Book 4, Nickel and Dimed

Read this lounging at Dan and Matt's when they were out. I figured it would reinforce beliefs I already held and it did. Poor people got it tough, minimum-wage entry-level service sector jobs are soul-crushing, and Wal-Mart sucks. Thought this paragraph at the end of the book was nice -

Guilt, you may be thinking warily. Isn't that what we're supposed to feel? But guilt doesn't go anywhere near far enough; the appropriate emotion is shame - shame at our own dependency, in this case, on the underpaid labor of others. When someone works for less pay than she can live on - when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently - then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The "working poor," as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else. As Gail, one of my restaurant coworkers put it, "you give and you give."

I've also been skimming through this online-only magazine whose latest issue compiles memorials given for David Foster Wallace. Zadie Smith's is a (much) shorter version of what she wrote in Changing My Mind.