Search Results for: health

Is Journalism a Form of Activism?

Portrait of journalist and suffragist Ida B. Wells, 1920. (Photo by Chicago History Museum/Getty Images)

Danielle Tcholakian | Longreads | March 2018 | 17 minutes (4,071 words)

Last weekend, as March For Our Lives protests took place all across the country, the student co-editor-in-chief of the Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School newspaper said on the CNN show “Reliable Sources” that journalism is a form of activism.

I was not surprised to see her quickly criticized on Twitter. Josh Kraushaar of the National Journal tweeted that the belief the student espoused is what’s “killing trust in our profession,” adding in a second tweet that the mentality the student shared “is more common among younger journalists.”

But I was surprised to see how many journalists came to the students’ defense, agreeing that journalism is a form of activism. They were highly respected, solid, investigative journalists. Los Angeles Times writer Matt Pearce asked, “Does anybody think that even the fairest and most diligent of investigative reporters wrote their horrifying stories hoping that nothing would change?” The Washington Post‘s Wesley Lowery asserted, “Even beyond big, long investigations, journalists perform acts of activism every day. Any good journalist is an activist for truth, in favor of transparency, on the behalf of accountability. It is our literal job to pressure powerful people and institutions via our questions.” Nikole Hannah-Jones, a reporter for The New York Times Magazine and arguably one of the greatest living reporters today, quoted Lowery’s tweet, agreeing with it. Read more…

Bending the Straight Line of Queer History

 

Manuel Betancourt | Longreads | March 2018 | 8 minutes (2,170 words)

 

Confronted by a historical record that mostly excludes and often disparages them, queer communities have long been forced to write their own histories — or, more often, to scrub them clean. After all, such histories can be dangerous to write, and the act of memorializing can sometimes feel like just another burden to bear.

In Feeling Backward: Loss and the Politics of Queer History, Heather Love warns against this, writing that “given the new opportunities available to some gays and lesbians, the temptation to forget — to forget the outrages and humiliations of gay and lesbian history and to ignore the ongoing suffering of those not borne up by the rising tide of gay normalization — is stronger than ever.”

Three recent novels, all of them decades-spanning narratives centered on LGBTQ characters, are attempts to connect recent queer history with contemporary gay life. Alan Hollinghurst’s The Sparsholt Affair, John Boyne’s The Heart’s Invisible Furies, and Tim Murphy’s Christodora are each expansive visions of post-war queer life. Set in London, Dublin, and New York City respectively, they tell stories about men and women living in the decades before and after gay liberation, through the AIDS crisis, and into the present. They depict everything from restroom cruising encounters and gay conversion therapy appointments to ACT UP meetings and late-night Grindr hookups. And they ask us to consider how past traumas haunt the 21st century.
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.
Read more…

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.

Read more…

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…

Growing Up Around Funeral Homes Didn’t Prepare Me for Death

Jodie Briggs | Longreads | March 2018 | 16 minutes (3,925 words)

I have never been afraid of dead bodies. Their frequent appearance in my family’s funeral home quickly normalized the sight of motionless limbs in elegant steel caskets. We were the lone proprietors of death in my childhood home of Denton, North Carolina, and my familiarity with the end of life led me to assume a certain ease with mortality. Or so I thought.

***

Every day after school, I walked to the funeral home with my older brother. My grandmother, who was 79 when I was born, lived in the apartment above the business with her two sisters, and our octogenarian babysitters delighted in feeding us Little Debbie Zebra Cakes and teaching us to play card games. When my brother got too old to play, I began slipping downstairs to practice my dance routines in the empty layout rooms.

The funeral home meant everything to my dad, who had grown up poor in an even more rural town 15 miles from Denton. Raised in a house that lacked indoor plumbing and forced to use an outhouse until he was in high school, my dad vowed to make something of himself. He tore a ruthless path through his teen years, raising hogs for slaughter for family income, risking teen ridicule by driving the school bus for a small stipend, and eventually making it through college and working his way up in the funeral business from summer intern to owner.

Our life ran on death. The entire family was recruited into the business even at tender ages. I was 8 or 9 when my dad asked me to catch the phones while he stepped out. He assured me that we probably wouldn’t get a death call but that if we did I only needed to take down the name of the dead, the phone number, and the next of kin. So, naturally, that’s exactly what happened, except that I got nervous and told them to call back.

As teens, my brother and I worked in the funeral home answering the phone, moving flowers, sneakily reading books (me) and washing cars, picking up bodies from the morgue, and observing embalmings (my brother). Two decades into her school-teaching career, my mom also joined the business. But no one could outwork my dad, who prided himself on working up to 12 hours per day, seven days per week, well into his 70s.

While my brother joined my parents in the business after college, I was eager to leave our town of 1,100 and eventually settled in New York, where I reveled in the anonymity, the public transportation, and the seemingly endless array of bookstores. But I was close to my family and visited often. Each visit brought the same barrage of questions from my parents’ friends, funeral home employees, and, usually, whoever was sitting in the neighboring booth at lunch: Was I married? (No.) Did I really feel safe living in New York? (Yes.) And wasn’t I glad to be out of the city for a few days? (Um, no. That’s why I lived there.)

We were the lone proprietors of death in my childhood home of Denton, North Carolina, and my familiarity with the end of life led me to assume a certain ease with mortality.

The shape of my visits depended on how busy the funeral home was. Dinner plans were contingent upon whether or not local characters like Flossie McDowell, a frequent funeral home visitor, made it through the night. I’d often wait around the funeral home until my dad felt content to leave. “Who’s on call?” he’d shout to the entire office, although he likely knew the answer. The employees rotated being the designated remover of bodies that died in the night. My brother had sometimes gone with my dad on these calls of duty when we were kids but I never joined in.

“Your daddy’s getting mighty old to clock in all these hours, ain’t he?” someone would inevitably say with a wink toward me and a nod toward my dad. Dad might let a good-natured curse word slip as he jumped into the air and, even in his late 70s, click his heels together before landing with a laugh.
Read more…

Hoffnung um jeden Preis

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Lindsay Gellman | Longreadsmärz 2018 | 23 Minuten (5,717 wörter)

Read the story in English

Kurz nachdem Kate Colgans Mutter, Janet, im vergangenen Sommer in einem Krankenhaus in der Nähe von Manchester, Großbritannien, aus der Narkose aufwachte, hatte sie eine einfache Bitte: “Bring mich nach Deutschland.”

Also hat Kate, 25, die Familien-Limousine mit einem Dachträger ausgestattet und mit Gepäck beladen. Sie verfügte die Entlassung ihrer Mutter aus dem Krankenhaus gegen ärztliche Anordnung und hob sie vorsichtig vom Rollstuhl auf den Beifahrersitz. Kates damaliger Verlobter Chad fuhr sie dann zusammen mit der kleinen Tochter des Paares 16 Stunden am Stück in eine Privatklinik am Rande von Dornstetten, einer ruhigen mittelalterlichen Stadt zwischen Stuttgart und Freiburg.

Bei Janet wurde im September 2016 metastasierender Magenkrebs diagnostiziert. Ärzte des National Health Service gaben ihr höchstens ein Jahr zu leben und boten nur eine palliative Chemotherapie an.

Eine palliative Therapie zu wählen erschien Kate wie das Eingeständnis eines Aufgebens. Sie durchsuchte das Internet nach anderen Möglichkeiten, und stieß auf die Hallwang Private Onkologische Klinik, eine Einrichtung die außerhalb des streng regulierten deutschen Krankenhauswesens operiert. Die Hallwang Klinik hat sich in den letzten Jahren inmitten einer Schar von Krebskliniken, die in Deutschland Fuß gefasst haben, profiliert, und vermarktet sich als eine Art Luxus-Spa mit maßgeschneiderten Behandlungen, einer idyllischen Lage im Schwarzwald, und delikaten Mahlzeiten, die in einem Esszimmer eingenommen werden.

Die Online-Testimonials der Klinik sahen vielversprechend aus, und so erkundigten sich die Colgans nach der Behandlung. Nach Durchsicht von Janets Krankenakte sagte ein Arzt der Hallwang-Klinik den Colgans, dass mit Hilfe eines experimentellen Medikamenten-Cocktails, der anderswo nicht ohne weiteres zu haben sei, Janet eine Remission ihrer Krankheit erreichen könne. Aber der Preis sei enorm: mehr als 100.000 Euro. Die Klinik rechnet nicht über Krankenversicherungen ab und verlangt in der Regel eine Anzahlung von 80 Prozent, bevor mit der Behandlung begonnen wird.

Eine Chance auf Remission schien einen Versuch wert zu sein — um jeden Preis.

