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How to Build an Emergency Fund on a Low Income
A realistic guide to building an emergency fund on a low income: how much you need, where to keep it, and small steps that actually work when money is tight.
How to Read a Poll Without Being Misled
Understand what a poll can and cannot tell you. Learn to read the margin of error, sample, and wording so headlines about polls never mislead you again.
Why We Learned to Throw Things Away, and Why Repair Is Coming Back
A decade ago, when a kettle stopped working or a washing machine started making an ominous grinding noise, a certain kind of person would open it up, poke around, and try to figure out what had gone wrong. Today most of us do something different. We look up the price of a replacement, notice that …
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Why It Is So Hard to Build a Neighborhood You Can Actually Walk Through
Imagine you need a carton of milk. There is a small grocery store about half a mile from your house — a ten-minute walk in principle. But between you and the milk lies a six-lane road with cars moving at forty-five miles an hour, a stretch with no sidewalk, and a parking lot you would …
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The Slow, Compounding Cost of Sleeping Too Little
Almost everyone knows the feeling of a single bad night: the fog, the short temper, the third cup of coffee. What far fewer people appreciate is what happens when small shortfalls stack up night after night, week after week. Losing an hour of sleep is not like skipping a meal you can simply eat later. …
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How Index Funds Quietly Changed What It Means to Invest
For most of the twentieth century, investing in the stock market meant one of two things. Either you tried to pick winning companies yourself, or you paid a professional to do it for you. Both approaches shared an unspoken assumption: that skill and effort would beat the market, and that the extra return would more …
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When the Local Newspaper Disappears, Something Civic Goes With It
Over the past two decades, thousands of local newspapers have closed their doors, and the ones that survive often operate with a fraction of the staff they once had. We tend to treat this as a business story, a sad but inevitable consequence of the internet eating advertising revenue. I want to argue that it …
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Why Housing Got So Expensive, and Why the Easy Explanations Are Wrong
Almost everyone agrees that housing has become unaffordable in a way that would have seemed absurd a generation ago. Where people disagree, often bitterly, is on why. The debate has hardened into camps that each grab one piece of a complicated picture and wave it around as the whole truth. I want to slow down …
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The Realistic Near Future of AI at Work, Without the Hype or the Panic
Conversations about artificial intelligence and jobs tend to swing between two extremes. One camp insists that mass unemployment is imminent and that most white-collar work will vanish within a few years. The other insists that nothing fundamental will change, because every previous wave of automation eventually created more jobs than it destroyed. Both camps are …
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