The New York Times Magazine 2016-05-01

U N E M P LOY M E N T
I S AT 5 P E R C E N T,
DEFICITS
ARE DOWN AND THE
OBAMA ECONOMY
IS GROWING.
WHY DO SO MANY
VOTERS FEEL LEFT
BEHIND?
EIGHT
YEARS AFTER
THE CRASH
BY
ANDREW ROSS SORKIN
M AY 1, 2016
THE
MONEY
ISSUE
IN SEARCH
OF THE
MIDDLE CLASS
W H AT
H A P P E N E D TO
WO R C E ST E R ,
M AS S.?
BY
A DA M
DAV I DS O N
WHERE
DID THE
G OV E R N M E N T
J O BS G O ?
BY
ANNIE
LOW R E Y
WHOS
M I D D L E C L AS S
ON TV?
BY
WESLEY MORRIS
IS IT ALL A
FIGMENT OF OUR
P O L I T I CA L
I M AG I N AT I O N ?
BY
CHARLES HOMANS
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The End of the

American Daydream
Middle-class aspirations
have shaped the countrys
politics for decades. What
happens when Americans
stop believing in them?
By Charles Homans
12
5.1.16
The Obama Recovery
Unemployment is 5
percent, decits are down
and G.D.P. is growing.
Why do so many voters
feel left behind?
By Andrew Ross Sorkin
76
68
64
54
50
THE MONEY ISSUE
Where Did the

Government Jobs Go?
Our Town
Moving On Up
Long a ticket to the

middle class, especially for
African-Americans, they
have become increasingly
dicult to nd.
In Worcester, Mass.,
my fathers family had
a simple middle-class
life. Today a much more
complicated economy
is taking shape in the city.
What happened to
all the working-class
TV characters?
By Annie Lowrey
By Adam Davidson
By Wesley Morris
Continued on Page 14
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26
21
34
30
42 38
86 46
THE MONEY ISSUE
Behind the Cover
Kathy Ryan, director

of photography:
Katy Grannan says
she always tries to
make her photographs
as nuanced and
particular as possible.
The presidents
informal pose jacket
o, hands in pockets
subtly suggests his
imminent freedom
from the burdens of the
past eight years.
First Words
Incredibly powerful
people still love to claim
theyve been bullied. What
does it mean for the rest
of us if even a bully can
be pushed around?
The Ethicist
Should a friend have

been told that his
date was H.I.V. positive?
By Heather Havrilesky
Letter of
Recommendation
Photograph by
Katy Grannan
By Kwame
Anthony Appiah
The Rabbit Who

Wants to Fall Asleep
makes explicit the
hypnotic intentions
most bedtime
stories keep hidden.
Lives
Raising eyebrows in
Durban, South Africa,
with the mention
of a traditional dish.
By Mark OConnell
By ZP Dala
Eat
A hero shops gigantic

fried-eggplant sandwich,
remade for the home.
On Photography
Family photos are

precious repositories of
intimacy. What happens
when they are scattered
or sold and then
found by a stranger?
By Teju Cole
By Sam Sifton
Voyages
Twenty-ve miles o
the Normandy coast,
600 residents live on a
few square miles
with no automobiles,
no streetlights
and no light pollution.
Photographs by Jon Tonks
14
5.1.16
Talk
The radio personality

Angie Martinez
doesnt like to crush
peoples hopes.
Interview by Ana
Marie Cox
Contributors
The Thread
Poem
Tip
Judge John
Hodgman
82 Puzzles
84 Puzzles
(Puzzle answers
on Page 85)
16
18
29
32
38
Copyright 2016 The New York Times
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W E IN V E S T YOUR MONE Y
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Contributors
Andrew Ross Sorkin
The Obama Recovery,

Page 54
Editor in Chief
Deputy Editors
JAKE SILVERSTEIN
JESSICA LUSTIG,
BILL WASIK
Andrew Ross Sorkin is a financial columnist for

The New York Times, founder and editor at large
of DealBook and co-anchor of CNBCs Squawk
Box. In his reporting for this weeks cover article
on President Obamas economy, Sorkin said he
was drawn to the topic in hopes of putting the
state of the economy and Obamas role in it in
context and wanting to better understand how
Obama himself thinks about it. As the author
of the book Too Big to Fail, Sorkin chronicled
the financial crisis of 2008. People forget about
those dark days, he said. Everyone has an
opinion about todays economy, but it has to be
measured against where it used to be.
Photographed by Kathy Ryan at The New York Times
on April 14, 2016, at 5:47 p.m.
Managing Editor
Design Director
Director of Photography
Features Editor
Politics Editor
Story Editors
ERIKA SOMMER
GAIL BICHLER
KATHY RYAN
ILENA SILVERMAN
CHARLES HOMANS
NITSUH ABEBE,
MICHAEL BENOIST,
SHEILA GLASER,
CLAIRE GUTIERREZ,
LUKE MITCHELL,
DEAN ROBINSON,
WILLY STALEY,
SASHA WEISS
Associate Editors
JEANNIE CHOI,
JAZMINE HUGHES
Chief National Correspondent
MARK LEIBOVICH
Staff Writers
SAM ANDERSON,
EMILY BAZELON,
First Words,
Page 21
Heather Havrilesky
Heather Havrilesky is a columnist for New York

magazine and the author of How to Be a Person
in the World, which will be published in July.
SUSAN DOMINUS,
MAUREEN DOWD,
NIKOLE HANNAH-JONES,
WESLEY MORRIS,
JENNA WORTHAM
Charles Homans
The End of the

American Daydream,
Page 50
Charles Homans is the politics editor for

the magazine.
Writers at Large
JIM RUTENBERG
David Carr Fellow

Art Director
Deputy Art Director
Annie Lowrey
Where Did the

Government Jobs Go?
Page 64
Annie Lowrey is a contributing editor at New

York magazine and a former business reporter
for The New York Times.
C. J. CHIVERS,
Designers
GREG HOWARD
MATT WILLEY
JASON SFETKO
FRANK AUGUGLIARO,
BEN GRANDGENETT
Digital Designer
Associate Photo Editors
LINSEY FIELDS
STACEY BAKER,
AMY KELLNER,
Mark OConnell
Letter of Recommendation,
Page 30
Mark OConnell lives in Dublin. His book To

Be a Machine will be published in March 2017.
His last article was about Vicks nasal spray.
CHRISTINE WALSH
Virtual-Reality Editor
Photo Assistant
JENNA PIROG
KAREN HANLEY
Copy Chief
ROB HOERBURGER
Copy Editors
HARVEY DICKSON,
DANIEL FROMSON,
Dear Reader: Do You Vote on

Hometown Matters?
MARGARET PREBULA,
ANDREW WILLETT
Head of Research
Research Editors
Every week the magazine publishes the results

of a study conducted online in July and August
by The New York Timess research-and-analytics
department, reecting the opinions of 2,987
subscribers who chose to participate. This weeks
question: Do you vote in local elections?
70%
Always
21%
Frequently
NANDI RODRIGO
NANA ASFOUR,
RENE MICHAEL,
LIA MILLER,
MARK VAN DE WALLE
Production Chief
8%
Occasionally
1%
Never
Production Editors
ANICK PLEVEN
PATTY RUSH,
HILARY SHANAHAN
Editorial Assistant
LIZ GERECITANO BRINN
Publisher: ANDY WRIGHT Associate Publisher: DOUG LATINO Advertising Directors: JACQUELYN L. CAMERON (Advocacy) SHARI KAPLAN (Live Entertainment and Books) NANCY KARPF (Fine Arts) MAGGIE
KISELICK (Automotive, Technology and Telecom) SCOTT M. KUNZ (International Fashion) SHERRY MAHER (Department Stores, Beauty and American Fashion) CHRISTOPHER REAM (Studios) JASON RHYNE
(Recruitment) JOHN RIGGIO (Legal Branding) JOSH SCHANEN (Media and Travel) SARAH THORPE (Corporate, Health Care, Education, Liquor and Packaged Goods) BRENDAN WALSH (Finance and Real Estate)
National Sales Office Advertising Directors: KYLE AMICK (Atlanta/Southeast) JACQUELYN L. CAMERON (Washington) LAUREN FUNKE (Florida/Southeast) DOUG LATINO (Detroit) CHRISTOPHER REAM
(Los Angeles/San Francisco/Northwest) JEAN ROBERTS (Boston/Northeast) JIMMY SAUNDERS (Chicago/Midwest) KAREN FARINA (Magazine Director) LAURA BOURGEOIS (Marketing Director, Advertising)
MICHAEL ANTHONY VILLASEOR
(Creative Director, Advertising) MARILYN M C CAULEY (Managing Director, Specialty Printing) THOMAS GILLESPIE (Manager, Magazine Layout) CHRIS RISO (Publishers Assistant).
To advertise, email karen.farina@nytimes.com.
16
5.1.16
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Who will crack the cancer code?

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+1 604 278 4604
The Thread
RE: MINECRAFT
Clive Thompson wrote about the vast and

expanding world of the popular computer
game that is teaching millions of children to
master the digital world.
While pointing out the admirable similarities between block play and Minecraft
(each of which provides opportunities for
creative problem solving, computational
thinking and the development of civic literacy), Clive Thompson does not acknowledge the major and undesirable dierences. A computer game can never capture the
sensations of working with real materials,
in this case, the weight, texture, grain and
smell of wood. Even the online human
interactions are often one step removed
from actual people and address a limited
range of social and emotional issues.
Technology has its place, but as a
developmental psychologist, I believe
that the disproportionate amount of
time that children today spend in front
of screens deprives them of direct experience with the rest of the physical and
interpersonal world. Leading a meaningful life and beneting society require
more than a generation of adept coders.
I wish the article presented a more balanced perspective.
Ann S. Epstein, Ann Arbor, Mich.
For an adult, the only thing more boring
and baling than Minecraft is listening to
your kid talk about Minecraft. (My kids
are 8 and 4.)
Which is why I enjoyed the Minecraft article, because it made me rethink
grudgingly, yes, but miraculously,
considering the depth of my loathing my attitude toward Minecrack.
Its no longer an awful, ugly, pointless

time-suck of a game with no objective
and no reward; now its an awful, ugly,
computer-programming game with social
elements and logic puzzles, which will help
set my daughter and son up for successful
futures! Right! Yes! Im going to go with
that from now on.
Lydia Marko, San Jose, Calif.
5.1.16
TWITTER
Part 1
Really liked
the Minecraft piece,
but it misses that
similar arguments
could be made of
other early massively
multiplayer online
role-playing games.
Part 2
Minecraft didnt
come from nowhere
as a video game,
nor did a semieducational online
social, cooperative
experience.
@chayak
RE: DONALD TRUMP
Je Sharlet considered Donald Trump as a

preacher of the prosperity gospel whose success is based largely on the power to persuade
people that his story can be theirs.
Je Sharlets article is unfair to the writings of Norman Vincent Peale and his
book The Power of Positive Thinking.
Sharlet implies that Peales book deals in
the kind of anger, bitterness and nancial and personal entitlement that the
writer believes characterizes Trumps
campaign. But Peales book does not
extol greed, does not support any form
of hatred and is not about supercial
magical thinking. It merely gives suggestions on how you can make an unpredictable and often deeply painful life on
earth more successful, comfortable and
joyful. There are no shallow guarantees
in it, no self-indulgent pronouncements
of personal power. The book is straightforward, unpretentious and smart; compassionate, contemporary and useful. It
is better than the articles assessment of
it, and yes, better than Trump. It is worth
rereading, or reading for the rst time.
Scott Klavan, the Bronx
Highly inuenced by Norman Vincent
Peales 1952 best seller, The Power
of Positive Thinking, Donald Trump,
Je Sharlet wrote, doesnt reject faith.
18
THE STORY, ON
Instead, he returns it to the roots of Christian business conservatism.

The lust for success and wealth, however, directly contradicts the Christian
New Testament, which favors the weak
and the poor and condemns the wealthy
and the pursuit of wealth. Actually,
many of Trumps followers dont even
think in terms of great wealth but rather
yearn for just a decent job. Their sense
of powerlessness is palpable. Trump
himself gave them a clue concerning
the real problem: The political class,
which the Republicans love to attack,
he declared, is actually a mere puppet to
the wealthy. However, Trumps followers ignore the implications, the reality
of class domination and instead focus
on a magnetic, messianic personality.
Theyll need a lot of luck.
Roger Carasso, Santa Fe, N.M.
CORRECTIONS:
Trumps
followers
ignore the
implications,
the reality
of class
domination.
An article on April 3 about the SoCalGas

methane leak in Los Angeles included an
erroneous reference to a pipeline-safety
law. The Pipeline Safety Bill, H. R. 2845,
signed by President Obama in 2012,
applied to pipelines that transport oil
and natural gas. The bill did not apply to
SoCalGas in this particular case because
the leak occurred at an underground storage facility; therefore the law could not
have prevented the leak. A quotation from
a newspaper editor also erroneously linked
the law to the SoCalGas leak.
An article on April 17 about a patient who
had obstructive sleep apnea described the disorder incorrectly. The soft tissue at the back
of the throat collapses during sleep; apnea is
not a disorder of the trachea.
Send your thoughts to magazine@nytimes.com.
Cover illustration by Christoph Niemann
Readers respond to the 4.17.2016 issue.
Illustrations by Tom Gauld
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First Words
Incredibly powerful people still love to claim theyve been bullied. What does it mean for the rest
of us if even a bully can be pushed around? By Heather Havrilesky
Picked On
Last month, Bruce Springsteen canceled a concert in Greensboro,
N.C., to protest a new state law that, among other things, requires
people to use the bathrooms of the biological sex reected on their
birth certicates. Springsteen released a statement saying he wanted
to show solidarity with those waging a ght against prejudice and
bigotry against trans people. In response, United States Representative
Mark Walker, a Republican who supports the bill, told The Hollywood
Reporter that Springsteens boycott was a bully tactic, thereby
joining a growing chorus of people who seem to have mixed up their
Davids and Goliaths. A few days later, a (white) North Charleston,
S.C., police chief refused to attend a community meeting on the
one-year anniversary of the death of Walter Scott because of what
he called the bullying tactics of its (black) members at previous
meetings. Last September, Kylie Jenner, a reality star worth millions,
claimed that she was being cyberbullied by commenters on social
media. In 2009, the blogger Heather Armstrong tweeted that no
one should buy a Maytag washer because of what she called the
5.1.16
21
+1 604 278 4604
First Words
companys inadequate response to her

broken appliance, and onlookers on Twitter accused her of bullying Whirlpool, the
companys $19 billion parent corporation.
In the old days, bullies were tough guys
who picked on wimpy guys, a predictable,
archetypal clash that inevitably led to a
heroic outcome. Picture the brute kicking
sand in the face of the scrawny wimp in
the Charles Atlas comic-book ads, inspiring our hero to pump up his muscles and
seek revenge. Picture Bluto, Popeyes
hulking nemesis, imperiling Olive Oyl
time and again so our favorite sailor man
could eat his spinach and save the day. For
decades, Western culture treated bullying
as an expected rite of passage that tested
a mans mettle, an unpleasant but surmountable obstacle on the path to glory.
As a result, bullying has long been
a rich source of comedy, with even its
insults and injuries mined for laughs, all
the better to set up that nal, triumphant
scene in which the bully gets his comeuppance. The 1989 cult hit Heathers took
this nal act of vengeance to an extreme:
A merciless group of high-school girls
harasses their peers until the characters
played by Winona Ryder and Christian
Slater murder them one by one, then
blow up the entire school.
That dark scene foreshadowed the
radical transformation of our view of
bullying that came 11 years later, when
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, two
seniors at Columbine High School in
Littleton, Colo., armed with pipe bombs
and a small arsenal of rearms, killed 13
people and then themselves. The media
painted a dramatic portrait of bullying
culture gone wild at the high school, with
an imagined trench coat maa of angry,
alienated geeks seeking their revenge
against popular jocks whod tormented
them for years. But in the 2009 book
Columbine, Dave Cullen, who reported
from the scene that day and studied the
event for the next 10 years, asserted that
the trench-coat maa was marginal, and
Harris and Klebold had nothing to do
with it. According to Cullen, Harris, the
lead perpetrator, had many friends, was
popular with girls and was rarely bullied.
He was just a psychopath.
A fundamental misunderstanding of
the event remains in place 17 years later,
but this misreading nonetheless helped to
incite a seismic but necessary shift
in the common wisdom on bullying. It
came to be acknowledged as a serious

threat to the emotional and physical
health of its victims. And then, with the
advent of social media came the rise of
cyberbullying, harassment that felt at
once private and public, ephemeral yet
deeply personal.
The roots of the word bully never foretold such a gloomy outcome. In the 16th
century, bully was originally a term of
endearment, arising from the Dutch word
boel, or lover, and broeder, or brother.
The word evolved into a greeting for a
male friend, and from there into a term
meaning worthy or jolly. This positive
connotation lived on into 19th-century
congratulatory slang Bully for you!
but back in the mid-17th century, an
alternate usage, meaning harasser of the
weak, had already caught on.
Today this meaning is utterly dominant, and antibullying slogans, campaigns and organizations make up a
fundamental piece of education culture.
22
Illustration by Matt Dorfman
5.1.16
This new order

has a way of
making us feel
more powerful
than ever and
more powerless
than ever in
rapid succession.
My 9-year-old daughter is currently serving as an antibullying ambassador at her

school, one of a gaggle of fourth-graders
charged with (gently) confronting their
peers on any and all bullying behavior.
According to my daughter, such oenses
range from being mean and hurting
someones feelings to teasing. The
linguistic creep evident here has often
struck me as troubling, especially as a
relatively laughable bully archetype has
been supplanted by the specter of mass
murder and suicide.
But as the word spreads beyond its
original childhood boundaries, it also
loses much of its power. Increasingly, feeling bullied is used broadly by
the powerful and the powerless alike to
describe feeling insulted (by a peer), feeling unfairly criticized (by a professional
critic), feeling diminished (by commenters) or merely feeling exposed to potential prot losses, ego injuries or points of
view that run counter to your own.
+1 604 278 4604
This frequent misapplication of the

term reects a larger sea change in the
way we view our social positions on an
emotional level. These days we tend to
see power less as the rightful inheritance
of the worlds winners (us!) and more as
the end product of a disgraceful cycle of
opportunists oppressing their way to the
top of the human heap.
Even historys traditional bullies are
feeling bullied these days. The presidential campaign has evolved into an
all-against-all dog pile, in which bullies
claim that they are powerless to represent themselves against this new bullying
mob that bullies bullies. Everyone from
Jeb Bush to Ted Cruz to Hillary Clinton
has called Donald Trump a bully; Time
magazine put the word next to Trumps
face on its cover. Trump, who in The
Art of the Deal boasts about giving his
second-grade music teacher a black eye,
memorably jeered at Bush in true bully
style in a December debate: Oh, youre
a tough guy, Jeb, I know. Real tough. Yet
Trump now casts himself as the victim
of the R.N.C.s corrupt nominating
rules, and threatens to disrupt the July
convention if he doesnt win the nomination. But isnt that the nature of bullies,
to see bullying wherever they turn? The
only person who ever called me a bully
was an ex-boyfriend who was bigger and
stronger than I was and lost his temper
when things didnt go his way. In couples
therapy, he described a recurring sense
that, if he allowed me to speak, he would
be destroyed forever.
This twisted perspective has a certain
logic in a digital world where, thanks to
the distribution of technologies across
the populace, everyone has power that
they didnt have just a few years ago.
This new order has a way of making us
feel more powerful than ever and more
powerless than ever in rapid succession.
Likewise, our antagonists seem to toggle
between invincible, superpowered bullies
who could easily crush us and laughably
archaic relics of the past. Locating the
real bully means deciding who has more
power: Banks or government? Celebrities
or their huge fandoms? Corporations or
customers? Teachers or parents? Sovereign nations or terrorist organizations? A
sta blogger or a public gure she covers?
With so many voices crying out, no wonder so many of us cant seem to tell if were
the bullied or the bullies.
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PA I D F O R A N D P O S T E D B Y
OPPENHEIMERFUNDS
GOING BELOW THE SURFACE

Can
C
an B
Biometrics
iome
Improve
Decision
on
n Making?
It turns out that whats really

driving our performance is
taking place below the level
of consciousness, says John
Coates, a Wall Street traderturned-neuroscientist and
author of The Hour Between
Dog and Wolf: How Risk Taking
Transforms Us, Body and
Mind.
Since before the time of Plato,
humans have been wondering
what it is exactly that compels
us to make the choices we
make. But it was in the 1970s

that two Israeli psychologists,
Daniel Kahneman and Amos
Tversky, began studying an
approach to decision making
based on human behavior.
This became the foundation

behavioral economics.
Building on that work,
psychologists, neuroscientists
and others are making new

ways we make decisions and
When confronted with certain types of

THE FRONTAL LOBE

Becomes active when
making rational decisions
based on logic.
THE LIMBIC REGION

Influences decisions
based on emotion or
instinct.
produced with
+1 604 278 4604
PA I D F O R A N D P O S T E D B Y
OPPENHEIMERFUNDS

what
ha
at ssome
ome m
might
ight ssimply
imply ccall
all
our gut.
gut.
DECISION ANALYSIS
There are
e cclearly
learly b
biological
iological
processes, ssays
ays C
Colin
olin
oeconomist
Camerer, neuroeconomist
at the California Institute
nstitute o
off
Technology. The gut
ut iiss jjust
ust
part of a body-brain system
yst
thats encoding emotion and

out what to do.
Data-driven and thorough.
THE IMPLICATIONS COULD BE TREMENDOUS FOR

INVESTORS: AN ADDITIONAL SOURCE OF DATA
THAT REVEALS NOT ONLY HOW THE MARKET IS
BEHAVING, BUT OUR OWN BODIES AS WELL.
But now with the help of
biosensing technology, we can
have greater insight into how
our bodies react to certain
choices and get a better sense
of how were feeling below the
surface. The implications could
be tremendous for investors:
an additional source of data
that reveals not only how the
market is behaving, but our
own bodies as well.
Find out more about how to
improve decision making at:
nytimes.com/oppenheimerfunds
An analytical approach based on examining

the pros and cons of each potential course
of action.
Time consuming. Potentially

disastrous if misinformed.
HEURISTICS
Rules of thumb based on prior
experiences and intuition.

time, or both, is scarce.

