Nick Schemm

“Positive thinking, after all, is an all-American coping mechanism, practically a national pastime. Author James Rorty noted this during the Great Depression, when he traveled America talking with people forced to seek work on the road. In his 1936 book, Where Life Is Better, he was dismayed that so many of his interview subjects seemed so unshakably cheerful. “I encountered nothing in 15,000 miles of travel that disgusted and appalled me so much as this American addiction to make-believe,” he wrote.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century

“The rent eats first.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City

“With the triumph of neoliberalism, bureaucracy was supposed to have been made obsolete; a relic of an unlamented Stalinist past. Yet this is at odds with the experiences of most people working and living in late capitalism, for whom bureaucracy remains very much a part of everyday life. Instead of disappearing, bureaucracy has changed its form; and this new, decentralized form has allowed it to proliferate.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“No one thought the poor more undeserving than the poor themselves.”
― Matthew Desmond, Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City