Today’s links Alissa Quart’s ‘Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream’: Divided we fall. Hey look at this: Delights to delectate. This day in history: 2003, 2008, 2018, 2022 Colophon: Recent publications, upcoming/recent appearances, current writing projects, current reading Alissa Quart’s ‘Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream’ (permalink) Steinbeck never said that Americans see themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires,” but that misquotation is so pervasive because it captures something vital about one version of the American Dream, the idea that anyone can make it in America by pulling themselves up by their bootstraps, which means that if you haven’t made it, it’s because of some defect within you, and not because of a rigged system: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/John_Steinbeck#Disputed In Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream, Alissa Quart – director of the Economic Hardship Reporting Project – addresses the meritocratic delusion of the “self-made man,” the story that, in America, the rich are good, and therefore the good are rich, and therefore the dwindling slice of the pie shared among everyone else is no more than they deserve: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/bootstrapped-alissa-quart?variant=40517189599266 Quart’s book braids together four strands: a factual account of the reality of social mobility in America; a kind of psychoanalysis of what the myth of being self-made does to your mind; a power analysis of how the self-made brainworm benefits the rich and powerful, and a program for breaking free of the stultifying grip of a belief in the self-made. Start with the factual: America is not a bootstrap-friendly land. If…Pluralistic: Alissa Quart's 'Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves from the American Dream' (10 Apr 2023)