NEUROECONOMICS

rational prefrontal cortex, as well as the
more emotional limbic region of the brain.
We may make better choices within
a social context thanks to emotions.

make a less than optimal choice.
HORMONES
The stress response hormones testosterone

enough to make bold decisions with
high rewards.
Cortisol can make us cagey and too

Photography by Martin Klimas.
+1 604 278 4604
On Photography By Teju Cole
Family photos are precious

repositories of intimacy.
What happens when they are
scattered or sold and
then found by a stranger?
26
5.1.16
Photograph by Jens Mortensen
The photographs were Polaroids, taken

between the 1970s and the 2000s. Zun Lee
bought them at ea markets, at garage
sales or on eBay. Most of them depicted African-Americans: people wearing
stylish clothes, relaxing in the yard, celebrating birthdays. A few depicted people
in prison uniforms. All the photographs
had somehow been separated from their
original owners and had become what
Lee calls orphaned Polaroids.
Found photographs have long been
important to artists like Lee. Photos taken
by amateurs can sometimes acquire new
value on account of their uniqueness,
their age or simply the knowledge that
they were once meaningful to a stranger. As part of a group, they can evoke
a collectors sensibility or tell us something about a historical period in a way
professional photographs might not. For
Lee, collecting found photographs of
African-Americans a project he called
Fade Resistance had an additional
and deeply personal meaning.
Lee was raised in Germany by Korean
parents. In his 30s, his mother told him
that the man who raised him was not his
biological father. But because her relationship with that man, who was black,
had been eeting, she refused to tell her
son more about him. This revelation, at
once momentous and limited, changed
Lees life. To make sense of his personal
loss, and to explore his connectedness
to black America, he took up photography. I became friends with Lee around
the time he began making pictures of
black fathers and their children in the
Bronx and elsewhere; that project led to
a book, Father Figure, for which I wrote
a preface. Later, Lee began to collect the
Polaroids thousands of them that
ended up in Fade Resistance.
Who took these photos? Who do they
depict? The basic contextual details we
would usually expect from snapshots are
missing here. The absence of this information is bittersweet: We are bewildered,
but we are also ferried over from imagery
into imagination. In Lees case, the story
of his orphaned Polaroids took a surprising turn. When he uploaded some of
them to Facebook, the social networks
facial-recognition technology immediately began to match them with real people.
Lee was not sure who was doing the tagging. Intrigued and wary, he sent a message to one individual who was tagged
Next Week: On Sports by Jay Caspian Kang
+1 604 278 4604
+1 604 278 4604
On Photography
in several of the pictures. There was no

response. Then, several weeks later, he
got a message from the same man: a curt
request that he take the pictures down.
I, too, collect found photographs, but
my collection is in the dozens, not in
the thousands. I buy not with any idea
that I might show them to anyone, but
because I like the way certain pictures
look. A few years ago, I bought a cache
of photographs from a thrift store in
Brooklyn, 35 or so pictures that I selected out of a pile of hundreds. There was a
photo of a group of well-dressed Asians in
a restaurant, with Westerners in military
uniforms. There were pictures of babies,
and pictures of blurred landscapes.
Twenty-two of the pictures I bought that
day featured the same woman at dierent
stages in her life. She was sometimes alone
and sometimes with family. But there she
was, in picture after picture, from as far
back as the late 1930s until at least 1980. She
was dark-haired (was she Italian?) and had
an unmistakable, toothy smile and cheeks
that rose high on her face. A few of these
photos had inscriptions, in pencil or pen,
on the back or along the white border on
the front. Rock of Gibralter [sic] Margaret, Kate & myself. Lake Huntington,
May 1939. I felt I was somehow rescuing
these pictures from the anonymity of the
pile. I named the woman Mrs. X.
I didnt put my images of Mrs. X online,
in part because I didnt want anyone to
recognize her. I also felt a little guilty:
my images of Mrs. X? I had the sense
that my possession of these pictures was
not their ideal posterity. They should be
in the keeping of people who knew this
woman, who cared about her. (Imagine
your own most precious family photos
permanently in the hands of a complete
stranger.) And yet, despite my doubts, I
was also happy to have the pictures. Here
she is in 1939 in her bathing suit, here she
is with her husband (?), her son (?). Here
she is abroad. We have color pictures
now. Then shes noticeably older, and the
husband (?) is no longer there, but there
are friends (?) and relatives (?). I looked at
each of the photographs through a mesh
of question marks, sustained by Mrs. Xs
absolutely distinctive smile. From time to
time, returning to the pictures, I am aware
that I am touching a photograph that Mrs.
X also touched. Is this woman still alive?
Its possible, but I doubt it.
The photos Zun Lee collected, digitally scanned and put out in public,
have had a dierent life from the photos
in my collection. He wrote back to the
man who was tagged in some of them
and suggested meeting. After all, he did
not consider himself the owner of the
photos, only their custodian. Perhaps,
Lee oered, he might y to Los Angeles
and hand the photos over in person. The
man said no. Lee was disappointed but
sympathetic. He said hed already been
thinking about how databases and tags
are not neutral, how they can wind up
being hostile toward communities of
color. I completely understood, Lee
told me. This man was saying, We are
28
Photograph by Jens Mortensen
5.1.16
Above: The back

of a found photo
of a seated woman.
The black paper
suggests that it was
pasted into an
album and then
ripped out. Opening
page: The backs
of found photos
from the writers
Mrs. X collection.
Teju Cole
is a photographer,
essayist and the author
of two works of ction,
Open City and Every
Day Is for the Thief. He
teaches at Bard College.
not willing participants. The black body

is used as a commodity, as something that
is surveilled. The man was telling me, No,
youre not welcome, this is not art, get the
hell out of our lives. And I understood it.
People have a right to be skeptical about
the encounter between the analog experience of life and the futuristic algorithms
that often prioritize what is possible over
what it desirable. Already there are reports
of churches scanning worshipers faces to
determine who attends regularly, the better to know whom to ask for donations.
Shops match your face to a database so
that they can greet you by name or
identify you as a potential shoplifter. Black
people in particular, against the historical
+1 604 278 4604
backdrop of surveillance and state hostility and corporate disregard, have a right
to doubt these technologies. There was a
recent report of Googles photo app automatically tagging a photo of two black
people as gorillas another instance of
machines replicating the nastier prejudices of their human teachers.
Lees pleasure in the Polaroids he
bought was also shadowed by questions:
Why had so many families lost their things
to secondhand dealers and estate sales?
Behind these photos of bell-bottoms,
Afros, birthday parties and interiors rich
with period detail lay the invisible stories
of evictions, dispossessions or separations.
The Polaroids were evidence of joy, but the
fate of the photographs themselves was
unhappy. Lee acceded to his interlocutors
request and took the tagged photos down.
In my collection, there is a picture
from the late 19th or early 20th century,
an image I think about as much as the
entire series of Mrs. X pictures. This
seated woman wears a long dark skirt,
dark stockings and polished dark shoes.
Her hair is a neatly parted mass of black,
almost an Afro. She wears a pale jacket
and is seated outside, next to a door and
a brick wall. She looks o to her right.
Below, not on the white border of the
photograph but directly on the photograph itself, someone has written, in ink,
the single word nigger.
I doubt that the person responsible for
this vandalism knew this woman personally. Perhaps it was written decades later.
The word, after all, has been with us a long
time, as has the spitefulness with which
it is deployed. But whenever the defacement occurred, I feel it has something in
common with both a contemporary form
of aggression and a very old one. Black
Americans, for most of their time in this
country, were named, traded and collected against their will. They were branded
physically tagged both to hurt and to
control them. The woman in my photograph has been tagged, too, semantically.
The written slur is like a brand.
Lee sent me a screen shot of his Facebook page as it looked while he was
uploading a batch of Polaroids. Several
of the images are of men in prison. There
are white rectangles framing the faces,
and there is an instruction above each
picture: Click Anywhere to Tag. That
mild directive an automated instruction from Facebook suddenly seems
Lees pleasure
in the Polaroids
he bought was
also shadowed
by questions:
Why had so
many families
lost their things
to secondhand
dealers and
estate sales?
sinister. What if these people dont wish

to be tagged? What are their rights? These
doubts have led Lee to focus more on an
oline display of these images. I faced the
more immediate conundrum of illustrating this column and decided not to show
the faces of the people in my collection.
American history has long struggled to
believe the joys and intimacies of black
American life. Social media, fortunately,
makes those human realities visible to a
much larger swath of the population than

ever before. But theres also a paradox: To
make intimacy public is often to render
it less intimate. For all of us, but especially for those in communities of color,
being digitally tracked does not solve
the conundrums of inequality. Whatever
else the machines learn, theyll have to
learn about our sense of privacy too, the
human necessity of leaving some things
untagged and undeclared.
Poem Selected by Matthew Zapruder
Poets have always written odes of praise not to just what is lofty but also to the
ordinary things that surround us, in order to see what such deep attention can reveal.
This ode is a metaphor, where ute becomes man, and vice versa, in ongoing,
illuminating, mysterious conversation.
ode to the ute

By Ross Gay
A man sings
by opening his
mouth a man
sings by opening
his lungs by
turning himself into air
a ute can
be made of a man
nothing is explained
a ute lays
on its side
and prays a wind
might enter it
and make of it
at least
a small nal song
Matthew Zapruder is the author of four collections of poetry, most recently Sun Bear. He teaches at Saint
Marys College of California and is editor at large at Wave Books. Ross Gay is the author of three poetry
collections, most recently Catalog of Unabashed Gratitude, published by the University of Pittsburgh Press last
year. It was the winner of the 2015 National Book Critics Circle Award for poetry.
Illustration by R. O. Blechman
29
+1 604 278 4604
Letter of Recommendation
The Rabbit Who Wants to Fall Asleep

By Mark OConnell
Putting our 3-year-old son to bed isnt a

task my wife and I undertake lightly. On a
typical night, there will be actual physical
struggles and a great deal of bitter haggling over the particulars over whether
it will be she or I who keeps vigil as he
bravely contends against his own fatigue,
over how many stories will be read to him
and which ones. There will also, typically, be a series of increasingly hostile
demands for glasses of water, and at least
one trip to the toilet that will eventually be exposed as a cynical diversionary
tactic. One night, his claim that he needed

to go was revealed as spurious, and I let
him know that I was onto his hustle. Im
not a fool, I said.
You are a fool, Dada, he countered
smoothly, staring up at me from his
unused potty.
In recent weeks, though, these nightly torments have been relieved by a
book called The Rabbit Who Wants
to Fall Asleep a book whose powerfully soporic eects my son is helpless
to resist, and which as a result has had
30
Photograph by Kyoko Hamada
5.1.16
Carl-Johan Forssen
Ehrlins book makes
explicit the hypnotic
intentions most
bedtime stories and
lullabies keep hidden.
a transformative eect on the style and

substance of his bedtime routine.
I have noticed that stories aimed at his
demographic tend to operate as cultural
propaganda on behalf of unconsciousness. Your typical work of toddler-focused
ction tends to converge on a climax in
which the protagonist (mischievous
child, curious animal, anthropomorphic
steam engine) succumbs to a pleasurable exhaustion after the adventures of
the preceding pages, and drifts o into
peaceful slumber. Its a nicely suggestive
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Letter of Recommendation
trajectory, certainly, but this sort of subtlety has no real purchase, at least not on
my son. The beautiful, if slightly sinister,
thing about The Rabbit Who Wants to
Fall Asleep is that it functions less as
cultural propaganda than as authoritarian
diktat. Its explicit aim is to bring about in
your child through the sedative eects
of repetition, through extreme dullness,
through strategically staged yawns a
state of narrative-induced anesthesia.
The book is the work of a Swedish
writer named Carl-Johan Forssen Ehrlin,
whose author bio lists a miscellany of
modish occupations: behavioral scientist,
communications teacher, life coach, leadership trainer. In an Instructions to the
Reader section, he tells us that passages
in bold text should be emphasized, while
italicized passages should be read in a particularly slow and calm voice. Used injudiciously, he writes, the book may cause
drowsiness or an unintended catnap, and
we are further cautioned never to read it
aloud close to someone driving any type
of vehicle or engaged in any other activity
that requires wakefulness. (This does seem
a little alarmist, though I wouldnt necessarily want to test it out on the open road.)
The narrative proper concerns a young
rabbit called Roger a name that can, we
are advised, be read as Rooo geeer with
two yawns who is having great diculty in getting to sleep. To alleviate this
situation, his mother takes him on a voyage to the other side of the meadow, where
there lives a kindly wizard named Uncle
Yawn, who specializes in helping rabbits
and children get to sleep using spells and
magic powders. Along the way, there are
encounters with somnolence-themed
animals (Sleepy Snail, Heavy-Eyed Owl)
whose pulverizingly dull soliloquies on the
topic of tiredness serve to prepare Roger,
and thus your child, for the nal somniferous encounter with Uncle Yawn.
At the wizards house, we hear more
discussion on such diverse topics as
sleepiness, going to sleep and being
asleep, before you yourself are eventually
directed, in one of the books frequent
square-bracketed interpolations, to symbolically sprinkle the invisible sleeping
powder over and around the child. Now
more and more tired with every step,
Roger is escorted back across the meadow
by his mother, before arriving home once
more, there to nally and unambiguously
lose consciousness. At this point in the
Number of
appearances the
following words
make in the first
three pages
of The Rabbit
Who Wants
to Fall Asleep:
32
Illustration by Radio
5.1.16
Fall: 19
Sleep: 36
Tired: 13
You: 36
Now: 23
plot, my son is invariably beautifully,

blessedly one step ahead of the rabbit.
Over successive nights, the story has
a cumulatively calming eect; its repetitive prose, at times weirdly reminiscent
of Gertrude Steins, is almost literally
enchanting, as is the manner in which the
sentences wander free of standard syntax,
and even meaning, as if the text itself were
drifting into a liminal territory between
consciousness and dreams. A typical passage describes our drowsy rabbit lying
there thinking about falling asleep, now.
He was lying there thinking about all the
things that can make him tired now, all
those things that usually would make him
tired and sleepy, so tired and sleepy.
I wont deny that my wife and I experienced some squeamishness, early on,
about eectively hypnotizing our son to
sleep, but we came quickly to the conclusion that the book merely makes explicit
and renders eective intentions
that were already implicit in many of the
stories and lullabies that had for so long
failed to get us anywhere. There was also,
Ill admit, some initial unease surrounding
the gure of Uncle Yawn, who with his
powerful, magical and invisible sleeping
powder seemed the sort of man youd
never take your child across a meadow to
visit in real life. But we realized that we
were projecting our adult fears and neuroses onto a blank cipher whose only real
work as a character was to act as an agent
of our own parental will. And I for one am
at peace with this. I cant speak directly
for my son, but he seems to be at peace
with it, too. He is, at any rate, at time of
writing, asleep.
Tip By Malia Wollan
to do, Alves says. Time the womans contractions; intense contractions at short
intervals signal impending birth. Wash
your hands and gather clean towels or
blankets. Maintain outward calm; distress
tends to spread between people. Dont tell
the woman when to push or what to do.
Trust her instincts and impulses.
Let the process ow, Alves says.
When the baby begins to emerge, do
not try to pull on the body or the umbilical cord. Do not push on the mothers
abdomen. Position yourself with a blanket
to help catch the baby. Wipe or suction
its nose and mouth to ensure clear airways. To cut the umbilical cord, place two
clamps, or tie two strings, an inch apart,
a little more than an inch out from the
babys navel. Slice between the two with
sterilized scissors. If possible, place the
baby on the mothers chest. Wait for the
mother to expel the placenta and monitor
her for bleeding. Get medical attention as
soon as possible.
Remember, birth is dramatic but ordinary. Worldwide, more than 250 women
give birth every minute. Airborne deliveries are rare, ill-advised and, Alves says, not
medically recommended. Of the 192,000
in-ight calls MedAire received last year,
just three cases resulted in in-ight babies.
(Twelve more cases involved women
going into labor, but those planes landed
before delivery.) The sky is a suspended
city, Alves says. Anything that can happen in a city can happen in ight.
How to Deliver
a Baby
You dont want the baby to fall on the

oor, says Dr. Paulo Alves, a medical
director for MedAire, which provides 136
airlines with medical training, logistics
and a telephone service that connects
ight attendants all over the world to
emergency-room doctors in Phoenix. If
a woman goes into labor somewhere far
from a hospital 37,000 feet above the
Pacic Ocean, say ask if anyone in the
vicinity has medical training. If not, help
her into a comfortable place. On a plane,
thats usually a reclining rst-class seat
or the galley oor. Make sure blankets
support her body so that when the baby
arrives, it lands gently. Babies are slippery
when theyre born, Alves warns.
Dont try any improvised exams or procedures. Dont do what youre not trained
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Voyages
Twenty-ve miles o the Normandy coast, 600

residents live on a few square miles with no
automobiles, no streetlights and no light pollution.
There isnt much noise either, besides the wind.
Thats the Coupe,
an isthmus that
connects Sark to
Little Sark. After
World War II,
German P.O.W.s
worked on the
path, reinforcing it
with concrete.
34
5.1.16
Photographs by Jon Tonks
+1 604 278 4604
Photographer:
Jon Tonks
Home:
Bath, England
One of my mates who loves Enya

told me about Sark Enya wrote a
whole album about the island. But I
really wanted to go because Sark has
a designation as a Dark Sky island, so
theres very little light pollution. There
are also no cars, no modern roads, no
streetlights. Its almost stopped in
Destination:
Sark
About Sark:
One of the Channel Islands, Sark is home to about 600 people, as well
as some horses (for transportation). Thanks to voluntary light restrictions
accepted by residents and businesses, the island is known for its stargazing.
time. Youre not entirely cut off from

the world there are bikes, horses and
tractors on the island.
At night, it was so bloody dark. Its
hard to convey the silence. Its as if I
didnt realize what real silence was until
I was on Sark. When I left the house in
the middle of the night, all I heard was a
whistle of the wind. I had this feeling of

extreme insignicance. The sky is just
endless there. I could see that eventually
those clis would collapse and disappear. And I wanted my images to convey
a sense of that, even in this place that
doesnt change that there is a fragile
nature to it all.
Clockwise from
top left: This was a
view from the boat
ride between the
British port Poole and
Guernsey, the island
next door. It took
three hours to get to
Guernsey and then
another hour to get
to Sark.
I stood on a cliff
edge. My shadow
is in the picture,
and I rarely take
self-referential
photographs. But I
was trying to think
of this journey, and it
felt as if I needed
to be part of the
narrative. You can
see Guernsey
in the distance.
This is known as
the Window in the
Rock. I think its
purposefully drilled
through as
a viewpoint.
Thats a shower
block. I stood near
the ferry archway
looking back at the
building. I dont
know if anyone
actually uses the
shower maybe
fishermen?
35
+1 604 278 4604
Voyages
The orange of the sky is
all light coming from
Guernsey. I wanted to see
the islands observatory
at night. Its known locally
as the shed, which is
exactly what it looks like
from the outside. But once
36
5.1.16
the roof has been rolled

back, a large telescope is
revealed. We saw the
colored bands of Jupiters
atmosphere and its moons.
Photograph by Jon Tonks
Star Bright: More photographs are at www.nytimes.com/magazine.
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So take a sip of your complimentary
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your trip even more.
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The Ethicist By Kwame Anthony Appiah
To submit a query:
Send an email to
ethicist@nytimes
.com; or send mail
to The Ethicist, The
New York Times
Magazine, 620
Eighth Avenue, New
York, N.Y. 10018.
(Include a daytime
phone number.)
38
5.1.16
More than 30 years ago, ve years or

so into a world shaped by AIDS, I had two
friends. One of them, Dean, was coming
to New York City for a job interview;
he didnt know anyone in the city and was
planning on being there for a few days
near Christmas. He was 24, smart and
ambitious. The other man, Bill, was
the last lover of a man named Colin,
who was my rst love. Colin didnt tell
Bill that he was H.I.V. positive; when Bill
became positive, Colin discovered he
was, too. Colin had died by the time Dean
was visiting New York.
Bill called me to ask if I wanted to go to
Lincoln Center. I couldnt, but I mentioned
that my friend Dean was coming to town
and that they worked in related elds.
They talked; they went to Lincoln Center.
I felt I was doing the correct thing in not
revealing Bills status to Dean. You can
guess where this is going. They had sex,
dated briey, broke up, didnt talk. Years
passed; Bill died. One night, I had dinner
with Dean and told him the Colin/Bill
story. Deans reaction made it clear that
he hadnt known Bills status. Dean
looked at me, and our friendship, which
had cooled for other reasons by this
time, stopped. Dean died a year or so
later of AIDS. Was it my fault?
Dave, Location Withheld
No. The primary responsibility for avoiding sexually transmitted diseases lies with
the people having sex. By the time youre
talking about, it was known that AIDS was
caused by a virus, that it could be sexually
and that you were right to have respected

Bills medical privacy. Still, with a visitor
who was not a New Yorker, you could
have reinforced the importance of safe sex
in this epicenter of the disease, whatever a
sex partners avowed status, and done so
without revealing what you knew about
Bill. Second, while duties of condentiality are less demanding when the person youre talking about is dead, it might
not have been a great idea to reveal what
you knew about Colin and Bill. My father
was fond of the Latin proverb De mortuis
nil nisi bonum. Speak only good of the
dead. It has limited applicability, I grant,
but over the dinner table, its a decent
enough rule of thumb.
I am the president of a community garden
in a large city. The city was among several
that applied for grants for gardens and
green spaces. (The awards totaled nearly
$200,000.) We won one of the four
awards! I excitedly shared the news with
my garden members. We have several
large projects that we could complete with
these funds. The impact on our garden
and the community would be signicant.
But a number of gardeners argued that we
should refuse the funds. It turns out that
the company funding the grant is partnered
with an international agricultural giant,
Monsanto, well known for its use of G.M.O.s,
pesticides, herbicides and other practices
that are perceived by some members as
contrary to the values of our small garden.
Is it wrong to accept these funds? If we do,
are we condoning those practices? If we
refuse, should we do it quietly or take
Bonus Advice From Judge John Hodgman

Mark writes: My 11-year-old son and I enjoy playing Yahtzee.
In a recent three-game match, I won the first game, he won
the second and I took the third. We then added our total
scores, and he came out on top, 733-654. He then declared
himself the winner. I contend that by winning two out of
three games, I should be allowed to claim that title.
I hate to rule against a child, especially after three close

contests, but Yahtzee, like politics, is a machine designed
to grind the idealistic dreams of youth to dust. Though he
played admirably, each game of Yahtzee is a winner-takeall contest. There is no proportional point allocation nor
superpoints he can hope to court. In this brokered contest,
I name the winner Dad. And it has nothing to do with my
discomfort with your childs racism and tiny, tiny hands.
Illustration by Kyle Hilton
Should I Have
Told My Friend
His Date Was
H.I.V. Positive?
transmitted and that the probability of

sexual transmission could be signicantly
reduced by various safe sex practices.
Bill and Dean presumably were aware of
all this. And in any case, people shouldnt
rely on third parties to inform them of a
partners status. They have a right to be
told directly by their partners.
At the same time, medical privacy is an
important value. In emergencies, it may
be necessary to reveal a persons health
status to protect others. But youre talking
about a situation in which there were easily
available steps your visiting friend could
have taken to protect himself. Nor did you
have reason to think that Bill was going to
endanger his date or that his date was
going to endanger himself.
Maybe Bill acted blamelessly. (We cant
be sure that Dean got the virus from
him. One baleful stare doesnt settle the
matter.) If Bill failed to mention that he
was H.I.V. positive, though, Dean had no
grounds to infer that he wasnt. And if Bill
falsely claimed to be negative? Even in the
early years of testing, medical authorities
made it plain that a negative result was
consistent with a persons having been
infected but not yet seroconverted. If
someone was having unsafe sex, a negative test result wouldnt have meant that
he was uninfected. Sex and rationality are,
of course, not the steadiest of companions. Thats why it has been important
to promulgate safe sex as a practice a
habit. Make it a default, and you dont
need to be especially rational to stick to it.
Ive said that youre not morally responsible for what happened to your two friends
Illustration by Tomi Um
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The Ethicist
the opportunity to make a big show of our

opposition to Monsanto?
Name Withheld
Heres another Latin adage: Pecunia non olet

money doesnt stink. The idea, of course,
is that money is not tainted by its origins.
The Roman emperor Vespasian is often
mentioned in this connection, because
when his son Titus complained about his
infamous urine tax, he held a gold coin
near the boys nose and asked if it smelled.
When the boy conceded that it didnt, Vespasian said, Yet it comes from urine.
The adage leaves many people unpersuaded. They regard money acquired by
sketchy means as itself sketchy. Thats a
backward-looking impulse. If the money
was made through an immoral process,
you can try to repair the wrong or punish
the guilty, but neither of those results is
achieved by letting the money go to someone else who doesnt know or doesnt care
how it was made.
Not taking
someones
money is an
odd form of
punishment.
There are forward-looking reasons for

socially responsible investing, to be sure:
You encourage companies to act ethically
by making a pool of money available for the
ones that do. I prefer these forward-looking arguments, though Im not against
punishing companies that have behaved
wrongly in part for the forward-looking
reason that it discourages further wrongdoing. But the situation is dierent when
youre accepting money, rather than providing it, and not taking someones money
is an odd form of punishment.
I understand your concern about the
symbolism of accepting funds from a
business with values that are contrary
to those of your association. Yet have
you satised yourself that practices you
avoid in your garden are in fact morally
objectionable in industrial agriculture?
Conventional agriculture requires reform;
you know its problems well. But could
we keep feeding the earths population
of seven billion if we simply eliminated
pesticides, herbicides, synthetic fertilizers
and genetically modied crops? Rice cultivation emits as much as a hundred million tons of methane each year; should
we one day consider genetically modied strains that would reduce emissions
while increasing productivity? How such
benets net out against the potential environmental hazards of these practices is a
complex empirical question. But feeding
the hungry surely counts for something.
We need to be better stewards of
our fragile environment. Spurning this
gift, however, will deprive you and your
excellent cause of a benet, without making any dierence to the corporations
behavior. Surely eective action toward
a better future one that will include
small-scale agriculture is more important than the satisfaction of having clean
hands. And if your hands get dirty, well,
isnt that part of gardening?
Kwame Anthony Appiah teaches philosophy
at N.Y.U. He is the author of Cosmopolitanism and
The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen.
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Eat By Sam Sifton
The Best Sandwich Ever

A hero shops gigantic fried-eggplant sandwich, remade for the home.
Dads turn. I count in reverse order:

that B.L.T., yes, perhaps with avocado;
turkey with Swiss, coleslaw and Russian
dressing on a kaiser roll; peanut butter
and gochujang (the Korean hot-pepper
paste) on sesame toast; a Reuben, on rye
of course, with pastrami, Swiss, sauerkraut, more of that Russian. I know a guy
who makes those as if he were building
violins for Pinchas Zukerman. I pause
before the No. 1 slot, as if reecting; I
enjoy giving this answer. My most favorite sandwich is fried eggplant, mozzarella and roast beef on an Italian hero, with
42
Photographs by Davide Luciano
It is a beautiful
torpedo of food
crunchy, silken,
sweet and
spicy all at once.
hot peppers and a slash of mayonnaise.

You can nd that sandwich at Defontes Sandwich Shop, on Columbia Street
in Brooklyn, near the exit to the Hugh
Carey Tunnel that leads from Red
Hook to the Battery in Manhattan. It is
a beautiful torpedo of food crunchy,
silken, sweet and spicy all at once. But
be careful. It is huge and outrageously rich. If you consume it all at once, it
can be the sort of sandwich to lay out
the afternoon in stages of grief. Often I
omit the roast beef from my order and
tell myself Ill eat only half. I always eat
Food stylist: Maggie Ruggiero. Prop stylist: Gozde Eker.
Your Top 5 favorite sandwiches, in order,

please. Go. This is a game I play in the car
with my children, as if we were characters
in a Nick Hornby novel. Its a diversion to
make long travel more bearable. We play it
all the time. The children rush to judgment,
and as is true for most of us, their answers
change along with their tastes. But of late:
grilled cheese on white, with tomato soup;
the B.L.T. from a store in Maine near their
uncles house, on thick country bread; ham
and Brie with mustard on baguette; a meatball sub from a local deli; and does a
hamburger count? (It does not.)
5.1.16
Comment: nytimes.com/magazinee
+1 604 278 4604
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Eat
the whole thing and hate myself through

my untouched dinner later in the day.
Recently, in a t of ambition, I set out
to make the thing at home, re-engineering
both the fried eggplant and the ratio of the
ingredients to make it a human-size sandwich, the sort of meal that oers satisfaction without hurting anyone, that delivers
deliciousness at a lower cost to the body
that consumes it. It is still a colossal feed.
It is still the best sandwich.
To start, fry the eggplant. You can do
this up to a day or two ahead of time. I use
small Italian eggplants, eight to 10 inches
in length, with dark, shiny skins, rm to the
touch. You can leave the skins on, or you
can peel them, as do some masters of the
fried-eggplant game, including the Franks
Castronovo and Falcinelli, of the Frankies
Spuntinos restaurants in Brooklyn and
Manhattan. Then I cut the eggplants into
thin planks and salt them awhile, not so
much because theyre bitter but because
the salt draws moisture from the esh, collapsing its cell structure and reducing the
amount of oil the eggplant picks up when
it cooks. Blot them well with paper towels
to remove the liquid and the excess salt,
and you will be good to go.
The frying is serial: A rst run through
hot olive oil cooks the eggplant and lightly
browns it; a second, after the cooked eggplant has been dipped in a wash of egg and
Parmesan cheese, gives it a slightly pued

crust, browned in spots, salty and oily in
the best possible way. (Some old recipes
for Roman-style fried eggplant call for a
dip in bread crumbs following the egg,
but I think this is overkill.) Let the twicefried eggplant drain a little, and the planks
will keep, lightly covered, for a few hours
on the countertop or for a few days in the
fridge. Theyre best at room temperature.
The rest of the sandwich is shopping:
Italian hero rolls, or loaves of Italian bread,
as well as fresh whole-milk mozzarella
(though Ive had good results even with the
plastic-y stu from the supermarket; just
be sure to allow it to come to room temperature before assembling your meal).
And while you can certainly make the
roast beef yourself, lets not overcomplicate things; youve already fried eggplant.
(Vegetarians can avoid the roast beef.) Lastly, youll need pickled Italian hot cherry
peppers, which you can slice into rounds
and apply as desired. The mayonnaise is
my preference. I know some people hate it.
In sandwich making, form always follows function. So wherever you come down
on the question of mayonnaise, follow your
decision with a small stack of fried eggplant
on the sandwichs bottom, followed by
another of sliced mozzarella and another
of roast beef, then top the whole with the
cherry peppers. The eggplant protects the
In sandwichmaking, form
always follows
function.
bottom of the sandwich from the moisture of the cheese, while the top absorbs
the acidity and re of the peppers. Fold
the mass together, and youve got the best
sandwich there is. For today, at least.
The Best Fried-Eggplant Sandwich
Time: 1 hour
2
smallish Italian eggplants, roughly

1 pounds total
tablespoons kosher salt
cup extra-virgin olive oil
large eggs
tablespoons grated Parmesan cheese
hero rolls
to 3 tablespoons mayonnaise
ounces fresh mozzarella cheese, cut

into thin slices
ounces sliced cooked roast beef

(optional)
cup hot cherry peppers, or to

taste, sliced
1. Line a large, rimmed sheet pan with

paper towels. Trim stem end from eggplants,
then peel and discard skin. Using a knife
or a mandoline, slice the eggplant lengthwise
into 316-inch-thick slabs. Arrange eggplant
in a single layer on a baking sheet. Sprinkle
both sides of eggplant with salt. Let stand for
approximately 10 to 15 minutes. Pat eggplant
dry with paper towels, and stack on a plate.
2. Discard the wet paper towels, and replace
it in the sheet pan with more, then place a wire
rack on top. In a large, deep skillet, heat the
oil over medium-high heat until it is shimmery.
Working in batches, fry the eggplant slabs
until just tender, approximately 30 to 40
seconds per side. Transfer fried eggplant to
rack to drain. Remove skillet from heat.
4. Working in batches, dip drained eggplant

into egg batter, then fry in oil until
puffed, lightly golden and cooked through,
approximately 2 to 4 minutes per batch.
Transfer fried eggplant to rack to drain.
You can cook the eggplant in advance of
assembling sandwiches. Covered, it will keep
in the refrigerator for a few days, though
the eggplant is best at room temperature.
5. Assemble sandwiches. Cut the hero rolls
open, then spread each one with mayonnaise.
Layer the slices of eggplant onto the bread
in equal portions, and top with equal portions
of the mozzarella and the sliced roast beef.
Add slices of hot cherry peppers to taste, fold
the sandwich together and serve.
Serves 4.
44
Photograph by Davide Luciano for The New York Times
3. In a large bowl, whisk together eggs and

grated Parmesan. Return the skillet to the stove
over medium-high heat until the oil is hot again.
5.1.16
+1 604 278 4604
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Lives
Hunger Games
Raising eyebrows in Durban,
South Africa, with the
mention of a traditional dish.
By ZP Dala
Name: ZP Dala
Age: 41
Location: Durban,
South Africa
46
5.1.16
Dala is a therapist
who has worked with
autistic children. Her
novel, What About
Meera, won an
Minara Aziz Hassim
Literary Award. It
was also longlisted
for the Etisalat
Prize and the Sunday
Times Literary
Award (South Africa).
I was never among the whos-who in

Durban, the beautiful city on the Indian
Ocean coast of South Africa, where I live.
But a few years ago, after some success
as a writer, I became a person to invite.
I loved it, make no mistake: the parties
with the intellectual set, the politicians
and anti-apartheid heroes, the serious
journalists and entertainers. It seemed
I had arrived.
But having arrived with little grasp
of the rules, I blundered a bit. Durban
has a contradictory quality about it that
makes you feel as if youve just walked
into someones extramarital aair. The
social scene is dominated by people,
like me, of Indian heritage, the descendants of sugar-cane cutters indentured
to South Africa in the 1800s. (The Indian
diaspora of Durban is the largest in the
world.) Now the tacit rule here, if youre
an Indian who happens to fall in with
the shiny crowd of country-clubbers and
private-school soccer mums, is to deny
who you really are. Buying clothes at
ea markets is best done in secret, darling, lest you face immediate sanctions.
I hadnt quite perfected the ne art of
hiding my cheap shoes.
Even so, there was one party I looked
forward to immensely, because I so
admired the honored guest. The thought
of spending an evening in her company, as well as with the high achievers of
Indian descent, was enough to make me
go out and buy a new dress. I cringed,
though, when I pondered the buet. I
spent most of my partygoing ravenously hungry, because those tiny trending
packages of carbohydrate-free one-bites
never quite managed to satisfy. Large
white plates with minuscule towers of
grilled organic vegetables drizzled with
macerated herbs were works of art, but I
bemoaned my lingering hunger.
It turned out to be an evening of tottering around eating fashionable nibbles,
while holding forth on serious subjects.
The conversation was great. But, oh, I
suered. At some point in the evening,
I had enough and loudly confessed to a
group of academics and socialites what I
was craving: bunny chow.
Durbans claim to fame is hot curry,
a spicier, punchier version of the North
Indian original. But its true incarnation is
called bunny chow. The name is strange;
it doesnt contain any rabbit but rather
a quarter loaf of unsliced white bread,
hollowed out and lled to bursting with

steaming curried beans or spicy mutton.
This substantial meal dates to the times
of the Indian sugar-cane cutters. The legend goes that because they lacked decent
meal breaks, a cook started putting their
daily curry into the bread, to be eaten
fast and hot.
There is no better taste than soft and
yeasty white bread soaked through with
thick curried gravy. And it is best eaten
with your ngers. Most bunny-chow
joints dont even supply you with cutlery. They simply point you in the general
direction of a water tap.
Is this a gorgeous dish? Most denitely. Is this fashionable fare? Most denitely not. Just mentioning it at my highclass party turned pouts into sneering
guaws. The upturned noses suggested
that I had lost my place on the invitation
lists for a long time to come.
These elite partygoers said bunny
chows were crass, not to mention terribly unhealthful because of all that bread.
One guest began to expound on how
South African Indians need to remove
themselves from the cane-eld mentality. I had heard this before. Culinary
tastes now said so much about you: how
fashionable you were, how far you had
evolved from your beginnings.
Thats when I began to feel that being
invited to join the intelligentsia and literati of Durban was a curse rather than a
boon. Why would I seek the favor of people who thumb their noses at their very
lineage? I imagined them hiding away old
photographs of grannies in unironed saris
or grandfathers in muddy elds, when
they visited one another for cocktails.
It was easy for me to walk away that
night and head to one of the oldest bunny-chow places in town, a dive of a hotel,
where it is said that in apartheid times,
nonwhites received their bunnies wrapped
in newspaper at the back door. And there,
surrounded by loud music and singing and
raucous people, I was truly happy.
While washing all that gravy o my
ngers, out of the corner of my eye, I
saw a gentleman ngers-deep into his
crass bunny chow, expensive tweed
sleeves rolled up high. He didnt see me
at rst, but I remembered him from the
party, joining in all the criticism about
the meal he was now eating. Oh, the look
on his face was priceless. Now my belly
was full.
Illustration by Melinda Josie
+1 604 278 4604
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The
Middle
Class
THE MONEY ISSUE
When the middle class emerged into the American

consciousness during the rst decades after the
Revolution, its members were referred to, in
Daniel Websters dictionary, as the middling
sorts. That second word, the historian Burton J. Bledstein argues, was crucial sorts
representing a decisive departure from the Old
World precision of social rank, a ight from the
xed binary of high and low into something
more uid and negotiable. By the 20th century,
those middling sorts had become the economic engine and political fulcrum of American
life. But today, in the early part of the 21st, in
an economy relentlessly pushing workers and
families into winning and losing camps, it has
become dicult to say what the middle class
even is: what it means, whom it should encompass, how possible it still is to achieve the kind
of happy stability that the phrase has connoted
for decades. In this special issue, we go in search
of Americas missing middle class, investigating the cause of its disappearance in locales that
range from a recovering former factory town to
ctional sitcom worlds to the well-appointed
cabin of Air Force One.
The New York Times Magazine
49
+1 604 278 4604
THE MONEY
By Charles Homans
Illustrations by Thomas Danthony
On April 12 last year, Hillary Clinton formally

announced her run for the presidency by posting a two-minute video on YouTube. For the rst
minute and a half, Clinton was nowhere to be
seen. Instead, the video showed a montage of a
dozen or so Clinton supporters: a middle-aged
white woman tending to her garden; two Hispanic brothers starting a business; a pregnant
young black woman and her husband unpacking
boxes in a sun-dappled suburban living room;
a burly, bullet-headed white man surveying an
American-ag-draped warehouse.
It was a carefully constructed portrait of the
American middle class, or the parts of it that tend
to vote Democratic like the patchwork of Carhartt and Ann Taylor that Barack Obama gathered
around himself for a speech in Cincinnati early
in the 2012 campaign, when he proclaimed himself a warrior for the middle class. American
politicians genuect toward the middle class so
reexively that failing to do so in a speech or
a statement about the economy seems almost
heretical which it turned out was the most
50
remarkable thing about Clintons video.

