Today’s Big Story

America’s Rising Rents

Nearly 40% of middle-income renting households are burdened by costs

How much is your rent? It’s a personal question, I know … I only ask because while rent costs have long weighed on lower-income households, they are now coming for the middle class. Nearly four in 10 middle-class renter households are burdened by costs, an NBC News analysis of Census Bureau data found. That’s up almost 20% since 2019, while the already high share of cost-burdened, low-income households rose just 2%.

A “cost-burdened household” is defined as one paying 30% or more of pretax income on rent and housing costs. This figure is widely used as a threshold for affordability: the Census Bureau measures housing costs against it, and the Department of Housing and Urban Development has used it for decades.

Wages for the typical U.S. worker have surged since the pandemic. And that’s good news. But for many Americans those gains are being gobbled up by rising rent. Rents jumped 30.4% nationwide between 2019 and 2023, while wages during that same period rose 20.2%, according to a recent analysis from online real estate brokers Zillow and StreetEasy. The gap between wage growth and rent increases was widest in large cities, including Atlanta; Charlotte, North Carolina; and Miami, Phoenix and Tampa. Other cities where renters are feeling the pinch include Baltimore, Cincinnati, Las Vegas, New York and San Diego.

Will this keep going? Some are hopeful that rental prices will shrink, if only a little. There is some evidence to suggest that the surge in rental prices is, for the most part, finally slowing down. While it is true that the latest data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, released on Sept. 1, shows that in August “shelter continued a more than 40-month increase,” there is some good news too. “Growth is continuing to slow,” reports NerdWallet. It is a hard pill to swallow that “rent prices are now 33.6% higher than they were before the pandemic”—but renters can at least find solace in the fact that the seemingly endless swell may at last be petering out.

So what is the median rent in America, you might ask? It rose to $1,987 in March, up 0.8% from a year ago. According to Zillow's analysis, the cost of rent has increased partly because of strong demand from millennials and Gen Z adults who have been squeezed out of the traditional housing market.

U.S. Ramps Up Pressure on Israel

Hamas rejects proposal for 30-day Gaza ceasefire

The Biden administration is ratcheting up pressure on the Israeli government to meet a set of demands from the U.S. to address the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. If Israel fails to fully implement the U.S. demands by Nov. 13, the U.S. could suspend its military assistance to Israel—a step the Biden administration has avoided so far but is gaining more support inside the State Department, a U.S. official tells Axios.

Sadly, it seems impossible to even imagine a ceasefire in the region anytime soon. Hamas on Thursday rejected the newest proposal brokered by Qatar, Egypt and the U.S. for a 30-day ceasefire in Gaza. According to Semafor, the proposal would have seen the release of a small number of Israeli hostages, but no withdrawal of forces from the Strip, Middle East Eye reported. Hamas has insisted instead on a permanent end to the conflict that has been raging for 13 months, killing more than 40,000 people in Gaza.

The recent months of war have completely transformed Lebanon, experts now say. Hezbollah, the Shiite movement that seemed almost invincible, is now crippled, its top commanders dead or in hiding. The Atlantic reports that the losses have been so extreme that they’ve led some in Lebanon to imagine a future without Hezbollah. Imagine that.

Voting Systems Are Targets of Conspiracy Theories

Experts explain how the machines work and why they're hard to hack

Voting machines have been at the center of a web of conspiracy theories after the 2020 election, with false claims that they were manipulated to steal the presidency from Donald Trump. There was no evidence of widespread fraud or rigged voting machines, and multiple reviews in the battleground states where the Republican president disputed his loss confirmed the results as accurate. In 2023, Fox News agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems, one of the largest voting machine companies, $787 million to avoid a trial in a defamation lawsuit. Still, many have continued to sow doubts about the machines.

Even the famous futurist Elon Musk—a major Trump backer—recently continued to stoke voting machine falsehoods, telling the crowd at a town hall in Pennsylvania, “The last thing I would do is trust a computer program, because it's just too easy to hack,” Musk said. But Lauren Cristella, the president of Committee of Seventy, a nonpartisan government watchdog organization in Philadelphia, told ABC News that “there was no credibility to those claims.”

So, how do voting machines work? And what security measures are in place to ensure that every vote is counted and free from interference? Historically, there have been five types of voting machines used in the U.S.: hand-counted paper, mechanical lever machines, punch-card machines, scanned paper ballots and direct-recording electronic devices, according to the MIT Election Lab. Going into the 2024 election, optical scan paper ballot systems are widely used to tally physical ballot votes, which can be likened to the technology used to score a standardized test. Direct recording electronic systems utilize buttons or a touch screen to record votes, often with a paper ballot record for audits or a recount. Derek Tisler, who serves as counsel in the Brennan Center for Justice's elections and government program, says that “in nearly all places across the country, about 98% of voters, when they cast their ballot, there is going to be a paper record of their vote.”

The Little Sins We Commit at Work

Now, more and more companies are strictly enforcing rules

After-hours use of the printer? Online shopping during an all-hands Zoom meeting? Taking 15 (okay, 20!) minutes longer for lunch than you’re supposed to … we’re all guilty of it. Right? But fair warning: Your employer may be paying closer attention these days. According to the Wall Street Journal, companies on the hunt for efficiency are deploying perk police to bust employees for seemingly minor infractions that, by the letter of company law, can result in termination.

Just look at the recent crackdowns at Meta, where employees were fired for spending $25 meal allowances on other items, Ernst & Young dismissing workers who watched multiple training videos at the same time, and Target canning employees who jumped the line to buy coveted Stanley water bottles ahead of the general public. As the employer-employee power struggle tilts in companies’ favor, the Journal found that some businesses are using strict rules enforcement to make an example of rule-breakers or reduce payroll without having a real layoff.

Of course, not every worker is breaking the rules. At least not all the time. When asked what they do in those relatively few minutes they confess to wasting, American workers reveal themelves as a nation of incredibly industrious loafers—pursuing all sorts of personal enrichment on the company dime. Respondents to a recent American Time Use Survey—conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics since 2003—reported that they spent 92.3% of time at work doing their actual job. Roughly half of the time the average person claimed to give to non-work activities was spent eating or drinking. Another 22% was devoted to a job other than the one they were currently being paid for, and the rest spent on the types of activities typically associated with goofing off at work: socializing, internet use, cigarette breaks and the like. And hybrid work has allowed us to pursue even more passions, like gardening and exercise, while officially on the clock.

A Weekend Pairing

‘A Gentleman in Moscow’ + a Apple Ginger Beer Cocktail

Based on the wildly acclaimed 2016 novel of the same name, A Gentleman in Moscow is an original Paramount+ mini-series that slid somewhat under the radar earlier this year. It's a show that seriously makes a case for the eternally underrated Ewan McGregor, who does some of the best work of his career here.

McGregor plays Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov, who ended up trapped in a hotel room after the October Revolution in the 1910s, forced into a sort of domestic exile via house arrest. While a lot of the themes here work better on the page, McGregor does great work to bring them to life on the screen the best he can. Reviewers call it a smart, shining show that's engaging and charming, too.

Why wait?