(Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle)  I teach American literature and media history at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and for many years I have taught a course called “Capital Fictions”—a class in which we examine the ways in which literature shaped, and was shaped by, the US economy at the turn-of-the-last-century. Though I never […]

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  The United States of Paranoia is witty, smart, and more than a little subversive. Ranging confidently through history and popular culture—from the Indian wars of Puritan New England to Andrew Jackson assassination conspiracy theory and the deconstructive tricksters behind Discordianism’s Operation Mindfuck, from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Young Goodman Brown” to Jack Chick’s Evangelicalist comic books—Jesse […]

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  In A Dream Foreclosed, journalist and activist Laura Gottesdiener highlights four people threatened by the loss of their homes; discusses racism and predatory lending; and challenges old ideas about property and private housing. In the orgy of subprime lending that created the great recession, and the subsequent foreclosures and evictions that followed, African Americans […]

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Since the late 90s, political pundits have debated how to define the working class and how to explain their voting patterns. Prior to the 2000 presidential election, a standard definition of the working class combined income, occupation, and education. Ruy Teixeira and Joel Rogers made the case for using education in part because exit polls […]

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  What is a police state, and have we become one? These questions are asked with higher frequency since young Edward Snowden blew a loud whistle on our government spying on our phone calls and e-mail. But there has long been a more prosaic, everyday quality to American over-policing that doesn’t require high-tech surveillance. The […]

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