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The Writers’ Roundtable: Fiction vs. Nonfiction

Illustration by Kjell Reigstad and Katie Kosma

Eva Holland | Longreads | April 2018 | 23 minutes (5,900 words)

A lifetime ago, it seems, I used to write fiction. I wrote little stories on scraps of paper as a young kid; throughout grade school, I filled my unused notebooks with attempts at novels; I wrote a few short stories in high school and college. But since I started freelancing full-time a decade ago, I haven’t written a single line of fiction.

For a few years now, I’ve been intrigued by the writers who manage to produce both fiction and nonfiction work — the ones who excel on both sides of the divide. How do they do it? Why? Do they prefer one to the other? Does one feed the other? I had so many questions, I finally decided to convene another writers’ roundtable (last time around, we talked freelancing) and I asked a few writers I admire to weigh in.

Benjamin Percy is a Minnesota-based writer of novels (most recently, The Dark Net), comics, and the nonfiction book Thrill Me: Essays On Fiction. His nonfiction stories have also appeared in the likes of GQ, Esquire, Outside, and Men’s Journal. Taffy Brodesser-Akner is a staff writer at the New York Times, a contributor to GQ and many other fine magazines, and the author of a forthcoming novel. Mary H.K. Choi has written for Wired, GQ, The Atlantic, and more. Her first novel, Emergency Contact, recently debuted on March 27. Adam Sternbergh is an editor at New York magazine and the author of the novels The Blinds, Shovel Ready, and Near Enemy.

ORIGIN STORIES

Eva Holland: When I was younger, I admit I barely even understood that nonfiction writing existed, outside of daily hard news reporting. My understanding of “writing” was entirely “fiction writing,” and I only fell in love with magazines and narrative nonfiction much later. So, my first question is: What came first for you as a writer — fiction, or non?

Benjamin Percy: Growing up, my only doses of nonfiction came from The Oregonian, Time, Newsweek, Fangoria, National Geographic, and Archaeology Magazine. Most of my reading was devoted to novels — mass-market paperbacks with embossed titles and dragons on the cover — and that’s what I hoped to become when I stepped into my first creative writing workshop: a genre novelist. The first time I wrote something that resembled “creative nonfiction,” I was in my mid-20s and only attempted it because a magazine approached me about an assignment.

Taffy Brodesser-Akner: I was absolutely, definitely, without a doubt going to be a fiction writer or a screenwriter. And then I wasn’t! When I left NYU with a BFA in screenwriting, I realized I had zero version of a plan. I didn’t know what to do, so I got a job that was advertised in the New York Times classifieds (a fiction writer might call this foreshadowing). It was to work at a Soap Opera Magazine. I was still writing screenplays, but they weren’t good—they were cynical, in the way that ’90s screenplays were cynical. And I was taught how to write those things so that they would sell, not so they would be meaningful. So I worked at the soap opera stuff, and I wrote profiles of the actors. I was going to get back into fiction…one day. But it was always hovering in the background. It seemed very fancy to me, to write a novel. And very big and out of reach. I became a freelance writer after a time, and realized I couldn’t devote the amount of time to a novel that a novel would need because I couldn’t bet so many working hours on something that wasn’t a sure thing. Read more…

The Top 5 Longreads of the Week

Plan B pill brochure
Scott Olson / Getty Images

This week, we’re sharing stories from Lizzie Presser, Kathleen McGrory, Bryan Curtis, Anna Merlan, and Amalia Illgner.

Sign up to receive this list free every Friday in your inbox. Read more…

“We All Had the Same Acid Flashback at the Same Time”: The New American Cuisine

Getty / 123RF images, Composite by Katie Kosma

Andrew Friedman | Excerpt adapted from Chefs, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: How Food Lovers, Free Spirits, Misfits and Wanderers Created a New American Profession | Ecco | February 2018 | 17 minutes (4,560 words)

* * *

He spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him.

