The Unwinding

There was a problem, of course, which was that usually no one made it into the room to argue the other side—and never anyone able to put up anything like the kind of money the corporations paid to lobbyists and campaigns.

And instead of us thinking that we are going into the unwinding, to me this is the greatest economic explosion that’s ever going to hit in our lifetimes, because all that money that’s being concentrated at the top, with food, fuel, clothing—what else do they control? banking—it might go back to little towns.

“If this is a one-hundred-fifty-year anomaly,” Dean said, “where we took all the cheap, affordable oil out of the ground, and used it to get us to where we are today—when that starts to unwind, we will go back to where we were before, but yet we will have learned so much in the process of all this new technology that we take with us.

He was seeing beyond the surfaces of the land to its hidden truths. Some nights he sat up late on his front porch with a glass of Jack and listened to the trucks heading south on 220, carrying crates of live chickens to the slaughterhouses—always under cover of darkness, like a vast and shameful trafficking—chickens pumped full of hormones that lef

From the 1920s until 1977, twenty-five uninterrupted miles of steel mills ran northwest to southeast along the Mahoning River: from the Republic Steel plants around Warren and Niles, through the U.S. Steel plant in McDonald and the Youngstown Sheet and Tube blast furnaces on Brier Hill, to U.S. Steel’s Ohio Works right in the middle of Youngstown,

The things you once thought important or even worth dying for aren’t worth a nickel now.

Edward Hopper),

back to where we were before, but yet we will

“Bandwidth” means the amount of information one can absorb.