In this scathing book, the author produced a landmark study of affluent American society that exposes, with brilliant ruthlessness, the habits of production and waste that link invidious business tactics and barbaric social behavior. Veblen's analysis of the evolutionary process sees greed as the overriding motive in the modern economy, and with an impartial gaze he examines the human cost paid when social institutions exploit the consumption of unessential...

From the beet fields of North Dakota to the National Forest campgrounds of California to Amazon's CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older Americans. Finding that social security comes up short, often underwater on mortgages, these invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in late-model RVs, travel trailers, and vans, forming...

"Freed Black women organizing for protection in the Reconstruction-era South. Jewish immigrant garment workers braving deadly conditions for a sliver of independence. Asian American fieldworkers rejecting government-sanctioned indentured servitude across the Pacific. Incarcerated workers advocating for basic human rights and fair wages. The queer Black labor leader who helped orchestrate America's civil rights movement. These are only some of the...

Winner of the 2016 Susan Smith Blackburn Prize. "From first moments to last, this compassionate but clear-eyed play throbs with heartfelt life, with characters as complicated as any you'll encounter at the theater today, and with a nifty ticking time bomb of a plot. That the people onstage are middle-class or lower-middle-class folks - too rarely given ample time on American stages - makes the play all the more vital a contribution to contemporary...

"They were three Black girls. Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong as they come; and her best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bonded--fervently and intensely in that unique way of little girls--as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the...

In today's fast-paced, fast food world, everyone seems to be eating alone, all the time--whether it's at their desks or in the car. Even those who find time for a family meal are cut off from the people who grew, harvested, distributed, marketed, and sold the foods on their table. Few ever break bread with anyone outside their own socioeconomic group. So why does Michael Carolan say that no one eats alone? Because all of us are affected by the other...

"To be published before the 2018 midterm elections, an accessible, actionable blueprint for how Democrats can build a lasting majority The American electoral system is clearly failing--more horrifically in the 2016 presidential election than ever before. In It's Time to Fight Dirty, David Faris expands on his popular series for "The Week" to offer party leaders and supporters concrete strategies for lasting political reform--and in doing so lays the...

This is an in-depth history of the cultural and intellectual evolution of the intelligentsia in Russia from Stalin's death in 1953 to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.