One of Hills of Patterson Range
Trees and Mountains
Normalizing fascists
"When Hitler’s party won influence in Parliament, and even after he was made chancellor of Germany in 1933 – about a year and a half before seizing dictatorial power – many American press outlets judged that he would either be outplayed by more traditional politicians or that he would have to become more moderate. Sure, he had a following, but his followers were “impressionable voters” duped by “radical doctrines and quack remedies,” claimed the Washington Post. Now that Hitler actually had to operate within a government the “sober” politicians would “submerge” this movement, according to The New York Times and Christian Science Monitor. A “keen sense of dramatic instinct” was not enough. When it came to time to govern, his lack of “gravity” and “profundity of thought” would be exposed."
Washing dishes. One of many jobs.
Checks are the economic dinosaurs Americans won’t give up
"Online payment systems like Venmo and Paypal are benchmarks of the digital era of banking that we're living in. There's also Zelle, a new peer-to-peer payment app launched by big banks like J.P. Morgan and Bank of America. So you might expect paper checks to be disappearing, but Americans just won't let their checkbooks go. In the U.S., people wrote about 38 checks on average in 2015, compared to 18 in Canada, 8 in the U.K., and almost none in Germany. Katie Robertson wrote a piece about Americans’ attachment to checks for Bloomberg. Marketplace's Kai Ryssdal spoke to her about why Americans are refusing to get with the economic times. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation. "