Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

by Jessica Bruder

Most who face this dilemma will not end up dwelling in vehicles. Those who do are analogous to what biologists call an “indicator species”—sensitive organisms with the capacity to signal much larger shifts in an ecosystem.

“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.