Podcasts about fulfillment winning

Producer's Note: The following episode of the podcast was recorded prior to the 2024 presidential election. In this week's episode, host Daniel Raimi talks with Holly Buck, an associate professor at the University of Buffalo and climate justice fellow at the Salata Institute for Climate and Sustainability at Harvard University. Buck shares insights from interviews with 100 experts, government officials, and members of the public across diverse industries and regions of the United States about strategies for removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Buck also discusses the broader energy transition, the effect of the federal policies related to this transition, and the challenges that communities face in implementing lower-carbon technologies. References and recommendations: “100 Conversations on Carbon Removal, Decarbonization, and Desired Futures” by Holly Jean Buck and Travis Young; https://www.decarb.social/ “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America” by Alec MacGillis; https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374159276/fulfillment

America is in the grips of polarization, and the recent assassination attempt on Donald Trump has underlined the potential for an escalation in political violence. It has never been more important for the media to complicate dominant narratives and resist oversimplification. Today, a journalist I admire returns to the program to model what that looks like in practice, bringing us a nuanced story about tensions within the conservative movement over school vouchers.Alec MacGillis is an award-winning American journalist, and a reporter for ProPublica. He's also the author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.You can find Tara Henley on Twitter at @TaraRHenley, and on Substack at tarahenley.substack.com

Episode 16 of the Just & Sustainable Economy podcast features a conversation with award-winning journalist, Alec MacGillis on his book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. Joining Alec in conversation is ASBN Co-Founder and CEO and Co-Founder of Seventh Generation, Jeffrey Hollender. Fulfillment is a A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice selection and investigates Amazon's impact on the wealth and poverty of towns and cities across the United States. Alec MacGillis's Fulfillment is not another inside account or exposé of our most conspicuously dominant company. Rather, it is a literary investigation of the America that falls within that company's growing shadow. With empathy and breadth, MacGillis demonstrates the hidden human costs of the other inequality—not the growing gap between rich and poor, but the gap between the country's winning and losing regions. The result is an intimate account of contemporary capitalism: its drive to innovate, its dark, pitiless magic, its remaking of America with every click.

Kenny decides to depress everyone by talking about a book that highlights some of the worst atrocities man has ever perpetrated by discussing Christopher Browning's Ordinary Men. This book chronicles the savage brutality of Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland. James then discusses Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis. The book is a polemic against the evil Amazon corporation. Here's the link to where you can purchase it on said evil corporation's website. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/kenny-james65/message

Chaired by Royce Kurmelovs There is a price to be paid for convenience. The one-click wonder of Amazon comes at a cost. In Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, Alec MacGillis sets out to explore what that cost is for the “America that fell in the company's lengthening shadow”, namely the places where Amazon's influence proved pernicious. Alec tells a chilling but utterly gripping dystopian tale of the pervasive destructive impact of Amazon on American life and many of its cities.

Alec MacGillis discusses his book "Fulfillment: America in the Shadow of Amazon." Tomaš Dvořák - "Game Boy Tune" - "Mark's intro" - "Interview with Alec MacGillis" [0:04:25] - "Mark's comments" [0:39:22] Mark Pritchard - "One Way Mirror" [https://markpritchard.bandcamp.com/track/one-way-mirror] [0:54:48] https://www.wfmu.org/playlists/shows/112493

In this episode of the Anti-Dystopians, Rowena Squires, an ancient historian, asks Alina Utrata everything you ever wanted to know about Amazon. How did Amazon go from online bookstore to commercial empire? Is Amazon Alexa really recording everything you say? How was AWS cloud computing invented? And why is the Library of Alexandria such a good origin story for the Amazon Alexa?You can follow Rowena Squires on Twitter @RowenaSquires, Alina Utrata @alinautrata and the Anti-Dystopians podcast on @AntiDystopians. Sign up for the Anti-Dystopians email newsletter at bit.ly/3kuGM5XAll episodes of the Anti-Dystopians are hosted and produced by Alina Utrata and are freely available to all listeners. To support the production to the show, visit: bit.ly/3AApPN4Articles mentioned in this episode:Business reporter Brad Stone's 2013 book “The Everything Store” and the 2020 follow-up “Amazon Unbound”Alec MacGillis's book “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America” The US House Judiciary Report on Monopolies Franklin Foer's deep-dive into Jeff Bezos's brain in the AtlanticCharles Duhigg's “Is Amazon Unstoppable?” For the rest of the articles mentioned in this episode, visit bit.ly/3kuGM5XNowhere Land by Kevin MacLeodLink: https://incompetech.filmmusic.io/song/4148-nowhere-landLicense: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

