"And no doubt it is more comfortable to submit to a blind enslavement than to work for liberation: the dead, for that matter, are better adapted to the earth than are the living."

Simone de Beauvoir, from The Second Sex

It [myth] is simply a way controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and suffering which is contemporary history.

T.S. Eliot, 'Ulysses', Order, and Myth (1928)

I had to advise a lot of people who were looking for jobs, and not just at Pan-Am…. And I’d tell them the secret to getting a job is to imagine the kind of person the company wants to hire and then become that person during the interview. The hell with your theories of what you believe in, and what your integrity is, and all that other stuff. You can project all that when you’ve got the job.

Flight Attendant Recruiter (1983)

Now that he has no insurance, Mr. Jackson takes his Effexor antidepressant pills every other day, rather than daily, as prescribed.

Robert Pear, "When a Job Disappears, So Does the Health Care" (Dec. 7, 2008)

The number of people on food stamps set a record in September, with 31.6 million people receiving benefits, up by two million in one month.

Nearly 4.4 million people are receiving unemployment insurance benefits, an increased [sic] of 60 percent in the past year. But more than half of unemployed workers are not getting help because they do not qualify or have exhausted their benefits.

Robert Pear, "When a Job Disappears, So Does the Health Care" (Dec. 7, 2008)

Starla D. Darling, 27, was pregnant when she learned that her insurance coverage was about to end. She rushed to the hospital, took a medication to induce labor, and then had an emergency Casesarian section, in the hope that her Blue Cross and Blue Shield plan would pay for delivery. [...] As it turned out, the insurance company denied her claim, leaving Ms. Darling with more than $17,000 in medical bills."

Robert Pear, "When a Job Disappears, So Does the Health Care" (Dec. 7, 2008)

Workers Give Up

The share of all men ages 16 and over who are working is now at its lowest level since the government began keeping statistics in the 1940s.

David Leonhardt, "Workers Give Up" (Dec. 5, 2008)