When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present

By Gail Collins

Introduction

“Do you appreciate you’re in a courtroom in slacks?”

On a steamy morning in the summer of 1960, Lois Rabinowitz, a 28-year-old secretary for an oil-company executive, unwittingly became the feature story of the day in New York City when she went down to traffic court to pay her boss’s speeding ticket. Wearing neatly pressed slacks and a blouse, Lois hitched a ride to the courthouse with her husband of two weeks, Irving. In traffic court, Magistrate Edward D. Caiazzo was presiding.

When Lois approached the bench, the Magistrate exploded in outrage. “Do you appreciate you’re in a courtroom in slacks?” he demanded, and sent her home to put on more appropriate clothes. Instead, the secretary gave the ticket to her husband, who managed to finish the transaction and pay the $10 fine—but not before the magistrate warned the newlywed Irving to “start now and clamp down a little or it’ll be too late.” When it was all over, Lois diplomatically told the courthouse reporters that “the way the judge thinks about women is very flattering” and promised to “go home and burn all my slacks.”

Since Caiazzo had no known record of tossing out male petitioners who showed up in overalls or sweatshirts, it was pretty clear that the showdown was really about women’s place in the world, not the dignity of traffic court. “I get excited about this because I hold womanhood on a high plane and it hurts my sensibilities to see women tearing themselves down from this pedestal,” the magistrate told reporters. It was a convoluted expression of the classic view of sexual differences: women did not wear the pants in the family—or anywhere else, for that matter. In return, they were allowed to stand on a pedestal. Read More

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture

By Ellen Ruppel Shell

From the day we open our first lemonade stand, most of us understand that price is a relative matter, one that can infuriate, surprise, sadden, or delight. As Harvard Business School professor Gerald Zaltman told me, “Price is typically a number, but there is nothing more subjective.” Who knew that the way prices are positioned on a menu can influence what we eat for lunch or that some numbers trigger in our minds the flashing light of good deal, while others send signals of rip-off? Looking deep inside the human brain, neuroscientists have discovered that the very anticipation of a “bargain” sets our neural networks aquiver. The manipulation of price can confuse us, block the thinking part of our brain and ignite the impulsive, primitive side, the part that leads us to make poor decisions based on bad assumptions. Ever wonder why you’ll drive five miles out of your way to save a buck on a six- pack of beer or, for that matter, a tank of gas? Or why you’ll snap up a sweater “marked down” from $150 to $50 but pass up the very same sweater selling for “full price” at $50? Or why you’d prefer to pay more for an item than witness someone else pay less? Ever wonder why your own closet is cluttered with ill-fitting shoes and T-shirts in unbecoming shades? As we will see, science has the answer.

Factory outlets are America’s number-one tourist destination, the fastest-growing segment of not only the retail industry but also the travel industry. In Las Vegas we see the point that outlets can be as dicey as the slots, treacherous places for those who don’t know the landscape. At the outlets a “designer” necklace, a pair of Levi Strauss jeans, a Coach bag are often mere decoys, name brands in name only. Who’s to know? And it’s not only outlets that lead us astray. Merchants of rugs, mattresses, jewelry, and almost everything else use similar strategies to make bad deals irresistible. Even Harvard University dilutes its brand to capitalize on the human penchant for bargains. When the price is right, what’s in the box seems to matter far less than what is on the label.

In the world of Cheap, “design” has become a stand-in for quality. Companies such as Target, H & M, and Zara offer consumers the look they love at a price they can live with—but at what true cost? In Sweden we visit IKEA, the global furniture retailer made famous and fabulously successful by a scheme of designing not just for low price but to low price. The consequences of this are both obvious and subtle. IKEA makes furniture available to all at a low price, which means college students, young couples, and others on a budget can furnish their homes in style. But IKEA does not overly concern itself with what Homer Simpson calls “fall-apart.” The company designs for easy construction, uniformity, cheap production, and transportability around the globe. Ultimately, what it markets is disposable, with everything that implies. The genius of IKEA and other cheap-chic purveyors is that they have made fashionable, desirable, and even lovable objects nearly devoid of craftsmanship. The environmental and social implications of this are insidious and alarming. Read More

The Battle for America 2008: The Story of an Extraordinary Election

By Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson

“I think the whole election was a novel,” Barack Obama said.

