Charles Finch

5 days ago | business-standard.com | Charles Finch

In some sense capitalism is already behind us. We live here in its fevered midst, to be sure, but a recognition is emerging, especially among younger generations: It isn't sustainable. The devastation of the natural world; the mindless consumerism; above all, the human misery that corporations trawl the world to extract, like ore, from souls as divine as yours or mine. All of it, increasingly, in service to the pathological greed of a few thousand mentally ill men. It cannot last.

1 week ago | flipboard.com | Charles Finch

2 days agoAccording to Federal Student Aid, the average student loan debt reached $38,375 by the end of 2024, with the total U.S. student debt now totaling $1.8 trillion. Meanwhile, coding bootcamp graduates earn an average starting salary of $70,698, often surpassing entry-level salaries for traditional …

1 week ago | nytimes.com | Charles Finch

FAKE WORK: How I Began to Suspect Capitalism Is a Joke, by Leigh Claire La BergeIn some sense capitalism is already behind us. We live here in its fevered midst, to be sure, but a recognition is emerging, especially among younger generations: It isn’t sustainable. The devastation of the natural world; the mindless consumerism; above all, the human misery that corporations trawl the world to extract, like ore, from souls as divine as yours or mine.

Mar 11, 2025 | nytimes.com | Charles Finch

WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine, by Alissa WilkinsonWe go on needing Joan Didion. The aloof gaze; the Scotch and cigarette chic; the crestfallen scrutiny of America, of life. Whatever combined in her, we seek it over and over, in a way that seems only to be intensifying since her death in 2021. She has become one of the things she was most suspicious of: a myth. One of the stories we tell ourselves in order to live.

Nov 21, 2024 | bostonglobe.com | Charles Finch

Did the first cave painters, thirty thousand years ago, get some special reward from the chief? Extra pebbles, maybe, or pottage? The history of art is a history of commerce: a winding helix of transactions down the centuries, the brute power of money bartered for the ethereal authority of beauty. In “Family Romance: John Singer Sargent and the Wertheimers,” Jean Strouse delicately and thoroughly traces one such exchange.