Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
Many workers in the contemporary economy are precarious service workers, cleaning the homes and offices of those with stable jobs, making other people’s lives seamless.
Amelia Horgan • Lost in Work: Escaping Capitalism (Outspoken by Pluto)
extreme presentism as a common experience of people who grow up poor.
Keith Payne • The Broken Ladder: How Inequality Changes the Way We Think, Live and Die
Down with Love: Feminist Critique and the New Ideologies of Work
A team of researchers at Stanford University, led by an economist named Raj Chetty, used newly accessible data from the Internal Revenue Service to write a series of papers that addressed questions of opportunity in American life. One, titled “The Fading American Dream,” asked a simple question: How likely is it that an American child will be bette
... See moreMichael Lewis • The Fifth Risk
People are scarce—or have made themselves scarce. But as we go through life, most of us have our troubles, our “problems.” Will only the wealthy and “well adjusted” be granted the company of their own kind?8
Sherry Turkle • Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other
“Long-term, healthy patterns of social organization, among all social life-forms, it seemed to me, hinged on work that maintained the integrity of the community while at the same time granting autonomy to its individuals. What made a society beautiful was some combination of autonomy and deference that, together, minimized strife.” Barry Lopez from
... See moreI was sixteen the first time I read it, and though I didn’t fully understand it all, I grasped the core thesis. As millions migrated north to factory jobs, the communities that sprouted up around those factories were vibrant but fragile: When the factories shut their doors, the people left behind were trapped in towns and cities that could no longe
... See moreJ. D. Vance • Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis
Demands for recognition without a parallel demand for economic justice is at the heart of why the self is belabored.
Micki McGee • Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life
Kurt Vonnegut’s novel, Slaughterhouse Five: America is the wealthiest nation on Earth, but its people are mainly poor, and poor Americans are urged to hate themselves . . . Every other nation has folk traditions of men who were poor but extremely wise and virtuous, and therefore more estimable than anyone with power and gold. No such tales are told
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