At this point in the pandemic, one group of Americans generally gets to show their faces. The other still does not. One group orders groceries from Amazon, while the other packages it. One group enjoys take-out. And the other delivers it in the rain. Today, in part two of my conversation with ProPublica journalist Alec MacGillis, we unpack the ways the pandemic has exacerbated the already enormous divide between the haves and the have nots. MacGillis discusses his recent book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, and how Democrats became such a big part of what he calls “the Amazon coalition.” We also talk about how the stubbornness of our political and media class—and their insistence on doubling down on short-sighted policies—is already reshaping our politics and culture. If you haven't yet listened to part one of the conversation, you can do so here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we approach the third year of this pandemic, it's become painfully clear that the stringent measures we took to mitigate against the virus had all kinds of unintended consequences. For mental health. For the economy. For our cities. And, especially, for our kids. Today, award-winning investigative journalist Alec MacGillis helps us understand the morally urgent costs of school shutdowns on our youngest generations, and how pandemic policies contributed to the crime surge plaguing so many American cities. MacGillis reported on these hidden costs with rigor, diligence and empathy well before the rest of the country caught up and said: hold on, these costs may be too high. (You can read many of those stories here.) Today's episode is part one of my conversation with MacGillis. Stay tuned for part two, where we'll talk about his recent book about Amazon, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, and how Big Tech and progressive policies are accelerating the inequalities that were already running rampant in America. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As we've said many times on this show, democracy is long and slow, which is the exact opposite of the ethos that Amazon has pushed into our culture through quick shipping, easily accessible entertainment, its takeover of cloud computing, and more.Amazon's expansion across America, from distribution facilities to data centers, is exacerbating regional inequities and contributing to the unraveling of America's social fabric. Not only that, cities competing for Amazon's  new facilities offer tax breaks that prevent funding from going to basic government services. And, the company's takeover of government procurement has taken lucrative contracts away from local businesses.Alec MacGillis, a senior reporter at ProPublica, chronicles these trends in new book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. The book chronicles how Amazon contributed to the gap between the country's winning and losing regions, and how its workplace practices foster isolation and competition, rather than camaraderie and shared goals. Was Amazon deliberately trying to undermine democracy? Or using the existing system to its benefit?  We talk with MacGillis about founder Jeff Bezos's political philosophy and how it's impacted the company's decision-making over the years. We also discuss what we as democratic citizens can do to push back against some of these forces.  Additional InformationFulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click AmericaAlec MacGillis on TwitterAlec's websiteRelated EpisodesCan corporations be democratic citizens?Reimagining citizenship in a consumer world

