Sublime
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Think of it as a massive experiment in mind control.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America
We’ve gone so far down this yellow brick road that “positive” seems to us not only normal but normative—the way you should be.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking is Undermined America
I was struck by how the deprivations that people experience can lead to eccentric kinds of compensation—like the hoarding syndrome of some of the poor.
Gary Smith • Radical Compassion: Finding Christ in the Heart of the Poor
In America, losing a job means making a hundred phone calls to a state unemployment-insurance system. Getting hit by a car means becoming your own hospital-billing expert. Having a disability means launching into a Jarndyce v. Jarndyce–type legal battle. Needing help to feed a toddler means filling out a novel-length application for aid.
The Atlantic • The Time Tax
A cynic might conclude that preventive medicine exists to transform people into raw material for a profit-hungry medical-industrial complex.
Barbara Ehrenreich • Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
It is an attack on the cruel idea that work confers dignity and therefore that people who don’t work—the old, the disabled—lack value. On the contrary, dignity is intrinsic to all human beings, and in designing a work regime rigged for the profit of the few and the exhaustion of the many, we have failed to honor one another’s humanity.
The Baffler • The New Neurasthenia
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,” reflected the late writer Stephen Jay Gould.
Jessica Bruder • Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