When the candidate materialized, she instead
said this: Everyday Americans need a champion
and I want to be that champion. Her omission
of middle class was intentional. Amy Chozick
of The New York Times wrote that the campaign
planned to shy away from the characterization
middle class because, her advisers say, the
term no longer connotes a stable life and
instead use the term everyday Americans.
Joel Benenson, Clintons chief strategist and
Obamas lead pollster, has thought a great deal
about issues of class. In 2011, he embarked on
an extensive project in which researchers conducted repeated interviews with about 100
middle-income, middle-aged swing voters in
the suburbs of Columbus, Ohio; Denver; and
Orlando, Fla. Its been valuable, he told me
recently, because its important to know what
kind of conventional assumptions about the
middle class hold up and which dont. Theres
no question that there was a massive recalibration after the nancial crash. People felt very
strongly that the foundations what they had
believed they would achieve by working hard,
doing things right were not the same as they
had been before. Public-opinion surveys, too,
show that something has shifted, sharply, in the
American self-denition. Last spring, a Gallup
poll found that the percentage of respondents
who identied as middle class or upper middle
class dropped 12 percent since the 2008 nancial
crisis; nearly half of those polled identied themselves as either working or lower class.
But Clintons use of everyday Americans
proved to be short-lived, perhaps because of
its undeniably leaden ring. (Has anyone but Sly
Stone ever self-identied as everyday?) By September, Clinton had dropped the phrase entirely.
Campaign ocials conceded to The Times that
it was confusing and, maybe, a bit too close to
Walmarts Everyday Low Prices.
The whole episode revealed a fundamental tension underlying this years anomalous
presidential contest. Americas self-image as a
middle-class nation is so deeply ingrained in the
countrys politics that we dont often stop to think
what, precisely, that means: whether it denes
a concrete socioeconomic identity a country
where most people are neither very rich nor very
poor or an aspiration, the notion that if you
work hard and play by the rules, as Clinton put
it the rst time she ran for president, youre entitled to at least a modest prosperity. Everyday
Americans was an attempt to acknowledge that
the gap between these two ideas has widened
to the point that ignoring it seems out of touch.
Yet in its reversal, the campaign inadvertently
revealed just how ill equipped American politics
is for a post-middle-class nation how deeply
the way the country speaks of itself is tied up
The End
of the
Middle-class aspirations have

shaped the countrys politics for
decades. What happens when
Americans stop believing in them?
5.1.16
+1 604 278 4604
ISSUE
American
Daydream
with these aspirations, even as more and more

of its citizens come to see them as out of reach.
During Donald Trumps ascent in the polls last

fall, the most confounding question in politics
was who, exactly, his supporters were. A couple
of weeks before the New Hampshire primary in
February, Byron York, a journalist well sourced
among Republican operatives, crisscrossed
the state asking party grandees: Do you know
anyone who supports Donald Trump? In more
cases than not, he wrote in The Washington
Examiner, actually, in nearly all the cases, the
answer was no.
As the rst election results and exit polls came
in, Trumps voters seemed to be mostly highschool-educated white men, mostly making less
than $50,000 a year. Perhaps more surprising,

this description also ts, with some tailoring,
the voters who have propelled the candidacy of
Bernie Sanders. In mostly white New Hampshire,
Sanders beat Clinton among voters making less
than $50,000 a year by a staggering 33 percentage points twice as big as his margin with
voters who made more than that and by 36
percentage points among voters without college
degrees. In Michigan, whose suburban voters are
one of the most-watched barometers in American politics, the margins were narrower but still
notable: Sanders won white voters without a college degree by 15 percentage points, and voters
making less than $50,000 by 3 percentage points.
These insurgent candidates are capturing
one of the two demographic groups that converged in the great middle-class experiment that
51
+1 604 278 4604
THE MONEY
began seven decades ago. When people spoke of

the middle class in the years immediately after
World War II, they were typically talking about
the group identied by the sociologist C. Wright
Mills in his 1951 book, White Collar: the usually college-educated, deskbound employees
of a newly technocratic, corporate economy. It
was only a few years later that the denition was
generally extended to include skilled blue-collar
workers, who were now earning solid incomes on
account of a booming postwar industrial economy and of unions that made sure their members
got an equitable piece of it.
The conuence of these two groups a vision
of insurance salesmen and machine operators,
mowing the lawns of adjoining split-level ranches
and talking about Sundays game felt extraordinary even in its own time, seemingly incontrovertible proof that American capitalism worked.
The fact is that Americas booming new middleincome class consists, to a startling extent, of
groups hitherto identied as proletarians, Fortune reported in 1954. Instead of overthrowing
the bourgeoisie, the proletariat had joined it.
The new middle-class utopia did, of course,
exclude most nonwhite Americans. Although
average incomes for nonwhites increased at about
the same rate as incomes for whites in the postwar
years, in 1959 the black poverty rate was still 56
percent, and blacks on average earned 53 percent
what whites did. What could be said for the midcentury middle class, though, is that it generally
worked astonishingly well for those who were
lucky enough to be part of it particularly for
blue-collar workers. Probably no one in American
history has achieved prosperity with the velocity
of the men who grew up destitute in the Depression and, by their 30s, had factory jobs that paid
(in 2016 dollars) upward of $50,000 a year.
The white- and blue-collar middle classes each
tended to vote Democratic, which made sense:
The new middle classs good fortune was the combined product of the New Deal, postwar Keynesian
economic policy, the G. I. Bill, organized labor and
government-backed mortgages. But in retrospect,
the Democrats hold on the white middle class was
balanced precariously on the racial status quo
which, by the mid-1960s, was breaking apart.
George Wallace, the segregationist Democratic
governor of Alabama who ran for president in 1964
in protest of Lyndon B. Johnsons turn toward civil
rights, performed well not just in the South but
also in white blue-collar enclaves in the few Northern states where he was on the primary ballot.
When he ran again as an independent in 1968,
the members of the United Auto Workers Union
local at the General Motors plant in Flint, Mich.,
voted to endorse him.
By 1984, the extent of the damage to the
Democrats postwar coalition had become clear.
That spring, Ronald Reagans campaign aired its
52
5.1.16
Solid Job That Still Exists No. 1

Human-Resources Specialist
The number of H.R. workers is projected to grow

about as fast as the overall work force.
But the long-term threat to H.R. from outsourcing
and automation is real, as companies
turn to low-cost vendors for things like benefits
administration. That said, the complication
of our countrys employment laws and the
changing health-insurance landscape might
increase demand for this work.
Morning in America ad, a Vaseline-lensed montage of overwhelmingly white suburban prosperity. Walter Mondale the son of a small-town
Minnesota minister whose politics radiated an
austere, Scandinavian morality spent the last
days of his campaign unfurling increasingly dire
pictures of urban and rural poverty and beseeching people to vote for an America of fairness.
Speaking bitterly of Reagans commercial, he
told a crowd at a church in Cleveland: Its all
picket fences and puppy dogs. No ones hurting.
No ones alone. No ones hungry. No ones unemployed. No one gets old. Everybodys happy. But
Americans liked the picket fences and puppy
dogs. Reagan swept every state in the country
save Minnesota and the District of Columbia.
Not long afterward, Stanley Greenberg, a 40-yearold Yale political scientist who moonlighted as
a political pollster, was contacted by a group of
Democratic Party and union ocials in Michigan. They asked him to help explain what had
happened that November in Macomb County
outside Detroit. In 1960, Macomb voted for John
F. Kennedy by a larger margin than any suburban
county in the country. In 1984, it voted for Reagan
by a margin of 33 percentage points. The sense
was that if we could gure out what happened
in Macomb County, Democrats would go a long
way toward righting the ship, Rick Wiener, the
chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party at
the time, told me recently.
In one sense, what had happened was obvious.
The postwar suburbs in general had been a racial
fortress, their homogeneity enforced by a web of
government policies and unocial restrictions
making it dicult for nonwhites to own property
in them, and few more so than Detroits. The
white ex-Democrats whom Greenbergs team
interviewed, he later wrote, expressed a profound distaste for black Americans, a sentiment
that pervaded almost everything they thought
about government and politics. Blacks constituted the explanation for their vulnerability and
for almost everything that had gone wrong in
their lives; not being black was what constituted
being middle class.
Still, Greenberg noted, Macomb voters had
not defected en masse from the Democratic
Party until after years of worsening economic
circumstances and until they perceived the
Democrats as not only having taken up the banner of the urban poor and nonwhites but also
having abandoned the white middle class. These
voters wondered why they werent the central
drama of the Democratic Party, Greenberg
wrote. Greenberg suggested that Democrats
oer a kind of grand bargain to the white middleclass voters he called Reagan Democrats: The
Democrats would reinstate the middle class as
Illustration by Hannah K. Lee
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ISSUE
only worsened since his presidency, the steady

pulling away of the superrich from everyone
else the division between the 99 percent and
the 1 percent. But the more politically meaningful divergence may be one happening further down the economic spectrum. Richard V.
Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution,
argues that the most signicant dividing line in
recent American experience isnt between the
99 percent and the 1 percent, but between the
80 percent and the 20 percent a group that
includes not just the very rich but also people
most Americans would identify as upper middle
class. This is where you draw the line if youre
interested not in absolute wealth but in the trajectory of wealth not whether you have a yacht
docked in St. Barts, but whether youre doing
better than you were ve years ago.
the gravitational center of the partys economic

policy if those voters accepted an expanded denition of who was included in the middle class.
Among the Democrats who took Greenbergs
advice was Gov. Bill Clinton of Arkansas, who
used the Macomb study as the playbook for
his 1992 presidential campaign, which he built
around the theme of the forgotten middle class.
Speaking to voters in Macomb County in March
1992, he oered a near-verbatim recitation of
Greenbergs proposal: The one thing that its
going to take to bring this country together is
somebodys got to come back to the so-called
Reagan Democratic area and say: Look, Ill give
you your values back. Ill restore the economic
leadership, Ill help you build the middle class
back. But youve got to say, O.K., lets do it with
everybody in this country.
Illustration by Thomas Danthony
You can see, in Clintons 1992 campaign,

the basic architecture of how politicians, and
many Americans, talk about the middle class
today not just the more diverse picture of
American prosperity that politicians of both
parties must at least pay lip service to, but also
a more expansive economic denition of what
the middle class is. In the rst year of his presidency, Clinton created a new top income-tax
bracket, starting at $250,000 (nearly $420,000 in
todays dollars). This is as close as we have to a
concrete upper bound for what counts, in political discourse, as the middle class; the middle
class tax policies of Obama, Hillary Clinton and
Bernie Sanders all apply to earners with incomes
of $250,000 or less.
Bill Clinton was acknowledging, presciently,
a skewing of the American economy that has
If the phrase everyday Americans tried to preserve a sense of common identity while acknowledging the fragmented economic realities of the
21st-century middle class, it also demonstrated
just how dicult that is to do. Consider the different experiences of two groups that sit mostly
within what the Democrats tax policies, at least,
dene as the middle class: The top 20 percent saw
its average real household income rise to $185,000
in 2013 from about $109,000 a year in 1967. The
middle 40 percent saw their real incomes rise,
too, but to only $68,000 from $52,000 the equivalent of a $348-a-year raise. The top 20 percent
is also more likely than the middle 40 percent
to believe that hard work gets you ahead in life.
Fissures have also deepened between the two
halves of the postwar middle class: between
college-educated, mostly white-collar workers
and high-school-educated, mostly blue-collar
workers. According to a Brookings study released
last year, men and women with bachelors
degrees earned a median of 7 percent and 16 percent more in 2013 than they did in 1990. Women
who either didnt attend college or attended but
didnt graduate made just 3 percent more up
to a meager $29,500 and those men made 13
percent less: a median of $40,700 a year, down
from $47,100 a year.
The aspirational idea of the middle class
spoke to the notion that even if Americans
were in various stages of prosperity, they were
all understood to be heading in the same general direction. But what happens when thats no
longer true? On one end of the middle class
spectrum is a dream inexorably receding from
view; on the other is a pair of socioeconomic
blinders obscuring the harsher economic realities of those further down the scale. The upper
middle class are surprised by the rise of Trump,
Reeves told me. The actual middle class are
surprised were surprised.
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THE MONEY
By Andrew Ross Sorkin
Photograph by Katy Grannan
54
0.00.16
5.1.16
The
Obama
Eight years after

the nancial crisis,
unemployment is
5 percent, decits are
down and G.D.P.
is growing. Why do
so many voters feel
left behind?
+1 604 278 4604
ISSUE
Recovery
55
+1 604 278 4604
T
wo months ago, across an assembly-room table in
a factory in Jacksonville, Fla., President Barack
Obama was talking to me about the problem of
political capital. His eorts to rebuild the U.S.
economy from the 2008 nancial crisis were
being hit from left, right and center. And yet,
by his own assessment, those eorts were vastly underappreciated. I actually compare our
economic performance to how, historically,
countries that have wrenching nancial crises
perform, he said. By that measure, we probably
managed this better than any large economy on
Earth in modern history.
It was a notably grand claim, especially given
the tenor in which presidential candidates of
both parties had taken to criticizing the state of
the American economy Many are still barely
getting by, Hillary Clinton said, while Donald
Trump said that were a third-world nation.
Asked if he was frustrated by all the criticism,
Obama insisted that he wasnt, at least not personally. It has frustrated me only insofar as it
has shaped the political debate, he said. We
were moving so fast early on that we couldnt
take victory laps. We couldnt explain everything
we were doing. I mean, one day were saving the
banks; the next day were saving the auto industry; the next day were trying to see whether we
can have some impact on the housing market.
The result, he said, was that he lacked the
political capital to do more. As his presidency
nears its end, this has become an increasingly
common refrain from Obama, who, despite his
prodigious skills as an orator, has come to seem
more condent about his achievements than
about his ability to promote them. I mean, the
truth of the matter is that if we had been able to
more eectively communicate all the steps we
56
THE MONEY
had taken to the swing voter, he said, then we

might have maintained a majority in the House
or the Senate.
The president had come to this factory, built
by Saft America for the manufacture of state-ofthe-art lithium-ion batteries, for a kind of belated
victory lap. One of Obamas rst major acts as
president was to sign the American Recovery and
Reinvestment Act, and some of the money in that
bill went to Saft. Now batteries were rolling o
the line, and Obama had stopped by to shine the
national spotlight on how far we had come since
the nancial crisis.
But the president did seem frustrated. As he
tried to sum up his economic legacy in Florida, our discussion stretched to twice as long as
planned, seemingly to the consternation of the
Secret Service. When we got back on Air Force
One, he sent an aide to ask if we could continue
the conversation; when I joined him again, he
looked as if hed been stewing over something.
He quickly returned to the topic of public perception. If you ask the average person on the
streets, Have decits gone down or up under
Obama? probably 70 percent would say theyve
gone up, Obama said, with some justiable exasperation the decit has in fact declined (by
roughly three-quarters) since he took oce, and
polls do show that a large majority of Americans
believe the opposite.
Obama is animated by a sense that, looking
at the world around him, the U.S. economy is in
much better shape than the public appreciates,
especially when measured against the depths of
the nancial crisis and the possibility now rarely
even considered that things could have been
much, much worse. Over a series of conversations
in the Oval Oce, on Air Force One and in Florida, Obama analyzed, sometimes with startling
frankness, nearly every element of his economic
agenda since he came into oce. His economy has
certainly come further than most people recognize. The private sector has added jobs for 73 consecutive months some 14.4 million new jobs in
all the longest period of sustained job growth
on record. Unemployment, which peaked at 10
percent the year Obama took oce, the highest
it had been since 1983, under Ronald Reagan,
is now 5 percent, lower than when Reagan left
oce. The budget decit has fallen by roughly
$1 trillion during his two terms. And overall U.S.
economic growth has signicantly outpaced that
of every other advanced nation.
Gene Sperling, the former director of the
National Economic Council who spent hours
inside the Oval Oce debating and devising the
presidents economic strategy, told me, If we
were back in early 2009 when we were coming
to work every morning with clenched stomachs,
with the economy losing 800,000 jobs a month and
the Dow under 7,000 and someone said that by
your last year in oce, unemployment would be

5 percent, the decit would be under 3 percent,
AIG would have turned a prot and we made all
our money back on the banks, that wouldve been
beyond anybodys wildest expectations.
There are, of course, many reasons so few
Americans seem to be celebrating. How people
feel about the economy, Obama told me, giving
one part of his own theory, is inuenced by what
they hear. He went on: And if you have a political party in this case, the Republicans that
denies any progress and is constantly channeling
to their base, which is sizable, say, 40 percent
of the population, that things are terrible all the
time, then people will start absorbing that.
But as Obama also acknowledged, the public anger about the economy is not without
empirical basis. A large swath of the nation has
dropped out of the labor force completely, and
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Feb. 26, 2016

