Words matter. These are the best Alissa Quart Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
Low-cost gear can make restless people like myself feel marginally happier.
Like other elements of childhood for the precociously gifted – private or home schooling, overstructured activity, and proto-professional training – edutainment products are part of a system that divides children into haves and have-lesses.
Civic poetry offers us a way to think and talk about issues that so much of public speech ignores, to make them new by dissecting and repurposing public speech, prying its falsehoods from its half-truths. It is fighting for its right to critique our would-be democracy.
While more people are working later in life because of happy things like longer life expectancy, they are also doing so because of very sad things, like a lack of Social Security benefits or retirement plans.
Uber is hardly the first company to exploit the financial vulnerability of teachers – and the desperation of public schools more broadly – to score PR points. Amazon, Boeing, Bank of America, and other corporations have played the part of school benefactor, offering everything from reward programs to school supplies.
‘Mr. Robot,’ in particular, signals the rise of a fresh post-Occupy portrayal of the wealth gap. No longer is the story of income inequity delivered via a well-meaning, crushingly earnest indie film by John Sayles or in a single laugh line on ‘Roseanne.’
The United States is the richest and also the most unequal country in the world.
There are things that neuroscience is useful for in terms of understanding behavior, but there are also things it is not all that useful for, like understanding the nuances of our reactions to poetry.
One thing we’re doing with the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, the nonprofit I direct, is providing financial support to journalists who were formerly middle-class.
I saw my gender – and myself – as something of a construct. Like anyone who read one too many women studies’ books in the 1990s, I aspired to both ‘do’ and undo my sex.
Even as a child, I had walked down streets reading novels, waiting for my feet to get stuck in tar as I crossed the road, like the absent-minded animal in a Richard Scarry kid’s book.
Having been built in the fashion I was as a child – created and then deflated – has left me with a distinct feeling of failure. Because I did not live up to my precocity, I experience it to be like a cross between a has-been and a never-was.
Going in and out of a proverbial ‘poor door’ – a separate entrance for income-restricted residents of mixed-income housing – of your city every day has its costs, even if the ‘poor door’ woman would be considered affluent in another location.
The middle class is a group defined by more than just money: it also leans on credentials, education, aspirations, assets, and, of course, household income.
No matter how we name and dissect inequality, we must keep explaining the larger downside of such concentrated extreme wealth.
Neurohumanities offers a way to tap the popular enthusiasm for science and, in part, gin up more funding for humanities.
To be ‘squeezed’ is to be bound by a very American psychological and socio-economic predicament. Being squeezed involves one’s finances, one’s social status, and one’s self-image.
Like Hipster Racism, Hipster Sexism is a distancing gesture, a belief that, simply by applying quotations, uncool, questionable, and even offensive material about women can be alchemically transformed.
‘Middle class’ used to mean having two children and sending them to high-quality public schools, or even occasionally to private schools. It meant new brown Stride Rite Mary Janes with little purple and silver flowers when the old shoes were pinching the toes.
Instead of working to give robots personhood status, we should concentrate on protecting our human workers. If that means developing a more cooperative approach to ownership of autonomous trucks so millions of drivers are not left out in the literal cold, so be it.
In my 20s, I was a freelance writer with little money and living in a rabbit warren one-and-a-half-bedroom with a roommate.
If we don’t at least try to make the future more equitable, most of us will left with simply scraps.
I’m just a reporter.
We in America believe in starting over – and over and over.
Although federal law prohibits companies with 15 or more employees from discriminating against pregnant job seekers, it can be quite hard for an ordinary woman to land a job if she lets prospective bosses know she is pregnant.
I love the show ‘Billions.’ But the main character is basically a hedge fund scumbag, and he’s the hero.
If everybody is a Facebook friend, what is an actual friend?
I used to teach at the Columbia journalism school, and I would tell my students that every book has to have a sentence that motivates it.
Money and one of its embodiments, social class, are both riveting and mysterious to children. And if we don’t challenge today’s stigma around class status, it will warp a new generation’s experience of an even more important class – the kind in which they learn. And that’s one thing we simply can’t afford.
Americans overall may live better than medieval aristocrats could dream of, but that means nothing when oligarchs live in the neighborhood next door, flaunting their luxurious homes and top-quality private schools.
Giftedness gives you this amazing tool kit for handling self-discipline and gives you an area of knowledge, but then it also gives you this weird set of aspirations.
Self-reinvention is an encouraging conceit. It is simply not always a possible one.
Making a movie, under any circumstances, is a highly stressful occupation.
Like politics, all status is ultimately local – people compare themselves to those they live near.
Motherhood gives you access to a range of different intellectual experiences and ways of seeing the world, which, in a way, makes you more flexible in the workplace. But our employers, our colleagues, don’t necessarily understand.
Approximating authenticity online is not such a tall order. In fact, it may be the very least we can do.
When I got pregnant with my daughter, both my husband and I were freelancers, and we didn’t have that much security. We had savings. We were better off than many people, but we didn’t have, you know, pensions and all the things that people used to have.
Mothers suffer in the workplace. That fact is by now so painfully familiar it even has a name: the motherhood penalty.
Economically anxious, many parents see their children’s accomplishments as a sort of insurance against the financial challenges of old age; high-achieving kids, this logic goes, will become high-earning adults and therefore be better able to help Mom and Dad pay for the assisted-living facility in a few decades.
For the rich and powerful, pregnancy might not be an obstacle – it might even help one’s career. But for the rest of us, it remains a hindrance.
In an economy where women now make up half the work force, we’re going to have to address the treatment of pregnant employees more systemically. The passage of the Pregnant Workers Fairness Act would better protect against the discrimination pregnant job seekers face.
I think our families or parents were trying to do best by us by telling us, ‘Do what you love.’ On an existential level, they might have done their best by us, but I think, in terms of the reality principle, maybe less so.
Unnatural constructs – cities and medical pain management – have always seemed pretty good to me.
On the surface, public schools can seem egalitarian, especially with their websites’ emphasis on words such as ‘connection,’ ‘community,’ and ‘choice.’ Yet despite this democratic vocabulary, money makes a big difference.
Teaching has always been a poorly paid profession, particularly considering its educational requirements and responsibilities.