Read more…

The Last Resort

Illustration by Xenia Latii

Lindsay Gellman | LongreadsMarch 2018 | 23 minutes (5,754 words)

Read the story in German

Soon after Kate Colgan’s mother, Janet, awoke from surgery in a hospital near Manchester, U.K., last summer, she made a simple request of her daughter: “Get me to Germany.”

So Kate, then 25, fitted the family sedan with a roof rack and piled it with luggage. She arranged for her mother’s voluntary discharge from the hospital, against doctors’ wishes, and eased her from a wheelchair into the car’s passenger seat. Kate’s then-fiancé Chad drove them, along with the couple’s infant daughter, some 16 hours straight to a private treatment clinic on the outskirts of Dornstetten, a quiet medieval town in southern Germany.

Janet was diagnosed with metastatic stomach cancer in September 2016, when she was 54 years old. British doctors with the National Health Service gave her up to a year to live and offered only palliative care with chemotherapy.

Choosing palliative care felt to Kate like giving up. She scoured the web for other options for her mother, and came across the Hallwang Private Oncology Clinic, a for-profit institution that operates outside of the strictly regulated German hospital system. The Hallwang Clinic has emerged in recent years as the highest profile of a bevy of cancer clinics to gain traction in Germany. It markets itself as a luxury spa of sorts, touting its individualized treatments, pastoral setting in southern Germany’s Black Forest, and delicately plated dining-room meals.

The clinic’s online testimonials looked promising, so the Colgans inquired about treatment. After reviewing Janet’s medical records, a Hallwang Clinic doctor told the Colgans a cocktail of experimental drugs not widely available elsewhere could mean eventual remission for Janet. But the price would be staggering — more than $120,000. The clinic does not accept insurance and typically requires an 80% deposit before treatment can begin.

A chance at remission seemed worth a try — at any cost.

Read more…

Drowning In a River of Murky Thought

Rebecca Droke/Pittsburgh Post-Gazette via AP

Sometimes our minds play tricks on us. We fixate on mistakes. We justify indulging cravings we can’t control. We think we hear the baby crying, but it’s just the breeze.

At The Believer, Barrett Swanson examines how he got lost in a maze of conspiratorial thinking after his high school friend Luke drowned in the Mississippi River. An accidental death seemed too unlikely a scenario to believe, but questioning that explanation opened grieving locals up to the possibility that predatory forces lurked around their town. Swanson was still mourning his friend while earning a PhD, and his academic training and solitary hours soon had him clinging to unnerving explanations and theories culled online. He had to examine his own mind to move through the paranoia and properly grieve.

When you’re supposed to be working on your dissertation—its own arduous search for meaning—your days are a wilderness: unscheduled, improvised, free. You can spend whole afternoons trawling Instagram or binge-watching prestige television. In my case, entire days were lost to conjectures about Luke’s death. For hours on end I would watch clips of Larry King Live, Anderson Cooper 360, and Geraldo Rivera, all of which featured interviews with Detectives Gannon and Duarte, who often mentioned Luke by name. On After Hours AM, a true-crime podcast whose aesthetic could be described as Dude, Where’s My Car? meets Unsolved Mysteries, a retired FBI agent named John DeSouza maintained that the Smiley Face Killers were a cult of psychopaths who drowned alpha males as sacrificial offerings to the ancient dark gods Moloch and Baal. This is how my days passed: afternoons spent in the echo chamber of television and the thickets of comment-board conspiracy, evenings dedicated to The Archaeology of Knowledge and Simulacra and Simulation. Flipping through my course texts at night, I often highlighted any passage that seemed even tangentially related to my headspace. “In a life we are surrounded by death,” Wittgenstein writes. “So too in the health of our intellect we are surrounded by madness.”

Curiously, the amateur sleuths I encountered on the internet often deployed the same literary frameworks that guided my seminar on critical theory. Several Footprints at the River’s Edge commenters riffed on nautical folklore, suggesting that perhaps, like the sirens who tempted Odysseus, covens of attractive females were luring victims to the rivers. One East Coast gumshoe, posting under the screen name Undead Molly, offered a Marxist interpretation: a mob of blue-collar workers, resentful of rich college students, was carrying out the drownings as an act of class warfare. One company in particular had come under Undead Molly’s suspicions: a manufacturing outfit called Trane Heating & Cooling, whose headquarters were based in La Crosse, where six of the bodies, including Luke’s, had been found. “Trane technicians travel in vans,” Molly wrote, “and have access to substances which could stun a healthy young man into unconsciousness.”

Read the story

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.