Working Class
Story Stream
Catching up with Geoff Dyer June 19, 2025
Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, was originally called “A Happening.” There would have been something of a joke to this discarded title; from one point of view, nothing much happens in the book. There’s an indelible ordinariness to this coming-of-a...
What Does It Mean To Be a Working Class Writer? June 19, 2025
When I arrived at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I was sure there’d been some mistake. After all, it was the most selective MFA program in the country, and the odds of acceptance were exceedingly low. And yet, there I was at the “Welcome Barbecue,” stan...
This Working-Class Writer Is now a Symbol of Elitism June 18, 2025
If a college student is interested in learning how to write fiction, they will often take a class called "Intro to Fiction" or "Intro to Creative Writing".In this class they will usually be asked to submit a short story to the professor, and this sto...
On Britney Spears June 05, 2025
“What Child Is This” is the first song Britney Spears performed live, as a kid growing up in rural Louisiana. She was born into a working-class family with an alcoholic father and a disgruntled mother who would scream at him fruitlessly when he came ...
What Working-Class Voters Really Want April 22, 2025
Democrats appear to have rediscovered the working class in the wake of the 2024 election. Their dismal showing among these voters—both white and nonwhite—doomed Kamala Harris’s candidacy and got them, and the country, another term of Donald Trump. So...
Main Street Ahead of Wall Street April 08, 2025
Ever since Donald Trump’s first term as president, his detractors in the Democratic Party and their spokespeople in the mainstream liberal media have had a recurring refrain: his single achievement in office was a tax cut for him and his rich buddies...
Searching for Bigger April 02, 2025
A century ago, Claude McKay published Home to Harlem, a novel narrating Black working-class experiences in the eponymous Black Mecca in the aftermath of the First World War. Home to Harlem is considered to be one of the first successful Black novels ...
A Liberal Writer Fails to Do the Work March 05, 2025
Inspired by the anger she felt at the passing of her working-class grandfather, Disposable (America’s Contempt for the Underclass) by New York Magazine writer Sarah Jones, offers capsule summaries of the lives of several Americans and then accounts o...
What Working-Class Voters Wanted November 25, 2024
At the end of the presidential campaign, Vice President Kamala Harris and her surrogates placed a bet on a hard-edged closing argument: that Donald Trump is a fascist and friend of dictators. She offered herself as the alternative, a messenger of hop...
The History of Wokeness November 14, 2024
Over the summer, I drove down to one of the numerous beach towns in Ocean County, New Jersey with two friends: one is a cop, the other a special ed teacher and athletic coach; both are black Americans in their late 20s. Over a dinner of chicken franc...
Workers of the World, Divide November 01, 2024
Timothy Shenk’s new book, Left Adrift: What Happened to Liberal Politics, tries to weave together two stories and sometimes succeeds. One is about the rival careers of two of the major center-left political advisers of the past half-century, Stan Gre...
