down to the church parking lot where they engaged in all kinds of unsupervised activities—throwing balls at each other in front of the church wall, climbing up trees and sometimes falling out of them, riding Hot Wheels until people skinned their knees. There was street hockey and there were scrapes. There were a few broken arms.
That experience of playing outside unsupervised in the dark—or walking a mile home from school in kindergarten—is very different from her own children’s experiences, even though they’re growing up in a very similar environment, with very similar parents. They aren’t leaving the house every day after dinner. If Emily had suggested that they walk home from school in kindergarten, even though it’s only a couple of blocks, there’s no chance that would have been met with the school’s acceptance.
Since 1955, there has been a continuous decline in children’s opportunities to engage in free play, away from adult intervention and control. In 1969, 47 percent of kids walked or biked to school, whereas in 2009 that number had plummeted to 12 percent.
How did we get here? What are the consequences of hypervigilant parenting? On kids’ happiness? On their well-being? Their mental health? And on their ability to grow into independent, self-sufficient, and successful adults? And, maybe most importantly, how can we alter this trajectory before it’s too late?
Today, we’re thrilled to introduce our new podcast series: Raising Parents with Emily Oster
If you like what you hear on Honestly, the best way to support us is to go to TheFP.com and become a Free Press subscriber today.
One evening, Michael Kovrig, a former Canadian diplomat, grabbed a late dinner in Beijing with his partner. When they arrived back at his apartment, men in black were waiting for them. Mr Kovrig was pushed into a waiting SUV. Handcuffed and blindfolded, he was driven to a detention centre in southern Beijing that would be his home for the next 1,019 days. September 24th 2024 is the third anniversary of Mr Kovrig’s release. And now he is ready to talk publicly about his ordeal.
On the Weekend Intelligence, we bring you the first in a two-part series from Drum Tower, our weekly podcast on China. David Rennie, The Economist’s geopolitics editor, speaks with Mr Kovrig about the night he was seized, and how his detention was part of a far bigger geopolitical game.
When scholars and policymakers consider how technological advances affect the rise and fall of great powers, they draw on theories that center the moment of innovation—the eureka moment that sparks astonishing technological feats. In Technology and the Rise of Great Powers: How Diffusion Shapes Economic Competition (Princeton UP, 2024), Jeffrey Ding offers a different explanation of how technological revolutions affect competition among great powers. Rather than focusing on which state first introduced major innovations, he investigates why some states were more successful than others at adapting and embracing new technologies at scale. Drawing on historical case studies of past industrial revolutions as well as statistical analysis, Ding develops a theory that emphasizes institutional adaptations oriented around diffusing technological advances throughout the entire economy.
Examining Britain’s rise to preeminence in the First Industrial Revolution, America and Germany’s overtaking of Britain in the Second Industrial Revolution, and Japan’s challenge to America’s technological dominance in the Third Industrial Revolution (also known as the “information revolution”), Ding illuminates the pathway by which these technological revolutions influenced the global distribution of power and explores the generalizability of his theory beyond the given set of great powers. His findings bear directly on current concerns about how emerging technologies such as AI could influence the US-China power balance.
Our guest today is: Jeffrey Ding, an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Georgetown University.
In 1857, the Meskwaki Nation began the long process of piecing their homelands back together. After decades of war, dispossession, and removal at the hands of the American government and American settlers, the Meskwaki, bit by bit, purchase by purchase, started to reestablish a land base along the banks of the Iowa River, more than a century and a half before Land Back became a hash tag.
In Red Earth Nation: A History of the Meskwaki Settlement(Oklahoma UP, 2024), the historian Eric Zimmer traces the history of this settlement (importantly, not a reservation) and the Meskwaki people through their ancient establishment as a people, and their fight to retain identity, land, and indeed, their very existence. A powerful example of community-based history writing, Zimmer tells a story that, while certainly not a straight line, refuses to be simply a tale of woe and hardship. Instead, this is a story of survival, perseverance, and of savvy politics even in the face of the most difficult obstacles.
One of the defining events of the Middle Ages took place in Constantinople on April 12, 1204.
Soldiers of the Fourth Crusade, under orders of the Doge of the Republic of Venice, breached the walls and sacked one of the greatest cities of the era.
The sack wasn’t just an orgy of violence and destruction, which it was. It also set into motion events that caused irreparable divisions between the Eastern and Western Christian worlds and, ultimately, the fall of the Byzantine Empire.
Learn more about the 1204 Sack of Constantinople and how it changed the course of Europe on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.
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Iran launched ballistic missiles at Israel this week, in the latest escalation between the two Middle Eastern powers. But would you believe that 40 years ago the two nations enjoyed a quiet diplomacy? What happened here? And why is the rest of the Middle East once more getting sucked into the rivalry? This week on How We Got Here, Max and Erin explain why “ancient hatred” isn’t to blame, what role Lebanon and Hezbollah play, and how Donald Trump has made—and could still make—all of this much, much worse.
