Must Read/Watch

• Jim Tankersley, Why America’s middle class is lost
• Bill Moyers interview with John R. MacArthur, Democrats Bow Down to Wall Street
• Jim Tankersley, A black hole for our best and brightest

Economics

• Josh Bivens, The U.S. Middle Class Has Faced a Huge “Inequality Tax” in Recent Decades
• Danielle Kurtzleben, The median wealth for whites in the US is nearly $142,000. For blacks, it’s $11,000.
• Kathleen Geier, The importance of having skin in the game: thoughts on economic diversity and liberal elitism
• David Cay Johnston, The ‘Hunger Games’ Economy
• Neil Irwin (NYT), A Big Safety Net and Strong Job Market Can Coexist. Just Ask Scandinavia.

Entrepreneurship

• Jim Tankersley, The great start-up slowdown
• Sam Frank, Battlefield Worth

Housing

• Dean Baker, What the Fresher Data Show on Down Payments and Mortgage Default Rates
• Scott Van Voorhis, In Mass., the Median Income Can’t Buy the Median-Priced Home

Science

• Andrew Gelman, Why it doesn’t make sense in general to form confidence intervals by inverting hypothesis tests
• Dennis Overbye (NYT), Kepler Spacecraft Finds New ‘Super-Earth’ 180 Light-Years Away
• Rachel Feltman, After a hardware failure, the Kepler spacecraft finds a second life — and an important new exoplanet

Politics

• Robert Kuttner, The Great Budget Sellout of 2014: Do We Even Have a Second Party?
• Robert Borosage, The New Center Democrats: There’s No There There
• [Sherrod] Brown Will Lead Democrats on Powerful Senate Banking Committee [Ed.:  Sen. Brown is one of the good ones.]
• Paul Krugman (NYT), Jeb’s Bubble
• emptywheel, As Last Piece of Business, Carl Levin Reiterates that Dick Cheney Lied Us into War

Trade

• Diane Cardwell (NYT), U.S. Imposes Steep Tariffs on Chinese Solar Panels
• BBC, Apple ‘deeply offended’ by BBC investigation

Russia

• Philip Giraldi, Don’t Risk War With Russia
• John Guida (NYT), Does the U.S. Need a New Approach to Putin?
• Vartan Oskanian, Russia is part of the solution and the problem

Arts and Culture

• The Guardian, Steve Albini on the surprisingly sturdy state of the music industry
• Sal Nunziato (NYT), The Internet, Not the Labels, Hurt the Music Industry
• Rena Silverman (NYT), A Photographer’s Forest Tale

Baseball

• SoxProspects, Offseason Notes: Trades, signings, and awards