EPISODE · Jun 5, 2026 · 38 MIN
"Class Apartheid" in America (and cigarettes)
from Mary in America · host Mary in America
Xochitl Gonzalez is a bestselling novelist, but, to me, she’s an economist. Her books are about collisions between economic classes; she captures precarity and luxury, access and scrappiness, often with gentrification as the site of these collisions. She has this freakishly astute lens because, she says, she herself has “changed economic classes,” not once but three times — an experience she’s now writing about in a forthcoming memoir. Further Reading: Last Night in Brooklyn Need Blind: A Memoir of Class in America “I Mean, Why Shouldn’t We All Smoke Cigarettes Again?”, New York Magazine What the Comfort Class Doesn’t Get, The Atlantic A Year of Confronting the Gentrification of Self, The Atlantic Subscribe to the show! YouTubeInstagramTikTokWebsite
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"Class Apartheid" in America (and cigarettes)
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