Welcome to Current Affairs. My name is Nathan Robinson. I'm the editor in chief of Current Affairs

Magazine. I am joined today by Alyssa Court, the executive director of the Economic Hardship

Reporting Project, and the author of the new book, Bootsdrapt, Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream.

Alyssa Korn, thank you for joining us on Current Affairs.

Oh, thank you so much.

Happy to be here.

Okay, so you open the book with some correspondence you tend to receive a certain type of correspondence

from a certain type of person with a certain type of attitude.

And I want to talk about that attitude.

And this is the attitude that says,

as I mentioned, you were headed the economic departure reporting project,

so you do a lot of reporting on poverty.

And so the responses you get often are people who are not sympathetic to the situation

of those upon whom you report.

Is that fair to say?

Yeah, I mean, this is like the comments pages and people emailing me personally,

call-ins if you're on television, like a C-SPAN or like a radio show,

kind of, I call it the P-Nod Gallery, and it's these voices that are like constantly critiquing

anyone who is in the falling down, middle class and onwards towards poverty, including subjects

of my last book, probably the

subjects of my new book, and many of our contributors, because at EHRP Economic Heartship Reporting

Project, 37% or so of our contributors describe themselves as working class or working for or near

...