Ester Bloom
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Alexandre Meneghini / Reuters The Unconscionable Difficulty of Getting Health Insurance for a Newborn
My own plan only covered my child as an extension of me for the first two days. After that, he was on his own.
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Ceri May Dorsey-Tyler The Revival of America's Hand-Painted-Sign Industry
Small businesses are increasingly relying on visual artists to convey that their products aren’t mainstream or mass-produced.
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Lucas Jackson / Reuters How Doctors Are Experimenting With Cutting Health-Care Costs
Small innovations are adding up to signal that providers and insurers are interested in saving money for patients.
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Lucas Jackson / Reuters For Sale (to Women Only)
From financial advice to house-cleaning, plenty of companies sell their services only to ladies. Is this more than savvy marketing?
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Tim Wimborne / Reuters The Politics of Crowdfunding a Hobby—or a Honeymoon
People are divided over whether personal fundraising is intrusive and vain, or a vital sharing of responsibility.
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Joshua Lott / Reuters When Women’s Literary Tastes Are Deemed Less Worthy
Mass-market success often leads critics to dismiss even high-minded novels as overly sentimental.
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Alexander Demianchuk / Reuters The Value of Being Difficult
One thing I’ve learned during my Obamacare pregnancy: Sometimes the only way to get quality information in the American health-care system is to be a nuisance.
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Kim Kyung-Hoon / Reuters How ‘Treat Yourself’ Became a Capitalist Command
Corporations love telling Americans they “deserve” fancy electronics and indulgent food.
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Lucy Nicholson / Reuters How Economic Issues Turned Into Feminist Issues
The next generation of the movement is (finally) embracing the idea that race, gender, and class can’t be divorced from one another.
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Andrew Kelly / Reuters America's Pregnancy-Care Paradox: Paying Ever More for the Same Bad Results
The infant-mortality rate in the U.S. is extremely high, especially considering how much people are spending to give birth.
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Alessandra Garofalo / Reuters The Rise and Fall of Plutocrat Feminism
A few elite women may be able to succeed in corporate America, but it’s failing everyone else.
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Elise Amendola / AP The Big, Bad Breastfeeding Industry
How much of the pressure to avoid formula is coming from companies with a financial stake in the matter?
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Whitney Curtis / Reuters The Literal Marketplace of Ideas
From books to movies to musicals, Americans spend heavily on the historical narratives they want to believe.
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Brian Snyder / Reuters Getting to the Bottom of Harvard Graduates' Gender Pay Gap
If the women of the Ivy League aren’t making as much money as their male peers, what hope does everyone else have?
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Regis Duvignau / Reuters Halfway Through My Obamacare Pregnancy
Which procedures are mandatory? Which aren’t? And why is it so hard to know?
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Gary Cameron / Reuters When Neighborhoods Gentrify, Why Aren't Their Public Schools Improving?
“Gentrification, it turns out, usually stops at the schoolhouse door,” the reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones has argued.
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Brian Snyder / Reuters When America Was 'Great,' Taxes Were High, Unions Were Strong, and Government Was Big
The bygone nation Donald Trump’s supporters yearn for looks awfully liberal, at least in terms of economic policy.
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Wikimedia Commons The Decline of Domestic Help
The absence of maids—exploited, largely invisible workers who decades ago made keeping a house in order look much easier—is one of the biggest reasons today’s middle-class families feel stretched for time.
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Anna Irene / Flickr Where Are They Now? Robber-Baron Edition
A financial check-in with the Gilded Age’s richest families, several generations later
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Paul Sakuma / AP Why Does Air Travel Make People So Grumpy?
Modern life is filled with mediocrity: Restaurants charge more and offer less. Movie theaters force patrons to sit through endless pre-roll commercials. So why do so many single out flying?
