Vox Sentences: The best jobs report in almost three years

1. So many jobs

Jobs jobs jobs jobs jobs. (Shutterstock)

• The economy added 321,000 (nonfarm) jobs in November, more than any jobs report since January 2012.

  [Vox / Danielle Kurtzleben]

• It gets better. September and October's totals were revised upward, and November reports tend to have big upward revisions.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Ben Casselman: "Let’s call a spade a spade: This month’s jobs report crushed it."

  [FiveThirtyEight / Ben Casselman]

• On the other hand, "private sector wages are still only up a low 2.1 percent for the year — which is to say, the job market isn't getting so hot that employees suddenly have the power to ask for a significant raise."

  [Slate / Jordan Weissmann]

• Wages should be rising by about 3.5 to 4 percent a year, not adjusting for inflation.

  [Washington Post / Matt O'Brien]

• The excellent recent jobs reports bring to mind "Recovery Winter" of 2011-2012 — which was followed by an awful spring.

  [Vox / Matt Yglesias]

• Krugman: this doesn't mean the Fed should let up, not until we finally get inflation above 2 percent.

  [NYT / Paul Krugman]

2. Zhou out

Chinese Politburo Standing Committee member Zhou Yongkang meets with US Attorney General Eric Holder in 2010. (Ng Han Guan-Pool/Getty Images)

• Zhou Yongkang, who ran China's domestic security service until 2012, has been expelled from the Communist Party and arrested for corruption.

  [NYT / Chris Buckley]

• Zhou, a former member of the Politburo, is the highest ranking Chinese official to be arrested since the Gang of Four were purged in 1976.

• He is believed to be a close ally of Bo Xilai, a former provincial government and national leadership hopeful, who was arrested in 2012 and sentenced to life in prison.

  [Washington Post / William Wan]

• "Bo’s unforgivable sin was to buck the system and campaign openly for a position on the standing committee. Zhou’s apparent support for him meant that Bo’s fall made him a marked man as well."

  [ChinaFile / Richard McGregor]

• FT reporter Richard McGregor: this doesn't mean Chinese leader Xi Jinping is serious about corruption. It does mean he's the most powerful Chinese leader in decades.

• Zhou stands accused of using his position as "de facto boss" of the Chinese oil industry to enrich his own family.

  [NYT / Michael Forsythe, Chris Buckley, and Jonathan Ansfield]

3. Rolling Stone and UVA

(Bob Mical)

• Rolling Stone has announced it is not standing by a story detailing an alleged gang rape in a University of Virginia fraternity.

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• "There now appear to be discrepancies in [the accuser's] account, and we have come to the conclusion that our trust in her was misplaced."

  [Rolling Stone / Will Dana]

• There wasn't a party at the frat Jackie, the alleged victim, recalled being assaulted at the night in question.

  [Washington Post / T. Rees Shapiro]

• And one of the alleged perpetrators, who Jackie finally named to friends after the story came out, wasn't a member of that frat.

• "But it seems clear that something traumatic happened to her in the fall of her freshman year … she has since been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder."

  [Vox / Libby Nelson]

• Jackie initially asked to be taken out of the article, but the reporter, Sabrina Rubin Erdely, threatened to use her story anyway.

  [Vox / Sarah Kliff]

• Erdely "did not talk to … any of the men that Jackie alleges participated in the rape."

  [Slate / Allison Benedikt and Hanna Rosin]

• That was because Rolling Stone came to "an agreement with Jackie not to contact her alleged attackers."

  [Washington Post / T. Rees Shapiro]

• We don't know how much of Jackie's story is true, or if any of it is, but it's not uncommon for trauma victims to misremember details.

  [Vox / Amanda Taub]

4. Misc.

• How a grad student took on a giant textbook publisher, and won.

  [Ars Technica / Doug Kari]

• The Washington Nationals' Jayson Werth is going to jail for 10 days for … speeding.

  [SB Nation / Grant Brisbee]

• A Harvard neurologist may have found the part of the brain responsible for sleep.

  [NY Mag / John Cloud]

• Michelle and Barack Obama's first date is being turned into a movie.

  [The Hollywood Reporter / Austin Siegernund-Broka]

• If Wes Anderson directed the new Star Wars trailer …

  [Funny Or Die / Jonah Feingold]

5. Verbatim

• "A publication that buoyed anti-black, anti-Latino, anti-Arab, Islamophobic racism was tolerable. A publication that fired two beloved white men was not."

  [Vox / Max Fisher]

• "I realize now that the minute I pledged myself to a band of brothers, I became a silent participant in the systematic denigration of women. "

  [Mic / Scott Ellman]

• "Further complicating the fact-checking process was the inconvenience that there's often no such thing as 'fact.'"

  [Mother Jones / Mac McClelland]

• "There is a snuff film in it, and everyone dies at the end."

  [Pacific Standard / Alana Massey]

• "In the very near future, undocumented immigrants who reside in California … may be covered by publicly-funded health insurance, while many U.S. citizens living in Texas and the Deep South will have no access to health insurance of any kind."

  [Bloomberg View / Francis Wilkinson]

• "Nightcrawler is a parable of bitter, burbling resentment, of people who think they deserve certain things just because of the accident of birth, and of a society that is simply too tired to deny them everything."

  [Vox / Todd VanDerWerff]

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