Class Politics

The struggle to pay for college is one of the defining features of middle-class life in America today. At kitchen tables all across the country, parents agonize over whether to burden their children with loans or to sacrifice their own financial security by taking out a second mortgage or draining their retirement savings. Indebted takes listeners into the homes of middle-class families throughout the nation to reveal the hidden consequences of student debt and the ways that financing college has transformed family life.

Taking up that challenge and drawing from Baldwin's fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and interviews, You Mean It or You Don't will spur today's progressives from conviction to action. It is not enough, authors Hollowell and McGhee urge us, to hold progressive views on racial justice, LGBTQ+ identity, and economic inequality. True and lasting change demands a response to Baldwin's radical challenge for moral commitment. Called to move from dreams of justice to living it out in communities, churches, and neighborhoods, we can show that we truly mean it.

It wasn’t surprising when the first abandoned bicycles were found along the dirt roads and farmland just across the border from Tijuana, but before long they were arriving in droves. The bikes went from curiosity, to nuisance, to phenomenon. But until they caught the eye of journalist Kimball Taylor, only a small cadre of human smugglers - coyotes - and migrants could say how or why they’d gotten there. This is the story of 7,000 bikes that made an incredible journey and one young man from Oaxaca who arrived at the border with nothing, built a small empire, and then vanished.

In this stirring and insightful analysis, activist and scholar Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor surveys the historical and contemporary ravages of racism and the persistence of structural inequality such as mass incarceration and Black unemployment. In this context, she argues that this new struggle against police violence holds the potential to reignite a broader push for Black liberation.

In this boldly drawn portrait of 18th-century England, Roy Porter defines a nation from its princes to its paupers, from its metropolis to its smallest hamlet. The topics covered run the gamut, covering diet, housing, prisons, rural festivals, bordellos, plays, paintings, and work and wages.

Peter Georgescu arrived in this country as a penniless Romanian refugee and rose to become the CEO of Young & Rubicam. Which is why he's so heartsick that in America today, with flat wages, disappearing jobs, and a shrinking middle class, his kind of rags-to-riches story doesn't seem possible now. But he has a message for his fellow CEOs: we're the ones who must take the lead in fixing the economy.

Em sua primeira obra inédita depois do sucesso de A elite do atraso, de 2017, Jessé Souza se dedica a compreender a classe média brasileira. Com o mesmo estilo claro e acessível, mas sem fazer concessões à superficialidade, ele agora apresenta uma visão original e inovadora dessa classe fundamental da sociedade.

For nearly half a century, Americans have been bombarded by neoliberal propaganda promoting the lie that wages are objectively determined by impersonal labor markets. This falsehood has been repeated by academics, journalists, business leaders, and politicians so often that even many on the liberal left and the populist right believe it. In Hell to Pay, Michael Lind, author of The New Class War, debunks this lie.

A groundbreaking work of history about the American middle class - its rise, why it faltered, and who truly benefited from its dominance.

London is a plutocrat's paradise, with more resident billionaires than New York, Hong Kong or Moscow. Far from trickling down, their wealth is burning up the environment and swallowing up the city. But what do we really know about London's super rich, and the lives they lead? To find out more about this secretive, security-heavy elite, sociologist Caroline Knowles walks the streets of London from the City to suburban Surrey, via Kensington, Notting Hill, Mayfair and elsewhere.

From Wall Street to the West Coast, from blue-collar billionaires to blue-blood fortunes, from the Google guys to hedge fund honchos, All the Money in the World gives us the lowdown on, among other things: the all-time richest Americans, who made and lost the most money in the past 25 years, the fields and industries that have produced the greatest wealth, the biggest risk takers, the most competitive players, the most wasteful family feuds, the trophy wives.

When racist curriculum "goes viral" on social media, it is typically dismissed as an isolated incident from a "bad" teacher. Educator Bree Picower, however, holds that racist curriculum isn't an anomaly. It's a systemic problem that reflects how Whiteness is embedded and reproduced in education. In Reading, Writing, and Racism, Picower argues that White teachers must reframe their understanding about race in order to advance racial justice and that this must begin in teacher education programs.

"Preserving the legacy of Arizona’s John McCain as one of the country’s most iconic statesmen is important work for the public trust and annals of history. As McCain’s first press secretary, Marla Sheiner, brings to historians and chroniclers a collection of rare documents from his first Congressional campaign and testaments to his leadership."

Silent at under 5 knots and capable of a massive nuclear punch, the 240-foot-long Russian Kilo Class submarine is one of the stealthiest, most dangerous underwater warships ever built. Every Third World dictator covets the Kilo, and Russia has already fulfilled a fifth of a 10-vessel deal with China. Now it's up to the President's new national security advisor, the irascible Texan Admiral Arnold Morgan, to foil delivery of the other 8 Kilos.

For millenniums, the elites have had access to knowledge that was out of bounds from the common folk. The knowledge was only known by those at the top of ruling hierarchy and was passed down to the next generation only. This knowledge enabled them to continue being at the top of hierarchy and rule those who are beneath them, establishing their stronghold over positions of power and influence. Ninety percent did not know anything about them and speculated about their lives and ideologies. They pondered and thought of conspiracy theories.

Many Americans take comfort and convenience for granted. We eat at nice restaurants, order groceries online, and hire nannies to care for kids. Getting Me Cheap is a riveting portrait of the lives of the low-wage workers—primarily women—who make this lifestyle possible. Sociologists Lisa Dodson and Amanda Freeman follow women in the food, health care, home care, and other low-wage industries as they struggle to balance mothering with bad jobs and without public aid.

“Don’t be evil” was enshrined as Google’s corporate mantra back in its early days, when the company’s cheerful logo still conveyed the utopian vision for a future in which technology would inevitably make the world better, safer, and more prosperous. Unfortunately, it’s been quite a while since Google, or the majority of the Big Tech companies, lived up to this founding philosophy. Today, the utopia they sought to create is looking more dystopian than ever.

For six months between 1966 and 1967, Wayne Johnston and his family lived in a wreck of a house across from his grandparents in Goulds, Newfoundland. At seven, Wayne was sickly and skinny, unable to keep food down, plagued with insomnia and a relentless cough that no doctor could diagnose, though they had already removed his tonsils, adenoids and appendix. To the neigh­bours, he was known as “Jennie’s boy,” a back­handed salute to his tiny, ferocious mother, who felt judged for Wayne’s condition at the same time as worried he might never grow up.

In 2002, the town of Galesburg, a slowly declining Rustbelt city of 33,000 in western Illinois, learned that it would soon lose its largest factory, a Maytag refrigerator plant that had anchored Galesburg's social and economic life for decades. Workers at the plant earned $15.14 an hour, had good insurance, and were assured a solid retirement. In 2004, the plant was relocated to Reynosa, Mexico, where workers sometimes spent 13-hour days assembling refrigerators for $1.10 an hour.

From the 1830s onward, a succession of well-born Britons headed west to the great American wilderness to find adventure and fulfillment. They brought their dogs, sporting guns, valets, and all the attitudes and prejudices of their class. Prairie Fever explores why the West had such a strong romantic appeal for them at a time when their inherited wealth and passion for sport had no American equivalent.