Barbara Ehrenreich has a new book.

America in the ’aughts—hilariously skewered, brilliantly dissected, and darkly diagnosed by the bestselling social critic hailed as “the soul mate”* of Jonathan Swift

Barbara Ehrenreich’s first book of satirical commentary, The Worst Years of Our Lives, about the Reagan era, was received with bestselling acclaim. The one problem was the title: couldn’t some prophetic fact-checker have seen that the worst years of our lives—far worse—were still to come? Here they are, the 2000s, and in This Land Is Their Land, Ehrenreich subjects them to the most biting and incisive satire of her career.

Taking the measure of what we are left with after the cruelest decade in memory, Ehrenreich finds lurid extremes all around. While members of the moneyed elite can buy congressmen, many in the working class can barely buy lunch. While a wealthy minority obsessively consumes cosmetic surgery, the poor often go without health care for their children. And while the corporate C-suites are now nests of criminality, the less fortunate are fed a diet of morality, marriage, and abstinence. Ehrenreich’s antidotes are as sardonic as they are spot-on: pet insurance for your kids; Salvation Army fashions for those who can no longer afford Wal-Mart; and boundless rage against those who have given us a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty.

Full of wit and generosity, these reports from a divided nation show once again that Ehrenreich is, as Molly Ivins said, “good for the soul.”

This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation

David Brooks:

The United States has been an affluent nation since its founding. But the country was, by and large, not corrupted by wealth. For centuries, it remained industrious, ambitious and frugal.

Over the past 30 years, much of that has been shredded.

The Great Seduction by Debt

J.K. Rowling:

Why do I talk about the benefits of failure? Simply because failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged. Rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.

The Fringe Benefits of Failure

FREUD, DORA (NO, NOT THAT DORA), AND SURFING’S SECRET AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN ROOTS

DISCUSSED: Surfing’s Premier Nihilist, Yet Another Papa-Centric Tale, Double-Secret-Crypto Jews, Something You Buy vs. Something You Do, Weimar on the Pacific, A Man Named Tubesteak, Hitchcockian Voyeurs, Sexual-Coming-of-Age Novels, Teaching Sally Field to Surf

The Believer - Gidget on the Couch

The French film director Jean Renoir once said, "The foundation of all great civilizations is loitering." But we have all stopped loitering. I don't mean we aren't lazy at times. I mean that no moment goes unoccupied.

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

From the archive:

To be sure, time marches on.

Yet for many Californians, the looming demise of the "time lady," as she's come to be known, marks the end of a more genteel era, when we all had time to share.

Also:

I believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, ... I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.

And finally:

The widespread use of enterprise systems has given top managers much greater latitude to direct and control corporate workforces, while at the same time making the jobs of everyday workers and professionals more rigid and bleak.

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

Loitering as the Foundation of All Things Great

How the Internet - and you - will make history deeper, richer, and more accurate.

Everyone's a historian now

The following is Samantha Power's address to the graduating class of Pitzer-Claremont College in California earlier this month.

Samantha Power: Message to Graduates: "Be a Good Ancestor"

Michael Lewis:

Here's a question you probably have never asked yourself:

What, at bottom, is a toilet?

To an ordinary person, it's a device for transferring ordinary human waste from the body to the sewer, as discreetly and sanitarily as possible. But just as all humans are not ordinary, all human waste isn't ordinary, and the waste of Russians is no exception.

From the recent archive:

Excrement in the Late Middle Ages: Sacred Filth and Chaucer's Fecopoetics

Pre-order now!

And also:

Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked, what did the turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

Getting to the Bottom of a Russian's 26 Toilets

"I never thought I'd see the day when a laptop was better at picking up girls than a Ferrari. That's it, I'm ditching Windows."

From the archive:

"No fighter pilot is ever going to pick up a girl at a bar by saying he flies a UAV."

Also:

Indica was fixated on my friend Ari. I asked her what kind of phone she had.

“A Sidekick,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s the same kind Brianna has.”

“Strippers’ phone of choice,” she said.

Jonathan Ive's Sharia Style

The nation’s carbon footprint has a distinct geography not well understood or often discussed. This report quantifies transportation and residential carbon emissions for the 100 largest U.S. metropolitan areas, finding that metro area residents have smaller carbon footprints than the average American, although metro footprints vary widely. Residential density and the availability of public transit are important to understanding carbon footprints, as are the carbon intensity of electricity generation, electricity prices, and weather.

Shrinking the Carbon Footprint of Metropolitan America