Poverty

Pawnshops, payday lenders, check cashers and rent-to-own companies take in $33 billion a year. In writing his new book, Broke, USA, Gary Rivlin discovered how the businesses justified making huge profits off the working poor.

Sargent Shriver, the founding director of the Peace Corps and the architect of President Johnson's War on Poverty, died on Tuesday. He was 95. Shriver spoke to Terry Gross in 1995 about his role in the War on Poverty.

The for-profit college industry has grown substantially in the past decade by targeting underprivileged students who qualify for federal loans, investigative journalist Daniel Golden says. But he says many of these students aren't getting what they hoped for out of college.

Michelle Alexander says that many of the gains of the civil rights movement have been undermined by the mass incarceration of blacks in the war on drugs.

The sitcom on Pop network is about a wealthy family that is thrust into poverty. Their interactions with the locals is the main story, and the main source of comedy — and it's worth checking out.

Richard Rothstein, who studies residential segregation in America, concludes: "Federal, state, and local governments purposely created boundaries in these cities."

Lancaster, Ohio, the home of the Fortune 500 company Anchor Hocking, was once a bustling center of industry and employment. At its peak following World War II, Lancaster's hometown company was the world's largest maker of glassware and employed more than 5,000 town residents. Though Anchor Hocking remains in Lancaster today, it is a shell of its former self, and the once thriving town is beset by underemployment and drug abuse. Lancaster native Brian Alexander chronicles the rise and fall of his hometown in his new book, Glass House.

Homeboy Industries founder Father Greg Boyle has spent 30 years working in LA with gang members and young people transitioning out of prison. His new book is Barking to the Choir.

For many poor families in America, eviction is a real and ongoing threat. Sociologist Matthew Desmond estimates that 2.3 million evictions were filed in the U.S. in 2016 — a rate of four every minute.

Robbie Fulks and Linda Gail Lewis come from different generations, but both play the old style of country music — her brother is Jerry Lee Lewis. They share songs and stories from their new album, Wild! Wild! Wild!

Stephanie Land's new memoir is about what it's like to work hard, but still live below the poverty line. It's also about how she went back to college, and became a writer.

Alex Kotlowitz discusses the people whose lives were changed or lost due to gun violence in Chicago one summer. He likens the trauma of living with gun violence to the PTSD some veterans experience.

New York Times reporter Jason DeParle says a provision in the new COVID relief package has the makings of a policy revolution — and would "roughly cut child poverty in half."

Pulitzer Prize winning author Matthew Desmond talks about the roots of American poverty and how he says so many affluent citizens benefit from government subsidies and exploitation of the poor. His new book is Poverty By America.

Public Health researcher Arline Geronimus makes the case that marginalized people suffer nearly constant stress from living with poverty and discrimination, which damages their bodies at the cellular level and leads to increasingly serious health problems over time. Her term for it is "weathering."