Sublime

Socially enlightened members of the educated elite tend to be disturbed by the widening gap between rich and poor and are therefore made somewhat uncomfortable by the fact that their own family income now tops $80,000. Some of them dream of social justice yet went to a college where the tuition costs could feed an entire village in Rwanda for a yea

She came up here for college, but her daddy got cancer, and the farm got sold, and ends stopped meeting, and she had to drop out.

Far below, they see a dim world of processed food, obesity, divorce, addiction, online-education scams, stagnant wages, rising morbidity rates—and they pledge to do whatever they can to keep their children from falling. They’ll stay married, cook organic family dinners, read aloud at bedtime every night, take out a crushing mortgage on a house in a

our culture has configured women’s liberty as corrosion, and for a long time, there was no way for a woman to be both free and good.

In a society where the good is defined in terms of profit rather than in terms of human need, there must always be some group of people who, through systematized oppression, can be made to feel surplus, to occupy the place of the dehumanized inferior.

Many workers in the contemporary economy are precarious service workers, cleaning the homes and offices of those with stable jobs, making other people’s lives seamless.