This kid ...

 ... always gets it right. I listened to his podcast excerpts last summer from "Catch & Kill". Now I think I'll buy it. He mentions Zuckerberg's FBook directly as a tool of online radicalizing. He won more awards for journalism by the time he was 20 then all the journalists I've ever worked with.

Wow

Barbara Ehrenreich is another author who I think has been sneaking peeks at my diary. I'm reading Bait & Switch: The Futile Pursuit of the American Dream, her follow up to Nickel & Dimed. Bait & Switch is like a play-by-play of what I'm going through right now.



One of Ehrenreich's greatest talents as a journalist and non-fiction author is to cut through the bullshit. As part of her "research" for Bait & Switch, she posed as a marketing and events organizer and went on a dozen "job search workshops" -- nearly all of which she had to cry foul on for their doling out of useless self-help cum pop psychology philosophies.

In response to the all-pervasive myth in this country that It's Really All Our Own Fault and We Attract Bad Shit, she had this to say:

What about the child whose home is hit by a bomb? Did she have some bomb-shaped thoughtform that brought ruin down on her head? And did my (job search) boot-camp mates cause the layoffs that drove them out of their jobs by "vibrating" at a layoff-related frequency? It seems inexcusably cruel to tell people who have reached some kind of personal nadir that their problem is entirely of their own making.

Damn skippy.