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In July, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that 30 million Americans don’t have enough to eat. The wealthiest large society on earth, built on perhaps its most favorable geography, is home to a mass of people living off tins of collected food. In the end, it is not the particularity of “Third World” …

It is still common to hear of a division between absolute and relative poverty. But poverty is always both relative and absolute. In a monetized economy, an individual’s relative lack of income can result in absolute deprivation. ($1.90, whatever it is worth in sub-Saharan Africa, can’t purchase th…

Menoret’s many drives through Riyadh neighborhoods allow him to introduce one of the other primary concerns of his book: the interplay of urban planning and political control, and the effects of suburbanization in particular. He describes the arrival of a powerful American oil company, which would …

In 2016, Zweig’s epiphany painfully paralleled my own incredulous reactions to Brexit and Trump. Because I did not share his before-the-fall optimism, I was surprised by my own shock—and saw that it was indicative of the problem. At the time of the election, I had been “based” in Berlin for several…

In this scene and others, Zweig begins to question the implicit we of liberal intellectuals and artists as a group, while still unable to let go of the mythos—or to really consider that other members of his circle may not have been so “optimistic” (nor so self-serving) as him. He rues his rosy na…