Quotes from Eula Biss

She was poisoned, but the reason she was crying was that her husband didn't want her anymore.

More than two hundred antilynching bills were introduced to the U.S. Congress during the twentieth century, but none were passed. Seven presidents lobbied for antilynching legislation, and the House of Representatives passed three separate measures, each of which was blocked by the Senate.

Between the 1930s and the 1970s, urban renewal programs demolished 1,600 black neighborhoods, and 90 percent of the low-income units destroyed for urban renewal were never replaced. Between 1934 and 1962 the FHA and the Veterans Administration financed more than $120 billlion worth of new housing, but only 2 percent of this went to nonwhite families.

Why is water so often a metaphor for money? Perhaps because we like to believe that our economic system is naturally occurring, not man-made. Maybe the movement of money feels inevitable if you imagine it as water, with only blameless gravity participating in the accumulation of wealth.

This is practice. And practice is all I want out of art.

Some people choose their precarity - evidence that precarity is not just a condition of our time, but a response to it. The precariat includes people who have forgone stable employment and retirement savings for temp work and travel and an uncertain future. Their very existence is unsettling, suggesting, as it does, that there might be something worth more than security.

The musician breaks the rules of work by playing, rather than working. It's queer, in that it's a transgression.

Mother: "He made me feel like I wasn't really a writer if I wasn't published. It was as if my poetry didn't mean anything unless it was accepted by someone else." After

Most people, Wright observes, prefer not to think of class as a means of control or exclusion, but as a collection of things that can be acquired, like property and education. Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.

TIAA is the largest agricultural investor in the world, the third largest commercial real estate manager in the world, and number 80 on the Fortune 500.

I have passed through several classes in my adult life, including the precariat. But I don't believe that to be true. I have always remained, more or less, in the class into which I was born.

Maintenance, she wrote, was the work of protecting progress, sustaining change, preserving the new, and keeping the dust off invention.

Unvaccinated children, a 2004 analysis of CDC data reveals, are more likely to be white, to have an older married mother with a college education, and to live in a household with an income of $75,000 or more—like my child.

In this case, I can only hope that my life, which is my crime, might also serve as my apology.

as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, "Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you." What

But refusing immunity as a form of civil disobedience bears an unsettling resemblance to the very structure the Occupy movement seeks to disrupt- a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent.

A Union soldier serving in the South said of the freedman, "Human or not, there he is in our midst, millions strong; and if he is not educated mentally and morally, he will make us trouble." That, in short, is the theory on which our public school system is based. By 1880 it had already developed its fundamental characteristics—it was, and is, as Michael Katz writes, "universal, tax-supported, free, compulsory, bureaucratic, racist, and class-biased.

in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.

The romance of treason never occurred to us for the brutally simple reason that you can't betray a country you don't have," James Baldwin writes. You can't be a traitor if you've never been a citizen.

Observing that we have waged wars on poverty and drugs as well as cancer, Susan Sontag writes, "Abuse of the military metaphor may be inevitable in

The release loop was tight, but I thought if I was drowning I would be able to pull anything.

Having virtually invented a paid profession and being almost exclusively available to the rich, doctors were suspect to the working class.

In proposing that one truth may derail another, it invites an enduring question—do we believe vaccination to be more monstrous than disease?

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive," John Kenneth Galbraith writes in the great first sentence of The Affluent Society. "But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding.