Not everyone I talked to about this project was enthusiastic. Some people found the subject too esoteric; specialists sometimes seemed to resent the intrusion of a mere writer into their fields. So I am intensely grateful to the people who did provide insights and encouragement along the way: my longtime friend sociologist Arlie Hochschild, anthropologist Erica Lagalisse, the various scholars who took time to talk to me, and my editors John Summers and Chris Lehman at The Baffler, where earlier versions of some bits of this book were published. Blame them for this book, since they unfailingly abetted my peculiar fascinations.
Chief among my enablers was my endlessly patient and intellectually supple agent, Kristine Dahl, as well as Deb Futter, the editor at Twelve who took the leap of offering me a contract. Deb’s successor at Twelve, Sean Desmond, bludgeoned earlier drafts into some semblance of coherence and also did a great deal to enliven the end product. Thanks, Sean, and thanks also to the sharp-eyed copy editor Roland Ottewell.
For the first time as an author I felt I needed a fact-checker and had the dazzlingly good fortune of finding Yasha Hartberg (thanks here to evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson), who was as comfortable with the scientific literature as with philosophy, history, sociology, and popular culture.
In addition to all these energetically supportive people, I had the help of my own personal posse, starting with my children, Rosa Brooks and Ben Ehrenreich. Both of them published books of their own while I was working on this one but still found time to read and comment on my drafts. My former husband, John Ehrenreich, who also published a book during this period, along with his wife, Sharon McQuaide, managed to provide valuable comments on this one. I am especially grateful to my colleague Alissa Quart at the Economic Hardship Reporting Project—a superb writer and editor—whom I also enlisted.
As a long-overdue homage, this book is dedicated to my thesis adviser at Rockefeller University, the brilliant and kindly immunologist Zanvil A. Cohn, whom I grievously disappointed by going off to become a writer and activist. He died in 1993, before I had a chance to formally apologize for what must have seemed a gross misuse of his time. If he had lived longer, I like to imagine that he would have seen this book as a small step toward compensation.