An Economist's Travelogue
My father took me to one movie, in 1957, when I was eleven years old. Our small town had two movie theaters then, the Roxy and the Ford, but we went to the State, in…
We’ve been living in Tucson, Arizona, for nearly a year. We came in January to escape the winter, planning to stay for two or three months and then move somewhere else, maybe Boulder, Portland (for…
The original draft of the book had the following appendix. We decided not to use it. An abridged version has been published at www.mrzine.org. Do you think I should have included it in the book?…
[Note: This first appeared in Counterpunch at http://www.counterpunch.org/yates10102007.html. It is based upon a story in the book.] Alan Greenspan's new memoir has put his tenure as Federal Reserve chairman on the hot seat, as critics…
One of the themes of Cheap Motels and a Hot Plate is work. More specifically the theme is dead-end work, how there is so much of this in the United States. Work has always been…
Eric Asimov is the New York Time's wine critic and a restaurant reviewer. Yesterday he wrote a glowing tribute to Portland, Oregon restaurants and some Portland chefs. Karen and I wrote him a letter, posted…
I taught my first class this past Tuesday. It is a large lecture section of seventy students, in a course titled "Globalization and Labor." It was the first time I was in a classroom like…
We drove the long and dismal trip from Washington DC to Amherst, Massachusetts on Monday, August 20. It was overcast and rainy, matching our moods. It had been a long and difficult ninety days on…
The last stops on the book tour were in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Washington DC, with a stop in Johnstown to visit friends. Much of this was familiar territory. Milwaukee is an industrial city hard…
While we were resting and visiting family in Joplin, Missouri, we went to the town of Carthage, a few miles away. Carthage was the site of a battle early in the Civil War, in 1861.…