Eula Quotes

Wealthier countries have the luxury of entertaining fears the rest of the world cannot afford.

Our willingness to believe the news is, in many cases, not entirely innocent.

Our fears are informed by history and economics, by social power and stigma, by myths and nightmares. And as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us. When we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs, as Slovic found in one of his studies, we tend to doubt the information, not ourselves.

Fear is isolating for those that fear. And I have come to believe that fear is a cruelty to those who are feared.

And when comfort is what we want, one of the most powerful tonics alternative medicine offers is the word 'natural.' This word implies a medicine untroubled by human limitations, contrived wholly by nature or God or perhaps intelligent design. What 'natural' has come to mean to us in the context of medicine is 'pure' and 'safe' and 'benign'. But the use of 'natural' as a synonym for 'good' is almost certainly a product of our profound alienation from the natural world.

idea that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you feel about it. Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.

That so many of us find it entirely plausible that a vast network of researchers and health officials and doctors worldwide would willfully harm children for money is evidence of what capitalism is really taking from us. Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value. But when we begin to see the pressures of capitalism as innate laws of human motivation, when we begin to believe that everyone is owned, then we are truly impoverished.

But risk perception may not be about quantifiable risk so much as it is about immeasurable fear.

An apology is also an admission of guilt

However we choose to think of the social body, we are each other's environment. Immunity is a shared space--a garden we tend together.

The problem has not been finding a place where I belong, which is how a children's book might tell it, but of finding ways of insisting on belonging nowhere.

And I suspect that Coca-Cola, unpoisoned, is more harmful to our children than vaccination.

We are, in other words, continuous with everything here on earth. Including, and especially, each other.

If we imagine the action of a vaccine not just in terms of how it affects a single body, but also in terms of how it affects the collective body of a community, it is fair to think of vaccination as a kind of banking of immunity. Contributions to this bank are donations to those who cannot or will not be protected by their own immunity. This is the principle of herd immunity, and it is through herd immunity that mass vaccination becomes far more effective than individual vaccination.

The Bible is the inerrant word of God,' Eula whispers, as defiantly as a whisper can be. 'And you only believe that because of how another group of men interpret the first group of men. People say you're supposed to put your faith in God, not men.

We do not tend to be afraid of the things that are most likely to harm us. We drive around in cars, a lot. We drink alcohol, we ride bicycles, we sit too much. And we harbor anxiety about things that, statistically speaking, pose us little danger. We fear sharks, while mosquitoes are, in terms of sheer numbers of lives lost, probably the most dangerous creature on earth.

I felt sick with hatred then for my own people. If you had asked me why I hated them, I might have said that I hated them for being so loud and for being so drunk. But now I believe I hated them for suddenly being my people, not just other people. In the United States, it is very easy for me to forget that the people around me are my people. It is easy, with all our divisions, to think of myself as an outsider in my own country. I have been taught, and I have learned well, I realize now, to think of myself as distinctly different from other white folks - more educated, more articulate, less crude. But in Mexico these distinctions became as meaningless to me as they should have always been.

Debates over vaccination, then as now, are often cast as debates over the integrity of science, though they could just as easily be understood as conversations about power.

But for now I prefer to think that I will go somewhere that is not so overimagined.

Purity, especially bodily purity, is the seemingly innocent concept behind a number of the most sinister social actions of the past century.

While we routinely call for more vaccine testing, and more human trials, the unspoken assumption is that we do not intend our children to be the subjects of those trials.

Not having money is time consuming. There are hours spent at laundromats, hours at bus stops, hours at free clinics, hours at thrift stores, hours on the phone with the bank or the credit card company or the phone company over some fee, some little charge, some mistake

By then I had moved often enough not to have the usual illusions about a clean slate or a fresh start or a new life. I knew that I could not escape myself. And the idea of beginning again, with no furniture and no friends, was exhausting. So my happiness then is hard to explain. I am tempted now to believe that entering the life one is meant to inhabit is a thrilling sensation and that is all.

A trust—in the sense of a valuable asset placed in the care of someone to whom it does not ultimately belong—captures, more or less, my understanding of what it is to have a child.

If by years of patient suffering, God can manage to take the harshness out of my voice, then the time has been well-spent.

If vaccination can be conscripted into acts of war, it can still be instrumental in works of love.

The more comfortable we are, research suggests, the more destruction we are likely to be causing.