President Obama touring the Saft America Advanced
Batteries Plant in Jacksonville, Fla.
the reality for the average American family is that

its household income is $4,000 less than it was
when Bill Clinton left oce. Economic inequality,
meanwhile, has only grown worse, with the top 1
percent of American households taking in more
than half of the recent gains in income growth.
Millions and millions and millions and millions
of people look at that pretty picture of America he
painted and they cannot nd themselves in it to
save their lives, Clinton himself said of Obamas
economy in March, while on the campaign trail
for his wife. People are upset, frankly; theyre
anxiety-ridden, theyre disoriented, because they
dont see themselves in that picture.
It is this disconnect that haunts Obama. He
has, by his own lights, managed the recovery as
well as any president ever could, with results that
in many cases exceeded his own best hopes. But
despite the gains of the past seven years, many
Photograph by Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
Americans have been left behind. Something

has changed, and as he prepares to leave oce,
Obama seems to understand that his economic
legacy might be judged not just by what he has
done, but by how the results compare to a bygone
era of middle-class opportunity, one that perhaps
no president, faced with the sweeping changes
transforming the global economy, could ever
bring back.
The economic meltdown that would dene every

aspect of Obamas economy came to a head well
before he became president, of course, and so did
the legislation that would be the basis for everything that came after. In September 2008 as
Lehman Brothers led for bankruptcy and AIG,
the worlds biggest insurance company, accepted a federal bailout Senator John McCain of
Arizona, in what was widely viewed as a political

move, suspended his presidential campaign and
called on Obama to rush back to Washington for
a bipartisan meeting at the White House. Obama
recalled the moment: I still remember Bush calling me and saying, Look, I doubt this is going
to be particularly useful, but I felt obliged to say
yes, and I hope you can come.
The next day Obama found himself in the
Cabinet Room just down the hall from the Oval
Oce, along with McCain and congressional leaders from both parties. Henry M. Paulson Jr., the
Treasury secretary, was developing a bank bailout
by which the Treasury would buy up to $700 billion
in shaky mortgage-backed securities troubled
assets a plan that eventually became the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP. He needed
votes, and Republicans werent going for it.
Nobody wanted to be seen as a friend of the banks.
Were sitting around a table, McCain is on one
side, Im on the other, Bernanke and Paulson and
President Bush, Obama recalled. Paulson says,
If we dont take action now, we could go into a
free fall. And given how bad the politics were, it
was still very tempting for Nancy and Harry
that is, the House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, and the
Senate majority leader, Harry Reid to let the
Republicans do what they needed to do.
Many within Bushs own party were supporting
an alternative bill that was focused on mortgageasset insurance and tax cuts. But Obama, convinced that anything short of a major bailout could
lead to economic catastrophe, said Democrats
should back Paulsons plan. They did.
It was a rare moment of bipartisanship, with
long-term political consequences. To Obama, this
was a necessary alliance with Wall Street and a
Republican president. To many others, it looked
like a sweetheart deal for the same people who
created the mess; some critics wondered why he
was not equally quick to help aggrieved homeowners through an aggressive mortgage-relief
or forgiveness program. The whole thing about
nancial crises is the tools that work are the ones
that will make you look like youre in bed with
the banks, said Timothy Geithner, an architect of
TARP whom Obama made his Treasury secretary.
The strange hot-cold relationship with Wall
Street made the next part of Obamas program
extremely complicated. When Obama took
oce, he turned immediately to trying to pass a
stimulus package. If TARP was meant to keep the
economy out of free fall, the stimulus was meant
to help it get back into good shape. The crucial
questions was: How much money was needed?
Many argue today that Obamas $800 billion
plan, the one that eventually became law, was not
enough. With a bigger boost, the economy would
have recovered much more quickly and years of
needless suering could have been allayed. In
truth, of course, the political headwinds against
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THE MONEY
stimulus were extraordinary. Republicans dismissed it as an irresponsible shopping spree that

would leave the country in even greater debt.
Boehner physically threw the bill on the ground,
arguing that it was nothing more than spending,
spending and more spending. But Democrats,
led by the decit hawk wing of the party, also
fought against anything too ambitious, and
Obama, still in the rst month of his presidency,
was left in the position of negotiating with his
own party, such that he was just barely able to
get the $800 billion on a straight party-line vote.
At rst, the results of the stimulus were just as
feeble as a stalwart Keynesian might predict. The
economy needed a big injection, but it got only
a medium-size one, so it continued to falter. A
January 2009 report from the presidents Council
of Economic Advisers projected that the stimulus would keep unemployment below 8 percent.
Instead, it climbed to 10 percent in 2009 and only
fell back below 8 percent in 2012, leading to criticism that the stimulus was ineective. Obamas
critics regularly trot out the talking point that
Obamas economy is the worst recovery since
World War II. Judged solely by the growth of
gross domestic product, that is accurate. But
Kenneth Rogo, a Harvard economics professor and co-author of This Time Is Dierent, a
well-regarded history of nancial crises, scoed
when I mentioned the worst recovery epithet.
Well, have we had a systemic nancial crisis
since World War II? he asked rhetorically. I
mean this was like nothing weve experienced
since World War II. The 1982 Volcker recession
was nothing compared to this, and so you have
to look at the nature of the shock.
Obama, though, was unable or unwilling to
rhetorically underscore the severity of the crisis
as it unfolded, so perhaps what should have been
seen as successes were seen as failures. It was
a delicate balance throughout 2009 and 2010 to
be straight with the American people about the
depths of the problem, how close we were to
disaster, without scaring the heck out of them,
Obama said.
Beyond the messaging challenge, Obama
faced a practical bind as well: Just as he was
trying to reinate the economy, he was also
being forced to cut government jobs, under
pressure from Republicans who contended that
government bloat and the cost of it could create
our next nancial crisis. Call it an anti-stimulus.
This is the rst recovery where you actually saw
the government work force decline, and that
created this massive scal drag throughout the
recovery, Obama said.
Despite all this, over the course of his presidency, Obama has actually been able to oversee
a much larger stimulus than has been typically
reported. If you add up all of his administrations
classic stimulus measures, including the many tax
58
breaks the administration extended, you get $1.4

trillion, a gure that is nearly twice the original
gure. The anti-stimulus, then, was counteracted
by a stealth stimulus.
Progressives dont fully appreciate the degree
to which the 2011 budget deal not only averted a
potential default but actually limited the potential damage of a newly emboldened Congress
in imposing austerity on a still-fragile recovery,
Obama said. And by me winning in 2012 and
getting the Bush tax cuts for the upper 2 percent
repealed, we ended up getting a grand bargain. Its
just we got it sequentially instead of all at once.
When I asked Barney Frank about how history
will judge the recovery, he was simultaneously
rueful and amused. As chairman of the House
Financial Services Committee, Frank was one of
the major legislative architects of Obamas economic program. You get no credit for disaster
averted or damage minimized, Frank said. By
way of illustration, he described a bumper sticker that a friend made him in 2010, with a slogan
that could have worked just as well for Obama:
Things would have sucked worse without me.
Frank, with a halfhearted laugh, added, Thats
not a very salable message.
Often in our conversations, the president expressed

a surprising degree of identication with Americas business leaders. If I hadnt gone into politics and public service, Obama told me, the
challenges of creating a business and growing
a business and making it work would probably
be the thing that was most interesting to me.
His showy embrace of capitalism was especially
notable given his fractious relationship with Wall
Street and the business community for much of
his rst term.
In December 2009, Obama was not reluctant
to chastise bankers. I did not run for oce to be
helping out a bunch of fat-cat bankers on Wall
Street, he told Steve Kroft on 60 Minutes. The
people on Wall Street still dont get it. They dont
get it. Theyre still puzzled, Why is it that people
are mad at the banks?
Given the national mood at the time, Obamas
words shouldnt have come as a surprise to the
business leaders. But the nancial sector had
buoyed Obamas campaign, giving him $16 million dollars in political support, nearly twice
what McCain received from it, and some executives responded to his new populism in emotional terms. Its a war, Stephen Schwarzman,
a co-founder of Blackstone Group, the giant private-equity rm, said of Obama in 2010 and his
eort to close a tax loophole that beneted the
industry. Its like when Hitler invaded Poland
in 1939. (Schwarzman later apologized.) Others seemed more concerned with the language
itself. In 2011, Leon Cooperman, a billionaire
hedge-fund manager, wrote a public letter to

Obama, saying: The divisive, polarizing tone
of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at
this point as much visceral as philosophical,
between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them. It is a gulf that is at once
counterproductive and freighted with dangerous historical precedents.
When I asked him about these reactions,
Obama laughed. The criticism he leveled at Wall
5.1.16
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ISSUE
July 21, 2010

Obama signing the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act alongside
members of Congress, his administration and Vice President Joe Biden in Washington.
Street was extraordinarily mild, he said, but it

hurt their feelings. I would have some of them say
to me, You know, my son came home and asked
me, Am I a fat cat? He laughed again.
Obamas rhetoric does seem mild, at least
compared with the withering contempt of, say,
Franklin Roosevelt, who, laying out the objectives for the second stage of the New Deal in
1936, said that reckless bankers and speculators
are unanimous in their hate for me and I
Photograph by Rod Lamkey Jr./AFP/Getty Images
welcome their hatred. Obama, to the contrary,

seems to nd their hatred irritating. One of
the constants that Ive had to deal with over
the last few years is folks on Wall Street complaining even as the stock market went from in
the 6,000s to 16,000 or 17,000, he said. Theyd
be constantly complaining about our economic
policies. Thats not rooted in anything theyre
experiencing; it has to do with ideology and
their aggravations about higher taxes.
Wall Streets biggest ght with Obama was

over the Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and
Consumer Protection Act, which Obama signed
into law in the summer of 2010. The legislation, which runs to 2,223 pages, limited Wall
Streets riskiest trading schemes, established
the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and
created a system to wind down failing banks
without taxpayer-funded bailouts and break
up banks that dont comply. Like the stimulus,
59
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THE MONEY ISSUE
market and to work arbitrage, he said.

But there is no doubt that the nancial system
is substantially more stable, he said. It is true
that we have not dismantled the nancial system,
and in that sense, Bernie Sanderss critique is
correct a reference to the Vermont senator
and presidential aspirant who regularly calls to
break up Americas biggest banks. But one of
the things that Ive consistently tried to remind
myself during the course of my presidency is that
the economy is not an abstraction. Its not something that you can just redesign and break up and
put back together again without consequences.
June 17, 2009

Obama and the Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner,
left, and Ben Bernanke, chairman of the Federal Reserve, meeting
with bank regulators in the White House.
Dodd-Frank has been seen as both going too

far and not far enough.
Some economists have suggested that the
reform package, combined with the Federal
Reserves eorts to force the banks to hold more
capital, most likely slowed lending and potentially economic growth in the short term. The new
rules may have been sensible in the aftermath
of the crisis, but they did take an economic toll.
Growth requires access to capital to nance
investments in plant, equipment, technology,
and workers, said Douglas Holtz-Eakin, a former
director of the Congressional Budget Oce who
now runs American Action Forum, a right-leaning research group. Dodd-Frank made capital
scarcer and more expensive at a time when the
weak economy desperately needed a boost to
growth. Holtz-Eakin estimated in 2015 that the
regulations would shave $895 billion o gross
domestic product over the next decade.
Obama sees the legislation in more complicated terms. He said that he liked the lm The Big
Short a vivid portrayal of the 2008 crisis with a
special emphasis on the avarice of its main architects but not its ending. It suggests, wrongly,
he said, that nothing has changed on Wall Street.
The nancial sector is bigger, absorbs more
resources and maybe most importantly, more
talent than I would like to see. I would like folks
who are really good at math to be going into
engineering and the sciences more than theyre
going into trying to build algorithms to beat the
60
5.1.16
Anybody who
says we are
not absolutely
better off today
than we were
just seven years
ago, theyre
not leveling with
you. Theyre not
telling the truth.
The Saft America plant, a giant 235,000-square-foot

mass of concrete, is a modern marvel: its roof covered in row upon row of solar panels, embodying
the renewable future that the batteries manufactured within are meant to sustain. (The main
customer for the batteries was originally meant
to be electric-car manufacturers, but the company is now selling mostly to utilities who want to
store solar and wind energy.) Obama spoke from a
makeshift stage set up at the center of the factory
oor, an American ag and a Saft logo perfectly
positioned behind him to catch the sight lines of
the photographers.
The reason Im here today is because Saft is
telling a story about the amazing work that people
all across this country have done to bring America
back from one of the worst nancial crises in our
history, Obama said, surveying the crowd.
He added: Anybody who says we are not
absolutely better o today than we were just
seven years ago, theyre not leveling with you.
Theyre not telling the truth.
The story Obama told was one of American
ingenuity and growth since the nancial crisis.
Unemployment in Florida peaked at 11.2 percent
in 2009, higher than the national average, and
the state was a center for home foreclosures.
Saft America was an example not of the governments eort just to reduce unemployment right
now, which it has, but also to spur investment
in the next-generation green technologies, like
lithium-ion batteries, that will help the economy
expand for decades to come.
In a way, though, the plant was inadvertently
telling a more complicated story, about globalization and the changing nature of commerce.
Saft America is a unit of Saft Groupe, a French
company with holdings around the world. Sales
of lithium-ion batteries have been considerably
slower than anticipated, and the factory has yet
to turn a prot. The French parent doesnt expect
protability for another two or three years and
has already written down part of its investment
on the factory.
Here was a factory built, in part, with U.S.
government dollars for the benet of the local
Photograph by Mandel Ngan/AFP/Getty Images
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THE MONEY ISSUE
Oct. 9, 2013
Obama, Bernanke and Janet Yellen leaving the State Dining Room of the White
House after Obama nominated Yellen to be Bernankes successor.
and national economy. Yet the factory, its technology and its patents are all owned by a foreign
corporation. Its French chief executive is almost
completely detached from the community here
in Jacksonville; he did not even attend Obamas
speech. And the factorys prots, to the extent
they ever come, may very well be sent abroad
instead of being reinvested here.
The factory visit might also tell a more complicated story about the presidency. It has always
been the case that voters credit or, more often,
blame the president for the nations economic performance. But it is also the case that the
president generally has considerably less sway
to move the economy than even he might like to
acknowledge. And as the economy continues to
disperse, that sway may be diminishing further.
A president has less power than ever, in either a
hard- power (legal/regulatory) or soft-power (cultural) sense, over American chief executives, let
alone over the chief executives of multinationals
based in France or China or other places where
many U.S. employers make their headquarters.
In the assembly room after the speech, Obama
acknowledged as much. When youre talking
about inversions, Obama said, referring to the
practice whereby American companies eectively move overseas, or youre talking about C.E.O.
perks or the gap between what the assembly-line
worker is making compared to what the C.E.O. is
making, all those things used to be constrained
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by the fact that you live in the city, youre going

to church in that city, your kids might be going
to the same school as the guy who is working on
the assembly line because public schools actually were invested in, Obama said. And all those
constraining factors have been greatly reduced
or, in some cases, eliminated entirely. And that
contributes to the trends toward inequality. That
contributes to, I think, a divergence between how
the people who run these companies and economic elites think about their responsibilities
and the policies that they promote with political
leaders. And thats had, I think, a damaging eect
on the economy overall.
Leaning forward in his chair, Obama described
the profound structural shifts in the economy
over the past two decades that voters often dont
appreciate or acknowledge. If you are a blue-collar worker, you saw manufacturing head out to
China, he said. Youre in a town, the plant closes. But in part because of the housing bubble
a whole bunch of blue-collar manufacturing
workers could suddenly shift into construction.
The underlying economic decay was covered
up by cheap credit, as homeowners made up for
the shortfall in wage growth with low-interest
second mortgages and unprecedented loads of
credit-card debt. And that meant that people felt
pretty good in terms of their purchasing power
even though their underlying situations hadnt
improved appreciably, Obama said. Then the
bubble bursts, and suddenly they get washed

away. Those construction jobs have returned
slowly, and many of those manufacturing jobs
never came back at all.
Theyd be much worse o had we not taken
the steps that we took, Obama said. But they
have a sense that its a little more of a struggle for
them than it might have been for their parents or
for their grandparents.
Obama considered the problem from a political
perspective. In some ways, he said, engaging in
those hard changes that we need to make to create
a more nimble, dynamic economy doesnt yield
immediate benets and can seem like a distraction
or an eort to undermine a bygone era that doesnt
exist. And that then feeds, both on the left and the
right, a temptation to say, If we could just go back
to an era in which our borders were closed, or If
we could just go back to a time when everybody
had a dened-benet plan, or We could just go
back to a time when there wasnt any immigrant
that was taking my job, things would be O.K. He
didnt mention Donald Trump or Bernie Sanders
by name, but the implications were obvious.
Perhaps the biggest economic shift during

Obamas presidency came from a piece of legislation that wasnt sold as such. On March 21,
2010, Congress passed the Aordable Care Act,
better known as Obamacare.
It was Obamas boldest piece of legislation and
the one that will most likely dene him. It has
been largely viewed as a social program, a way
to provide health insurance to tens of millions of
uncovered citizens. But the bill, which aected
not just insurance companies but doctors, hospitals and pharmaceutical companies, also had an
immediate and growing impact on the economy
as a whole. The health care industry accounts for
17.5 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product,
and health care spending accounts for 8 percent
of the average household budget. Of course, the
largest economic challenge most Americans ever
confront comes in the form of a sudden health
crisis. In the long term, Sperling told me, the
Aordable Care Act will actually be seen as one
of the great economic accomplishments, not
just health care, economic. Because it actually
is closing a key part of the insecurity gap.
In closing that gap, though, Obama has been
confronted with a knotty economic and political
paradox. The legislation was designed to slow the
growth of health care costs, even as it extended
coverage. Slowing the growth of an industry that
accounts for nearly a fth of the U.S. economy is
inevitably going to mean slowing the growth of
the economy as a whole. The legislation was also
designed to exert a more subtle economic inuence. For most of the postwar era, most Americans received health
(Continued on Page 80)
Photograph by Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
+1 604 278 4604
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+1 604 278 4604
Where
Did the
Government
Jobs
THE MONEY
Finding careers in the public

sector long a ticket to
the middle class, especially for
African-Americans has
become increasingly dicult.
By Annie Lowrey
Illustrations by Lara Odell
On a muggy afternoon in April, Angelina Iles, 65, folded herself

into my passenger seat and took me on a tour of her beloved
Pineville, La., a sleepy town smack in the middle of the low, wet
state. We drove past spaced-out, low-slung houses and boarded-up businesses shuttered restaurants, a decrepit gas station
as Iles, an African-American retired lunchroom worker and
community activist, guided me toward the muddy banks of the
Red River. Near there stands the locked-up Art Deco shell of
the Huey P. Long hospital, which once served the poorest of the
poor in Rapides Parish and employed more than 300 workers.
When employers leave towns like Pineville, they often do
it with a deaf ear to the pleading of state and local governments. But in the case of Huey P. Long, the employer was the
government itself. Its demise began, arguably, in 2008, when
Bobby Jindal was swept into the Louisiana governors mansion on a small-government-and-ethics platform, promising to
modernize the state and unleash the power of American private industry along the Gulf Coast. At the time, Louisiana was
ush with federal funds for Hurricane Katrina reconstruction
and running a budget surplus. Jindal and the State Legislature
slashed income taxes and started privatizing and cutting. This
was a source of great pride for Jindal. During his failed bid for
the presidency last year, he boasted that bureaucrats are now
an endangered species in Louisiana. Ive laid o more of them
than Trump has red people, he said, and Ive cut my states
budget by more than hes worth.
He laid o more than just bureaucrats. Jindal cut appropriations for higher education, shifting the cost burden onto
students themselves. (State spending per student was down
more than 40 percent between 2008 and 2014; just one state,
Arizona, cut more.) And he shuttered or privatized nine charity
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FINAL TK
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hospitals that served the states uninsured and

