Since today’s #CancelStudentDebt announcement tease, I’ve been obsessed with the inflation calculator and how boomers’ sense of money/value is so off. My mom made $13K/year as a public school art teacher in 1972. Paltry right? You may be shocked to see that in today’s US dollars. I also looked up the 2022 value of $125,000 in the years my husband and I were born.

My parents went to the Univ. of Illinois in the 1970s. My dad paid for it on Social Security following his dad's death. My mom paid for it in dimes saved in a booze bottle. Tuition then was $352, $530, $530, $730 all in (for mom). So ~$2,575-$4300 today. Here's what it costs now! (her recollection fits within the tuitions listed for members of Congress who went to U of I Urbana-Champaign before and after her, btw. This is a fun document!!! demos.org/sites/default/… )

These people love means testing as a compromise and I get that “$125,000” sounds like a lot but this is absolutely insane to do. The numbers do not add up.

A THREAD: let’s say you took out $100K to go to college and you’re currently an adult with a mortgage and one child.

https://twitter.com/business/status/1562098148859846656

You live in an American city. Your average monthly student loan repayment is $1600/month. Your daycare bill is $2500/month. Your mortgage+property taxes is $3000/month.

Your average monthly payments for these three things=$7100.

Your annual bill? $85,200/year.

I might have mentioned this but when we started watching older seasons and I realized Murray the muppet disappeared I fell down a wormhole of the Sesame drama around the transition to HBO and it's because the old lead writer voiced Murray and he quit. archive.thinkprogress.org/street-fight-w…

https://twitter.com/juwanthewriter/status/1560648127052480514

Murray is a symbol of the Sesame #resistance. His voice, Joey Mazzarino resigned in protest of the planned changes to Sesame, writing: “After almost a year of battling for what I believe is the heart and soul of the show, I lost the war.” archive.thinkprogress.org/street-fight-w…

I had a .5% chance of losing our first baby and that happened six months before the pandemic began, so, you know, when you experience improbable loss like that, it makes the risk of going to say, a bar, feel less worthwhile for the baby you're grateful to have alive, for example.

https://twitter.com/asymmetricinfo/status/1458141860761722881

I respect that everyone has different risk tolerances, and at this point in the pandemic, I spend a lot of time weighing my mental health against risk of the behavior I think would contribute positively to my mental health.

honestly it's extra rage-inducing that this "debate" between a few old men about whether parental leave should be guaranteed and paid in this country is happening simultaneously with Roe no longer being law of the land. The government is reaffirming its position that women should have babies no matter what but that also the act of having a baby or parenting is so devoid of value that you should not be entitled to guaranteed paid leave for three months or even one (!).

A few thoughts on Pregnancy and Infant Loss Remembrance Day—one, is I am adamant on using "pregnancy loss" as opposed to "miscarriage." "Miscarriage" imbues blame, like the birthing parent did something wrong. But maybe more subtlety, "loss" makes grief more inclusive. People who do not get recognized nearly enough, imho, in pregnancy and infant loss are non-birthing partners. I've heard from a lot of them over the past two years. Their bodies don't do the thing, so they feel less connected to and entitled to grief, which is simply not true.

These incompetent old white men love using Christmas as a deadline to pressure legislative action even though they all also know they don’t actually care about being home and it only punishes staff. Just get rid of the debt limit already!

https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1445807638302896130

Love, Meredith, pointlessly on the floor of the Capitol because of the “fiscal cliff,” New Years Eve 2013

I don’t often if ever grant on-the-record interviews to other reporters. But after being contacted for this story, I spoke at length in defense of @feliciasonmez and put my name to it. Lived experience should not be disqualifying and you cannot “both-sides” sexual assault.

https://twitter.com/carter_sherman/status/1442837799175086082

As @carter_sherman bravely shows through her disclosure here, her personal experience made her reporting better and more sensitive, not worse. Part of why political news is so broken is because privileged white men who have never needed govt protection or support guide coverage.