You could begin this story in any number of places, so why not in the back of a dinged-up VW van parked on a Moroccan camping beach, a commune of tents and makeshift domiciles? It’s Christmas 1972. Inside the van is Bruce Marder, an American college dropout. He’s a Los Angelino, a hippy, and he looks the part: Vagabonding for six months has left him scrawny and dead broke. His jeans are stitched together, hanging on for dear life. Oh, and this being Christmas, somebody has gifted him some LSD, and he’s tripping.

The van belongs to a couple — French woman, Dutch man — who have taken him in. It boasts a curious feature: a built-in kitchen. It’s not much, just a set of burners and a drawer stocked with mustard and cornichons. But they make magic there. The couple has adventured as far as India, amassing recipes instead of Polaroids, sharing memories with new friends through food. To Marder, raised in the Eisenhower era on processed, industrialized grub, each dish is a revelation. When the lid comes off a tagine, he inhales the steam redolent of an exotic and unfamiliar herb: cilantro. The same with curry, also unknown to him before the van.

Like a lot of his contemporaries, Marder fled the United States. “People wanted to get away,” he says. Away from the Vietnam War. Away from home and the divorce epidemic. The greater world beckoned, the kaleidoscopic, tambourine-backed utopia promised by invading British rockers and spiritual sideshows like the Maharishi. The price of admission was cheap: For a few hundred bucks on a no-frills carrier such as Icelandic Airlines — nicknamed “the Hippie Airline” and “Hippie Express” — you could be strolling Piccadilly Circus or the Champs-Élysées, your life stuffed into a backpack, your Eurail Pass a ticket to ride.

Marder flew to London alone, with $800 and a leather jacket to his name, and improvised, crashing in parks and on any friendly sofa and — if he couldn’t score any of that — splurging on a hostel. He let himself go, smoking ungodly amounts of pot, growing his hair out to shoulder length. In crowds, he sensed kindred spirits, young creatures of the road, mostly from Spain and Finland. Few Americans.

Food, unexpectedly, dominated life overseas. Delicious, simple food that awakened his senses and imagination. Amsterdam brought him his first french fries with mayonnaise: an epiphany. The souks (markets) of Marrakech, with their food stalls and communal seating, haunt him. Within five months, he landed on that camping beach, in Agadir, still a wasteland after an earthquake twelve years prior. He lived on his wits: Back home, he’d become fluent in hippy cuisine; now he spent his last pennies on brown rice and vegetables, cooking them for strangers who shuttled him around. Just in time, people started feeding him, like the couple in whose van he was nesting. Food was as much a part of life on the beach as volleyball and marijuana. People cooked for each other, spinning the yarns behind the meals — where they’d picked them up and what they meant in their native habitats. Some campers developed specializations, like the tent that baked cakes over an open burner. Often meals were improvised: You’d go to town, buy a pail, fill it with a chicken, maybe some yogurt, or some vegetables and spices, and figure out what to do with it when you got back.

Marder might as well have been on another planet. “This was so un-American at that time,” he says.
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Who Does She Think She Is?

Illustration from an 1883 journal, via Getty.

Laurie Penny | Longreads | March 2018 | 23 minutes (5,933 words)

 

Another day at the Telegraph and another attack on Laurie Penny.
— Nick Cohen, The Spectator, 2011

Do you think that red hair and makeup is used for anything other than attention? Her writing? Same. That bitch is a whore who needs to die choking on cocks.
— 4chan, 2016

I think that nice Laurie Penny over at the New Statesman must actually be a conservative mole dedicated to undermining leftism from within.
— Alex Massie, also at The Spectator, 2013

Hang this clown. Hang Laurie Penny.
— Urban75 (British left-wing forum), 2011

Now I don’t want to make light of her depression, but she has probably brought this on herself.
Desert Sun, “We Need to Talk about Laurie Penny,” September 2017

* * *

It’s a clammy summer night. You’re 24, and you call a suicide hotline.

The nice lady who answers is probably in her seventies. She is very understanding as you explain to her that hundreds of people, thousands of strangers, are saying awful things about you, that some of them seem to really want to hurt you. You don’t know why. You’re just a writer, and you didn’t expect this. But some of them tell you in detail their fantasies of your rape and murder.