indigent. They were outdated and costly, Jindal
argued, and private management would improve
access, care and the bottom line. Huey P. Long was
one of those hospitals.
Iles, along with dozens of other workers and
activists, helped organize a protest against the
cuts, she told me. They held a vigil on the hospitals front lawn. Iles even helped produce an
anti-Jindal documentary called Bad Medicine
that was broadcast on local television. But it was
all for naught. The good governor did not want
to listen to us, Iles said, checking her constantly
buzzing phone in the car. The hospital closed its
doors in 2014, and its patients were redirected
to other local medical centers and clinics. All of
the hospitals workers lost their jobs.
Driving around Pineville, Iles and I dropped in
on a friend of hers from church, Theresa Jardoin,
68, who worked in the hospital for 41 years, most
recently as an EKG supervisor. Out of work, she
spends most of her days at home, taking care
of her family. Earlier, Iles had introduced me to
another friend, Linette Richard, whose story was
similar. She had been working as an ultrasound
technician when the hospital closed. She lost
much of what she had been expecting for her
retirement, because she had not been there long
enough. Nobodys jumping to hire a 58-year-old,
especially in my eld, Richard said. You can
get a low-paying job, like McDonalds or Burger
King. But higher up? We dont have positions
available. Thats the way it is.
Thats the way it is across much of Louisiana.
The state has added 80,000 new jobs since the
Great Recession ocially ended in 2009. But at the
same time, jobs have been shrinking at every level
of government, with local oces losing 10,600
workers, the state government 31,900 and the
federal government 1,600. Louisiana is an exaggerated case, but the pattern persists when you
look at the country as a whole. Since the recession
hit, private employers have added ve million jobs
and the government has lost 323,000. The country has recovered from the recession. But public
employment has not.
The public sector has long been home to
the sorts of jobs that lift people into the middle
class and keep them there. These are jobs that
have predictable hours, stable pay and protection from arbitrary layos, particularly for those
without college or graduate degrees. Theyre also
more likely to be unionized; less than 7 percent
of private-sector workers are represented by a
union, while more than a third of those in the
public sector are. In other words, they look like
the blue-collar jobs our middle class was built on
during the postwar years.
The public sectors slow decimation is one of
the unheralded reasons that the middle class has
shrunk as the ranks of the poor and the rich have
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swollen in the post-recession years. This is certainly true in Louisiana, where ve of the 10 biggest employers are public institutions, or health
centers that in no small part rely on public funds.
In Rapides Parish, which includes Pineville, the
biggest employer is the school district.
Across the country, when public-sector workers lose their jobs, the burden disproportionately
falls on black workers, and particularly women
people like Theresa Jardoin and Linette Richard.
We felt middle class, Richard told me. Now
we feel kind of lower.
In the middle of the last century, a series of legal

and legislative decisions fueled by and fueling
the civil rights movement increased the number of black workers in government employment.
F.D.R. ended ocial discrimination in the federal
government and in companies engaged in the
war eort; Truman desegregated the armed forces; Kennedy established the Committee on Equal
Employment Opportunity; and Johnson signed
an executive order banning discrimination by
federal contractors. As a result, black workers
gained more than a quarter of new federal jobs
created between 1961 and 1965. And the share of
government jobs held by women climbed 70 percent between 1964 and 1974, and nearly another
30 percent by the early 1980s.
Through the middle of the century, the wage
gap between white and black workers narrowed
Illustration by Lara Odell
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as social forces and political pressure compelled

private businesses to open up better jobs to black
workers. Public-sector work has been a backbone of the black middle class for many reasons,
says Mary Pattillo, a sociologist at Northwestern
who studies race and class. Armative action
helped bring marginalized groups into the public work force; there, they beneted from more
public scrutiny of employment practices. The
inability to re people in a willy-nilly fashion has
likely protected African-Americans, who are perhaps likely to be red in a willy-nilly fashion, she
says. As of 2007, black workers were 30 percent
more likely than workers of other races to be
employed in the public sector.
For any number of reasons, the Great Recession unraveled much of the progress made
by the black middle class. Leading up to the
mortgage crisis, black families tended to have a
higher proportion of their wealth tied up in their
homes. And regardless of their income, black
families were much more likely to be rejected
for conventional mortgages and pushed into
high-cost subprime loans. All of this meant that
when housing prices turned down, the blackwhite wealth gap yawned. As of 2013, white
households were, on average, 13 times wealthier than black households, the biggest gap since
1989, according to Pew Research Center data.
Declining tax revenue led to tightened
state budgets, which led to tens of thousands
of layos for public-sector employees. And
during the recovery, public workers became
easy political targets precisely because of their
labor protections. Collective-bargaining rights,
pension funds and mandatory raises look like
unnecessary drains on state coers to a work
force increasingly unfamiliar with such benets.
And when the layos came, black Americans
experienced a disproportionate share of the
ill eects. A graduate student of sociology at
the University of Washington, Jennifer Laird,
wrote a widely cited dissertation, examining
the eects of public-sector layos on dierent
races. She found that the government-worker
unemployment rate climbed more for black
men than for white men and much more for
black women than for white women, with the
gap between the two groups soaring from less
than a percentage point in 2008 to 5.5 percentage points in 2011. It may be that black workers
are more likely to be laid o when the layos
are triggered by a sudden and signicant reduction in funding, she wrote. When the number
of layo decisions increases, managers have
more opportunities to discriminate. Worse,
once unemployed, black women were the
least likely to nd private-sector employment
and the most likely to make a full exit from the
labor force. As a result of all these economic
punishments, a recession that set America back

Machine Operator
Manufacturing jobs have been battered

over the past few decades, thanks to offshoring
and automation a trend that looks set to
continue. But that is not to say that all good bluecollar jobs are disappearing. Many niches
are growing: Wind-turbine service technicians
(the people who fix those giant, high-tech
windmills) and commercial divers (the people
who do underwater repairs on oil rigs) are
two of the fastest-growing middle-class jobs.
half a decade may have set black families back

a whole generation, if not longer.
And because the public sector provides so
many essential services, cuts to it have a cascading
eect. Hospitals close, and people have to drive
farther away for medical care. Teachers aides
lose their positions, and local kids no longer have
the same degree of special-education attention.
Angelina Iles, the retiree I met in Pineville, cited
the loss of dental, mental-health and emergency
medical services as being a particularly profound
problem for her community.
Other states and towns are electing to have
smaller public work forces. Wisconsin, for
instance, has thinned its ranks of government
workers by some 5,000 since its Republican
governor, Scott Walker, led a push to abrogate
public workers organizing rights a political choice with profound economic and racial
ramications. They try to say that collective
bargaining is a drain on the economy, when it
provides the ability and opportunity for folks
to have a seat at the table, Lee Saunders, the
president of the American Federation of State,
County and Municipal Employees, told me. And
the economic evidence does show that a higher
concentration of unionized workers increases
intergenerational mobility and raises wages for
all workers, public and private.
With time, government jobs should come
back; that pathway to the middle class should
grow again. Government jobs are always slower to come back after a recession, says Roderick
Harrison, a former Howard University demographer. It takes time for private businesses to rehire
workers. It takes time for tax revenue to rise to a
level at which cities and states feel comfortable
adding public workers back onto their payrolls.
That means that the portion of the black middle
class that was dependent on government jobs
police, schools, emergency workers and so on
is going to take longer to recoup and regain
whatever positions they had, he says.
For Pineville, that recovery might come too
late for many of its workers, especially those
who were looking toward retirement. Because
Linette Richard cant nd suitable work, she and
her husband get by on what he makes as a car
salesman. She has given up trying to nd work
again around Pineville. So has Theresa Jardoin,
who has resigned herself to a tougher retirement than she thought she would enjoy.
All of a sudden, theres nothing, she said,
sitting in an easy chair in her living room, just
blocks from Huey P. Long, playing with her
granddaughters hair. You cant enjoy retirement
in this situation.
You didnt even get a pocket watch, did you?
Iles asked.
No, Jardoin said, with a resigned laugh. Just
aches and pains.
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Our
THE MONEY
In Worcester, Mass., my
fathers family had a simple
middle-class life. Today
a much more complicated
economy is taking shape
in the city.
By Adam Davidson
Photographs by William Mebane
The house existed, in my mind, as an idea, almost

a dream, before I ever discovered the actual
place: Bumpas house, the home of my fathers
grandfather. It represented, in the telling of my
father and other older relatives, the kind of place
youd get to live in if you worked hard. It was
huge, on a hill, with a big yard, and every Christmas it was lled with toys: Bicycles and skis
and basketballs, my dad, Jack, now 79, recalled.
And a croquet set. On Zillow these days, its
value is estimated at just over $200,000, which
happens to be almost exactly the median price
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for an existing house in the United States. This

seems tting. For my fathers family, the dreams
fullled by this house had meant a climb from
bare subsistence to the middle. This house was
the middle; Worcester, where the house still
stands, was the middle. The life that Bumpa and
Narny built here was the middle. And that, to
them and to their children and grandchildren,
was a triumph, the goal of a good life.
Having studied the American economy for
years, Ive often reected on how much my
fathers family perfectly models the middle-class
story how closely the details of their lives illustrate the bigger economic forces around them.
The way I read economic history, the middle class
was a driving force in the American economy for
about a century, starting in the second half of the
1800s. Its growth created a virtuous circle: The
more people moved into the middle, the more
money they made and spent, and the richer the
country became, which made more room for
more people to move into the middle too.
But in learning about my familys economic
history, Ive also come to understand how deeply
their story is embedded in the history of a place,
of one particular city created by and for the middle class. When I mention Worcester to people
from New England, they often give a knowing
nod or laugh this unlovely, down-on-its-luck
city of dead industry and collapsing buildings. But
Worcester was an engine for betterment until the
middle of the 20th century, a magical place that
transformed lost and impoverished lives.
A few weeks ago, I called my dad to relate what
I had learned about his grandparents, George
and Mildred Bestick. He told me he knew almost
nothing about them before they got to Worcester,
where they had settled by 1917. Bumpa and Narny
existed as if they had no history. As a child, all
my dad knew was that the Bestick name was Irish
and that Narny, born Mildred Bailey, came from
an old, proud New England family with Mayower ancestry. They were respectable, clearly. Just look at the massive house and Bumpas
three-piece suits and Narnys quiet devotion to
her Baptist church.
Only recently, I learned that this respectability was actually self-reinvention, built
on top of origins in poverty and chaos. My
great-grandparents economic journey was one
thats harder to make today, in part because there
are fewer middle cities now. Even during the
middle-class heyday of the 20th century, they
couldnt have done it without Worcester.
Perry Avenue and Seymour Street
There is no single technical definition of the

middle class or even consensus on what
middle refers to. Many use it in the context
of income distribution, to designate the range
in which people live at or near the median
70
Previous pages: Worcester is known for its three-deckers, three-story houses

built quickly and cheaply during the citys manufacturing boom in the late
19th century. They were big and affordable and perfect for immigrant families,
including my own ancestors.
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Douglas Court
Worcester is filled with contradictory sights: crumbling infrastructure, decaying homes, yet fresh paint and siding
and other signs that someone is making some money, trying to create a good home. This is the tension in much
of the city collapse of an old way of working combined with a new, hard-to-discern promise that makes Worcester
so representative of the overall U.S. economy.
Photograph by William Mebane for The New York Times
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THE MONEY
Pleasant Street near Oxford Street

For so many families today, and for my family more than a century ago, the first toeholds in a new economy are
gained by selling products to other immigrant families. Worcester has been a haven for immigrants, particularly poor
ones with few New World connections. It was once Jewish, Greek, Italian and Irish immigration; today Worcester
has notable Ghanaian, Iraqi and South American populations.
income. But I believe that definition misses a

crucial, historical role played by what we call
the middle class today. In its earlier incarnations, the members of the middle class were
situated between a tiny powerful elite and
much larger numbers of landless laborers and
subsistence farmers who struggled to feed
their families. Most people typically did not
buy anything manufactured or delivered from
afar; their food came from what they or their
neighbors grew; they made their own homes
and clothes. They operated largely outside of
a money economy.
For nearly as far back as we have economic
records, we can see evidence of a third, sometimes very small group. These middlemen were
crucial: They lled an essential intermediary
role, turning raw materials into nished goods.
Some were craftspeople, making pottery, textiles,
processed foods or other luxuries. Others were
72
These
two trapped,
poor, broken
people somehow
managed
to create a
new life.
traders, transporting raw materials and nished

goods over long distances. The middle classes
varied by country and era, but they shared
certain characteristics. Perhaps the most profound was a unique sort of control over their
destinies. In premodern life, the middle people
werent so poor as to be stuck permanently
in misery, but neither were they bound by the
social codes and strictures of nobility that tended to accompany wealth. They were often more
exposed to market forces; their livelihoods, to
a great degree, depended on an ability to spot
opportunity and sell the right things to the
right people at the right price.
We often attribute the Industrial Revolution
to a handful of brilliant inventors who created
the steam engine, the power loom and other
transformative technologies. But many economic historians point out that these developments required a broader middle class,
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New Bond Street

Worcester was a center for abrasives and grinding technology. Norton, seen here, and its neighbor, Heald Machine, made
a variety of industrial grinding materials the rough disks and machinery that grind metal into shape. This was a crude,
rough industry that required strong workers who didnt need a lot of education. By working in these plants, my grandfather,
great-grandfather and countless uncles and cousins found their place in the middle class.
characterized by education, a feeling of opportunity and a lack of deep commitment to the

existing socioeconomic order. The Industrial
Revolution could just as easily be called the
middle-class revolution. Those intermediaries,
who converted raw materials into usable consumer goods, took over the economy. We know
that story: mass production, global trade, faster
innovation ensues. Its possible to have an endless chicken-and-egg debate over whether the
middle classes created or were created by the
Industrial Revolution. But the answer, plainly,
is both, and for well over a century we lived in
a world dened by the middle class.
By the early 1900s as the people who would
become my family were establishing themselves
in Worcester the virtuous circle had begun to
take hold nationwide. Factories were growing
quickly, oering long-term, decent-paying jobs
to former farmers, day laborers and immigrants.
Photographs by William Mebane for The New York Times
As workers earned more money, they bought

more goods, which meant the factories got more
orders and needed to hire more people. As factories became more sophisticated, they needed
a better-educated work force and, indeed, the
public-school revolution began, ensuring that
the children of the new factory workers would
be better educated and better able to make even
more money. By the 1930s, the middle class
was not just an aspirational destination; it had
become a bedrock of the country.
Worcester wasnt anybodys rst choice, at least not

in my family. The rst to arrive were Solomon
and Leah Davidson, Jews from Kaunus, Lithuania. Both were born in 1862 and left their homeland sometime in the 1890s as part of the rst big
wave of Jewish emigrants, eeing anti-Semitism
and poverty. They wandered awhile. They were
in England until 1898, but I found no records

of what they did there. They appear in New
York, then head for Boston. Finally they end
up in Worcester, in time for the 1900 federal
census, now responsible for seven children.
Solomons occupation is pedlar rags [sic].
Rhonda McClure, who specializes in immigration
papers at the New England Historic Genealogical
Society, told me that Solomon Davidson, my
great-great-grandfather, was one of the poorest,
least-connected immigrants she had ever come
across. He arrived in America, heading a family
of eight, with $18 to his name, a pittance even
then. A mark on his immigration papers suggests
that he was taken aside for additional questioning, something McClure says was unusual; immigration ocers probably feared he would be a
destitute beggar. Once settled in Worcester, he
applied for citizenship and presented two witnesses to attest to his decency. One was a liquor
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Pleasant Street
This was the home of my great-grandparents, Bumpa George and Narny Mildred Bestick.
However modest it seems today, this house was something like a dream to me, a place I heard
about throughout my childhood as the ultimate symbol of success.
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Elementary-School Teacher
They are at once scholars, therapists,

babysitters, janitors, coaches and umpires, and
there are 1.5 million of them. The job outlook
for such teachers is decent, if variable depending
on region; the more kids there are, the more
teachers there need to be, of course, leading to
lots of jobs in high-growth states like
Colorado and Texas. And the pay is decent,
too: $55,000 for a 10-month year at
least before you add in the countless hours of
uncompensated overtime.
salesman, the other a grocer; each said he had

met Solomon recently and done business
with him presumably sold him some liquor
and groceries or bought some rags and he
hadnt cheated them. McClure says shes never
seen a naturalization document with such tenuous claims. Applicants usually enlist family
members or at least a religious figure to serve
as character references for them.
Solomon struggled in Worcester. The 1910
census identies him as a fruit vendor, a notch
but hardly a leap up the socioeconomic scale,
because fruit requires at least some meager capital to invest. By 1923, he was selling tonics, or
sketchy medicines, on the street. Yet the family
was somehow able to buy one of Worcesters
three-decker buildings, which must have felt
like a miraculous accomplishment for folks who
arrived with nothing a few years earlier. And soon
enough, his children were thriving. My great-aunt
Ethel once described how she and my great-grandfather, Jacob, would pretend to go to sleep and
then sneak out the window to go to the dance halls.
Solomons children began working in late adolescence, but not as street peddlers; his daughters
became stenographers and bookkeepers; a son
worked in a shoe store. Jacob opened his own
tannery. The next generations, the ones that
came of age after the 1930s, produced the familiar
complement of Jewish immigrant children successes among them lawyers and accountants
and C.E.O.s and a high-level executive at CBS.
Jacobs eventual wife and my great-grandmother, Annabelle Lewis, was another sort of
Worcester immigrant. She grew up in a remote
corner of Maine, descended from Yankee sailors.
Her father was a saloonkeeper; the census says he
couldnt read or write. What stories I remember
about him are brutal: He was a violent drunk, a
horrible father. According to family accounts, she
ed early and ended up in Worcester, with little
education, no money, no prospects. She worked
in a dance hall, dancing with men for money.
In December 1916, she and Jacob made a hurried trip to Vermont to be married by a justice
of the peace. Three months later, my grandfather
Stanley was born. One of Jacobs sisters told me
that their father, upon hearing his son married a
non-Jew, ripped his clothes and proclaimed him
dead to the family. Jacob and Annabelle moved to
Rhode Island for a time but returned to Worcester a few years later to open the tannery. They
were beginning to repair relationships with the
family when Jacob became sick with tuberculosis.
He died in 1924, when my grandfather Stanley
was 7. A few years later, Stanley met a young girl
at school, Helen Bestick. She wrote in her diary,
I met a Jew today.
Helens family had its own story of Worcesters
redemptive powers. Her father, George (the man
my dad called Bumpa as a
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What happened to all the

working-class TV characters?
By Wesley Morris
Illustration by Sara Cwynar
We tend to fetishize labor. Anybody whos drooled over a

sexy-remen calendar knows that: Blue-collar dudes are hot.
Its a clich. But the third episode of the 10-part, Brooklyn-bar
web series Horace and Pete turns the clich into a four-alarm
tragedy. A middle-aged woman named Sarah (Laurie Metcalfe)
sits at a table confessing to something that morties her. She
is deeply turned on by her father-in-law. His name is Roger,
and hes an 84-year-old ex-Navy man who drives a pickup
truck and used to farm. He comes over to make repairs on
Sarahs country cottage, and as he does his thing shirtless,
indierent to her she just, you know, watches him.
What arouses Sarah is not Roger himself. Its Rogers work.
Its as if she hasnt seen a man wield a tape measure or tighten
table legs in so long that she has pornographized it.
I get it, sister. Ive been watching TV. Were out of Rogers,
what few we even had. In 2007, television underwent a great
expansion beyond the major broadcast networks, beyond
televisions and into all kinds of genres just at the moment
the economy shrank, and a fantasy emerged. As real people
became poorer and lost their jobs, the ones on TV got richer,
and their jobs seemed more beside the point. All that space
to tell new stories ended up dedicated to a limited set of
jobs and an increasingly homogeneous notion of what work
even means.
These days, there are only a handful of workplace taxonomies in scripted television. Weve got police precincts,
crime-and-forensics teams and legal-medical-Beltway dramas.
NBCs Chicago Med, Chicago Fire and Chicago P.D. are
a virtual sexy-calendar night. These shows might know what
a blue collar is, but theyre class-unconscious: Their characters dont usually work for the explicit maintenance of their
livelihoods. They work for comedy, for suspense, for sport.
For the most part, TV cops, lawyers, bureaucrats and doctors
inhabit the same kinds of toothsome residences and wear
the same exquisitely tailored clothes, all showing o how
76
5.1.16
Moving
On
Up
THE MONEY
+1 604 278 4604
ISSUE
Up
In the late 1980s, the

