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At a time when Americans were being continually informed that our crises were over—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were ending, we lived in a post-racial society, the good jobs would be back any day now—I saw no improvements on the ground.
It is easy, when people feel frightened and abandoned, for a demagogue to exploit those feelings of despair for political gain.
It is easy for that demagogue to translate fear into fanaticism, to shift extremism into the mainstream and market it under the guise of populism.
“This is the thing about creativity that is rarely acknowledged: Most people don’t actually like it.”
What ladders we have are being yanked away.
“gentrification is trickle-down economics applied to urban development:
Rich cities such as New York and San Francisco have become what journalist Simon Kuper calls gated citadels, “vast gated communities where the one percent reproduces itself.”
it’s economics and the role of the state that defines politics. If you’re an economic conservative, despite how ironic and sarcastic you may be or how tight your jeans are, you, my friend, are a conservative…”
We watched from afar, wondering what it was like to have something to lose.
it is hard to plan for what is already gone.
the goal of unpaid internships: transforming personal wealth into professional credentials.
Unpaid internships lock out millions of talented young people based on class alone.
“I think right-wing populists hate the ‘liberal elite’ more than economic elites because they’ve grabbed all the jobs where you get paid to do something that isn’t just for the money—the pursuit of art, or truth, or charity,”
“Being wealthy in America today means not having to come across anyone who isn’t.”
Jobs are no longer jobs but symbolic positions, indicative of where you come from and determinative of where you go.
The job you work increasingly reflects the money you already had.
Post-recession America runs on a contingency economy based on prestige and privation.
Zero-opportunity employers are refusing to pay people because they can get away with it.
The view from the cracks is a lot clearer than the view from above. When you look down on people, they stop being people. But when you watch from below, you see how easy it is to fall.
Unemployment is not only the loss of a job. It is the loss of dignity. It is the loss of the present and, over time, the ability to imagine a future. It is hopelessness and shame, an open struggle everyone witnesses but pretends not to see.
“Charity is no substitute for justice withheld,” Saint Augustine
poorer Americans, living check to check, are “more likely to perceive the future as a chaotic series of short-term cycles.”
Like internships, adjunct positions are often necessary to advance professionally—but only the well-off can afford to work them without living in poverty or debt. The result is a professoriate of an increasingly uniform class background, much like the policy, finance, and journalism circles McArdle describes.
“The life prospects of an American are more dependent on the income and education of his parents than in almost any other advanced country for which there is data,”
By requiring unpaid internships, professions such as journalism ensure positions of influence will be filled only by those who can pay for them.
Like everything else in St. Louis, grief is unequally allocated. This is a city where people live their whole lives seeing certain neighborhoods only on TV.
In America, academic hiring is rigid and seasonal. Each discipline has a conference, usually held in the fall, where interviews take place.
“The more difficult it is to get an article into a journal, the higher the perceived value of having done so,”
The high price is designed to maintain the barrier between academia and the outside world. Paywalls codify and commodify tacit elitism.
What I did not understand is that academic publishing is not about sharing ideas. It is about removing oneself from public scrutiny while scrambling for professional security. It is about making work “count” with the few while sequestering it from the many.
in academia, perseverance is redefined as the ability to suffer silently or to survive on family wealth.
Last week, a corporation proudly announced that it had created a digital textbook that monitors whether students had done the reading.
Academics love to complain about superficial reporting or uninformed policy, but their own system denies professionals the opportunity to add depth to their work.
“Parenthood means you cannot possibly behave as though society’s rules and norms apply equally to all,”
Students who shell out for exotic volunteer trips abroad compete with students of what C. Z. Nnaemeka termed “the un-exotic underclass”—the poor who have “the misfortune of being insufficiently interesting,”
College shows you are serious enough about your life to risk ruining it early on.
most renowned journalists have never formally studied journalism.
The problem in journalism is not that people are writing for free. It is that people are writing for free for companies that are making a profit.
A British government report showed that in the U.K., journalism is the third most exclusive profession to enter, with the greatest decline in social mobility among its practitioners.
Mainstream media cruelty targets those who lack power.
Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci has called the Internet “a public sphere erected on private property.” All voices can speak, but only few are heard. Amplification is tied to prestige, meaning that where you publish—and what privileges you already have—gives your words disproportionate influence.
her accomplishments already trumped her gender in terms of her public reputation, if not in her private life. She was seen as a person, so she could afford to be seen as a woman.
Building a career in policy often means not only living on little income, but paying your way around the world.
Between the state and the citizen, we have the media, whose biases and careerism thicken the fog.
Paranoia is aggression masked as defense.
Big Brother is scary not just because he knows so much, but because he is capable of so little.
“And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
but the Bush administration did accomplish something. They accomplished the mission of persuading everyday Americans that the unthinkable is normal.
This is normal, they say—but if Iraq should have taught us anything, it is how easily and brazenly “normal” can be redefined.
If Iraq was launched on the illusion of invincibility, the financial crisis is abetted by the acceptance of powerlessness.
