Music

Hey everyone, welcome back to the Jack Evan show. I am Jen Pan here with Kale Brooks. Kale, what's new? How are you?

I'm good just chilling, you know, just actually I had COVID last week, so I'm getting over that. So I've been struggling along.

Yeah, I've been very like strategically muting coughs. So, you know, you will not hear a cough in the stream. I promise you.

How are you doing?

I'm doing okay. I don't know if people noticed, but we were off last week. And unfortunately, there was some sad news last week also, which is that the great writer Barbara Aaron Reich died.

We're both fans. I don't know if you have any quick thoughts, Kale, but we felt like we should say something since since Barbara Aaron Reich, I think, has been a huge influence not just on us personally, but obviously the broader left.

And rightfully, you know, while most of the world was mourning the queen, we were mourning the real queen, the left's queen truly actually.

Yeah, but Barbara obviously was a journalist. She was a prolific author. She was a thoroughly committed political activist who spent much of her life, much of her writing trying to expose the cruelty of modern capitalism and highlighting the needs and the humanity of the poor.

Yeah, she also wrote extensively on health care as well as gender. She was like a socialist feminist in the best sense of both of those labels.

Her most important work includes nickel and dime, fear of falling, bait and switch, bright-sided hearts of men. The recently released natural causes. And of course, something that has probably featured pretty prominently throughout what we do here is her writing on the professional managerial class.

I actually came into contact with Barbara's writing because of nickel and dime, which was assigned because of a high school English class.

So I wasn't like a great English student by any means. I was fine, but like I didn't always keep up with the reading, but I very clearly remember reading that entire book and it actually affected me quite a bit.

And so, you know, and as she and others have pointed out, the book, you know, which is dealing, it's like detailing her experience trying to live off of minimum wage jobs.

It was pretty much primarily written for middle-class people to actually have a better understanding of the realities of working class life in America.

So I hope that, you know, me and others, you know, our politics of middle-class Bernie Bros.

Hopefully, you know, it was a great deal to, you know, our public eye schools assigning Barbara Aronite to us.

Well, on public education, as did Barbara Aronite.

I do want to say about nickel and dime, so that came out in 2001. And as you noted, it is her first-person account of basically showing the impossibility of trying to live on a low-age job in America.

And, you know, that impossibility is obviously obvious to anybody who works those jobs.

But I think that's something that is important to remember is like the mainstream media and like even huge parts of the left were not talking about that in 2001.

Like this is, you know, obviously way before Bernie Sanders, this is before Occupy Wall Street.

...