Dan Kopf

US students are judged by how well they score on math, reading and science tests. US educators are assessed by their student’s improvement on those tests. The US labor market, however, is increasingly placing a premium on pleasant personalities. Schools that focus narrowly on cognitive skills without teaching social skills may be overlooking a key component to workplace success.

Richard Linklater, the man behind the movies Boyhood, Before Sunrise, Dazed and Confused, and School of Rock is the greatest director of the last 25 years. He is followed in excellence by the British realist Mike Leigh and the Iranian new wave master Jafar Panahi.

India is currently the world’s fastest-growing major economy. And before long, it may leapfrog the US on a ranking of the largest.

The 2017 job numbers started with a bang. The Bureau of Labour Statistics reported that 227,000 new jobs were created in January—over 50,000 more than economists were expecting. They were the best job creation numbers of the last six months.

This is an alternative version of a story published February 3, 2017 that has been edited using the Hemingway App.

Since US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, protests have become ubiquitous in America. The day after Trump was sworn in, millions gathered gathered in cities around the country for a women’s march. Trump’s temporary ban on US entrants from seven Muslim-majority countries likewise led thousands of people to flock to airports to demonstrate. 

If judged by voter enthusiasm, democracy is struggling.

US President Donald Trump wants to raise the unemployment rate by one percentage point, and it’s actually an idea the political left can get behind.

Silicon Valley has been making a lot of noise since US president Donald Trump signed an executive order temporarily banning visitors from Iraq, Iran, Sudan, Libya, Somalia, and Yemen, and barring refugees from Syria indefinitely. The rest of the business community, not so much.

In the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election, the proliferation of “fake news” got a lot attention.  The phenomenon received substantial coverage from very real news organizations, and some observers went so far as to blame Democrat Hillary Clinton’s loss to US president Donald Trump on these false stories that went viral on Facebook. Clinton herself called fake news an “epidemic.”

This story contains no spoilers.

The reaction from US president Donald Trump’s own Republican party when he first called for a ban on all Muslim travel to the United States, in December of 2015, was swift and harsh.

In the wake of US president Donald Trump’s executive order barring and restricting refugees from several Muslim-majority countries, some Americans are unearthing past expressions of the country’s generosity to those fleeing the threat of violence abroad.

On Jan. 18, as the Philadelphia 76ers were about to pull off their best win in recent memory, against the Toronto Raptors, thousands of basketball fans began a strange chant.

Adam Smith, the influential 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist, spent his life dismantling the theory of mercantilism. Centuries later, newly installed US president Donald Trump wants to bring it back.

In taking his first step towards building a US-Mexico border wall, US president Donald Trump begins an attack on a vanishing issue. Today, Trump signed an executive order to direct federal resources to build a wall intended to staunch the flow of Mexican immigrants entering the US illegally.

The United States has an economic advantage that is the envy of the world. Inventors flock to the United States, like nowhere else.

One of Donald Trump’s first actions as US president was to sign an executive order (pdf) to freeze non-military federal hiring. The move, White House press secretary Sean Spicer explained at a Jan. 23 press briefing, “counters the dramatic expansion of the federal workforce in recent years.”

If you really want to piss off the economist Carmen Reinhart, refer to her coauthored research with fellow Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff as the work of “Rogoff and Reinhart.” (Whoops.)

We are truly entering the post 2008 financial crisis world.

US president Barack Obama will leave office with an approval rating of 57% according to a survey from the polling firm Gallup taken from Jan. 9-15, 2017. Obama’s exiting approval rating is 23 percentage points higher than former US president George W. Bush’s when he left office, but nine points lower than Bill Clinton’s.

Over most of the 20th century, researchers consistently found that as the economy grew, workers got about the same share of what was produced. That no longer seems to be the case.

Americans continue to kid themselves that if you work hard you can climb the ladder. But the perception and reality are moving farther apart.

The next time you are choosing which fund to invest in, make sure the manager was not born into privilege.