The nice lady is very sweet as she asks you if these voices ever tell you to do things. Yes, they tell you to stop writing. You inform the nice lady about this in a creepy whisper because your family is sleeping nearby and you don’t want to wake or worry them. These strangers tell you you don’t deserve to live, let alone have a newspaper column. Do they tell you to hurt yourself? Yes, every day.

The nice lady tells you to hold the line, because if it’s alright, she’s going to transfer you to one of her colleagues with specialist training.

No, wait, you say. You’re not hearing voices. You’re not delusional.  The nice lady can Google you. This is really happening.

* * *

The internet hates women. Everyone knows that by now, and nobody precisely approves, but we’ve reached a point of collective tolerance. It’s just the way of the world, and if you can’t handle it, honey, delete your account. Stop engaging online. Cut yourself off from friends, family, and professional contacts, shut down your business, blow up your social capital, stop learning, stop talking, just stop. Or else.

The U.N. Broadband Commission tells us that one in five young women has been sexually harassed online. Amnesty International’s latest report suggested that over three-quarters of women and girls expected violence and abuse if they expressed an opinion online. “Online” is the least significant word in those sentences. I have been asked enough times if “the internet is bad for women.” And yes, there is reason enough to warn your daughter, your partner, your friend to watch out for herself online, to think twice before “putting herself out there.” You’d warn her in much the same way that you might warn her not to walk through town alone at night, not to wear a short skirt, not to let her guard down, not to relax, ever. And the message is the same: The future, like the past, is not for you. You may visit, but only if you behave.

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Uncomfortable Silences: A Walk in Myanmar

Myanmar, photo courtesy the author

David Fettling | Longreads | March 2018 | 19 minutes (5,019 words)

Now what I remember most about him is what he said about the Rohingya: that they were troublemakers, not really citizens of his country, undeserving of sympathy, that he hated them. He had said it standing under a banyan tree, and I had noticed, again, his dress: he was wearing a longyi, a Burmese sarong, and with it, new-looking, Western hiking boots. His longyi’s knot was tied impeccably. His boots appeared to me to not quite fit him.

But I spent three days and walked 50 kilometers with him before he said this. Through a trekking agency I’d arranged to meet him in Kalaw, in hill-country in central Myanmar, and took an overnight bus there from Yangon. The bus was ultra-modern, air-conditioned, and near-empty. Arriving at dawn, I disembarked into cold air and a fog that obscured the tops of pine trees. I found the café where we were to meet, ordered a tea. Every few minutes a man sidled up to me and asked if I needed a guide. When I said I had one already they looked not merely disappointed but resentful; slinking away, I saw them lingering on the café’s margins.

This was a year ago, so Myanmar was still in-vogue: after decades of oppressive military government and isolation internationally, it had begun to ‘open’ and appeared to be moving toward democratization. A perception of the country as a dramatic ‘good-news story’ — a newly-liberated populace, pursuing long-denied opportunities — was drawing increasing international interest. I badly wanted to see Myanmar and Kalaw through this lens; but those sullen, hands-in-pockets-would-be-guides kept straying into my field of vision.

He arrived fifteen minutes late. He looked extremely young: early twenties, I guessed. He introduced himself as Thomas — I blinked, asked him to repeat it. Thomas was at once exuberantly friendly and palpably nervous: as he met me he profusely apologized. “I’m sorry, sir” — I never got him to stop calling me sir — “I am running late. I still have to get some things from the supermarket. I am running late, I am sorry. I think maybe you will write this on TripAdvisor.” I told him it was no problem, and we walked two streets over, not to a supermarket but to a small, dowdy grocery store. Thomas disappeared; I waited outside. Next-door was an internet café. Young men played computer games, their faces near-expressionless. The fog was clearing to a powder-blue sky, yet I felt a sense of anti-climax: this, apparently, was Myanmar’s transformation in actuality. Thomas reappeared; walking quickly, he continued to apologize. “I am sorry about this,” he said, into the chilly blue morning. “I am sorry about this.”
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You’ve Reached the Winter of Our Discontent

Universal Pictures, Illustration by Katie Kosma

Rebecca Schuman | Longreads | March 2018 | 9 minutes (2,305 words)

 

The ’90s Are Old is a Longreads series by Rebecca Schuman, wherein she unpacks the cultural legacy of a decade that refuses to age gracefully.

