Please enter your email below: We will notify you when this product becomes availableWelcome to the Online Store We invite you to browse through our store and shop with confidence. We invite you to create an account with us if you like, or shop as a guest. Either way, your shopping cart will be active until you leave the store. PLEASE NOTE: We only ship wine to locations within the state of Virginia. All other items may be shipped outside of Virginia. Byrd Cellars Wine UmbrellaGift CardsPete's Red Hot Spiced Wine Syrup - 13 oz. Winter SolsticeRaven RedDahlgren's Raid Red MuscatNorton ReserveSummer Music Series Tickets Thank you for visiting us.Were you born before this date? Keith Bedford / Reuters Escaping Poverty Requires Almost 20 Years With Nearly Nothing Going Wrong The MIT economist Peter Temin argues that economic inequality results in two distinct classes. And only one of them has any power. A lot of factors have contributed to American inequality: slavery, economic policy, technological change, the power of lobbying, globalization, and so on.

In their wake, what’s left? That’s the question at the heart of a new book, The Vanishing Middle Class: Prejudice and Power in a Dual Economy, by Peter Temin, an economist from MIT. best wine prices in houstonTemin argues that, following decades of growing inequality, America is now left with what is more or less a two-class system: One small, predominantly white upper class that wields a disproportionate share of money, power, and political influence and a much larger, minority-heavy (but still mostly white) lower class that is all too frequently subject to the first group’s whims.best tasting homemade wine kits The War on Stupid Peopledry white wine popular American society increasingly mistakes intelligence for human worth.best red wine quotes

As recently as the 1950s, possessing only middling intelligence was not likely to severely limit your life’s trajectory. top 10 french wines 2013IQ wasn’t a big factor in whom you married, where you lived, or what others thought of you. best wine shops east villageThe qualifications for a good job, whether on an assembly line or behind a desk, mostly revolved around integrity, work ethic, and a knack for getting along—bosses didn’t routinely expect college degrees, much less ask to see SAT scores. best wine day trip from parisAs one account of the era put it, hiring decisions were “based on a candidate having a critical skill or two and on soft factors such as eagerness, appearance, family background, and physical characteristics.”best wine cheese pairing

The 2010s, in contrast, are a terrible time to not be brainy. Those who consider themselves bright openly mock others for being less so. buy wine online virginiaEven in this age of rampant concern over microaggressions and victimization, we maintain open season on the nonsmart. People who’d swerve off a cliff rather than use a pejorative for race, religion, physical appearance, or disability are all too happy to drop the s‑bomb: Indeed, degrading others for being “stupid” has become nearly automatic in all forms of disagreement. meshaphoto / Getty / Konstantin Orlov / Shutterstock / Katie Martin / The Atlantic Torching the Modern-Day Library of Alexandria “Somewhere at Google there is a database containing 25 million books and nobody is allowed to read them.” You were going to get one-click access to the full text of nearly every book that’s ever been published. Books still in print you’d have to pay for, but everything else—a collection slated to grow larger than the holdings at the Library of Congress, Harvard, the University of Michigan, at any of the great national libraries of Europe—would have been available for free at terminals that were going to be placed in every local library that wanted one.

At the terminal you were going to be able to search tens of millions of books and read every page of any book you found. You’d be able to highlight passages and make annotations and share them; for the first time, you’d be able to pinpoint an idea somewhere inside the vastness of the printed record, and send somebody straight to it with a link. Books would become as instantly available, searchable, copy-pasteable—as alive in the digital world—as web pages. Purple Turtle Photography / Getty The Complex Lives of Babies A new documentary explores how early experiences drive development. The idea that new babies are empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge of the world around them doesn’t sound unreasonable. With their unfocused eyes and wrinkly skin, tiny humans sometimes look more like amoebas than complex beings. Yet scientists have built a body of evidence, particularly over the last three decades, that suggests this is patently untrue. “When kids are born, they’re already little scientists exploring the world,” said the filmmaker Estela Renner via a video conference from Brazil before a recent screening of her new documentary The Beginning of Life (streaming on Netflix) at the World Bank in Washington, D.C.

That’s something Renner, a Brazilian mother of three, discovered as she spoke with early-childhood experts and parents in nine countries around the world about the impact a child’s environment in the first few years of life has on not only her physical development, but her cognitive, social, and emotional development, too. “I didn’t know that kids were not blank slates,” she said. “It changed the way I look at babies.” If more people recognized that fact, the way communities and policymakers think about and invest in the early years of life might be different. How Online Shopping Makes Suckers of Us All Will you pay more for those shoes before 7 p.m.? Would the price tag be different if you lived in the suburbs? Standard prices and simple discounts are giving way to far more exotic strategies, designed to extract every last dollar from the consumer. As Christmas approached in 2015, the price of pumpkin-pie spice went wild. It didn’t soar, as an economics textbook might suggest.