Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
2018 book Heartland was published, I heard from thousands of readers who were relieved and delighted to recognize in its pages their unsexy place, or a place much like it. The book is an intersectional critique of our ill-addressed socioeconomic class structure, my family’s rural poverty serving as a springboard to analyzing US history, policy and ... See more
Sarah Smarsh • From Kansas, with love: like it or not, my home defies stereotypes
I dream of a world in which no child suffers for our country’s greed.
Sarah Smarsh • Bone of the Bone: Essays on America by a Daughter of the Working Class
Parenthood likewise forces an encounter with the illogic of the market: good fortune means getting to pay someone less than you make to do a job that’s harder and probably more important than your own.
Jia Tolentino • Can Motherhood Be a Mode of Rebellion?
Girlhood is big business. The ones who are best at it literally treat it as an occupation, modeling or taking suitably candid-looking pictures of themselves, recommending clothes and jewelry and books, going viral on TikTok. They’re performing a way of being that looks joyful, effortless, and adorable. It’s a performance that by definition has a sh... See more
consuming the girl
Forgoing the caricature of rurality as frighteningly remote and disconnected, Somebody Somewhere also nails the liminality of town and country, for many.
Sarah Smarsh • From Kansas, with love: like it or not, my home defies stereotypes
At a moment when our social fabric is tearing, we would do well to look at the true threads of every unseen and misunderstood place. Efforts to diversify the powerful spaces that tell stories and create culture – newsrooms, publishers, Hollywood writers’ rooms – must address place, geography and class as identity markers.
Sarah Smarsh • From Kansas, with love: like it or not, my home defies stereotypes
By the time Palin talked about “the real America,” it was in precipitous decline. The region where she spoke, the North Carolina Piedmont, had lost its three economic mainstays—tobacco, textiles, and furniture making—in a single decade. Local people blamed NAFTA, multinational corporations, and big government. Idle tobacco farmers who had owned and
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