* * *

After Richard Linklater’s Slacker became an unexpected box-office hit in 1991, every major studio in the United States dropped untold amounts of money trying to clone its success — that is, to duplicate a film that cost $23,000 to make and whose entire raison d’etre was that it did not care about success.

Some offerings, such as Cameron Crowe’s Singles (1992), succeeded in spite of their own distributors’ low expectations. Others, such as then “indie comic” (!) Ben Stiller’s Reality Bites, succeeded in spite of, or probably because of, their own craven cynicism. (There was also Threesome, Lord help us all.) These films relied, without exception, on two crucial tropes: the cynical cool of rejecting ambition and popularity, and the mopey, tortured Gen X man-child who embodied that cool.

In the nineties, the rules for how to be cool were pretty simple.

  1. Having a job (or four) was cool, as long as you didn’t try very hard at it. (Having a “career trajectory” was decidedly not cool, which is probably why I am 41 years old and have never had one to speak of.)
  2. Wearing a vintage grease-covered gas-station attendant uniform as a jacket was cool if its original owner was that weird older cousin who bought you beer. (Buying an expensive jacket crafted to look like a vintage-replica gas-station attendant uniform was extremely not cool.)
  3. Weed was cool. (Doing coke and being all ’80s yuppie aggro was not cool.)
  4. Being nasty about famous people who were way too popular was cool, which is probably why I thought it acceptable to proclaim, in the arts column I wrote with my friend Justin for my college newspaper, that I wanted to shoot Jewel. Shoot Jewel! What did Jewel ever do to me? She seems very nice. But Jewel didn’t subscribe to the Vassar Miscellany News, so it was a victimless crime.
  5. Numbered lists of how to be cool were definitely not cool.
  6. It was cool to view everything at an ironic distance, including the concept of ironic distance itself.

In the nineties, the worst insult you could lob — or get — was to be a sellout. Dominant mass-produced mainstream culture — literally anything, the exact moment it became popular enough to no longer be confined to your friend’s basement and maybe a ‘zine — deserved to be mocked. If you were lucky enough to like something before it got big, then you found yourself flush with the only currency Gen X accepted. Read more…

The Last Days of Jerry Brown

Longreads Pick

First elected governor of California in 1974, his progressive values have put him ahead of the curve, though his environmental policy and disorganization also earned him criticism. He’s now the state’s oldest governor. This is the story of his last days in office, and a portrait of his 40 years of public service.

Author: Andy Kroll
Published: Mar 18, 2018
Length: 22 minutes (5,745 words)

Why Is Northern Mexico’s Thriving Resale Clothing Business Illegal?

AP Photo/Julie Jacobson

Americans bury 21 billion pounds of clothing in landfills each year. That’s sick. Soil and water are used to grow cotton, which gets treated with poisonous herbicides and pesticides, only to bury it back in the ground? For Racked, Eileen Guo reports from Southern California about Mexico’s secondhand clothing economy that has developed around American excess.

A large portion of Goodwill clothing ends up in discount bins in a warehouse a mile north of the US-Mexico border, at what Guo calls “the end of the nonprofit’s supply chain.” There, Mexican citizens buy them at low prices to sell back in Mexico, sometimes at specialized resale stores, often at open-air markets and online. This system is certainly better than burying clothes in a landfill; people can use them and make a living. Unfortunately, the practice is illegal, because Mexico’s textile industry and manufacturing interests say the used clothing trade competes with their legitimate business. In response, enterprising people have created an elaborate system for smuggling the contraband that should not be contraband and making what is truly an honest living.