It was mid-December 2008. The president-elect was seated in his transition headquarters in the federal building in downtown Chicago. Next to him were a football, and a basketball with an “Obama ‘08″ insignia. Bulletproof panels had been placed along floor-to-ceiling windows.

Obama was welcoming and upbeat, although later that day he would learn during a meeting with his economic advisers that the fiscal crisis was even worse than they had believed. Escorting us to his office, he expressed mock dismay at the mess around the desk of his personal assistant, Reggie Love. Eyeing an open bag of potato chips and papers strewn on the floor, he exclaimed that this was no way for the president-elect’s space to look. “Reggie!” he shouted, but Love was nowhere to be seen. Read More

The Death of Why?: The Decline of Questioning and the Future of Democracy

By Andrea Batista Schlesinger

Introduction: Questions and Power

Why?

Why is the first question most children ask. With this question we express, to the delight and the chagrin of our parents, our power.

In my life, questions have always been power. Asking them enabled me to overcome the challenges I faced as a young woman sitting at tables where I didn’t automatically belong.

The link between questions and power in our democracy is at the heart of this book. As the market reaches ever deeper into every aspect of our lives, as consumerism rises, as globalization makes the distance between countries and people smaller, where will our power as citizens in a democracy come from? Read More

The Evolution of God

By Robert Wright

Introduction

I was once denounced from the pulpit of my mother’s church. The year was 1994. My book The Moral Animal had just been published, and I’d been lucky enough to have it excerpted in Time magazine. The excerpt was about the various ways in which our evolved human nature complicates the project of marriage. One such complication is the natural, universally human temptation to stray, and that is the angle Time’s editors chose to feature on the magazine’s cover. Alongside a stark image of a broken wedding band were the words “Infidelity: It may be in our genes.”

The pastor of the First Baptist Church in Santa Rosa, California, saw this article as a godless defense of philandering and said so one Sunday morning. After the service, my mother went forward and told him that her son was the author of the article. I’m willing to bet that—such are the wonders of maternal love—she said it with pride.

How far I had fallen! Back around age nine, at the Immanuel Baptist Church in El Paso, Texas, I had felt the call of God and walked to the front of the church as a visiting evangelist named Homer Martinez issued the “invitation”—the call for unredeemed sinners to accept Jesus as their savior. A few weeks later I was baptized by the church’s minister. Now, nearly three decades later, another Baptist minister was placing me in the general vicinity of Satan. Read More

Where Underpants Come From: From Cotton Fields to Checkout Counters—Travels Through the New China and into the New Global Economy

By Joe Bennett

Introduction

There are 6.5 billion people in the world. Line them up as on a parade ground, then inspect them like a commander in chief. Roughly every hundredth person you pass will be British. Every fifteen-hundredth or so will be a New Zealander. Every fifth will be Chinese.

Officially China has 1.3 billion citizens. Actually it has rather more, perhaps as many as 1.6 billion. That’s as near as makes no difference a quarter of the world’s population. It’s also five times as many people as America’s got.

Having gone to the trouble of gathering 6.5 billion people into one place, do another little exercise. Ask all the farmers to step forward, the people who make their living by tilling soil or tending livestock. Of those, one in three will be Chinese. Read More

Our Lot: How Real Estate Came to Own Us

By Alyssa Katz

From Chapter One

Almost Like a Conspiracy

Chicago, 1972

She poured another glass from the vodka bottle. It was approaching three a.m., Indiana time, here on the campus of Notre Dame, a couple of hours drive east from the city where Gale Cincotta had lived her whole life. By day Cincotta was nominally a housewife, a mother of six boys and young men living in Austin, a West Side Chicago neighborhood. But by now she was working full-time and beyond, trying to rescue Austin and surrounding communities from a real estate plague that showed no signs of receding. It was, she would say, “almost like a conspiracy of people deciding that this area was going to go.”

Huddling in the dorm room with an ex-Methodist minister, who was downing Jack Daniel’s himself, Cincotta dragged on a series of Salems, the smoke wafting over her platinum bouffant sprayed out into stiff cascades.

She always brought two bottles to organizing meetings, which often went on long past midnight. One was for herself, and the other to help inspire the other activists—student interns, career community organizers, and neighborhood residents like herself—to keep going. Cincotta used the vodka not to dull the hurt, but to fuel her will to prevail over those responsible for the destruction. Read More

The Eliminationists: How Hate Talk Radicalized the American Right

By David Neiwert

From the Introduction

Unleashing the Demonic

LIBERAL HUNTING PERMIT
No Bag Limit—Tagging Not Required. May be used while under the influence of Alcohol. May be used to Hunt Liberals at Gay Pride Parades, Democrat Conventions, Union Rallys, Handgun Control Meetings, News media Association, Lesbian Luncheons and Hollywood Functions.
MAY HUNT DAY OR NIGHT WITH OR WITHOUT DOGS.
—A bumper sticker available at some conservative Web sites, spotted near a gay-pride parade in San Francisco.

In July of 2008, a graying, mustachioed man from the Knoxville suburb of Powell, Tennessee, sat down and wrote out by hand a four-page manifesto describing his hatred of all things liberal and his belief that “all liberals should be killed.”

When he was done, Jim David Adkisson drove his little Ford Escape to the parking lot of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church in Knoxville. A few days before, the church had attracted media attention for its efforts to open a local coffee shop for gays and lesbians. Leaving the manifesto on the seat of the car, he walked inside the church carrying a guitar case stuffed with a shotgun and 76 rounds of ammunition. Read More

Lords of Finance: The Bankers Who Broke the World

By Liaquat Ahamed

From the Introduction

On August 15, 1931, the following press statement was issued: “The Governor of the Bank of England has been indisposed as a result of the exceptional strain to which he has been subjected in recent months. Acting on medical advice he has abandoned all work and has gone abroad for rest and change.” The governor was Montagu Collet Norman, D.S.O.—having repeatedly turned down a title, he was not, as so many people assumed, Sir Montagu Norman or Lord Norman. Nevertheless, he did take great pride in that D.S.O after his name—the Distinguished Service Order, the second highest decoration for bravery by a military officer.

Norman was generally wary of the press and was infamous for the lengths to which he would go to escape prying reporters—traveling under a false identity; skipping off trains; even once, slipping over the side of an ocean vessel by way of a rope ladder in rough seas. On this occasion, however, as he prepared to board the liner Duchess of York for Canada, he was unusually forthcoming. With that talent for understatement that came so naturally to his class and country, he declared to the reporters gathered at dockside, “I feel I want a rest because I have had a very hard time lately. I have not been quite as well as I would like and I think a trip on this fine boat will do me good.”

The fragility of his mental constitution had long been an open secret within financial circles. Few members of the public knew the real truth—that for the last two weeks, as the world financial crisis had reached a crescendo and the European banking system teetered on the edge of collapse, the governor had been incapacitated by a nervous breakdown, brought on by extreme stress. The Bank press release, carried in newspapers from San Francisco to Shanghai, therefore came as a great shock to investors everywhere. Read More

The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works

By Henry Waxman

Introduction

During my thirty-five years in Congress, I’ve been involved in hundreds of hearings. Many were forgettable. A handful have had lasting impact. And one, on April 14, 1994, stands among the great Washington dramas. Like the McCarthy and Watergate hearings, it has assumed a place in popular mythology as a turning point in our national history that lives on in textbooks and Hollywood movies.

On that morning, in a hearing room of the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the CEOs of the nation’s seven largest tobacco companies assembled for the first time to testify before Congress. I had summoned them there in my capacity as chairman of the Subcommittee on Health and the Environment to answer questions about the $61 billion industry they controlled and the 440,000 people who died every year as a result of its products. It was a showdown that had been years in the making.

The life of a congressman is often one of painstaking process. You endure the daily grind of committee meetings, markups, and hearings in order to build the foundation that all great legislation requires—from landmark measures like the New Deal, the Civil Rights Act, Medicare and Medicaid, to major new initiatives like climate change legislation and universal health care that could soon be enacted. You persevere so that those who abuse the public trust will be held to account. But mostly you do it for the rare and fleeting occasions when your actions might improve the lives of millions of your fellow Americans. Read More