I’ve been remiss about updating the blog, but here’s a roundup of some stuff I’ve been doing:

• Today an op-ed I wrote came out in Newsday: Beware of this misleading snapshot. It looks at how the economy is actually not so great for many ordinary Americans, in spite of the glowing unemployment and stock-market figures, because of growing inequality and a deepening division of non-labor.
• Brian Halpin of the University of California, Davis, and I did a webinar for the University of Wisconsin–Madison’s Institute for Research on Poverty on Structural and Cultural Barriers to Employment for the Working Class.
• My Atlantic essay on transactional marriage was recommended by Longreads, Pocket Hits, and the Belabored podcast of Dissent.
• I was featured, along with What’s the Matter with Kansas? author Thomas Frank, on the Harvard Divinity School Ministry of Ideas podcast, in an episode devoted to Demeritocracy.
• I was quoted in two news radio segments on Virginia Public Radio: Census Data Suggests Gap Between the Rich and Poor Varies Across Virginia and Proposed Cuts to SNAP Benefits Could Hit Rural Virginia Especially Hard.
• I was interviewed on the Wisconsin Public Radio show Central Time and the Dallas NPR affiliate show Think.
• I did an interview with CUNY sociologist Richard E. Ocejo for the New Books Network podcast about my book Cut Loose.

Here’s the video of my Institute for Research on Poverty webinar: