Author Archives: CeliaZeller

The Band Wye Oak’s Main Attraction

by CeliaZeller Posted on August 15, 2016

Mother Jones

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Wye Oak
Tween
Merge

Courtesy of Merge Records

Jenn Wasner has one of the great voices in music today, whether she works in the folk-pop duo Wye Oak, the electro-leaning Dungeonesse, or Flock of Dimes, which spans both. Increasingly, however, she’s been blurring the stylistic lines between her projects, with the difference now seeming to be her choice of collaborators rather than the sound she achieves. Collecting tracks recorded between the previous two Wye Oak albums, Tween finds Wasner and multi-instrumentalist Andy Stack in peak form, ranging from techno-dreamy (“Out of Nowhere”) to epic and muscular (“If You Should See”) to sleek and breezy (“Watching the Waiting”). As always, Wasner’s evocative singing is the main attraction. She balances stoic melancholy and hopeful resilience beautifully, and her deft vocal overdubs are breathtaking. Next, keep an eye out for a Flock of Dimes album, due in late September.

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The Band Wye Oak’s Main Attraction

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Photos: Inside Urban Shield, the Convention for Warrior Cops

by CeliaZeller Posted on September 5, 2014

Mother Jones

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Each year, the Alameda County Sheriff’s office hosts Urban Shield, a trade show and series of exercises for first responders, primarily police department SWAT teams from around the nation. (Similar events have also been held in Boston and Dallas.) The first two days are taken up by a trade show, where vendors show off gear from armored vehicles to dog-mounted cameras and anatomically correct medical dummies. Mother Jones’ Shane Bauer is attending this year’s event and has been tweeting some of the highlights.

Here’s all the gear that was being hawked:

Some choice quotes, photos, and video from the convention:

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Photos: Inside Urban Shield, the Convention for Warrior Cops

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Wage Stagnation Is No Illusion

by CeliaZeller Posted on July 21, 2014

Mother Jones

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Bloomberg has a long article today wondering whether wage stagnation is mainly due to demographic shifts:

25- to 34-year-olds will make up 22.5 percent of the workforce by 2022, compared with 21.6 percent in 2012….Meanwhile, the share of 45- to 54-year-olds in their best earning years will drop by 3.3 percentage points in the decade ending 2022.

….Hollowing out the middle-aged working population could cut median earnings because such employees bring home the biggest paychecks. The median 45- to 54-year-old household earns $66,400 a year, compared with $51,400 for 25- to 34-year-old households.

Well, sure. Compared to 30 years ago, the theory goes, we have more young workers bringing down the average and fewer prime age workers raising the average. As a result, the average is declining. But all that means is that baby boomers are aging out of the workforce, not that wages are necessarily in bad shape.

That makes sense. At least, it would make sense if it were true. The thing is, in an article more than a thousand words long, we never learn that we can look at this directly. The chart on the right shows the median wages of just 25-34 year olds, and as you can see, they’ve been declining for more than a decade. This has nothing to do with demographics because it’s measuring wages for the same age group the entire time.

Now, these figures don’t include health insurance, and they only go through 2012. So they aren’t of much help if, say, the Fed is trying to gauge the tightness of the labor market in the second quarter of 2014. Nonetheless, they certainly show a long-term trend of wage stagnation that plainly has nothing to do with demographics. This makes it vanishingly unlikely that wage stagnation over the past six months is merely due to demographic shifts.

It’s a nice fairy tale to pretend that wage stagnation might just be an artifact of boomers retiring, but easily available data quite clearly shows otherwise. It’s real.

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Wage Stagnation Is No Illusion

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