A 72-count box of store-brand K-Cups is almost $30. A 64-ounce bottle of coffee creamer is almost $8. A 4-pound bag of sugar (shrinkflation; it used to be 5 pounds) is almost $10. These aren't luxuries.
Few do so as deftly as Beth Macy's new book, " Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America." Throughout her career as a journalist, Macy has covered rural poverty and corporate greed. Her 2014 book, " Factory Man," followed a Virginia furniture-maker's fight against Chinese offshoring; in 2018, she published " Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America," an investigation of the opioid crisis that was subsequently adapted into a Hulu series.