Dirt: Cutting Class

Socially enlightened members of the educated elite tend to be disturbed by the widening gap between rich and poor and are therefore made somewhat uncomfortable by the fact that their own family income now tops $80,000. Some of them dream of social justice yet went to a college where the tuition costs could feed an entire village in Rwanda for a yea

If he seemed older than he was, it was because he was letting go of one of the things that defines youth: hope. “The smartest minds of our generation are either buying or selling stocks or predicting if you’ll click on an ad,” he said. “This is the tragedy of our generation.” The effect of the tragedy had been to shrink his ambition. He was thinkin

Those from moneyed parents often are sentenced to private schools where they are dunked in old ink, soaked in Latin and Greek, and suffer the education of the elite. I know the arguments for a classical education. However, the point I labor toward is this: our perception of the people we deal with every day depends upon who we are ourselves. When o

Self-invention, once the imagined path to boundless opportunity, has become a burden under which a multitude of Americans hoping to fast track their careers, or simply secure their basic necessities, have labored.

Through the decades, self-help authors had helped members of the growing urban white-collar class see themselves as independent smallholders despite feeling increasingly like slaves to a system they could neither control nor understand. Using rags-to-riches anecdotes to demonstrate that everyone is master of his own destiny, the genre is paradoxica