Tag
Poverty
-
Nonprofit Neighborhoods: How Not to Fight Poverty
Wishing to end poverty “wherever it existed,” LBJ acted not with government aid, but with a non-profit. The results have been catastrophic.
-
Public Thinker: Virginia Eubanks on Digital Surveillance and People Power
“We have to build against the legacy of inequality. Intentionally. We have to build our values into our design practices.”[none-for-homepage]
-
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 …
-
Global Water Wars and the Public Good
Future global water wars are now widely predicted. In 1995, Ismail Seragaldin, vice president of the World Bank (1993–2000), first raised the specter of crisis with the …
-
The Invention of the “White Working Class”
As liberals came to terms with what happened on Election Day 2016, early press reports focused on the so-called white working class. We’d seen these …
-
The Problem with Philanthropy
In The Self Help Myth, Erica Kohl-Arenas shows how hundreds of millions of dollars of investment and decades of advocacy have failed to address the poverty …
-
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 create an army of machines that could finally deliver us from work and back to a laborless Eden. Paul Lafargue promised this to us…
-
Make Way for the “World-Class” City
Inaugurating a new generation of mechanical street sweepers, Arvind Kejriwal, Delhi’s chief minister, heralded the coming of a new era: “If we continue to receive the love and support of the public and the workers, then not in five years, we will make Delhi a world-class city in just four years.”1 By June 2020, more…
-
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 by one of the greatest political catastrophes in human history. Framed by this intimate conjunction of triumph and tragedy, the analysis of…
-
Miserable Ways to Make Money: An Interview with Jake Halpern
“Banks are not the good guys in this scenario. The banks are squeezing as much as they can out of people.”
-
The Teflon Kid: How Annie Enables Apathy About Inequality
What’s not to like about seeing an adorable black child nestled up with a baby animal on the cover of the New York Times Style Magazine? The composition of this shot links child actor Quvenzhané …
-
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 apprenticeship and certifying him as a master in his own right. Over the next four decades, Frantz would hang, behead, or otherwise kill 394 people,…
-
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 particular and global. From her very first novel, the 1994 best seller Breath, Eyes, Memory, which made her something of a literary…
-
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 still quiet house in Park Slope to the 7th Avenue F train stop. The bright light of…
-
On the Itinerant as Philosopher: An Interview with Aman Sethi
Aman Sethi’s A Free Man, a portrait of a day laborer in modern Delhi, is the latest contribution to an emerging subgenre of creative nonfictional books about Indian cities—itself a subset of a growing fascination with the poetics and practices of the metropolises of the Global South—that includes Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City (2004), Katherine Boo’s…