Capitalism has already impoverished the working people who generate wealth for others. And capitalism has already impoverished us culturally, robbing unmarketable art of its value.

For toxicologists, “the dose makes the poison.” Any substance can be toxic in excess. Water, for instance, is lethal to humans in very high doses, and overhydration killed a runner in the 2002 Boston Marathon. But most people prefer to think of substances as either safe or dangerous, regardless of the dose. And we extend this thinking to exposure, in that we regard any exposure to chemicals, no matter how brief or limited, as harmful.

Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity. For some of the mothers I know, a refusal to vaccinate falls under a broader resistance to capitalism. But refusing immunity as a form of civil disobedience bears an unsettling resemblance to the very structure the Occupy movement seems to disrupt--a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent.

I know you're on my side," an immunologist once remarked to me as we discussed the politics of vaccination. I did not agree with him, but only because I was uncomfortable with both sides, as I had seen them delineated. The debate over vaccination tends to be described with what the philosopher of science Donna Haraway would call "troubling dualisms." These dualisms pit science against nature, public against private, truth against imagination, self against other, thought against emotion, and man against woman.

This is why the chances of contracting measles can be higher for a vaccinated person living in a largely unvaccinated community than they are for an unvaccinated person living in a largely vaccinated community.

Bicycles are sometimes kindly accommodated by cars, often ignored, occasionally respected, sometimes nervously followed, and frequently not even seen. In this sense, riding in traffic is not unlike being a woman among men.

Sonata,” he says, “means ‘sounding together.’ It is an argument in which one theme is presented in opposition to another and they struggle until one wins, in the resolution. It is a beautiful form, it has endured into this century.

We had been arguing for hours and it was dark in the room. We sat silently on the couch, I was tapping my foot against the table. He glanced at the green digital glow of the clock. “2:05 is beautiful,” he said. I looked, and it was.

The belief that public health measures are not intended for people like us is widely held by many people like me. Public health, we assume, is for people with less—less education, less-healthy habits, less access to quality health care, less time and money. I have heard mothers of my class suggest, for instance, that the standard childhood immunization schedule groups together multiple shots because poor mothers will not visit the doctor frequently enough to get the twenty-six recommended shots separately. No matter that any mother, myself included, might find so many visits daunting. That, we seem to be saying of the standard schedule, is for people like them.

I was only going to stay six months. I stayed three years, and I never stopped thinking about leaving. But when I left, I left my entire life behind. I have to explain to you why I no longer live in New York, but first I have to explain to myself why I stayed so long.

She was poisoned, but the reason she was crying was that her husband didn’t want her anymore.

The tradition of the personal essay is full of self-appointed outcasts. In that tradition, I am not a poet or the press, but an essayist, a citizen thinker.

the lies we want to believe tell us something about ourselves.

True empowerment of students, I came to realize, necessarily means a certain disempowerment of teachers.

Some apologies are unspeakable. Like the one we owe our parents.

10-9-8... I am speaking in tongues. 4-3-2... Eula has her prayers and I have mine.

Eula-Beulah was prone to farts—the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. “Pow!” she’d cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marshgas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing. Because, while what was happening was sort of horrible, it was also sort of funny. In many ways, Eula-Beulah prepared me for literary criticism. After having a two-hundred-pound babysitter fart on your face and yell Pow!, The Village Voice holds few terrors

Eula. Happely mi new gown maketh me to loke fayrer then I sholde doe. xan. Sothe you saye, I haue not sene a mynioner this many dayes, I reken it Englishe cloth. Eu. It is english stuff and dyed in Venis.

One of the paradoxes of our time is that the War on Terror has served mainly to reinforce a collective belief that maintaining the right amount of fear and suspicion will earn one safety. Fear is promoted by the government as a kind of policy. Fear is accepted, even among the best-educated people in this country, even among the professors with whom I work, as a kind of intelligence. And inspiring fear in others is often seen as neighborly and kindly, instead of being regarded as what my cousin recognized it for - a violence.

What he is drawn to in their philosophy, he tells me, is the idea that you cannot control what happens to you, but you can control how you feel about it. Or, as Jean-Paul Sartre put it, “Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you.” What has been done to us seems to be, among other things, that we have been made fearful. What will we do with our fear? This strikes me as a central question of both citizenship and motherhood. As mothers, we must somehow square our power with our powerlessness. We can protect our children to some extent. But we cannot make them invulnerable any more than we can make ourselves invulnerable. “Life,” as Donna Haraway writes, “is a window of vulnerability.

When I started riding a bike I realized there’s a real relationship between a body powering itself going down the street and the way you interact with your community,” Smith says. “The violence of the power of a car is an alienating device. It’s the last thing we need in our neighborhoods.

In the past few decades quite a few people have suggested -- citing most often the offence of impossible proportions -- that Barbie dolls teach young girls to hate themselves. But the opposite may be true. British researchers recently found that girls between the ages of seven and eleven harbor surprisingly strong feelings of dislike for their Barbie dolls, with no other toy or brand name inspiring such a negative response from the children. The dolls "provoked rejection, hatred, and violence" and many girls preferred Barbie torture -- by cutting, burning, decapitating, or microwaving -- over other ways of playing with the doll. Reasons that the girls hated their Barbies included, somewhat poetically, the fact that they were 'plastic.' The researchers also noted that the girls never spoke of one single, special Barbie, but tended to talk about having a box full of anonymous Barbies. 'On a deeper level Barbie has become inanimate,' one of the researchers remarked. 'She has lost any individual warmth that she might have possessed if she were perceived as a singular person. This may go some way towards explaining the violence and torture.

Eula-Beulah was prone to farts—the kind that are both loud and smelly. Sometimes when she was so afflicted, she would throw me on the couch, drop her wool-skirted butt on my face, and let loose. “Pow!” she’d cry in high glee. It was like being buried in marshgas fireworks. I remember the dark, the sense that I was suffocating, and I remember laughing.

This is practice. And practice is all I want out of art.

We do not know alone. Dracula

Words like ‘custody’ don’t mean the same thing to him. I don’t want us to own anything together. “You don’t want to be happy,” he accuses me.

Mother: “Rumi wrote that…roughly…the only thing that will be with you to your grave is your work. Only your work will speak for you after you’re gone.” There

The problem of pain is that I cannot feel my father's, and he cannot feel mine. This, I suppose, is also the essential mercy of pain.

Speaking of privilege, David said when he gave me her biography, it is a privilege to spend your life writing. Not a luxury, he clarified, but a privilege.

Never forget that work is the story we tell ourselves about money.

Part of what makes a job good, they understood, is the sense that what you do matters.

Maintenance is the tax I pay on this life, I think. And that is why I want to do it by hand, with heavy shears.

Art unmakes the world made by work.

Perhaps the starkest measure of the failure of our economic policies,” Binyamin Appelbaum writes, “is that the average American’s life expectancy is in decline, as inequalities of wealth have become inequalities of health.

Black is closing in around my eyes. I realize with a great, tired sadness that I am losing the world. The walls, the molding on the door frame, the yellow of the lamp, his back at the sink… are all achingly beautiful. I reach out and feel myself groping in the air, feel myself falling great distances, feel nothing at all. Suddenly, with a red rush I can breathe and I can see. I get up from the floor before he turns around and says, “You look flushed.

Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?” the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. “They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders.” Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk. In a study that invited people to compare various causes of death, Slovic found that people tended to believe that accidents cause more deaths than disease and that homicide causes more deaths than suicide, when the opposite is true in both cases. In another study, people significantly overestimated the fatality rates of highly publicized or dramatic dangers like cancer or tornadoes. One could interpret this, as Sunstein does, to mean that most people are just wrong about risk. But risk perception may not be about quantifiable risk so much as it is about immeasurable fear. Our fears are informed by history and economics, by social power and stigma, by myths and nightmares. And as with other strongly held beliefs, our fears are dear to us. When we encounter information that contradicts our beliefs, as Slovic found in one of his studies, we tend to doubt the information, not ourselves.

It is unfortunate that in some places, especially in the United States, people have resisted making choices that will keep them and their families safer. I don’t agree with these choices, but I also think it’s unhelpful to simply label them “anti-science,” as so many people do. In her book On Immunity, Eula Biss looks at vaccine hesitancy in a way that I think also helps explain the resentment we’re seeing toward other public health measures. The distrust of science is just one factor, she says, and it is compounded by other things that trigger fear and suspicion: pharmaceutical companies, big government, elites, the medical establishment, male authority. For some people, invisible benefits that might materialize in the future are not enough to get them past the worry that someone is trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The problem is even worse in periods of severe political polarization, such as the one we’re in now.

One of the most frightening things about children, in my experience, is their intelligence. They inevitably know more than we suspect them of knowing. They appraise us with devastating accuracy. And they are aware of injustices we have learned to ignore.

Do people know which risks lead to many deaths and which risks lead to few?” the legal scholar Cass Sunstein asks. “They do not. In fact, they make huge blunders.” Sunstein draws this observation from the work of Paul Slovic, author of The Perception of Risk.

One of the paradoxes of our time is that the War on Terror has served mainly to reinforce a collective belief that maintaining the right amount of fear and suspicion will earn one safety. Fear is promoted by the government as a kind of policy. Fear is accepted, even among the best-educated people in this country, even among the professors with whom I work, as a kind of intelligence. And inspiring fear in others is often seen as neighborly and kindly, instead of being regarded as what my cousin recognized it for—a violence.

Piff and his team of researchers found that the rich are more likely than the poor to cut off other vehicles when driving through intersections. And they’re less likely to stop for pedestrians. They’re more likely to cheat in a game, and more likely to think of greed as good. But money is not to blame for this, Piff suggests. What’s to blame is the comfort that a higher class status affords—the independence, the insularity, the security, the illusion of not needing other people. “While having money doesn’t necessarily make anybody anything,” Piff told New York magazine, “the rich are way more likely to prioritize their own self-interests above the interests of other people. It makes them more likely to exhibit characteristics that we would stereotypically associate with, say, assholes.

In a section of The Vaccine Book titled “Is it your social responsibility to vaccinate your kids?” Dr. Bob asks, “Can we fault parents for putting their own child’s health ahead of that of the kids around him?” This is meant to be a rhetorical question, but Dr. Bob’s implied answer is not mine. In another section of the book, Dr. Bob writes of his advice to parents who fear the MMR vaccine, “I also warn them not to share their fears with their neighbors, because if too many people avoid the MMR, we’ll likely see the disease increase significantly.” I do not need to consult an ethicist to determine that there is something wrong there, but my sister clarifies my discomfort. “The problem is in making a special exemption just for yourself,” she says. This reminds her of a way of thinking proposed by the philosopher John Rawls: Imagine that you do not know what position you are going to hold in society—rich, poor, educated, insured, no access to health care, infant, adult, HIV positive, healthy immune system, etc.—but that you are aware of the full range of possibilities. What you would want in that situation is a policy that is going to be equally just no matter what position you end up in. “Consider relationships of dependence,” my sister suggests. “You don’t own your body—that’s not what we are, our bodies aren’t independent. The health of our bodies always depends on choices other people are making.” She falters for a moment here, and is at a loss for words, which is rare for her. “I don’t even know how to talk about this,” she says. “The point is there’s an illusion of independence.

I think you should define the word ‘gentrification,’” my husband tells me now. I ask him what he would say it means, and he pauses for a long moment. “It means that an area is generally improved,” he says finally, “but in such a way that everything worthwhile about it is destroyed.

The study looked at two groups of people, one vaccinated against the flu and the other not vaccinated. After both groups were asked to read an article exaggerating the threat posed by the flu, the vaccinated people expressed less prejudice against immigrants than the unvaccinated people.

More than two hundred antilynching bills were introduced to the U.S. Congress during the twentieth century, but none were passed. Seven presidents lobbied for antilynching legislation, and the House of Representatives passed three separate measures, each of which was blocked by the Senate.

I had, a decade earlier, read through 2,354 New York Times articles reporting lynchings between 1880 and 1920, so the events of the past year were less startling to me than the persistence, for well over a century, of the notion that the routine murder of black men is necessary for our collective safety.

Whiteness is not a kinship or a culture. White people are no more closely related to one another, genetically, that we are to black people. American definitions of race allow for a white woman to give birth to black children, which should serve as a reminder that white people are not a family. What binds us is that we share a system of social advantages that can be traced back to the advent of slavery in the colonies that became the United States. 'There is, in fact, no white community,' as Baldwin writes. Whiteness is not who you are. Which is why it is entirely possible to despise whiteness without disliking yourself.

There are some words that seem to well up from inside me without reason. I will be walking along an empty hallway, leaning against the wall of an elevator, looking at the ceiling of my apartment when I find myself saying, “sorry.” But I am not saying it to anyone else, it is only for the sound of the word, the feel of it.

Caretaking, she suggests, is not an inherent threat to liberty. “From a feminist, caring framework,” Peterson writes, “liberty is not defined as complete separation and independence from the parent.” If fathering still reminds us of oppressive control, mothering might help us imagine relationships based not just on power, but also care.

I once met a man of pro-football-sized proportions who saw something in my hesitation when I shook his hand that inspired him to tell me he was pained by the way small women looked at him when he passed them on the street—pained by the fear in their eyes, pained by the way they drew away—and as he told me this, tears welled up in his eyes.

So, Clara, tell us what happens when a group begins to pray about the same thing,” Cecilia said. “Well, first of all, more people know about the need. More people get involved in bringing a person or a situation before God. He doesn’t need to be reminded because He knows everything. But He wants us to participate in people’s lives and the things going on around us. He wants us to partner with Him in His plan to draw people to Himself. So the end result of a lot of people praying about the same thing is increased glory to God. That’s the way it works. When we pray, we participate in what God is doing. He gets the glory, and we get the privilege of walking with Him, and in that process we are changed. And guess what happens from that change? He gets the glory.” “How do you figure that?” Eula said. “Philippians 2. Paul talks about having the same mind that Jesus had. He didn’t have to come here and give up His life. He didn’t have to be obedient and die on a cross. But He humbled Himself. And look at what happens at the end of that passage. God raises him up to the place of highest honor and gives Him the name above every other name. Every knee is going to bow, every tongue will declare that Jesus Christ is Lord—now get this—to the glory of God the Father. The whole point of the work of Jesus, the whole reason for His sinless life, the reason for the miracles and raising Him from the dead was the glory of God.” “Praise Jesus!” Tressa said.

I begin my days by practicing piano, which I do badly but with ardor. Then I read for a while. I write until I’m too hungry to keep writing and then after lunch I spend some time in my garden before writing again. I want to also study French, but I rarely do. As I meander my way through one of these days, it occurs to me that my work life resembles the life of an eighteenth-century aristocrat.

Consider relationships of dependence,' my sister suggests. 'You don't own your body- that's not what we are, our bodies aren't independent. The health of our bodies always depends on choices other people are making.' She falters for a moment here, and is at a loss for words, which is rare for her. 'I don't even know how to talk about this,' she says. 'The point is there's an illusion of independence.

Immunity is a public space. And it can be occupied by those who choose not to carry immunity. For some of the mothers I know, a refusal to vaccinate falls under a broader resistance to capitalism. But refusing immunity as a form of civil disobedience bears an unsettling resemblance to the very structure the Occupy movement seeks to disrupt—a privileged 1 percent are sheltered from risk while they draw resources from the other 99 percent.

One of the mysteries of hep B immunization is that vaccinating only “high risk” groups, which was the original public health strategy, did not bring down rates of infection. When the vaccine was introduced in 1981, it was recommended for prisoners, health care workers, gay men, and IV drug users. But rates of hep B infection remained unchanged until the vaccine was recommended for all newborns a decade later. Only mass vaccination brought down the rates of infection, and it has now virtually eliminated the disease in children.

Vaccination works,” my father explains, “by enlisting a majority in the protection of a minority.” He means the minority of the population that is particularly vulnerable to a given disease. The elderly, in the case of influenza. Newborns, in the case of pertussis. Pregnant women, in the case of rubella. But when relatively wealthy white women vaccinate our children, we may also be participating in the protection of some poor black children whose single mothers have recently moved and have not, as a product of circumstance rather than choice, fully vaccinated them.

AIDS education taught us the importance of protecting our bodies from contact with other bodies, and this seems to have bred another kind of insularity, a preoccupation with the integrity of the individual immune system. Building, boosting, and supplementing one’s personal immune system is a kind of cultural obsession of the moment. I know mothers who believe this is a viable substitute for vaccination, and who understand themselves as raising children with superior immune systems. But children with superior immune systems can still pass disease. Pertussis, like polio and Hib disease and HIV, can be carried without symptoms.

In 2012, a Taliban leader in northern Pakistan banned polio vaccination in his region until the United States ceased drone strikes there. Vaccination campaigns, he claimed, were a form of American espionage. While resembling the rumors of secret plots in Nigeria, this was, unfortunately, more easily verifiable. In pursuit of Osama bin Laden, the CIA had used a fake vaccination campaign—administering real hep B vaccine, but not the three doses necessary for immunity—to gather DNA evidence to help verify bin Laden’s location. This deception, like other acts of war, would cost the lives of women and children. The Lady Health Workers of Pakistan, a team of over 110,000 women trained to deliver health care door-to-door, had already endured years of brutal intimidation by the Taliban and hardly needed association with the CIA. Not long after the Taliban banned immunization, nine polio vaccinators, five of them women, were murdered in a coordinated series of attacks.