Joe Biden's press staff circulating Jennifer Rubin columns to "allies" to tweet and Politico covering this as if it's some big scandal instead of merely dopey behavior is why everyone in DC should get the f out of it every once in a while. literal white nationalists attacked the Capitol and wanted to murder members of Congress THIS YEAR, but the last thing published before the apocalypse/end of the republic will just be "Look who got snubbed from Ron Klain's birthday party!"

🧵 A few thoughts on the Ben Smith piece on Politico (which seems like a crazy thing to write about in a detached way considering he was one of the big figures who launched the site. The anecdotal lede hints at a conflict w/o directly addressing it) (1/4) nytimes.com/2021/08/29/bus… "A workplace culture *some* employees described as grinding and *sometimes* sexist" is an insane thing to write as a person who worked there—either you were too high up in the Politico caste system to know or you're being intentionally obtuse about the place (2/4)

🧵I shared this privately yesterday but I think it’s important to share with everyone #onhere: the more I think about it, the more I feel like there is a pre-1/6 me and a post-1/6 me. (1/4) I went into the Capitol building daily for seven years believing certain things, about our republic, about my personal safety at the Capitol, and all those beliefs have been violated and shattered. Worse, those like me who feel this way are being gaslit by powerful people. (2/4)

Two years ago, in a hospital bed and irreversible labor, I had a lot of time to think about what was happening to me, how I was swiftly approaching an outcome we didn't desire. And I thought about Republicans attacking Ralph Northam over this interview: cnn.com/2019/01/31/pol… I thought about how what Ralph Northam described was exactly what I was experiencing, how the mainstream media had taken the GOP bait and made this into a "controversy" when what the actual medical doctor was describing was palliative care within the bounds of medical ethics.

I have an idea on how to react: we don’t value women as a society and so there is no consensus around “sexual assault is bad.” There are literally reporters who not only say “cancer is bad” but also actively fundraise to end cancer and are therefore actual activists.

https://twitter.com/timmarchman/status/1418551573890932739

Don’t get me wrong, cancer *is* bad. But it’s wild reporters will put on hats to symbolize their belief that cancer is bad to fundraise for cancer research but we can’t agree sexual assault is bad. Likely because for years, men in power exerted their power by ignoring consent.

In @newrepublic, I ask, if an attempted mass execution at the Capitol—where reporters could have died and Republicans were both accomplices to the crime and rejected for history that their lives mattered—doesn’t end both sides journalism, what will?
newrepublic.com/article/161361… Editors and outlets have an obligation to protect their reporters. This used to mean from bullying sources who were unhappy with stories. We are now asking Capitol Hill journalists to divorce their humanity from their reporting, which is dangerous both for them and for the public

A THREAD:

The rarest, most beautiful thing in journalism is finding an editor you love, and let me tell you, there was no one I loved working with more than @jerryadler. He was based in NYC when I was in DC, and though we talked every day, it was months before we first met IRL. On the day we finally met, I remember walking into the @YahooNews news room and just yelling around, "Where's Jerry?!" (Because I am truly insane). As it was the #beforetimes, when I found him, I gave him the biggest hug. @jerryadler is smart, witty and a writer's editor.

A picture posted by @careyseuthe of her and Miss Rose, a gregarious cashier in the small carryout restaurant on the Senate side of the Capitol, has made me sad anew over just how devastating it was to see the confederate flag in the building, with a primarily Black support staff. In 2013, the sandwich maker in that small Capitol restaurant died during Ted Cruz’s ill-fated shutdown of the government. For a few days I thought maybe he was furloughed but when I realized he wasn’t, I wrote a eulogy for him in @rollcall. rollcall.com/2013/11/05/cap…

I’m so grateful for this picture of @AndyKimNJ taken by @andyharnik. I think a lot about how I will explain difficult things to our son and this picture is a shining light: The people we send to Washington to represent us are caretakers of the most precious thing, our republic /1 I will tell him that just as we are caretakers for him on hard days and easy days, bad days and good days—and it is our highest responsibility to protect him with the pride and love commensurate with his preciousness—so, too, are our congresspeople for our government. /2