Apartment Choice

The struggles of the impoverished are well documented. But how about the unique pain and struggle associated with being wealthy in New York City? In her research for “ Uneasy Street : The Anxieties of Affluence” ( Princeton University Press , out Sept. 5), Rachel Sherman interviewed 50 New York-area parents of young children, whose household incomes ranged from $250,000 to $10 million and with assets totaling up to $50 million. These locals live pampered lives — with multiple high-end properties, teams of household employees and frequent, lavish vacations — but still, they do impressive mental gymnastics to avoid identifying themselves as truly rich. For instance: Helen, a stay-at-home mom with an annual family income of $2 million, describes herself as “in the middle, in the sense that there are so many people with so much money. They have private planes. They have drivers. They have all these things.” This kind of creative (and self-serving) logic is prevalent among Sherman’s su...

Things Fall Apart It is hard to imagine being invaded and forced to change virtually all of our ways by a foreign nation. Unfortunately for the Ibo society, imperialism was forced upon them. All they could do was sit back and watch as the English changed all aspects of their life. Everything from religion to family life was changed by imperialism. The title, Things Fall Apart, suits the book very well because that is essentially what happened to the Umuofia village. The cultural traditions of Umuofia eventually fell apart. The main points of focus in Things Fall Apart are life inside the Ibo tribe, the struggle of one man’s desire to succeed, and imperialism. During part one of the story, Achebe takes the reader through the daily lives of the Ibo people. The reader is exposed to different aspects of Ibo culture like the role of women in society and the process of growing food. The role of women in the Ibo tribe was very specific and minimal. When a man wanted to marry a woman, he...

Ready to start working on a new development project? Great! But not everything is about coding. In fact, the most difficult part comes when several people have to work together towards the same goal, and without a way to visualize all the to-do's, things can often fall apart before they begin. That's where Scrum comes into play. Scrum is a Project Management set of good practices that can be applied in any software project . In fact, it can be applied in any project that has a defined output. Scrum is based on iterations, or Sprints as they're called in the Scrum world. Each Sprint contains all the phases of a long-term project such as: Analysis Design Implementation QA At the end of each Sprint, the product increment that could be achieved during the Sprint's time will be reviewed and validated and the cycle will begin again to build a final product in an iterative way that prevents team members from getting overwhelmed. Those functional increments of the final prod...

Katz’s Deli, the iconic New York deli, has been serving its customers for well over 100 years. Getty Images Elon Musk once compared building a business to “eating glass and staring into the abyss of death.” George Orwell, for his part, once described writing a book as a “bout with a long illness,” a sentiment that many entrepreneurs and creatives would agree with. The point is: No one would willingly subject themselves to any of the suffering that goes into building something if they thought their efforts were going to disappear with the wind. Yet the truth is, most businesses and most art does disappear. It might be easier than ever today to start a business—a few bucks on LegalZoom and you’re the CEO of a brand new LLC. What is still hard and what has always been hard it keeping your doors open, staying in business, and keeping customers happy over the long term will never be easy. In a world obsessed with the new and the trendy, we don’t tend to give enough credit to people do ma...