Main Street

Interesting Things Around the Internet

• Five years after Katrina, how are working people faring in New Orleans?
• The Home Affordable Modification Program, or HAMP, was supposed to help people keep their homes. Instead, it hurt people financially. Dave Dayen at Firedoglake has been covering this story in depth.
• Matt Yglesias:
  

  If you drive from Washington, DC to Brooklin, ME you certainly won’t feel like you’re driving through a country in which there are no potentially useful infrastructure projects that could be undertaken during the several-year period of elevated unemployment that we’re now projected to face. For example, there’s the bridge from New Hampshire to Maine: “The application says the bridge is ’structurally deficient’ and ‘functionally obsolete’ and has a weight limit of three tons.”

• Things like the recent massive egg recall show how messed up our food system is in so many ways, hitting agricultural and food workers and the people who eat food. (Do you eat food? I do.)
• Have trouble recognizing people you’ve met before? You might have prosopagnosia, or face blindness. Test yourself here.