I gave my son a lavishly illustrated edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland for his fourth birthday, and it did not take very long for me to realize that this was a gift for me, not for him. As Alice engaged in repartee with a dodo early in the book, my son became bored. Alice’s bewilderment and disorientation, which I had anticipated might speak to my son’s experience of being a child in an adult’s world, spoke instead to my own experience navigating the world of information. Being lost in Wonderland is what it feels like to learn about an unfamiliar subject, and research is inevitably a rabbit hole. I fell down it, in my investigation of immunization, and fell and fell, finding that it was much deeper than I anticipated. Like Alice, I fell past shelves full of books, more than I could ever read. Like Alice, I arrived at locked doors. “Drink me,” I was commanded by one source. “Eat me,” I was told by another. They had opposite effects - I grew and shrank, I believed and did not believe. I cried and then found myself swimming in my own own tears.

Perhaps what matters,” Sunstein muses, “is not whether people are right on the facts, but whether they are frightened.” And people do seem to be frightened. We are locking our doors and pulling our children out of public school and buying guns and ritually sanitizing our hands to allay a wide range of fears, most of which are essentially fears of other people. All the while we are also, in our way, reckless. We get intoxicated, from the Latin “to poison,” for fun. This contradiction leads Sunstein to worry that regulatory laws based on the priorities of the general public maybe prone to a pattern of “paranoia and neglect.” Too much attention may be spent on minimal risks, while too little is paid to pressing threats. Paranoia, the theorist Eve Sedgwick observes, tends to be contagious. She calls it a “strong theory,” meaning a wide-ranging, reductive theory that displaces other ways of thinking. And paranoia very frequently passes for intelligence. As Sedgwick observes, “to theorize out of anything but a paranoid critical stance has come to seem naïve, pious, or complaisant.” She does not believe that paranoid thinking is necessarily delusional or wrong, but only that there is value to approaches that are less rooted in suspicion. “Paranoia,” Sedgwick writes, “knows some things well and others poorly.

In the nineteenth century, poor urban women could give birth in charity hospitals for free, though wealthier women still gave birth at home. As childbirth moved into hospitals, the maternal death rate rose dramatically. Childbed fever, as puerperal sepsis was called, was spread by doctors who did not wash their hands between exams. But doctors blamed it on tight petticoats, fretting, and bad morals.

Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive,” John Kenneth Galbraith writes in the great first sentence of The Affluent Society. “But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding.

We shouldn’t ask our rich to be good, in other words, we should ask our economic system to be better.

Henry George, who proposed that profits made from a natural resource, like land or coal or oil, should be distributed equally among everyone. No individual, he argued, should build a fortune by laying claim to a collective resource. George believed that everyone was entitled to profit from their labor, but that profits made from the ownership of property should be heavily taxed. The woman who invented the Landlord’s Game, Elizabeth Magie, was an advocate of that tax.

We don’t have to privilege accumulation over distribution. But that is the rule that governs our everyday lives—our work and our play.

Opportunity hoarding is the term for this, and it takes the form of admissions procedures, testing, tuition costs, licensing, ranking, and all sorts of credentialing.

Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.

the Pigouvian tax, a tax that’s added to the price of a thing because of the social cost of that thing. Like the tax on cigarettes.

in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.

The game was informed by the theories of Henry George, who proposed that profits made from a natural resource, like land or coal or oil, should be distributed equally among everyone. No individual, he argued, should build a fortune by laying claim to a collective resource.

The musician breaks the rules of work by playing, rather than working. It’s queer, in that it’s a transgression.

The middle class, in this approach, lies between the capitalists who have control and the workers who are controlled. The middle class includes small-business owners who are both capitalists and workers, salaried managers and supervisors whose financial interests are entangled with the corporations they serve, and educated professionals who have enough capital to make investments. This is a middle class with capitalist aspirations. And that is why Marx considered this class dangerous. It is a class of conflicting allegiances and internal contradictions.

Most people, Wright observes, prefer not to think of class as a means of control or exclusion, but as a collection of things that can be acquired, like property and education. Your class, in this approach, is determined by how much you have of three kinds of capital—economic capital, cultural capital, and social capital. Or, what you own, what you know, and who you know.