This is because Mexico’s protectionism of its clothing makers isn’t just targeted at the used clothing trade. When China entered the World Trade Organization in 2001, the Mexican government imposed tariffs of up to 1,000 percent on Chinese goods, which ultimately decreased to 20 percent by 2011. And it wasn’t until 2012 that “affordable” fast fashion brands like H&M, Forever 21, and Gap arrived in the country. Even then, they were still out of reach of most shoppers both because of their location (only in Mexico City) and prices (for example, 69 pesos or $5.30 for a pair of boxer briefs, far too expensive for 2012’s annual household per capita income of $3,358.29.)

So along with American guns (much easier to buy in the US given its lax gun laws), California weed (higher-quality than Mexican marijuana, following legalization), and auto parts (legal, but often undeclared to avoid paying high customs duties), secondhand clothing cannot just cross the border; it must be smuggled.

Forced underground, the used clothing trade thrives as one of the “weapons of the weak,” as anthropologist Gauthier describes “the things that people do to just survive under conditions of economic exploitation.”

All along the border, this is done through ant trading, a process by which small volumes of contraband are brought over the border to avoid suspicion or, at the very least, mitigate the risk of confiscation if caught.

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The Way We Treat Our Pets Is More Paleolithic Than Medieval

Egyptian mummy of a cat from the Louvre's collection. (Photo by CM Dixon/Print Collector/Getty Images)

John Bradshaw | Excerpt adapted from The Animals Among Us: How Pets Make Us Human | Basic Books | October 2017 | 18 minutes (4,861 words)

 

We have no direct evidence proving that people living prior to 10,000 bce had pets. Any kept by hunter-gatherers must have included species tamed from the wild, which would leave little archaeological evidence: their remains would be impossible to distinguish from those of animals killed for food or kept for other — perhaps ritualistic — purposes.

Since we don’t have evidence from the prehistoric past, we must look to that gleaned from the past century. A remarkable number of hunter-gatherer and small-scale horticultural societies that persisted into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in remote parts of the world — Amazonia, New Guinea, the Arctic, and elsewhere — give us insight into the behaviors of earlier Stone Age societies. We can start by asking whether hunter-gatherers already kept pets when they were first documented, before they had time to acquire the habit from the West.

It turns out that many small-scale “Paleolithic” societies kept pets of some kind: sometimes dogs, but mostly tamed wild animals, captured when young and then brought up as part of the human family. Native Americans and the Ainu of northern Japan kept bear cubs; the Inuit, wolf cubs; the Cochimi from Baja California, racoons; indigenous Amazonian societies, tapir, agouti, coati, and many types of New World monkeys; the Muisca of Colombia, ocelots and margays (two local species of wild cat); the Yagua of Peru, sloths; the Dinka of the Sudan, hyenas and Old World monkeys; native Fijians, flying foxes and lizards; the Penan of Borneo, sun bears and gibbons.

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Seeking a Roadmap for the New American Middle Class

The next American middle class
Illustration by Zoë van Dijk

Livia Gershon | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (1,950 words)

Over the past few months, Starbucks, CVS, and Walmart announced higher wages and a range of other benefits like paid parental leave and stock options. Despite what the brands say in their press releases, the changes probably had little to do with the Republican corporate tax cuts, but they do reflect a broader economic prosperity, complete with a tightening a labor market. In the past couple of years, real wages hit their highest levels ever, and even the lowest-paid workers started getting raises. As Matt Yglesias wrote at Vox, “for the first time in a long time, the underlying labor market is really healthy.”

But it doesn’t feel that way, does it? From the new college graduate facing an unstable contract job and mounds of debt to the 30-year-old in Detroit picking up an extra shift delivering pizzas this weekend, it just seems like we’re missing something we used to have.

In a 2016 Conference Board survey, only 50.8 percent of U.S. workers said they were satisfied with their jobs, compared with 61 percent in 1987 when the survey was first done. In fact, job satisfaction hasn’t come close to that first reading in this century. We’re also more anxious and depressed today than we’ve been since the depths of the recession, and we’re dying younger — particularly if we’re poor.

So maybe this is a good moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers. Imagine for a moment that everything goes right. The long, slow recovery from the Great Recession continues, rather than reversing itself and plunging us back into high unemployment. Increased automation doesn’t displace a million truck drivers but creates new, more skilled driving jobs. The retirement of the Baby Boomers reduces labor supply, driving up wages at nursing homes, call centers, and the rest of the gigantic portion of the economy where pay is low.

Would this restore dignity to work and a sense of optimism to the nation? Would it bring back the kind of pride we associate with the 1950s GM line worker?

I don’t think it would. I think it would take far more fundamental changes to win justice for American workers. But I also think it’s possible to strive for something way better than the postwar era we often remember as a Golden Age for workers.

Let’s start by dispelling the idea that postwar advances for American workers were some kind of natural inevitability that could never be replicated today. Yes, in the 1940s, the United States was in a commanding position of economic dominance over potential rivals decimated by war. And yes, companies were able to translate the manufacturing capacity and technological know-how built up through the military into astounding new bounty for consumers. But, when it comes to profitability, business has also had plenty of boom times in recent decades, with no parallel advances for workers.

This is the moment to stop and think about what really good economic news would look like for American workers.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country. Page through Working, Studs Terkel’s classic 1972 book of interviews with a broad range of workers, and factories come across as a kind of hellscape. A spot welder at a Ford plant in Chicago describes standing in one place all day, with constant noise too loud to yell over, suffering frequent burns and blood poisoning from a broken drill, at risk of being fired if he leaves the line to use the bathroom. “Repetition is such that, if you were to think about the job itself, you’d slowly go out of your mind,” he told Terkel.

The stable, routine corporate office work that also thrived in the postwar era certainly wasn’t as unpleasant as that, but there’s a whole world of cultural figures, from Willy Loman to Michael Scott, that suggest it was never an inherent font of meaning.

The fact that the Golden Age brought greater wealth, pride, and status to American workers, both blue- and white-collar, wasn’t really about the booming economy or the nature of the work. It was a result of power politics and deliberate decisions. In the 1930s and ‘40s, unionized workers, having spent decades battling for power on the job, at severe risk to life and livelihood, were a powerful force. And CEOs of massive corporations like General Motors were scared enough of radical workers, and hopeful enough about the prospects of shared prosperity, to strike some deals.

A consensus about how jobs ought to work emerged from these years. Employers would provide decent pay, health insurance, and pensions for large swaths of the country’s workers. The federal government would build a legal framework to address labor disputes and keep corporate monopolies from getting out of control. Politicians from both parties would march in the Labor Day parade every year, and workers would get their fair share of the new American prosperity.

Today, of course, the postwar consensus has broken down. Even if average workers are making more money than we used to, the gap between average and super-rich makes us feel like we’re getting nowhere. We may be able to afford iPhones and big-screen TVs, but we’ve got minimal chances of getting our kids into the elite colleges that define the narrow road to success.

And elite shows of respect for workers ring more and more hollow. Unions, having drastically declined in membership, no longer have a seat at some of the tables they used to. Politicians celebrate businesses’ creation of jobs, not workers’ accomplishment of necessary and useful labor. A lot of today’s masters of industry clearly believe that workers are an afterthought, since robots will soon be able to do anyone’s jobs except theirs.

But let’s not get too nostalgic about the Golden Age. As many readers who are not white men may be shouting at me by this point, there was another side to these mid-century ideas about work. The entire ideological framework defining a job with dignity was inextricably tied up with race and gender.

From the start of the industrial revolution, employers used racism to divide workers. And union calls for respect and higher wages were often inseparable from demands that companies hire only white men. The Golden Age didn’t just provide white, male workers with higher wages than everyone else but also what W.E.B. Du Bois called the “public and psychological wage” of a sense of racial superiority.

Just as importantly, white men in the boom years also won stay-at-home wives. With rising male wages, many white women — and a much smaller number of women of other races — could now focus all their energy on caring for home and family. For the women, that meant escape from working at a mill or cooking meals and doing laundry for strangers. But it also meant greater economic dependence on their husbands. For the men, it was another boost to their living standard and status.

Golden Age corporate policies, union priorities, and laws didn’t create the ideal of the white, breadwinner-headed family, but they did reinforce it. Social Security offered benefits to workers and their dependents rather than to all citizens, and excluded agricultural and domestic workers, who were disproportionately black. The GI Bill helped black men far less than white ones and left out most women except to the extent that their husbands’ benefits trickled down to them.

Let’s also set aside the nostalgia about how we used to make shit in this country.

Today, aside from growing income inequality, unstable jobs, and the ever-skyward climb of housing and education costs, a part of the pain white, male workers are feeling is the loss of their unquestioned sense of superiority.

So, can we imagine a future Golden Age? Is there a way to make working for Starbucks fulfill all of us the way we remember line work at GM fulfilling white men? Maybe. With an incredible force of political will, it might be possible to rejigger the economy so that modern jobs keep getting better. It would start with attacking income inequality head-on. The government could bust up monopolistic tech giants, encourage profit-sharing, and maybe even take a step toward redistributing inherited wealth. We’d also need massive social change to ensure people of color and women equal access to the good new jobs, and men and white people would need to learn to live with a loss of the particular psychological wages of masculinity and whiteness.

But even all that would still fail to address one thing that made work in the Golden Age fulfilling for men: the wives. Stay-at-home moms of the mid-twentieth century weren’t just a handy status symbol for their men. They were household managers and caregivers, shouldering the vast majority of child-raising labor and creating a space where male workers could rest and be served. And supporting a family was a key ingredient that made otherwise draining, demeaning jobs into a source of meaning.

Few men or women see a return to that ideal as a good idea today. But try imagining what good, full-time work for everyone looks like without it. Feminist scholar Nancy Fraser describes that vision as the Universal Breadwinner model — well-paid jobs, with all the pride and status that come with them, for all men and women. She notes that it would take massive spending to outsource childcare and other traditionally unpaid “female” work — particularly since those jobs would need to be good jobs too. It would also leave out people with personal responsibilities that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, hand over to strangers, as well as many with serious disabilities. And it certainly wouldn’t solve the problem many mothers and fathers report today of having too little time to spend with family.

A really universal solution to the problem of bad jobs would have to go beyond “good jobs” in the Golden Age model. It would be a world where we can take pride in our well-paid jobs at Starbucks without making them the center of our identities. That could mean many more part-time jobs with flexible hours, good pay, and room for advancement. It could mean decoupling benefits like health care and retirement earnings from employment and providing a hefty child allowance. Certainly, it would mean a social and psychological transformation that lets both men and women see caring work, and other things outside paid employment, as fully as valuable and meaningful as a job.

As a bonus, this kind of solution would also make sense when we do fall back into recession, or if the robots do finally come for a big chunk of our jobs.

All this might sound absurdly utopian. We are, after all, living in a world where celebrity business leaders claim to work 80-plus hour weeks while politicians enthusiastically deny health care to people who can’t work.

But the postwar economy didn’t happen on its own. It was the product of a brutal, decades-long fight led by workers with an inspiring, flawed vision. And today, despite everything, new possibilities are emerging. Single-payer health care is a popular idea, and “socialism” has rapidly swung from a slur to a legitimate part of the political spectrum. Self-help books like The 4-Hour Work Week — which posit the possibility of a radically different work-life balance, albeit based on individual moxie rather than social change — have become a popular genre. Young, black organizers in cities across the country are developing their own cooperative economic models. And if there’s any positive lesson we can take from the current political moment, it’s that you never know what could happen in America. Maybe a new Golden Age is possible. It’s at least worth taking some time to think about how we would want it to look.

***

Livia Gershon is a freelance journalist based in New Hampshire. She has written for the Guardian, the Boston Globe, HuffPost, Aeon and other places.