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The babysitter reports that last week J asked her if she was poor and she said yes, but then she felt wrong about her answer all week. I didn’t want him to think this is what it looks like to be poor, she says, gesturing toward her North Face coat and her L.L.Bean backpack. The babysitter is a form…

“Wealth is not without its advantages and the case to the contrary, although it has often been made, has never proved widely persuasive,” John Kenneth Galbraith writes in the great first sentence of The Affluent Society. “But, beyond doubt, wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding.”

This woman’s grandfather built her house, I’ll learn later. She owned it outright and could have left it to her children but the property taxes kept going up in her old age. Someone selling loans convinced her to remortgage the house to pay her taxes, another neighbor tells me. And that’s how she l…

Next door, in the house just like ours, lives an actual African American grandmother, the wife of the retired postal worker. We’re getting paid to have our house made over to look like what a set designer imagines their house looks like so that Walmart can try to sell things to people who look like…

So much silence and the mind became unbearable [...] Cancer had ripped through her mother so fast, there was so little time to consider something so frivolous as loss. What a luxurious thing, to feel. The pain a tender ache now that she could massage and curl into. [...]