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Literary studies

A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One-Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby

A Rotten Crowd: America, Wealth, and One-Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby

One century ago, F. Scott Fitzgerald invited us into the lives of the “rotten crowd,” Jazz Age Americans with far more money than morals. In “A Rotten Crowd”: America, Wealth, and One Hundred Years of The Great Gatsby, John Marsh welcomes us back to Fitzgerald’s world to examine the rich and their reckless approach to human relationships, their poor taste in friends, and the harm they cause. Marsh leads us to wonder: What kinds of waste—economic, environmental, emotional—accompany a culture of wealth? What kinds of relationships do the wealthy form with those they rely upon to maintain their power—and how does capitalism and the need

Beyond Plague Urbanism

Beyond Plague Urbanism

A soulful and poetic examination of the future of city life

Our cities have been plagued by economic injustices and inequalities long before COVID-19 upended urban life everywhere. Beyond Plague Urbanism delves into this zone of urban pathology and wonders what successive lockdowns and exoduses, remote work and small-business collapse, redundant office space and unaffordable living space portend for our society in cities and our cities in society.

The city has historically been a Great Book inspiring a liberal education, the kind that teaches you how to become a citizen of the world. The city was always an existential rite of passage, especially for young people, broadening

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