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What is fascinating, if at times baffling, in Depraved Indifference are the complex financial arrangements of the wealthy, the murky amorality of which eases the transition from licit to dubious to unprincipled and vile. Evelyn’s husband, Warren, apart from his properties, keeps money in an offshor…

Indiana’s work is abundant and motley: there is video art, poetry, plays, a monograph on Andy Warhol, several years’ worth of art criticism for The Village Voice, a memoir, and of course, the novels. If one cared to assign all this an overarching theme—the exercise is dubious, but no less so than r…

A lot of workers responded to this tacit, cowardly pact with business as they did in the 1930s: they weren’t having it. Beginning in the 1960s, there was wave after wave of wildcat strikes across the industries of coal mining, automobile, trucking, education, railroad, construction, and transit. Wo…

After the disaster, Nader began looking into the finances of the UMWA with the sneaking suspicion that Tony Boyle was fleecing the union. It turned out he was right: Boyle was exceedingly corrupt. The union was, for Boyle, a surefire way for him and his family to get rich. When he was a union offic…

At some point during the miners’ shift in Number 9 that November, one of the four gigantic fans that were meant to suck the methane out of the tunnels stopped running. There was supposed to be an alarm system tied to the fans rotation, but someone had disabled it. Unbeknownst to the workers, the tu…