Stayin' Alive on Huffington Post and Mother Jones 2010 Best Book Lists

Stayin' Alive is on Huffington Post's list of 2010 Best Books on Social and Political Awareness. Mother Jones' blogger Kevin Drum put it on his top five (technically top two) books. Check it out at HuffPo and Mother Jones.

On Gender and the 1970s Working Class (long post)

The talented Yale historian Jennifer Klein, in an otherwise quite supportive review, took me to task for having an "exclusively male" definition of culture in Stayin' Alive in her recent review for Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. She even called my use of masculinity and class a "tautology." Klein's critique--and the many other similar critiques I predict will come--was foreordained. Since Klein and I agree on a lot, I'd like to use her review as a chance for a long and indulgent explanation of what it is that I'm trying to say about how gender and class mixed--or failed to--in the 1970s. 


Klein's point, I think, is that I fall into the trap of talking about white guys as a false

Droppin' g's for the Unemployed

Official unemployment went up, again, getting that much closer to a solid ten percent. And don't even get me started on the unofficial rate and the amount of despair that goes along with it. The AFL-CIO did a moving video piece on people running out of unemployment benefits. Made me wonder when the administration is going to turn its attention away from Goldman Sachs long enough to think about working people. 

Oh, I meant "workin' people." I forgot that we now show our solidarity with wage earners not by putting them to work or distributing the national bounty their way, but by dropping our g's. Watch Obama. Ever since the debates, he has been doing some linguistic slumming, proving his working class cred on terms defined by the populist right: by being on the side of strugglin' and hard workin' people facin' an uncertain future. When he addresses other subjects, however, the g's magically return to his Harvard-trained gerund pronunciation.