Vox's Sean Illing talks with professor and media researcher Nikki Usher about her new book News for the Rich, White, and Blue, which documents systemic problems in the ways journalists and institutions decide what counts as news and whom the news is for. They discuss racial, gender, and class biases in the industry, developing a “post-newspaper consciousness,” and the role of place in shaping our civic life. Host: Sean Illing (@seanilling), Interviews Writer, Vox Guest: Nikki Usher (@nikkiusher), senior fellow, Open Markets Institute Center for Liberty and Journalism; professor, University of Illinois References:  News for the Rich, White, and Blue by Nikki Usher (Columbia University Press; 2021) Messengers of the Right: Conservative Media and the Transformation of American Politics by Nicole Hemmer (U. Penn Press; 2018) "Leslie Moonves on Donald Trump: 'It May Not Be Good for American, but It's Damn Good for CBS'" by Paul Bond (Hollywood Reporter; Feb. 29, 2016) Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America by Alec MacGillis (Farrar, Straus and Giroux; 2021) Stuck in Place: Urban Neighborhoods and the End of Progress toward Racial Equality by Patrick Sharkey (U. Chicago Press; 2013) "The Media's Post-Advertising Future Is Also Its Past" by Derek Thompson (The Atlantic; Dec. 31, 2018) Prism Reports MLK50: Justice Through Journalism The 19th City Bureau Enjoyed this episode? Rate Vox Conversations ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ and leave a review on Apple Podcasts. Subscribe for free. Be the first to hear the next episode of Vox Conversations by subscribing in your favorite podcast app. Support Vox Conversations by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts This episode was made by:  Producer: Erikk Geannikis Editor: Amy Drozdowska VP, Vox Audio: Liz Kelly Nelson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Alec Macgillis, author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-click America, discusses key themes form his book including regional inequality, economic concentration, the decline of Main Street and the decline of manufacturing jobs as seen through the emergence of Amazon as a dominant player in the US economy. The impact of the tech economy also created fissures in both political parties that are still playing out.

Journalist Alec MacGillis joins the podcast to discuss his recent book, "FULFILLMENT: Winning and Losing in One-Click America," which uses Amazon as a frame to explore regional inequality in the U.S. MacGillis writes that Amazon that has three types of towns: its software development-engineering towns, its data center towns and its warehouse towns. What is the impact of these broad economic forces on 'warehouse towns' like Louisville? How is blue-collar work different now than decades ago? What are the political ramifications of growing disparities between 'hyper-prosperous' places like Washington D.C. and 'left behind' places like Baltimore?  

We've become accustomed to the ease of online shopping, but what's the human cost of all those timesaving clicks? Alec MacGillis, senior reporter for ProPublica, joins host Krys Boyd to discuss how Amazon and other digital retailers are affecting the larger economy as they drive some cities to either boom or bust. His book is called “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America.”

In this episode, Niki, Neil, and Natalia discuss the tragedy of the Surfside condominium collapse and what it means for Miami. Support Past Present on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/pastpresentpodcast Here are some links and references mentioned during this week's show:  On June 24, a security camera captured the collapse of much of the Surfside condominium complex, killing a still untallied list of residents. Natalia cited this Slate article on the death of the Florida dream. Niki contextualized the collapse in the tradition of neoliberal deregulation, explained here.   In our regular closing feature, What's Making History: Natalia recommended Alec MacGillis' book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. Neil comment on Christianity Today's article, “Rick Warren Mastered the Formula for Suburban Church Growth.” Niki discussed her own CNN opinion piece, “The House Takes a Revealing Vote on Confederate Statues.”

During the pandemic, Amazon added 425K workers and 50% more warehouse space, the stock price rose 80%, and the personal fortune of Jeff Bezos increased by $58B. In this country, 100M subscribe to Prime and Amazon reaps half of every dollar people spend online. In FULFILLMENT: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, ALEC MacGILLIS looks beyond the numbers to reveal the consequences its online commerce + immediate delivery revolution is having throughout American society.

Alec MacGillis is in conversation with Jesse J. Holland about his new book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America . Alec MacGillis is a senior reporter at ProPublica. MacGillis previously reported for The New Republic, The Washington Post, and the Baltimore Sun. He won the 2016 Robin Toner Prize for Excellence in Political Reporting, the 2017 Polk Award for National Reporting, and the 2017 Elijah Parish Lovejoy Award. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Atlantic, New York, Harper's, and New York Times Magazine, among other publications. A resident of Baltimore, MacGillis is the author of The Cynic, a 2014 biography of Sen. Mitch McConnell, and the forthcoming Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. Jesse J. Holland is an award-winning writer, journalist and television personality. Jesse is host of the Saturday edition of C-SPAN's Washington Journal, can be seen weekly as a political analyst on the Black News Channel's DC Live and occasionally on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News and other news outlets for news and analysis. He is the author and editor of the new Black Panther: Tales of Wakanda prose anthology released in February 2021 from Titan Books and Marvel, the first prose anthology featuring the first mainstream black superhero. He is also author of The Black Panther: Who Is The Black Panther? prose novel, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award in 2019 and The Invisibles: The Untold Story of African American Slavery Inside The White House, which was named as the 2017 silver medal award winner in U.S. History in the Independent Publisher Book Awards and one of the top history books of 2016 by Smithsonian.com. Jesse also wrote Star Wars: The Force Awakens - Finn's Story young adult novel and Black Men Built The Capitol: Discovering African American History In and Around Washington, D.C. Writers LIVE programs are supported in part by a bequest from The Miss Howard Hubbard Adult Programming Fund. Recorded On: Wednesday, June 2, 2021

