You probably wonder why you should even continue with online dating or go out to mingle when it never results in your getting asked on dates.

You don’t know what you could be doing wrong, and wonder if perhaps all of the good men really are taken. From where you sit, it seems as though other women don’t have this same problem.

Hello, lost generation.

The Millennials entered the workforce during the worst downturn since the Great Depression. Saddled with debt, unable to accumulate wealth, and stuck in low-benefit, dead-end jobs, they never gained the financial security that their parents, grandparents, or even older siblings enjoyed. They are now entering their peak earning years in the midst of an economic cataclysm more severe than the Great Recession, near guaranteeing that they will be the first generation in modern American history to end up poorer than their parents.

Recessions are not good for anyone, from infants to the elderly. Nor are pandemics. Americans born during this calamity will be more likely to have low birth weights and to be in poor health generally, with lifelong effects. Children will not just endure this trauma—manifested in lost months of schooling, skipped meals, housing volatility, and increased abuse—but will carry it with them. Zoomers graduating into the recession will die sooner because of it, suffering increased incidence of heart disease, lung cancer, liver disease, and drug overdoses in the coming decades; they will also earn less over the course of their lives. The elderly are likely to be the most economically insulated group but are facing the most terrifying health consequences.

Among adults the news isn’t good, either. And particularly not for those youngish-but-no-longer-young adults who came into this crisis already vulnerable, already fragile, already over-indebted and underpaid. The Millennials were left with scars during the Great Recession that never quite healed, and inherited an economy structured to manufacture precarity for the young and the poor and black and brown, and to perpetuate wealth for the old and the rich and white.

THE fires are blazing. The west of the United States has endured some 50,000 wildfires this year, and over 8.5m acres (3.4m hectares) have burned. Northern California has suffered in particular recently as flames have swept through parts of the landscape, killing at least 23 people and devastating wineries. In Canada, as of August 30th (the latest available figure), 7.4m acres had burned. The Canadian fires extended eastwards, but the main concentration was in the west, with British Columbia enduring its worst year, in terms of land burned, since 1958. Why have so many fires burned in North America this year?

As the number of people confirmed dead in Northern California fires rose to 15, officials warned Tuesday that the toll could rise as multiple fires scorched upward of 100,000 acres.

Sonoma County alone has received about 200 reports of missing people since Sunday night, and sherriff’s officials have located 45 of those people, said Sonoma County spokeswoman Maggie Fleming.

After Hurricane Irma, Floridians never felt compelled to remind the federal government that they were U.S. citizens. Nor did Texans after Harvey.

But that’s just what Governor Ricardo Rossello and the commonwealth’s government have done, over and over, in the wake of Hurricane Maria. “There needs to be unprecedented relief for Puerto Rico so that we can start the immediate effort right now,” Rossello said Tuesday on MSNBC.


Puerto Rico, an island of 3.4 million American citizens without a vote in Congress, is lobbying Washington for what could be billions in funding to rebuild its infrastructure, including its decimated energy grid. And it’s doing so amid an already costly hurricane season.

Though Hurricanes Harvey and Irma have passed, the clean up has only just begun. Now, one of our favorite Instagram pages, @HotDudesReading, is teaming up with the nonprofit First Book to send books to all the kids who have been impacted by the storms.

The two groups have joined forces to launched a GoFundMe campaign to raise money for the initiative. 100% of the funds raised will be used to gather books and distribute them to children affected by the storms. Several publishers, including Chronicle Books and Simon & Schuster, have also joined the effort, already donating 10,000 books to the effort.