This is a delightful surprise: #AWE is nominated for @Goodreads Readers’ Choice Awards! (VOTE by Nov 10!) http://ow.ly/eXg7g

Forgive the delay in my informing you of this, but:

The American Way of Eating, along with some impressive works like Will Allen and Charles Wilson’s Good Food Revolution, has been nominated for a Goodreads Reader’s Choice Award. So: GO VOTE!

This is a real honor: Nominees are selected based on reader metrics, so that means a lot of people actually liked and/or read the book.

As a lesser-known, first-time author, winning this award would do a lot for me professionally — a good nudge to publishers, for instance, that I”m worth contracting with for a second book — so please: CAST YOUR VOTE ASAP (you get three!).  Voting ends next week, so do it now before you forget!

As Common As Dirt

The American Prospect • Sept. 11, 2012

“As Common as Dirt” is the 2013 James Beard Award winner in the Politics/Policy/Environment category.

One morning earlier this year, in the borderland town of Brawley, California, 75-year-old Ignacio Villalobos perched on a chair in his trailer, removed a plastic bag from the well of a rubber boot, and finished dressing for work. Dawn was still an hour away, and in the wan light of the kitchen, Villalobos took off his house sandals and pulled the bag over his right foot. He bunched it at the ankle, then slipped his foot into his boot. Continue reading “As Common As Dirt”

Series: Getting By

The Young and the Jobless

New York’s newest growth industry is a generation of young adults who are not in school and not employed. Most aren’t even looking for work. A changing economy is partly to blame–but so is government’s disinvestment in job training.

Ending Workfare as We Know It?

With 400,000 still on the rolls, New York City is taking a new approach to welfare reform’s second round. Could a gentler touch really put more of the city’s poor to work?

The New Safety Net?

Today, most antipoverty efforts are aimed at boosting low wages, not offering a check. For many families struggling to make a living, it’s still a high-wire act with many dangers.

The New Safety Net?

Part 3 of series, “Getting By”

Winner, 2006 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism
Finalist, 2006 Livingston Award for Young Journalists

City Limits • November/December 2005

Early this April, before the snow had completely disappeared, Milagros Espinal undertook an annual ritual, rustling her three children out of her Bronx apartment for a 15-minute jaunt over the Tri-Borough Bridge. Upon reaching Bayside, Queens, she hunched over an aging Hewlett Packard computer, consulting earnestly with her stepbrother, Veder Velarde. Between slurps of Coke, Milagros and Veder, who works in accounting, focused on the task at hand: painstakingly inputting figures from the receipts and 1099s generated by the child-care business she was running out of her living room. It was a late start for Milagros. She had hoped to finish her taxes months before, but now April 15 loomed just two weeks away, and she was anxious to dispense with the paperwork. Continue reading “The New Safety Net?”

Ending Workfare as We Know It?

Part 2 of series, “Getting By”

Winner, 2006 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism
Finalist, 2006 Livingston Award for Young Journalists

 

City Limits • July/August 2005 

It starts before Benita Andrews even makes it home. Five o’clock finds her walking to her South Bronx apartment, a ramshackle three-family covered in aluminum siding. Her kids–nine in all–spot her from their third-floor window, and they are already calling for her when she is half a block away. By the time Andrews passes the corner house, known as a drug spot, and a stoop blaring salsa music, her front stairs are lined with children. “It gets kinda crazy when I get home. Everybody’s all ‘Mommy, mommy, mommy.’” says Andrews, feigning irritation. “I about fall into a coma come 10:00.” Continue reading “Ending Workfare as We Know It?”

Ending Workfare as We Know It?

City Limits • July/August 2005

It starts before Benita Andrews even makes it home. Five o’clock finds her walking to her South Bronx apartment, a ramshackle three-family covered in aluminum siding. Her kids–nine in all–spot her from their third-floor window, and they are already calling for her when she is half a block away. By the time Andrews passes the corner house, known as a drug spot, and a stoop blaring salsa music, her front stairs are lined with children. “It gets kinda crazy when I get home. Everybody’s all ‘Mommy, mommy, mommy.’” says Andrews, feigning irritation. “I about fall into a coma come 10:00.”

So far, the only sign of exhaustion from Andrews is a deep breath before the onslaught from her children begins. “I want to be working, but there’s too many loose ends at home,” she says matter-of-factly. Asked what it would take for her to leave welfare, Andrews raises her eyebrows–I have tried and it does not seem possible, her look says–and ponders the question. “If I do Scratch n’ Match [a state lottery game], that might cover me for three or four years,” she says. Pressed for specifics, Andrews launches into a list. Continue reading “Ending Workfare as We Know It?”

The Young and the Jobless

Part 1 of series, “Getting By”

Winner, 2006 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism
Finalist, 2006 Livingston Award for Young Journalists

City Limits • March/April 2005

One in five.

That’s how many of New York City’s young adults, ages 16 to 24, are not working and are not going to school. Only a few of them are even looking for jobs. There are 200,000 in all–the approximate population of Richmond, Virginia.

There have always been young people for whom high school failed, and work was out of reach, but the sheer numbers have never been greater, according to new research from the Community Service Society of New York. The problem is not New York’s alone: The number of young adults whom policymakers call “disconnected” is surging nationwide. Continue reading “The Young and the Jobless”

Market Babies

Finalist, 2004 Casey Medal for Meritorious Journalism

 

City Limits • January 2003

Kwame Boame is only 6 years old, but he’s already got a helluva commute. Every Monday morning, Kwame’s mother, Kimberly Paul, rustles him out the door at 6:30 to take the A train from their apartment in the Dyckman Houses, at the northern tip of Manhattan, to the island’s southern border. In the Broadway-Nassau station, next to the magazine stand on the A platform, they meet Kwame’s great-grandmother, who shepherds Kwame onto the train to Bedford-Stuyvesant, where he goes to school. For the next five days, he’ll stay with his grandmother and great-grandmother. Kwame won’t see his mother again until Friday. Continue reading “Market Babies”