This week, we speak to Alec MacGillis, a reporter at ProPublica and author of the new book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, about how Amazon has transformed the American economy and workforce. In the intro segment, a woke pastor's ancestry debunked, and our project on big philanthropy.

We look at two new books about Amazon—Fulfillment by Alec Macgillis and Amazon Unbound by Brad Stone—as an occasion to further consider the galactic expansion of this evil empire, the relentlessly sociopathic god-emperor at the top, and bad takes that revere Bezos as a quirky innovator and blame consumer choices in the market for the human misery Amazon causes. We’ve dug into Amazon a lot over the last couple months. But Amazon is big. It contains multitudes and contradictions. There’s always more to cover, to analyze, to track, to just try wrapping our minds around. Some stuff we reference: • Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America | Alec MacGillis: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374159276 • Amazon Unbound: Jeff Bezos and the Invention of a Global Empire | Brad Stone: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Amazon-Unbound/Brad-Stone/9781982132613 • To Understand Amazon, We Must Understand Jeff Bezos | Ben Smith: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/13/books/review/amazon-unbound-brad-stone.html • We know about Amazon’s sins. Do we care? | James Kwak: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/we-know-about-amazons-sins-do-we-care/2021/03/18/b7ff73ce-7acb-11eb-85cd-9b7fa90c8873_story.html Subscribe to hear more analysis and commentary in our premium episodes every week! patreon.com/thismachinekills TMK shirts are now available: bonfire.com/store/this-machine-kills-podcast/ Hosted by Jathan Sadowski (twitter.com/jathansadowski) and Edward Ongweso Jr. (twitter.com/bigblackjacobin). Production / Music by Jereme Brown (twitter.com/braunestahl)

(This conversation originally aired on March 16, 2021)Tom's guest on this archive edition of Midday is Alec MacGillis, an award-winning reporter for ProPublica whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker and The Atlantic, among other publications. His latest book is about Amazon, and about the seismic shifts that it has caused not only in the American economy, but in American culture as well since Jeff Bezos started his on-line bookstore in the summer of 1994. The new book is called Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. Bezos will step aside as Chief Executive this summer, but Amazon’s dominance in the economy will remain unparalleled. It is an enormous marketplace that dwarfs its nearest competitor in on-line retail sales. Its servers hold the data for companies across the globe, including some of Amazon’s fiercest rivals. And the ways it influences the health and well-being of communities large and small, and the ways in which it has changed the very nature of work are myriad. Amazon’s distribution system is massive. It has warehouses within 25 miles of nearly half of the US population, including two in the Baltimore metro area, from which more than 6 billion packages are delivered every year.In his latest book, Alec MacGillis takes us into those warehouses, and the lives and communities of the people who work there. With assiduous reporting and powerful writing, he chronicles the enormous imprint of Amazon, and its far-reaching effects on American society.Alec MacGillis joins us on the line from his home in Baltimore. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Ralph welcomes journalist, Alec MacGillis, author of “Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America” about how Amazon continues to suck the life out of Main Street and what can be done about it. And the director of Public Citizen’s Health Research Group, Dr. Michael Carome, gives us the latest on our approach to the Covid pandemic. Plus, we answer a listener about how to avoid flying on Boeing’s 737 Max.