Conner family, of
Roseanne, worried
about work and money
in ways few TV
families do today.
77
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THE MONEY
To the extent that TV has always been an advertisement for something, it was often an advertisement for the middle class: a job, a family, a home,
products to put in it. But early sitcoms engaged
with matters of aspiration and failure, and they
were tied to work. If employment didnt dene
a character from episode to episode, it sustained
him (and it was usually a him). Some, like Jackie
Gleasons Brooklyn bus driver, Ralph Kramden,
the human caldron of The Honeymooners
(1955-56), had jobs. Some, like Dick Van Dykes
Rob Petrie, the klutzy TV writer on The Dick
Van Dyke Show (1961-66), had careers. Work,
or the lack of it, slotted you into a clear socioeconomic class. Kramdens dissatisfaction he
devoted a lot of time to hatching get-rich-quick
schemes became the tacit sadness of the The
Honeymooners. It was the rst rueful sitcom.
Petrie had a suburban-New York living room that
Kramden would have killed for.
By the 1960s, prime-time television was barely
two decades old, and it was already a little nostalgic and class-neutral, broadcasting shows safely
ensconced in either the suburbs or the distant
past. But the decades relentless turmoil (civil
rights, Vietnam, political assassinations, Watergate, feminism) demanded discourse. On TV, that
conversation happened in the living rooms of the
working class, middle class and working poor, on
All in the Family, Maude and Good Times,
each a creation of Norman Lear, each a demonstrable emblem of its characters social station.
Archie Bunker (All in the Family) was a white
foreman in Queens; Florida Evans (Good Times)
was a sporadically unemployed black housekeeper
in Chicagos Near North Side projects. Bunker's
armchair racism, sexism and all the rest wouldnt
seem to have anything to do with Evans's prideful despair. But the two shows dramatized their
opposing dissatisfaction. Class was the perch from
which to see who you were and were not, and from
which members of the television audience could
see who they were, too.
The discontent on those shows ran like a fuse
through the 1970s into the late 1980s. The end of
the Reagan era and start of the rst Bush administration coincided with the arrival of Married
. . . with Children and Roseanne, a pair
of long-running sitcoms about the white
lower-middle class and working poor the
Bundys and Conners, respectively. The rst was
more bitterly toxic (my mother got a whi of its
vulgarity and forbade it) than the second. But
78
Source photo: Everett Collection
fabulously art directors and costume designers

earn a paycheck. Sometimes we see more of their
work than that done by the people who inhabit
it. Now on TV, no matter your actual job, almost
everybody belongs to the same generic, vaguely
upper-class class.
5.1.16
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ISSUE
each show descended from Lears righteous class

consciousness. And each felt like a rebuke of the
vertiginous aluence and physical beauty of soaps
like Dallas and Dynasty and a rejoinder to the
upper-middle-class comfort of The Cosby Show.
Writers and producers from The Cosby
Show Matt Williams, Marcy Carsey and Tom
Werner also helped create Roseanne, which
was set in Lanford, Ill., a ctional factory town
whose homes had a corresponding lived-in averageness. The show made work and money matter.
A dollar had to stretch and food had to last for a
family of ve. Through its early seasons, neither
Roseanne nor Dan Conner could keep a full-time
job. Fundamentally, the shows preoccupations
were as typical as those on The Cosby Show:
How, for instance, do we raise these kids? But some
werent: Are we going to stay married?
At the time, the country welcomed the duality
of Brooklyns prosperous black Huxtables and the
penniless white Conners. Rather than sink to the
bottom of the ratings, Roseanne hovered at or
near the top, often alongside Cosby, for most of
its run. Some weeks, more than 20 million people
watched them both.
In latter-season Roseanne, something crucial changed. Roseanne became the manager of
a loose-meat-sandwich spot. Her nancial worries didnt abate (until, of course, a nal-season
Hail Mary had the Conners hit the lottery), but
steady employment changed the nature of the
show. Gradually, everybody spent more time at
the restaurant, hanging out. The change now feels
like both a socioeconomic triumph and a creative
capitulation: The show was just following where
other sitcoms were already headed. Characters
went from hanging out at work (The Mary Tyler
Moore Show, WKRP in Cincinnati, Taxi) to
hanging out instead of working.
Cheers, which ran for 11 seasons on NBC,
starting in 1982, was the rst great hangout
show: neutralizing the depiction of class and
removing the pressures of work. Life is hard
enough, Cheers said; lets just make TV. Ever
since, television started taking it easier on us.
Bill Clinton was in the White House, and the
economy had improved. On Seinfeld, Living
Single, Friends, Ellen, Its Like, You Know,
Sex and the City, Girlfriends and, much later,
Happy Endings and New Girl, the commingling, childless men and women might have had
jobs, but almost none had consequential careers.
How many jobs did Elaine and George have on
Seinfeld? And in how many elds? And Kramer
how was he paying to live across the hall from
Jerry? Hangout shows placed friendship above
family, obviating the typical economic ecosystem. Belonging to a family of friends probably
means you only have to support yourself.
TV became and still is a medium struggling to understand average, ordinary,

Truck Driver
It is a tough job monotonous, lonely and

high-pressure. But truck driving has proved a
middle-class stalwart, with about 1.8 million
people on the road, most of them men, making
an average of $19 an hour. Right now, the
employment outlook is pretty good. But in the
long term, the threat from automation is real.
Oil and gas outfits are already using remotecontrol vehicles to transport iron ore and crude
oil, and automotive companies are investing
heavily in driverless trucks. For this profession,
a technological doomsday might be nigh.
normal. When the economy began to tank in

2007, television was barely equipped to reect
the collapse, in part because the people who
make shows were largely immune: They were
well-compensated creatures of the entertainment industry, mostly unaected by a shrinking economy. That disconnection sanitized TV
against the complexities of race and class. Many
sitcoms now are set in the places their creators
know best: soundstages and writers rooms.
There is, currently, a diet version of the Huxtable-Conner dichotomy recurring on ABC.
It pairs The Middle, about getting by in the
heartland, with Black-ish, which asks whether
prosperity dilutes blackness. But the networks
marquee show, Modern Family, a masterful
machine that makes highly polished sitcommery,
has so little to do with most modern families that
its claim of modernity often feels like a joke.
People working for minimum wage or doing
manual labor became the province of reality television shows like Dirty Jobs and Undercover
Boss, which has company executives pretend
to be employees. More than once, the revelations and class disjunction that emerge from the
ruse have made me cry. Were still some distance
from The King of Queens, which was set at a
UPS-like facility.
Watching Modern Family, Two Broke Girls
and Girls, I often nd myself asking what it
even means to work. The characters on these
shows, especially Girls, exist in an alternative
realm a kind of whatever class. Neurosis,
there, is a condition of identity, not of social station. The work you do is on yourself. But after
ve seasons on HBO, even Girls suspects a
problem. The show has always been a stealthily
shrewd satire of Millennial life. Its characters
relationship to work has ranged from nonexistent to insultingly indulgent. The triumph of the
most recent seasons nal episode is the glee it
takes in thumbing its nose at gentrication in our
neighborhoods and on TV. Flighty Shoshanna
converts conscientious Rays empty cafe into a
anti-hipster coee shop. As the original owner,
Hermie, goes on a tirade while pouring free coffee around the shop, you can see the place is busy
with cops and nurses, the average-looking and
the elderly, the solidly middle-class.
Its a joke if youre not working, youre not
real that doubles as a critique of both Girls
itself and the cultural ravages of the hangout
show, especially. Television is losing what work
is and knows it. Sarahs arousal by that old working man on Horace and Pete is a recognition
that something primal has gone: the making, the
doing that prove that we exist. We built this; we
manufactured that. Those jobs are disappearing.
The factories and mills and laundries are now lofts
and cafes where characters sit around and talk
where all they do is hang out.
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Obama
(Continued from Page 62)
insurance from their employers,

in the form of benets. If they quit
their jobs or were red, they could
lose those benets, and if they had
a pre-existing condition, they could
have a hard time getting them back,
even if they got a new job with good
benets elsewhere. That meant they
would be much less likely to leave
a job, and that meant employers
could be a little less worried about
raising wages, because they had a
somewhat captive work force. In the
age of the gig economy, more portable insurance could transform the
way we work and potentially have a
real eect on wages in some sectors.
In 2014, the Congressional Budget
Oce released a report estimating
that the Aordable Care Act would
reduce the total number of hours
worked, on net, by about 1.5 percent
to 2.0 percent during the period
from 2017 to 2024 a seemingly
disastrous outcome for the economy. But, the director of the oce,
Doug Elmendorf, later wrote, The
reason for the reduction in the supply
of labor is that the provisions of the
A.C.A. reduce the incentive to work
for certain subsets of the population.
In other words, a lot of people worked
because they had to, in order to keep
their insurance. Now they could quit,
even if they were sick; a positive
development for them, but with a
perverse eect on the economy.
And for all of that, Americans
do not yet seem to be feeling the
benets of the new program, in part
because the benets remain uncertain. If your health care premiums
go up by 6 percent, youre still irritated, Obama said, even though
the trend lines have been those
premiums are going up 15 percent.
Republicans were unanimously opposed to the bill, and Obama
could pass only so much major legislation before the congressional
election that many expected to ip
House control from the Democrats
to the Republicans, as it indeed did.
That meant that he had to choose
the A.C.A. over any number of other
high-priority agenda items, including another stimulus, perhaps in the
form of a massive infrastructure bill,
which would have given the economy an unambiguous boost. If you
80
went back a few years, you might

say, Well, he shouldve focused even
more on pushing through a bigger
scal stimulus, which he could have
if he wasnt going for the Aordable
Care Act, Rogo said. That was a
trade-o he made, and it cost him.
Obama knows it. The fact of
the matter is, is that our failure in
2012, 2013, 2014, to initiate a massive
infrastructure project it was the
perfect time to do it; low interest
rates, construction industry is still
on its heels, massive need the fact
that we failed to do that, for example, cost us time, Obama said. It
meant that there were folks who we
could have helped and put back to
work and entire communities that
could have prospered that ended up
taking a lot longer to recovery.
After 2010, all that was available
to Obama was executive action:
The ascendant G.O.P. made anything else nearly impossible. So the
president turned more and more to
regulatory rule changes and executive orders. He raised the minimum
wage for federal contract workers
to $10.10; he overhauled immigration policy to protect some illegal
immigrants from deportation (the
Supreme Court just heard a case
to overrule the action); he signed
an order calling on government
agencies with oversight of industry to nd ways to make them
more competitive, like pressing
cable companies to let customers
use cable boxes made by rivals. But
without Congress, the big legislative moves, the ones that would
really change history, seemed past.
I can probably tick o three or
four common-sense things we could
have done where wed be growing
a percentage or two faster each
year, Obama said. We could have
brought down the unemployment
rate lower, faster. We could have
been lifting wages even faster than
we did. And those things keep me
up at night sometimes.
When the presidents motorcade left

Saft to head back to Air Force One,
I noticed something unusual: The
plants parking lot was extremely
small. It dawned on me that Obamas
tour of the factory, lled with photo
ops and handshakes, had included
very little interaction with workers.
Instead, he was shown machine after

machine, mostly operated by computers. At one point, he was introduced to WALL-E, a robot named
after the Pixar lm that takes battery components from a tray. No
employees necessary. This giant
mecca of innovation, a physical marvel that if built several decades ago
would have easily employed a few
thousand people, employs only 300.
It was a scene that underscored
a challenge facing the U.S. economy and one that may be the driving
factor behind greater inequality:
Were not only losing jobs to overseas competition, were losing them
to technology. Obama noted the
robots, too. We just saw here those
robots were pretty impressive, but
also pointed to the direction the
economy is going, he said.
He clearly recognizes the problem he said he spends a lot of time
thinking about it but he also knows
the solutions will come only when he
is long out of oce. Many citizens, he
said, back on Air Force One, have to
worry about retraining at some point
in their careers, because they cant
anticipate being in one place for 30
years. The occupational mix in the
economy places greater demands on
people because its changing more
rapidly. And all of this makes people feel that they dont know whats
around the corner. For whatever
sense of uncertainty business leaders lament, this may be a much more
profound sense of uncertainty.
Its one of the reasons that I pursued the Trans-Pacic Partnership,
he said, bringing up the free-trade
pact that, uniquely, has divided both
parties, not because Im not aware
of all the failures of some past trade
agreements and the disruptions to
our economy that occurred as a consequence of globalization, but rather
my assessment that most trends are
irreversible given the nature of global supply chains, and so we better be
out there shaping the rules in ways
that allow for higher labor standards
overseas, or try to export our environmental standards overseas so that
we have more of a level playing eld.
Whether a president can truly
improve, or damage, an economy
remains an open question. The greatest economic power might in fact
remain in the hands of the Federal
Reserve. Economists credit the Feds
policy of keeping interest rates at historic lows with helping to pump up

the economy and bring unemployment down. At the same time, the
Fed has been blamed for widening
inequality, swelling the price of real
estate and corporate prots, even as
savers and retirees dependent on
xed-income assets have suered.
That can cut either way in terms
of a presidents economic legacy.
Critics of Obama, including the new
House speaker, Paul Ryan, credit
Ben Bernanke, the former Federal
Reserve chairman, and Janet Yellen,
the current chairwoman, for whatever recovery weve had since the
crisis, contending it happened in
spite of the president. I think the
Federal Reserve has done more,
Ryan said at a January news conference. Frank, for his part, almost
jumped through the phone when I
mentioned that argument during
an interview. And Bernanke and
Yellen were appointed by whom?
Neither Bernanke or Yellen would
have been able to do what they were
doing without his full backing.
Ultimately, however, Obama said
the lessons of his time in oce are
being misunderstood in the election
campaigns. If you look at the platforms, the economic platforms of
the current Republican candidates
for president, they dont simply
defy logic and any known economic theories, they are fantasy, Obama
said. Slashing taxes particularly for
those at the very top, dismantling
regulatory regimes that protect our
air and our environment and then
projecting that this is going to lead
to 5 percent or 7 percent growth, and
claiming that theyll do all this while
balancing the budget. Nobody would
even, with the most rudimentary
knowledge of economics, think that
any of those things are plausible.
He continued: If we cant puncture some of the mythology around
austerity, politics or tax cuts or
the mythology thats been built
up around the Reagan revolution,
where somehow people genuinely
think that he slashed government
and slashed the decit and that the
recovery was because of all these
massive tax cuts, as opposed to a
shift in interest-rate policy if we
cant describe that eectively, then
were doomed to keep on making
more and more mistakes.
5.1.16
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Worcester
toddler), grew up poor in Braintree,

another small industrial city in Massachusetts. Eventually he became
an oce manager in a razor factory, which, given his background,
would have counted as an impressively skilled, sit-down job. At 33,
he seemed to be stuck: at home,
caring for aging parents; his two
siblings had long ago found spouses
and moved away. Then he married
a 30-year-old widow, Mildred, who
had survived a tough life as well. She
was born in Plymouth, Mass., where
her ancestors, passengers on the
Mayower, had settled centuries
before. But by early adulthood, she
was with her parents in Braintree,
with a failing marriage, a baby and
a job as a stitcher in a shoe factory.
Before long, her husband and baby
both died. Whenever it was she met
Bumpa, she would have been considered a spinster with a questionable past, whatever the distinction
conferred by her heritage.
Their history makes me love
Worcester. These two trapped,
poor, broken people somehow met
and managed to put all that pain
behind and create a new life in
what still felt like the fresh, quickly
growing frontier of central Massachusetts. Bumpa, following a tip
from a minister who had moved to
Worcester, seems to have arrived in
the city with an oce job in hand,
at the Heald Machine Company,
where he worked until his retirement decades later. A combination
of historical luck, a fast-growing
economy and his own hard work
enabled him to carve out a good life
that must have seemed unattainable
when he was younger.
My grandparents, Stanley and
Helen, had their own hurried wedding in 1936, followed too soon
by the birth of a son, my father,
Jack. Before long, they had three
more children. By then their families were able to help out. Bumpa
George got Stanley a job at Heald.
It was a great job for a young man
with a new family in the midst of
the Depression. He did well there
and rose to factory foreman. By
the time he retired after 54 years at
the company, Stanley owned three
homes and vacationed in Europe in
the summer. Needless to say, few

people dealing with pregnancy in
high school today could expect to
attain such a good life.
The virtuous circle collapsed by the

1980s. Technological innovations
changed factory work. (Its incorrect to say that America doesnt
make anything anymore. U.S. manufacturing has grown steadily for
the past several decades. Todays
factories, however, are lled with
very few albeit highly skilled
employees and lots and lots of
machines.) The expansion of global
trade meant that low-skilled American workers were competing with
low-skilled workers abroad. And
many of the countrys rules, like
union-friendly laws and other protections for workers, were weakened or disappeared.
The forces that would eventually
alict the American middle class
came early to Worcester. The development of the Interstate highway
system, beginning in the 1950s, and
containerized shipping a few years
later, meant that factories much
farther away could aord to ship
to East Coast ports. Manufacturing became more consolidated
Heald Machine, for example, was
bought by Cincinnati Milacron,
which brought some of its workers
(including my grandfather Stanley)
to Ohio. There are still factories in
Worcester for example, Norton,
one of Worcesters biggest and oldest plants (which was bought by the
French conglomerate Saint-Gobain
in 1990). But long gone are the days
when Worcesters plants oered a
decent job to just about anybody
willing to put in a hard days work.
New employees looking to join the
middle class must have not just a
high-school diploma but an associate degree, if not a bachelors degree.
For all its decline in the second
half of the 20th century, Worcester
did enjoy one bit of good fortune: In
the 1960s, the University of Massachusetts placed its medical school
in the city. The school, which continued to grow, brought several
generations worth of high-paying
medical jobs and a fair number of
lower-paying support positions.
Similarly, Worcesters position close
to the center of New England has
been good for the transportation

business. Many of my relatives who
stayed in town have worked either
in the medical center as nurses or
in the transportation eld as truck
drivers, dispatchers, rail-yard
inspectors. These are solid, stable
jobs, but they dont enable the kind
of jump-up in socioeconomic status
that my family experienced many
decades ago.
If you drive around Worcester
now, its easy to imagine there is no
rising middle class, no aspiration at
all. In reality, its just much harder
to tell Worcesters story simply. A
century ago, you could have picked
any three-decker and immediately
grasped the basic life story of all
its tenants: where in the world they
came from, which factory they
worked in, what their hopes and
fears were for their children. Today
things are not so clear. Deborah
Martin, a professor of geography
at Clark University in Worcester,
has spent years leading students
through the city and researching its
social dynamics. She knows a fair bit:
where the Ghanaians live, how the
Latino immigrants are dierentiated
by country of origin. But she often
nds herself noticing newly renovated three-deckers and wondering,
who is that? What are they doing?
Worcester reects whats going
on throughout the United States.
There are a healthy number of higher-paying jobs. The Worcester area
has a disproportionately large community of well-paid medical professionals, from nurses and midwives
to physicians and microbiologists;
it has a huge number of educators for its population, a result of
having nearly a dozen colleges
in one medium-size city. But it
also has more than the average
number of lower-skilled jobs at
or near the minimum wage
food-service workers, personal-care aides and a host of other
medical-care assistants.
John C. Brown is a professor of
economics at Clark and a visiting
scholar at the Federal Reserve Bank
of Boston. He told me that Worcester
is right in the middle when it comes
to the current circumstances of
once-ourishing manufacturing centers in New England. Brown says one
quick way to assess a citys fortunes
over time is
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81
+1 604 278 4604
Puzzles
SPELLING BEE
SWITCHBACKS
BATTLESHIPS
By Frank Longo
By Patrick Berry
By Wei-Hwa Huang
How many common words of 5 or more letters can

you spell using the letters in the hive? Every answer
must use the center letter at least once. Letters may
be reused in a word. At least one word will use all 7
letters. Proper names and hyphenated words are not
allowed. Score 1 point for each answer, and 3 points
for a word that uses all 7 letters.
Answers in this grid proceed in two long, winding paths.

