Interviews by ROBERT ALFORD, CYDNEY GILLIS, ADAM HYLA, ROBIN LINDLEY, ROSETTE ROYALE and MAGGIE TARNAWA
Working it out
"I had this job that sounded great on paper. It was writing summaries of articles in scientific journals, so I thought that I would learn a lot because I'd be surveying all this stuff. The problem was that there was a quota of writing 28 of these per day, which is flatly impossible. So the job was structured on the assumption that it could be done in this rote, mindless way. You know -- just follow these instructions and you could magically produce a summary of something without even really comprehending it. So in other words, it was complete bullshit, and what we produced was really kind of garbage. In my own case, I know it was, and the irony is that I got that job because I had a masters degree. So that credential kind of obscures a more real stupidification of the work itself, and it paid a wage to match. It paid $23,000 per year, and a further irony is that I'd previously made about twice that much working as an unlicensed electrician, and using my own judgment every day."
--Matthew Crawford, author of "Shop Class as Soulcraft: an Inquiry into the Value of Work"
"There was a seething foment among working people at that time in response to the impact of the Depression and unemployment. In Seattle, the Unemployed Citizens League set up a virtual city on the Duwamish tide flats -- it was a Hooverville. They had a mayor and an informal city government and a sanitation department and a security detail, the whole thing. And no money -- there was lots of barter. It was a vast sea of shanties and shacks made out of materials of all kinds. My dad wrote an article on it called the "The Republic of the Penniless" [that appeared] in the Atlantic Monthly. He got a generous check that tided us over through much of the Depression. Nobody was making any money, including him."
--Will Parry, unrepentant Communist, 90 years old
There's only one thing we care about: kids graduating from college. That's it. That's the one outcome, and everything we do is leading to that outcome, so we have lots of interim outcomes. Our theory is that if you're failing in the fourth grade, then you're not on your way to college, so we want you to be passing in the fourth grade. But, if you are failing in the fourth grade or even in the fifth grade, that does not mean that you're not going to go to college: It just means that we've got some indicators that let us know that this is becoming more and more serious, and for us to do our job, we're going to have to really intervene and get that kid."
--Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children's Zone
"In the United States people are very lucky: They have congressmen and senators who sometimes listen to their constituents, and we have a mechanism in the "First World" to influence politicians and policy. In order to do that people have to be informed, and in my own small way I try to help. It's getting more and more difficult, I'm finding, to convince networks and broadcasters to take on these subjects. They tend to be much more interested in celebrities and scandals rather than issues which are affecting millions upon millions of people. I think that's my job--to try and do that whenever I can. I don't do it all the time: I do lots of jobs to cover my mortgage. But occasionally I sort of summon the energy and get the opportunity to do these other stories which are more meaningful."
--Michael Davie, Rhodesian-born documentary filmmaker, Emmy-winning director of "Gorilla Murders"
America, the not-so-beautiful
"The economic meltdown proves that the economy is no longer capable of providing people with sustenance and living; the incompetent and evil handling of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans proves that the government is both incompetent and malfeasant; the inability of the military to prevent 19 morons from flying around our skies for two-and-a-half hours, without being apprehended by the Air Force, proves that the billions of dollars that we pour into the military are all squandered and wasted; and the 2000 election and also the 2004 election prove that the system is not democratic. So rather than just sit around and wait for things to get worse and collapse, let's get rid of this ridiculous regime."
--Ted Rall, author of "The Anti-American Manifesto"
"In the United States now, I calculated that 40-45 percent of all the bottled water originates as municipal tap water.
And the labels are incredibly misleading. If it doesn't say spring water, it's likely to originate in a municipal system, but they do what they can to hide the source. The standards of identity put some constraints on what a bottler can call the [product]. If they say "spring water," it has to come from a spring or from a groundwater aquifer that feeds that spring. But "glacial water" doesn't have to come from a glacier, or "alpine water" doesn't have to come from an alpine source, or "Arctic" doesn't have to come from the Arctic.
There's a difference between standards of identity and branding. A good example is Poland Springs water, owned by Nestle. Poland Springs came from Poland Springs, Maine, and won the "best tasting water in the world" award at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis. But today, none of Poland Spring water comes from the original Poland Springs. The original spring was shut down in 1980. It's now a brand, not a source."
--Dr. Peter Gleick, author of "Bottled and Sold: The Story Behind Our Obsession with Bottled Water"
"The media character that was created around me, to this day, is ludicrous to me, and I don't see myself in it. But worse than that was the notion of guilt by association: [that] if we were in a boardroom together, then somehow Obama owns those histories, those perspectives, those policies. Nothing could be further from the truth.
And worse even than that, was when Sarah Palin got ahold of the phrase, "Palling around with terrorists." She wasn't just implying guilt by association, she was saying that there are real Americans, real citizens, and then there's the rest of you. And the fact is, I am a real citizen, I was born here. She may not like what I believe, I don't like what she believes. But I would never say she's not worthy to be part of the polity. I'll fight her on her evidence, arguments and policies, but the idea that I can cast her out of the polity is wrong."
--Bill Ayers, former militant with the Weather Underground, author of "To Teach: the Journey, in Comics"
"I renounced my citizenship because I realized sometime in my mid-twenties that I had been lied to. I believed that America was the greatest nation on earth and that it was the protector of freedom and democracy. As I learned alternative views of history, I become aware that the U.S. had crushed numerous democratic movements around the world and had installed many brutal dictators including Saddam Hussein, among other things.
