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Times on What We're Giving Up: Living Alone. Times on Gen Z Job Hunting: "Dehumanizing," "Utterly Humiliating."
The New York Times is really crushing it on the "we asked lots of random people to weigh in on our terrible present" beat this week. First there was the piece about the things Americans are living without (gift link), a depressing look at the sacrifices both big and small that people are making in this time of economic uncertainty.
Featured among those struggling Americans is Minneapolis's Michael Hanson, 23, who makes $34,881 and tells the Times he's given up on the idea of ever living alone. "Growing up, I couldn’t wait to finish college and live in a studio apartment of my own," he says. "I’ve given up on having the privacy and agency I thought I’d have earned by this age."
Similarly depressing, there's this one from Callie Holtermann: "Searching for Jobs, Gen Z Feels Like It’s Staring Into ‘the Void’" (gift link).
You have to read alllll the way to the end to get to our tenuous local angle here, so we'll just pop it in below in full. But you really should read the whole story to get a sense for how bad Gen Z has it—like millennials before them, they take a lot of shit for a generation that's up against a hellish... everything.
Anyway, from the Times:
James Hernández, 23, who lives in Minneapolis, spent months looking for a job in public health — a task made more challenging by the president’s cuts to funding for the National Institutes of Health, he said. While Republicans insisted the economy was in good shape, Hernández was being asked about his hobbies by an A.I. recruiter.
This summer, after months of radio silence, he finally got what seemed like a golden opportunity: a video interview with two real people for a role at a utility company. But shortly after Hernández joined the call and began making his pitch, the recruiter onscreen closed his eyes and leaned back in his chair.
He seemed to have fallen asleep mid-interview.
“At that point, just give me the A.I.,” said Hernández, who did not end up getting the offer.
ICE Pays Countries Millions to Accept Deportees
Not everyone that ICE detains can return to their home country; many asylum seekers have court protections that keep them from being sent back. According to this incredibly upsetting, well-reported piece from Madison McVan for Minnesota Reformer, the current administration has found a truly disgusting workaround: giving volatile countries hundreds of millions of dollars in exchange for incarcerating our immigrants indefinitely.
Kenis Lopez Gonzalez, who fled torture in Nicaragua in 2022 for the relative safety of Shakopee, Minnesota, was arrested by ICE goons in January of 2025 and in August was sent to a prison center in the Central African Republic.
“I tried to explain to them that first, I had protection,” says Lopez Gonzalez on the phone from his cell. “Second, I had a habeas corpus pending. And third, they were violating my due process rights.”
McVan points out that most of the countries we’re paying for these services are authoritarian, and they're often war-torn and extremely impoverished. El Salvador got $6 million from the U.S.; since then its detainees have “reported beatings by guards, sexual assault, psychological abuse, lack of medical treatment, and poor living conditions.” Central African Republic was a-OK with accepting people from us after we gave $85 million to the country’s International Organization for Migration. Other countries include Eswatini, which has an absolute monarchy and extreme political repression, and Congo, which hasn't been stable politically since the 1990s.
At least Lopez Gonzalez might get a repreive.
Demuth Squares Off Against Hungry Children, Swifties
GOP gubernatorial candidate Lisa Demuth went into the weekend before Election Day taking a bold stand against Minnesota’s overwhelmingly popular universal free school-lunch program and against regulating Live Nation.
On The Jay Thomas Show Thursday, Demuth unequivocally supported imposing income limits on Minnesota’s school lunch program, WDAY reports. The program has reduced the number of children who skip lunch and alleviated the stigma that comes with limiting free lunches to poorer children.
And in a press conference today, Demuth called out her opponent, Sen. Amy Klobuchar (DFL-MN) for focusing on insignificant matters like regulating monopolies. As Matthew Blake at MinnPost noted, Demuth griped that Klobuchar went into action “not for Minnesota taxpayers but for Taylor Swift fans.” (You know, there might be some overlap there….)
As Blake writes:
This is not an abstract economic issue affecting a few entitled Taylor Swift fans. Live Nation has arguably made it out of reach for people without much disposable income to ever see their favorite musical artists perform. To get on my soapbox here, they can prevent people from leaving their house and interacting with the outside world through art.
Kids, Swifties… maybe Demuth can say something mean about puppies too before next Tuesday.
It's Almost Time to Vote!
We probably don't need to tell you, the civically engaged Racket reader who likely also can't wait for campaign ad szn to end, that Tuesday is Election Day. But in case it's your first time voting in Minnesota, or you're not sure where you usually vote, or you want to peer over a sample ballot, here's a gentle reminder that you can find all of that right here.
For a more in-depth look at the local races and the folks runnin' in 'em, we sat down with THE local election guide guru Naomi Kritzer on today's episode of RacketCast. You have the whole weekend to brush up on the issues and the candidates!
