The inspiration for this episode came from four books that I've read recently, which we will link to in the show notes. The first is Class by Stephanie Land, her sophomore book which functions like a sequel to her

smash hit made. Evicted by Matthew Desmond, a Pulitzer Prize winning masterpiece that reads more like a novel than heavily researched

non-fiction as well as his more recent book, Poverty by America, which felt like Desmond's impassioned and no punches pulled perspective on all the things that

were afraid to say out loud about our relationship with America's poor.

And finally, Palaces for the people. Eric Kleinenburg's work about the way

an investment in social infrastructure rather than just physical infrastructure helps communities

thrive and grow and how receding further and further into our own little private lives

spells disaster for everyone but the very wealthy. So in that sense I think you can think about this episode a little bit like an

audio book report amalgamation both the research that they have inspired me to do and also the connections that their respective works

allowed me to make as I was kind of reading all of them in the same time period.

But my interest in this topic originally began after I read a land's book made, which was a book that

NPR called an unflinching portrayal of a single mom's will to survive. It was an instant hit and in 2021 Netflix turned her memoir

into a limited series that tells her story over 10 poignant gut-wrenching

episodes and after I watched it, I casually mentioned it to a friend that I thought

it was excellent. And my friend said, yeah, you know, I couldn't watch it, I had to turn it off,

it was way too triggering.

Because having grown up with a single mother

who struggled to make ends meet, she said,

it brought up too many distressing emotions

to watch that same struggle play out in 4K and this response I soon learned was actually quite common.

When I posted a short video about the series on social media back in 2022, many of the 120 comments said

something similar, that this show felt like watching my own childhood or this

...