Over six million prime-age men are neither working nor looking for work; America's low unemployment rate hides the fact that many men have dropped out of the workforce altogether. Our workforce participation rate is on par with that seen during the Great Depression.
Why does this problem affect men so acutely? Why is it so specific to America? What are these ... Show More
Apr 2025
Amy Zhang, "Circular Ecologies: Environmentalism and Waste Politics in Urban China" (Stanford UP, 2024)
After four decades of reform and development, China is confronting a domestic waste crisis. As the world's largest waste-generating nation, the World Economic Forum projects that by 2030, the volume of household waste in China will be double that of the United States. Starting in ... Show More
1h 7m
Jan 26
Terry Williams, "Life Underground: Encounters with People Below the Streets of New York" (Columbia UP, 2024)
Aboveground, Manhattan’s Riverside Park provides open space for the densely populated Upper West Side. Beneath its surface run railroad tunnels, disused for decades, where over the years unhoused people have taken shelter. The sociologist Terry Williams ventured into the tunnel r ... Show More
27m 9s
Jan 26
Lesly-Marie Buer, "RX Appalachia: Stories of Treatment and Survival in Rural Kentucky" (Haymarket, 2020)
Using the narratives of women who use(d) drugs, this account challenges popular understandings of Appalachia spread by such pundits as JD Vance by documenting how women, families, and communities cope with generational systems of oppression. Prescription opioids are associated wi ... Show More
44m 56s
Apr 2023
#614 - Nicholas Eberstadt - Why Do Millions of Men Not Want to Work?
Nicholas Eberstadt is a political economist, demographer, American Enterprise Institute scholar, and an author.
More than 7 million prime working age men in America are not looking for work, and each year that number continues to grow. Given that unemployment is at a massive low, ... Show More
54m 59s
Feb 2022
Elizabeth Anderson, "Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk about It) (Princeton UP, 2019)
One in four American workers says their workplace is a "dictatorship." Yet that number almost certainly would be higher if we recognized employers for what they are-private governments with sweeping authoritarian power over our lives. Many employers minutely regulate workers' spe ... Show More
50m 1s
Jun 2023
Rose Hackman, "Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power" (Flatiron Books, 2023)
In some ways, Hackman’s Emotional Labor: The Invisible Work Shaping Our Lives and How to Claim Our Power (Flatiron Books, 2023) serves as a natural update to Arlie Hochschild’s classic, The Managed Heart. After all, in public life it’s most often the women members of the service ... Show More
21 m