Citizenship is a contract, and it has rights and obligations. I don't agree to the obligations, which include paying into a tax system that is being used to commit mass murder around the world.
If you see the world the way I do, all people are part of my human family. And that includes Israelis."
--Ken O'Keefe, Gulf War vet who traveled aboard a six-vessel flotilla bound for Gaza on May 31, 2010; the flotilla was raided by Israeli Defense Forces; nine people died
Border wars
"I think that a lot of immigrant groups have gone through this cycle of coming in, people feeling threatened by them, laws being passed, prejudice against them, and often times in school, we learn about it as something in [the] past, right? I mean, America is supposed to be a place of freedom, but unfortunately if we step outside of the moment and look at what's happening in our current time, it's the same story. So there are definitely parallels and especially with the kinds of laws as well. There was a law requiring the Chinese to carry their papers at all times with the penalty of imprisonment, so that sounds somewhat similar to the [proposed] Arizona laws."
-- Shawna Yang Ryan, author of the novel "Water Ghosts"
"What the Obama administration is carrying out ... is about the toughest program against illegal immigration ... we've ever had in this country. He's stepped up what are known as desktop raids, where instead of immigration agents raiding places where illegal immigrants are suspected of working, they check the employers' I-9 forms. They've sent out hundreds of letters to employers informing them that there's a suspicion that they've got illegal immigrants in the workforce and they need to do something about it.
The end result is almost the same as an actual raid: even though ICE [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents haven't swooped in, the employers have to dismiss people for fear that there would be a raid. And that's their notion of enforcement. And the end result is that more people, I fear, are driven into the shadows. Obama came into office saying he would bring people out of the shadows. Targeting these large employers, there are still plenty of other employers where these workers can find jobs, and you're still not dealing with the root cause."
--Jeffrey Kaye, author of "Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration"
Class is in session
I'm so fortunate: I make between $18,000 [and] $22,000 a year every year, and that usually includes about five grand of unemployment. I mean, I just live really low-key. And I watched the real estate go up and up and up and up and up and up and up and up, and the real root of our economic crisis [is] housing is unaffordable. There's no working class anymore. You're either [at] Real Change or you're a yuppie. What's in between? My [property] taxes are $5,000 a year. I can't wait to be 62 when I get a break, for being poor, on my taxes, because they're killing me.
--Lori Larsen, local working actor
"And so this class, in spite of how progressive they are, and in spite of their progressivism, they're whiteness and their class are still mixed. And the fact of the matter is that non-white people are not moving into this class quickly enough. I'm always amazed at how progressive we are, but our inability to make real sacrifices for real change. What do white people do when they move to a gentrifying neighborhood but the public school isn't quite how they want it, because of the test scores or whatever other reason? They put their kid in private school or they move to a different city with a better public school system. Which isn't really a way to progress the class or allow anyone else to join. And so I think the two things, race and class are so mixed, that when you say, upper-middle class liberal, it still means whites."
--Christian Lander, blogger, author of "Stuff White People Like"
Pop culture rocks
"Candy has actually been subjected to taxes at different times for the past hundred years. In the 1920s when legislatures wanted to pass a tax on candy, they described it as a luxury, not a necessity. Now this was to pay for the war effort and things like that and there was a certain kind of social attitude that we should make some sacrifices, sacrifice some luxuries. There was a sort of consensus around that. Today, when the Washington legislature talked about taxing candies, they talked about it as a "sin tax," that there's something sinful and morally suspect about the way we like candy. I think that's really interesting, the idea that there's something really wrong, really evil about candy and the pleasure it gives us. It points to a kind of moralism in our society."
--Samira Kawash, the Candy Professor
"Yes, those of us, ahem, of a certain age certainly remember ordering Sea Monkeys from the back of comic books back in the '70s. But what Sea Monkeys are in fact are artemia, a kind of tiny shrimp-like thing that grows in the Great Salt Lake. They hatch out of tiny cysts that are extremely durable, which makes them a very transportable product. Artemia are one of the key bases for feeding juvenile sea bass and indeed all marine farmed fish."
--Paul Greenberg, author of "Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food"
"Psychedelics in general, they kind of have a bad rep because in the 60s there was a lot of stuff going on: civil rights, rock-and-roll, feminism. But you also had assassinations, people destroying property and violent protests, as well as peaceful protest. You had people so angry with the established traditions that they kind of threw up a fist of anger towards them. So in many ways psychedelics are associated with destruction, anarchy and things that are not really shamanic at all. I'm not saying there's not a place for revolution, but it's not fair to call ayahuasca [a hallucinogenic tea] a drug simply because psychedelics are associated with a very violent, rebellious, tumultuous time."
--Adam Elenbaas, author of "Fishers of Men: The Gospel of an Ayahuasca Vision Quest"
Hope for the future
"Oh yeah! You can surely have sex in space. Gravity is your friend when it comes to intercourse, as long as one person is sort of fixed in place. Because you tend to sort of bump away from each other: It's kind of hard to stay together. But there's so many different ways to have sex when you don't have gravity to deal with ... although privacy would be an issue. Particularly on a Mars mission where space would be a premium."
--Mary Roach, author of "Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void"
"I make a calendar every year that people put in their kitchens, and it's part of the dialog in the 'kitchen community.' The kitchen is where life happens