Good morning, Quartz readers!
What is a first world problem? As an American who on Thursday celebrated Thanksgiving, I’ve had a lot of recent opportunities to ask myself that question. Its gravity began to weigh on Wednesday evening, when an emptied out New York became a playground of parties and gatherings for those not leaving town. The bars and restaurants were open, hospitality workers sacrificing as usual for one more night of tips, which make up the bulk of their wages.
As the cooking began in earnest on a fuzzy Thursday morning, the question was not how to fill our dinner plates, but how to avoid overfilling them. What items should stay in their packaging, to leave room for the 14 pound turkey and its trimmings? Even as inequality grows, and as many struggle with hunger, poverty, and lack of opportunity, some of us are extremely fortunate to live in a world of relative abundance.
And yet, though a quarter of Americans volunteer or donate to help others, their efforts, on a structural level, are doomed to fall short. That’s because 1% of of US families control 38.6% of the nation’s wealth. At a Thanksgiving dinner for 100 people, it’s one (likely old, white, male) who gets a heaping slice of the pumpkin pie—and everything else. (It’s worse globally: the 1% control 50.1%.)
An old American rule of polite dinner table conversation is not to discuss money, religion, or politics. That norm has been evaporating for years, most recently thanks Donald Trump’s evangelical-powered victory, which has led America to the brink of a corporate tax cut proponents claim will increase wages—but which looks like a giveaway to nonpartisan economists and business leaders.
The first world problems I felt guilt over—a day off work, a full dinner plate—are actually basic human needs that are out of reach for a growing share of the population. Few politicians or executives seem to recognize that—at their peril. When the history of our time is written, the economically-driven protests of Occupy Wall Street, the global refugee crisis, and the political upheaval in authoritarian regimes around the world, most recently Zimbabwe, might read less like a handful of disconnected events than the opening shots in a great global rebalancing that is only starting to unfold.—Paul Smalera
Five things on Quartz we especially liked
We made a gift guide for you. As the frenzied season of holiday shopping kicked off with Black Friday, Jenni Avins introduced Quartzy’s inaugural gift guide, which offers a framework for conceiving of great presents forevermore. Five writers investigated the appeal of the best gifts they have given and received—a pair of black jeans, a fancy candle, a pasta-making class, a handwritten love letter, and a bundle of chocolate-sea-salt cookies.
China is adopting Western standards of female beauty. There has been much hype about the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show extravaganza being staged in Shanghai by the American lingerie company earlier this week. In China, however, a reality show tied to it made a splash before a single model appeared, writes Noël Duan. Road to the Runway narrowed 30 long-legged, dewy-faced Chinese models down to one, who won a casting in the show. The serialized spectacle reinforced Western standards of female beauty—with which China has had a long and fraught relationship.
Reading out loud changed the world. People think of reading as for introverts, but scholars believe that in the 5,000 or so years humans have been writing, silent reading is a relatively new form of leisure, writes Thu-Huong Ha. There’s much debate about when Europeans began to read silently, but it’s likely that the development “helped facilitate intellectual rigor, introspection, criticism of the government and religion, even irony and cynicism that would have been awkward to read aloud.”
Talk to strangers—it’s good for you. Small talk, writes Rina Diane Cabellar, can feel painful and awkward, exposing the conversation starter to potential rejection or embarrassment. But it also fulfills a basic human desire for socialization, helping both parties to feel seen and acknowledged on what can be an otherwise lonely planet.
Why net neutrality matters. With the FCC announcing a rollback of Obama-era rules mean to keep internet access on a level playing field, Americans can look to Spain and Portugal to understand the price opacity and complexity that’s coming, writes Michael Coren. Even though US internet providers have pledged to continue to respect net neutrality principles, it’s easy to wonder how long that will last.
Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
Refugees are inventing a new language. At the Moria prison camp on the Greek island of Lesvos, the English language is undergoing an accelerated morphology. As the displaced struggle to make themselves understood in their quest for services and eventual freedom, Matt Broomfield of the New Statesman explains how the way they learn to communicate is shaping communication itself.
A nation of sandwich eaters. Whether you’ve heard the lore of the Earl of Sandwich’s namesake invention or not, this Guardian article by Sam Knight is a fresh, detailed look at how the simple phenomenon of assembling quality ingredients between two pieces of bread and selling them in a paper box have come to define the United Kingdom’s relationships to food, immigration, labor, Brexit, and indeed, the world.
Some ambassador. The crumbling Ambassador Bridge connects the United States to Canada. It is privately owned by an aging billionaire who has leveled entire neighborhoods in Michigan and waged scores of lawsuits against municipalities, the state, and Canada in order to maintain a stranglehold on the crossing—and the tolls that go directly into his pockets. In Harper’s, Matt Mossman looks at how a gas station owner came to control a key chokepoint in the North American economy. (Also from Harper’s: America’s publicly owned roads aren’t in great shape, either.)
Fatal digital attraction. A woman in a stale marriage plays an online multiplayer game. She meets another player. They begin an online affair. Her husband discovers it, and fights for her, exposing both parties to their families. The third party, though, doesn’t slink away. Instead, he uses every text message, naked selfie, and video, every shred of information he can dig up on his ex-lover and her husband, to attempt to ruin their personal and professional lives. And as Brooke Jarvis explains for Wired, even a judgment against him in a federal lawsuit doesn’t seem to have slowed him down.
The sins of Mark Halperin go well beyond sexual harassment. Halperin, fired by ABC for predatory behavior toward younger female coworkers, also pioneered a brand of gossipy, Beltway-insider journalism that helped give rise to Donald Trump. Eve Fairbanks of Buzzfeed writes that he treated politics “like it was an intriguing game, the kind that masked aristocrats played to entertain themselves at 19th-century parties: Everyone was both pawn and player, engaged in a set of arcane maneuvers to win an empty jackpot that ultimately meant nothing of true importance.
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