The Annoyance Economy | The Beautiful, Unpredictable Life of Ryuichi Sakamoto | The World’s Highest-Paid Tennis Players 2023 | The Work You Do, the Person You Are

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The Annoyance Economy - The Atlantic

Has the American labor market ever been better? Not in my lifetime, and probably not in yours, either. The jobless rate is just 3.8 percent. Employers added a blockbuster 336,000 jobs in September. Wage growth exceeded inflation too. But people are weary and angry. A majority of adults believe we’re tipping into a recession, if we are not in one already. Consumer confidence sagged in September, and the public’s expectations about where things are heading drooped as well.

The gap between how the economy is and how people feel things are going is enormous, and arguably has never been bigger. A few well-analyzed factors seem to be at play, the dire-toned media environment and political polarization among them. To that list, I want to add one more: something I think of as the “Economic Annoyance Index.” Sometimes, people’s personal financial situations are just stressful—burdensome to manage and frustrating to think about—beyond what is happening in dollars-and-cents terms. And although economic growth is strong and unemployment is low, the Economic Annoyance Index is riding high.

There’s plenty to be annoyed about. Voters are just not excited about the Joe Biden versus Donald Trump rematch. Trump’s favorability among Republicans has fallen. Half of Democrats want someone other than Biden to be the nominee. And voters really hate the guy running on the other side of the aisle. Polarization is fueling a huge gap in partisan economic expectations: Republicans don’t think the economy is good when Democrats are in charge, just as Democrats refuse to believe the economy is good when Republicans are in the White House. The effect has grown big enough over time to lower Americans’ aggregate views of the economy.

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The Beautiful, Unpredictable Life of Ryuichi Sakamoto - The New Yorker

In late March, Ryuichi Sakamoto, who was hailed as “arguably the best-known and most successful Japanese musician in the world,” died at the age of seventy-one. The cause was complications from cancer, which he had been battling for two years. I first got to know Sakamoto in 2018 and, since his diagnosis, had been interviewing him. I wasn’t sure what form a piece about Sakamoto would take, but it seemed important to capture everything I could. Sakamoto moved from New York to Tokyo in 2022 to continue his treatment, and our meetings became less frequent. Eventually, even Zoom was too tiring, and then he was gone.

In July, still unsettled, I went to the Shed, in Manhattan’s Hudson Yards, to see “Kagami,” a mixed-reality show dedicated to his memory. For the piece, Sakamoto was filmed over three days in December of 2020 at a green-screen studio in Tokyo. That footage forms the basis for a virtual Sakamoto with the same neat silver mop of hair and round tortoiseshell eyeglasses as the living Sakamoto. There are moments in “Kagami” when the composer looks like a video-game character who has unlocked the Piano Spirit level. Mostly, though, Sakamoto is the flame in his own digital shrine, accompanied by the sound of his playing and a shifting backdrop of rain, smoke, and stars. The conjured tableaux do not distract from the impression that the show—kagami means “mirror” in Japanese—seeks resurrection through reflection.

Some of the audience at the Shed watched with the benign acceptance they might bring to M&M’s World, but others were wiping away tears under the heavy headsets. The next day, I e-mailed an old friend, Laura Forde, who is a creative director at the Times. I knew from an Instagram post that she had been moved by “Kagami,” though we’d never spoken about Sakamoto. “There are artists whose music I love more, or maybe I just listen to more often.” Forde wrote back. “So why the grief? I think it’s what he represented to me: humility, curiosity, and emotional intelligence.”

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The World’s Highest-Paid Tennis Players 2023 - Forbes

Since 2007, Roger Federer has reigned as the world's highest-paid tennis player. But while the 42-year-old Swiss ace is still collecting an estimated $95 million a year, his retirement last September means that one of his old rivals now wears the crown as the sport's top earnerâwith an heir apparent looking increasingly ready to seize the throne.

Novak Djokovic is the new champion of Forbes' annual tennis earnings list, hauling in an estimated $38.4 million (before taxes and agents' fees) over the past 12 months. No other active player can match his total on the court ($13.4 million from prize money) or off the court (an estimated $25 million from endorsement deals, appearance fees, and licensing and memorabilia income). But Carlos Alcaraz, who outlasted Djokovic in an epic Wimbledon final in July to claim his second Grand Slam title, is not far behind by either measure. The 20-year-old Spanish phenom raked in $31.4 million over the past 12 months, including $11.4 million on the court and an estimated $20 million off it, to land at No. 2.

That is a big raise from last year, when Alcaraz made his debut on the list at No. 10 with an estimated total of $10.9 millionâand then won the U.S. Open the following month. In the women's game, Iga Swiatek, who has also won two Grand Slams in the past year, made a similar jump, from outside the top ten all the way to No. 3 this year, with an estimated $22.4 million in earnings. She is joined by three other first-timers: Coco Gauff (No. 7, $15.2 million), Casper Ruud (No. 8, $14.4 million) and Jessica Pegula (No. 10, $10.9 million).

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The Work You Do, the Person You Are - The New Yorker

All I had to do for the two dollars was clean Her house for a few hours after school. It was a beautiful house, too, with a plastic-covered sofa and chairs, wall-to-wall blue-and-white carpeting, a white enamel stove, a washing machine and a dryer—things that were common in Her neighborhood, absent in mine. In the middle of the war, She had butter, sugar, steaks, and seam-up-the-back stockings.

I knew how to scrub floors on my knees and how to wash clothes in our zinc tub, but I had never seen a Hoover vacuum cleaner or an iron that wasn’t heated by fire.

Part of my pride in working for Her was earning money I could squander: on movies, candy, paddleballs, jacks, ice-cream cones. But a larger part of my pride was based on the fact that I gave half my wages to my mother, which meant that some of my earnings were used for real things—an insurance-policy payment or what was owed to the milkman or the iceman. The pleasure of being necessary to my parents was profound. I was not like the children in folktales: burdensome mouths to feed, nuisances to be corrected, problems so severe that they were abandoned to the forest. I had a status that doing routine chores in my house did not provide—and it earned me a slow smile, an approving nod from an adult. Confirmations that I was adultlike, not childlike.

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