Path A starts in the upper-left corner and winds left and
right, taking hairpin turns at the curved ends. Path B
starts in the same place but winds up and down. Each
path contains a series of answers placed end to end,
one letter per space (including each loop on the sides),
clued in order of appearance.
This is a puzzle version of the classic pencil-andpaper game. Place 1 cruiser (3 grid cells, as shown),
2 destroyers (2 cells) and 3 submarines (1 cell) in the grid
horizontally and vertically so that no 2 vessels touch,
not even diagonally. The numbers at the side of the grid
tell you how many cells in the corresponding rows and
columns are occupied by vessels.
Rating: 10 = good; 15 = excellent; 20 = genius
Path A Popular guy who can do no wrong (2 wds.)

Large landed estate in Mexico School singing group
(2 wds.) Scream
Ex.
3
1
2
1
0
0
3
Path B 1992 gold medalist Devers Utahs ___ Canyon

Plant used to make Christmas decorations Compass
pointer Gym game in which players try not to get hit
D
N
L
H
A
B
Our list of words, worth 23 points, appears with last weeks answers.
ACROSTIC
V 2
24 C
By Emily Cox & Henry Rathvon
119
25 A 26 G 27
89 R
D 7
J 28 M
29
F 92 M 93
112 F
51 107 121 154 26
95
54
24
70
86 124
19
62
93 128 168
11
101 27
65
49 158
iceberg
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

14 123 63 157 38
48 149 29
K. Brewery takeout order; small
E. Pizza-party portions, often

74
78
F 79 A 80 U 81
98 C 99 B 100 D
97
113 32 164 13 138 52
F. Just before the deadline (hyph.)
77
L. City east of The Hague
17
164 K 165 D
D 20 T 21
S 42 V 43 D 44 U 45 M
64 R 65 J 66 F
105 I 106 V
87 P 88 H
107 G 108 H
129 R 130 M 131 L
148 A 149 I 150 T 151 D

169 T 170 N 171 C 172 F
R. As a question, a schoolyard retort;
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

147
16 129 89
31
64
139 110 126 160 81
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

84
____ ____
152 166
P. Stone with the appearance of a
crude tool
61
41
T. Completely caught up; underwater
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

35 169 20 150
55 83
111
U. Hundred Acre Wood pessimist
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

72 136 23 115 87
80 104 132
37
44 159
V. Risk factor for sleep disorders
Q. Jersey or Guernsey, administratively
(2 wds.)
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
46 112 66
131 36
82 68 125 50
127 42
33
91 153 172 137 78
18 145 94 109 69
152 O
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
15 170 103 60 118 85 146 40
O. Class in combat sports

39
B 22 O 23 P
S. Like Austin Powers in style
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
102 117 53 135 22
1
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
as a statement, cheering support

(2 wds.)
28 45 167 130 142 76
singer (2 wds.)
41
166 O 167 M 168 I
N. The Piano Has Been Drinking
67
L 19
1
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I 63 E
146 N 147 R
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

59
S 62
1
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
82 Q 83 T 84 O 85 N 86 J
M. Apartment-door security feature

92
0
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
122 B 123 E 124 J 125 Q 126 S 127 V 128 I
142 M 143 Q 144 V 145 L
160 S 161 B 162 V 163 Q
1
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
Q 18
101 J 102 O 103 N 104 U
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

6
71
J. James ____, the inventor of basketball
(3 wds.)
151 100 43 165 133 114
96 Q 97 E
H. The Thrilla in Manila, for one
105 12
D. 1950 movie musicals title song
E 15 N 16
3
.
v
.
.
.
.
.
60 N 61
Hendrix died
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
98 156 116
K 14
4
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
56 B 57 V 58 H 59 M
I. How Abraham Lincoln and Jimi
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
13
1
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
52 K 53 O 54 C 55 T
157 E 158 J 159 U
161
99
1
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
2
.
.
.
.
.
.
<
38 E 39 O 40 N
135 O 136 P 137 F 138 K 139 S 140 C 141 H
73 108 58 155 141 120 88
C. Hugo or Nebula Award category
J 12
113 K 114 D 115 P 116 C 117 O 118 N 119 A 120 H 121 G
155 H 156 C
A 11
0
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
34 Q 35 T 36 L 37 P
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
10
F 10
2
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
R 32 K 33 F
I 94 L 95 G
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____
75
I 30 V 31
G 9
G 72 P 73 H 74 E 75 C 76 M 77 K
____ ____ ____ ____ ____
140 171
G. Something huge or powerful
B. Completely covered as if by a flood

21 122 56
I 49 J 50 Q 51 G
132 U 133 D 134 A

153 F 154 G
70 D 71
90 V 91
109 L 110 S 111
____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____ ____

47
T 5
67 O 68 Q 69 L
A. Mode of travel involving a team

79
O 4
46 F 47 A 48
Guess the words defined below and

write them over their numbered
dashes. Then transfer each letter to
the correspondingly numbered square
in the pattern. Black squares indicate
where words end. The filled pattern will
contain a quotation reading from left
to right. The first letters of the guessed
words will form an acrostic giving the
authors name and the title of the work.
148 134 25
S 3
3
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
3
2
1
2
2
0
0
Fleet
0
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
96
34 143 17
163
90 106 30
57 162 144
82
+1 604 278 4604
Worcester
to look at its population. Many urban areas in

Massachusetts experienced a population collapse
in the 1970s and 1980s. But Worcester and some
others have had slow and steady growth over
the past few decades. Worcester, he notes, cant
credit its success to any one industry. It doesnt
have, say, Bostons robotics or the tourism of
Salem and Lowell. Worcester instead benets
from a whole bunch of things: hospitals, universities and a bit of manufacturing still. Nothing
screams at recent immigrants or people struggling in other parts of New England to rush
to Worcester to fulll their dreams. The citys
economy is a more complicated tale.
One day recently, I went to see the shuttered
Heald Machine factory on the northeast side
of town. As I drove past the factory gates, the
rst shop I noticed, right across the street, had
some Arabic writing in the window. I stopped
the car and entered a tiny tailors shop. I met
the proprietor, Ahmed Yusef. He grew up in
Mosul, Iraq, where he worked with his father,
also a tailor. His father had specialized in custom-made mens suits. But after the American
invasion, Mosul became a front line in the battle between American and Iraqi forces and Al
Qaeda. Nobody wanted mens suits, so Ahmeds
father took a contract making uniforms for the
Iraqi Army. This landed him on a hit list, and in
2005 the family ed, rst to Syria, then to Egypt,
worrying all the while that their temporary visa
would not be renewed and that they would be
sent back to Iraq. In 2012, the family received
word that its refugee application to the United
States had been approved, and they were oered
a chance to resettle in Arizona. Ahmed, thrilled,
called the one person he knew in America, an
old client who lived in Worcester. Dont go to
Arizona, he was told. Its too hot there, and there
are no jobs. Move to Worcester, where housing
is cheap, and opportunities are plenty.
Ahmed soon found work as a tailor hes been
at Brooks Brothers for three years now. One day,
walking with his parents in Worcesters Green
Hill Park, his mother pointed out a young Iraqi
woman. Now theyre married, and they have a
newborn daughter and plans for more kids.
Ahmed opened his own business, though he
still works several shifts a week at Brooks Brothers. He envisions that, one day, hell have many
children, that some of them will even work with
him in the tailor shop.
He told me that he has been to New York and
Miami. They were beautiful: Like a dream, he
said. But he was always happy to get back to
Worcester. Those other cities are too expensive,
too busy. Too much, he said. I said, You like
Worcester. He said: No, not like. Love. I love it. I
have a future. New York is for dreams. Worcester
is for working.
+1 604 278 4604
Puzzles Edited by Will Shortz
47 Dips made with
olives, capers and

anchovies
48 Fragrant wood
50 Grain to crush
fortune
51 Background-check
runner, maybe
20 Tried to open, as a
pet door
52 Government org.
in Breaking Bad
21 Seamans aid
53 Oh, thats clever!
22 *Z, for one
55 Something to be
24 Behind
divvied up
25 O grave, where is
____ victory?:
56 Hundred, in
I Corinthians
Honduras
26 Neither wizards
59 Stand in the
nor witches, in
shadows
Harry Potter
60 *Ted talks, say
books
68 Reebok rival
28 Language
69 Texas city in the
descended from
movie Friday
Old Norse
Night Lights
29 Tiara
70 Bonn one
accompaniment
72 Pro-consumer
31 Subject of the 1954
ideology
Nobel Prize in
76 In back
Medicine
77 Jet fuel, mainly
32 Eagerly unwrap
82 Stave o
34 God whose name
83 Good friend,
sounds like a
informally
word meaning
understated
85 Find some
advantage
36 Take its toll?
86 Red giant in the
38 *Board
constellation
42 *Alliance member
Cetus
46 They may result in
87 *Crossed pair
title changes, for
89 *Search party
short
1 Grass and such
7 Lifesavers, e.g.
11 Turns o
19 Source of good
Puzzles Online: Todays puzzle and more

than 9,000 past puzzles, nytimes.com/crosswords
($39.95 a year). For the daily puzzle commentary:
nytimes.com/wordplay.
Mobile crosswords: nytimes.com/mxword
19
By Joel Fagliano and Byron Walden

ACROSS
93 Drainage pit
94 ____ example
95 Owls prey
97 Browns and Blues
99 House Hunters
network
102 Bromine
and uorine
compounds
105 Kind of band
107 Move it
108 Boastful types
110 *Lets hope
114 Group with the
1985 No. 1 hit
Broken Wings
115 ____ about right
116 Eyelike opening,
in architecture
117 Ones breaking
game rules?
118 Big buildup
119 Great Eurasian
region
DOWN
1 Almanac fodder
2 Home of the daily
World-Herald
23
25
26
29
30
34
11
27
31
32
35
36
43
37
44
62
63
49
53
57
83
86
58
90
91
76
41
66
67
78
79
80
71
81
85
88
92
93
96
104
108
40
59
77
84
95
103
39
70
87
89
18
54
65
75
82
17
50
69
74
16
46
64
68
73
15
38
45
56
61
14
33
52
60
13
28
48
55
12
24
51
102
10
21
47
72
20
22
42
105
109
94
97
98
99
106
100
101
107
110
111
114
115
116
117
118
119
112
113
5/1/16
STELLAR WORK
3 Clicker for
Dorothy
4 Tie word
5 Well, fancy that!
6 Abbr. that can be
written with an
ampersand
7 The casino in
Casino
8 Soccer goof
9 Kite adjunct
10 Goldbrick
11 The Pentagon inits.
12 Crystalline
weather
phenomenon
13 ____ of Heaven!
too gentle to be
human (line
from Shelleys
Epipsychidion)
14 Unlofty loft
KENKEN
Fill the grid with digits so as not to repeat a digit in any row or column, and so that the digits within each
heavily outlined box will produce the target number shown, by using addition, subtraction, multiplication
or division, as indicated in the box. A 5x5 grid will use the digits 15. A 7x7 grid will use 17.
15 Labor pain
16 Pirates mate, in
literature and lm
17 Besmirches
18 German vice
admiral killed in
W.W. Is Battle of
the Falklands
20 Celtic who was the
M.V.P. of the 2008
N.B.A. Finals
23 Kaiser Permanente
oering
27 Begat
30 W, for one
31 March 14, to math
lovers
33 Fibonacci or
Galileo
35 Casino oering,
derived from the
Latin for ve
each
37 Revenue source for
Fish and Wildlife
departments
39 Jocular disclaimer
40 Spoonful, say
41 Cmo ____ usted?
42 Sch. whose mascot
is Paydirt Pete
43 Coastal desert of
southern Africa
44 Fruity drink
45 Tops in
handwriting, say
49 Small stream
50 Wheat ____
52 What
sharpshooters take
54 Prompt
57 Vow thats mostly
vowels
58 When golden
goals happen in
the N.H.L.
61 Arts-page
contributor
62 Novelist Vonnegut
63 Big Four record
co. that broke up
in 2012
64 Headlong or
headstrong
65 Striven
66 What rugged
individualists
seldom admit to
67 Light shade
71 Classic hairremoval brand
72 Reputation
73 Gung-ho
74 Skin: Sux
75 Numbskull
78 Posting at JFK or
DFW
79 Eastern royals
80 Heavy load
81 Pause word in
Psalms
84 Scam with three
cards
85 Information on a
sports ticket
88 Exceed
90 Fashionable
91 Latin carol word
92 Prynne of The
Scarlet Letter
96 Question marks
key-mate
98 Charlies Angels
director, 2000
100 Keep occupied
101 One of 1,288 in the
book of Numbers
102 Biodiesel fuel
source
103 Prex with ecology
or chemical
104 ____ Linda, Calif.
106 ____-deucy
109 Some 112-Down
retakers: Abbr.
111 Tan neighbor, on
calculators
112 Exam with a
Science Reasoning
section
113 Wish undone
KenKen is a registered trademark of Nextoy, LLC. 2016 www.KENKEN.com. All rights reserved.
84
+1 604 278 4604
Answers to puzzles of 4.24.16
TEE TIME
L
O
C
A
T
E
A
V
A
T
A
R
H
I
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E
A
C
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N
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L
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N
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T
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D A
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B
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SPLIT DECISIONS
L O
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Answers to puzzle on Page 82

SPELLING BEE
Lengthened (3 points). Also: Delete, deleted, dented,
detente, entente, genteel, gentle, length, lengthen,
netted, nettle, nettled, teeth, teethe, teethed, telnet,
tended, tenet, tented, tenth. If you found other
legitimate dictionary words in the beehive, feel free
to include them in your score.
85
+1 604 278 4604
Angie Martinez
Doesnt Like to
Crush Peoples
Hopes
Interview by Ana Marie C
Cox
o
ox
Youve been hosting a hip-hop

h
radio
caades. It seems
show for about two decades.
that other music genress dont
d
have the
dio
o that hip-hop
same relationship to radio
es a reason for
does. Do you think theres
that dierence? People who
w are fans of
hip-hop are fans of the overall
verall culture. Its
the clothing, its the lifestyle,
ylee, its the music,
its the TV shows we watch.
h.. Its really a full
culture as opposed to just th
the
he music. Radio
can deliver all the parts of that as well.
oiice, you write
In your memoirs, My Voice,
ad
dly East Coast/
a little bit about the deadly
90
0s. A few times
West Coast feud of the 90s.
you attribute it to youth.
h. Was there no
older generation of rap st
stars
tars to look up
pers, but I dont
to? There were older rappers,
think anyone had experienced
ncced this type of
conict on a national level.
vell. When youre
a grown-up, you learn ways
ay
ys how to cope,
you evolve into a person wh
who
ho can deal with
conict better. When youre
urre young, it can
go bad fast.
Radio used to be the singular
ullar place to nd
new music, but with the democratization
deemocratization
brought on by the Internet,
errnet, you guys
ke any more.
kers
arent the only tastemakers
w music today?
So how do you nd new
ev
verybody. You
Through anybody and everybody.
od
dy who speaks
have to just nd somebody
to you. I can get it from my
y Uber driver.
Have you actually gotten a good recommendation from an Uber driver? Let me
see, cause Im in an Uber right now. Hes
listening to Future, but Im already up on
Future. The driver says he wants me to
listen to more bachata.
In the book, you write a bit about a
boyfriend who felt threatened by your
86
5.1.16
Age:
45
Occupation:
Radio personality
Hometown:
New York
Martinez hosts
The Angie Martinez
Show on Power
105.1 in New York and
is the author of
the autobiography
My Voice.
Her Five
Favorite Rappers:
1. Jay Z
2. Rakim
3. Notorious B.I.G.
4. J. Cole
5. 2Pac
success. Ye
Yeah, I need to call him and let
him know that I wrote that.
But you dont
d
really talk explicitly
about sexi
sexism or gender in your career.
I was a tom
tomboy, so I was used to being
around a lot of boys. When
I got into the music business and hip-hop, I didnt really
give it muc
much attention. I really just kept
going and kept working. It was almost
like blinde
blinders. But now I do see it. I was
19, making sure I had baggy clothes on,
trying to blend
b
in, trying to make sure
I knew all my stu, to be sitting at a
table full o
of guys talking about hip-hop.
I wasnt co
consciously thinking: Cause Im
a woman, I have to know more. But I
wanted to know more. I wanted to sit at
the table w
with them.
You had a very short-lived gig on
American Idol. Four shows, is that
correct? It might have been three.
One reason
reaso you left is you said you
didnt like crushing the hopes of the
people who
w
auditioned. Were you
able to watch
wa
that show at all? I love
that show, but I wasnt a singer. I didnt
feel secure enough to be able to take an
opportunit
opportunity away from somebody.
But you re
released two albums yourself,
which give
gives you some credibility. Why
havent yo
you done any more? I can hear
some of th
the songs and be like, Oh, its
kind of goo
good. But I think any artist, even
probably a seasoned artist, probably
looks back on the rst couple of things
that they did
d and is like, Oh, I could
have done better than that. Its like looking at a hig
high-school photo.
One thing you did with your show was
that you o
oered a sympathetic ear to
people who
wh may not be getting sympathy in other
oth places. You gave a pretty
friendly in
interview to Chris Brown in
2009. I treated
tre
him like a human being
who made a mistake not a monster.
So lets sa
say Donald Trump wanted to
come on your
y
show. Yeesh. The dierence is tha
that Chris was still pretty much
a kid at tha
that point. With Trump, I think
he knows what
w
hes doing. Contrary to
what a lot of people say, he is not a dumb
guy. I keep hoping that maybe its a like
some big facade, and maybe he doesnt
believe some of the things hes saying,
hes just trying to get in the position, and
once hes there hell do the right thing.
You really do try to see the best in people.
I try! Thats a really hard one, though.
Interview has been condensed and edited.
Talk
Photograph by Christian Oth
+1 604 278 4604
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Get energized at SoulCycle or the new

DIVE INTO the

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Ill reclaim a lost passion.

Fidelity doesnt believe in set it and forget it plans.

Every someday needs a plan.

Investing involves risk, including risk of loss.

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The End of the

The Obama Recovery

THE MONEY ISSUE

Where Did the

Long a ticket to the

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THE MONEY ISSUE

Behind the Cover

Kathy Ryan, director

Should a friend have

The Rabbit Who

A hero shops gigantic

Family photos are

Photographs by Jon Tonks

The radio personality

Copyright 2016 The New York Times

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Andrew Ross Sorkin

The Obama Recovery,

Andrew Ross Sorkin is a financial columnist for

Chief National Correspondent

Heather Havrilesky is a columnist for New York

The End of the

Charles Homans is the politics editor for

David Carr Fellow

Where Did the

Annie Lowrey is a contributing editor at New

Mark OConnell lives in Dublin. His book To

Dear Reader: Do You Vote on