Nick Schemm

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

“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

“A film like Wall-E exemplifies what Robert Pfaller has called ‘interpassivity’: the film performs our anti-capitalism for us, allowing us to continue to consume with impunity.”
― Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops,” reflected the late writer Stephen Jay Gould.”
― Jessica Bruder, Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century