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[...] accidents are the proper subject of this book.

I don’t mean happenstances, or missteps—too many liberal commentators frame our current political moment as a baffling mistake; history taking a wrong turn. I mean “accident” as it was used by late theorist and urbanist Paul Virilio: the accid…

Lately the acting in TV commercials has gotten really good. The other night I saw an ad for some company that helps people get rid of timeshares they don’t want anymore and I thought, Man, that was great, really affecting. That could have been an episode of Togetherness on HBO, if that was still …

For each step forward, though, there was often a step or two back. In 1944, the Philadelphia Transportation Company, bowing to Roosevelt administration pressure, promoted eight African Americans to streetcar motormen. The Transit Workers Union supported those promotions, but forty-five hundred whit…

SPEAKING AT A NEWS CONFERENCE for the very first time, Takele Gobena, an Uber driver in Seattle, awkwardly approached the microphone to convey two messages: first, that Uber drivers needed a union and, second, that Uber paid miserably. Gobena, a gangly, twenty-six-year-old refugee from Ethiopia, sa…

There are thousands of examples of American companies moving operations abroad—to make televisions in China, refrigerators in Mexico, or shirts and slacks in Bangladesh. Many corporations told unions to swallow concessions or else they would move production overseas. Here’s one example: In 1988, Ge…