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This Is Hell!

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream / Alissa Quart

This Is Hell!

This Is Hell!

News

4.9937 Ratings

🗓️ 24 April 2023

⏱️ 79 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Alissa Quart joins This is Hell! to discuss her new book, Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream. Alissa Quart is a journalist and executive director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.

Transcript

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0:00.0

I need to do it but I don't know why

0:07.0

I'm that way

0:15.0

I'm that way. that way.

0:17.0

Make a turn.

0:18.0

Make a turn. Oh, uh, okay. Oh, uh.

0:24.0

Oh,

0:25.0

Mee, it's back!

0:27.0

Make it back! This is hell.

0:47.0

live from the United States where capitalism is the virus. This is hell.

0:50.0

Have you ever tried to lift yourself up by your boot straps?

0:55.0

Well, please don't.

0:57.1

You can't.

0:58.1

You'll just end up hurting yourself, falling flat on your face.

1:01.3

Or elsewhere, according to a website called Useless Etymology, your face or elsewhere.

1:02.8

According to a website called useless etymology, which apparently is not all that

1:07.5

useless, the phrase, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, originated shortly before the turn of the 20th century.

1:15.6

It's attributed to a late 1800s physics school book that contained the example question, why cannot a man lift himself by pulling up on his

1:27.4

bootstraps because that's the way the people used to phrase things the expression

1:31.6

pulling yourself up by your boot straps was understood to mean

1:35.6

attempting to do something absurd until roughly the 1920s at which point it started to

1:41.3

evolve toward the current understanding which is to do something. at which

1:43.4

it started to evolve toward the current understanding, which is to do something without any outside help.

...

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