Tag: Poverty

Nurturing the Margins

“Wherever you are, I hope you are safe and know I loved you enough to write you this book,” Catherine Hernandez writes in the opening pages of her debut novel, Scarborough. While the dedication ...

A Laborless Eden?

A utopian fantasy has always served as an engine for scientific progress—the fantasy that, one day, we might harness enough fossil fuel, enough computing power, and enough mined mineral wealth to ...

Streetwise in Weimar

Scholars of Weimar Germany have long wrestled with the fact that this period of unparalleled innovation in intellectual and cultural life was a time of economic and social crisis, brought to a close ...

Progress and Execution

Frantz Schmidt hanged his first thief when he was 19, on a June day in 1573. Either his father or another master executioner pronounced the hanging “executed adroitly,” concluding Frantz’s ...

Ordinary People

Edwidge Danticat has a way of making small lives tell big stories. Gently and quietly, she writes the outrageous and compels us, her readers, to become intimate with tragedies that are at once ...

Storybook Plutocracy

George Packer’s The Unwinding is a minor masterpiece of the social-disintegration genre—a beautifully written, clinically observed story of the slow-rolling economic transformation that has, over the ...

RiteCheck 12

The sky is inky black when my alarm clock gongs at 5:30 a.m. By the time I’ve showered and left the house, it’s 6:20, and I hunch my shoulders against January’s cold, hurrying the two blocks from my ...