Sublime

When we refuse to recognize what works, we risk swallowing the lie that nothing does.

this is the fine print of civilization, and slogging through it gives form to an otherwise amorphous debate, allowing us to notice just how misshapen the American safety net truly

Eviction affects the old and the young, the sick and able-bodied. But for poor women of color and their children, it has become ordinary. Walk into just about any urban housing court in America, and you can see them waiting on hard benches for their cases to be called. Among Milwaukee renters, over 1 in 5 black women report having been…

Some highlig

In the 1960s and 1970s, destitute families often relied on extended kin networks to get by. Poor black families were “immersed in a domestic web of a large number of kin and friends whom they [could] count on,” wrote the anthropologist Carol Stack in All Our Kin. Those entwined in such a web swapped goods and services on a daily basis. This did lit

Poverty infringes on American prosperity, making it a barricaded, stingy, frightened kind of affluence.

Poverty isn’t a line. It’s a tight knot of social maladies. It is connected to every social problem we care about—crime, health, education,

If incarceration had come to define the lives of men from impoverished black neighborhoods, eviction was shaping the lives of women. Poor black men were locked up. Poor black women were locked out.10

Ending poverty wouldn’t lead to social collapse, nor would it erase income inequality. There is so much of that in America today that we could make meaningful gains in equality, certainly enough to abolish poverty, and still have miles and miles of separation between

By the time they reach their mid-thirties, almost