Over the past year Americans have come to rely more and more on Amazon and the convenience of the retail giant's at-home delivery service. It certainly has been a handy tool during a time when any trip out the door came fraught with pandemic risks, but what if this one-click lifestyle comes with hidden costs? On this edition of KCBS In Depth we speak with Alec MacGillis, a veteran journalist who set out to understand the massive changes that have swept American life in recent decades: What he found when he went looking--again and again--were stories that ran directly through an Amazon warehouse. He tells those stories in his new book, "Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America."  Host:Keith Menconi  See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Amazon's Crushing Reign w/Alec MacGillis In this episode, author Alec MacGillis joins me to talk about his recent book Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. We talk about Amazon's questionable business practices, whether or not Amazon is a symptom or a disease, the urban-rural divide, and the all-important question: should I cancel my Prime account? I encourage you to buy Alec's book at any of the following independent bookstores: The Ivy Bookshop | Baltimore, MD Left Bank Books | St. Louis, MO The Tattered Cover | Denver, CO Point Reyes Books | Point Reyes, CA You can also find other independent booksellers and look at the growing Creedal booklist at bookshop.org/shop/creedal. Don't forget to leave me a rating and review on Apple Podcasts!

A conversation with Alec MacGillis, the author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, about Amazon and, among many other things, its expansion in New York City AFTER the collapse of its HQ2 plan here as the brave new pandemic economy has accelerated America's great divergence.

(1:05) Senior reporter for ProPublica Alec MacGillis joins Mountain Money to talk about his new book focusing on how our lives are intertwined with a single corporation and its role in America’s regional inequality: Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America . (23:27) Jeffrey Korzenik will join Mountain Money to make a case for second chance hiring, which he discusses in his new book Untapped Talent: How Second Chance Hiring Works for Your Business and the Community . Mountain Money will end the hour talking about the local construction scene with (41:53) Gary Hill of Midway Construction .

In 1937, the famed writer and activist Upton Sinclair published a novel bearing the subtitle A Story of Ford-America. He blasted the callousness of a company worth “a billion dollars” that underpaid its workers while forcing them to engage in repetitive and sometimes dangerous assembly line labor. Eighty-three years later, the market capitalization of Amazon. com has exceeded one trillion dollars, while the value of the Ford Motor Company hovers around thirty billion. We have, Alec MacGillis contends, entered the age of one-click America—and as the coronavirus makes Americans more dependent on online shopping, its sway will only intensify. Award-winning journalist MacGillis has embarked upon a literary investigation of the America that he believes falls within the shadow of Amazon. His book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America, MacGillis told the stories of those who’ve thrived and struggled to thrive in this rapidly changing environment, and he joined us in conversation with UW history professor Margaret O’Mara to share what he’s gleaned. From our own Seattle to suburban Virginia to Baltimore and beyond, he ranged across the country gathering insight into the impact that Amazon has had. The reach has stretched to Congress as well, MacGillis explored, with lobbyists and government contractors. With empathy and breadth, he demonstrated the hidden human costs of the other inequality between the country’s “winning” and “losing” regions, inviting us to an intimate account of contemporary capitalism. Alec MacGillis is a senior reporter for ProPublica. He worked previously at The Washington Post, Baltimore Sun, and The New Republic, and his journalism has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and other publications. He is the author of The Cynic, a 2014 biography of Mitch McConnell. Margaret O’Mara is a professor of history at the University of Washington and a contributing opinion writer at The New York Times. She is the author of several books, including The Code: Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. Buy the Book: https://www.thirdplacebooks.com/book/9781250829276  Presented by Town Hall Seattle. To become a member or make a donation click here. 

Amazon's PR has been having a temper tantrum this past week on Twitter, going after politicians and random people online for daring to criticize the working conditions at their facilities. Alec MacGillis, author of Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One Click America, shows that while the working conditions are bad and low paid, that is only part of the story about how Amazon is changing work, pay, and entire cities.  Support this podcast: http://patreon.com/publicintellectual http://jessacrispin.com

In this episode we focus on the question of what should be done to constrain the dominance of the tech platforms, and to regulate the ways in which they control aspects of our economy, markets and the public sphere. First up, we hear from Alec MacGillis, a reporter for ProPublica that has just written a book that considers Amazon's dominance and what it means for wealth of American cities and people called https://www.amazon.com/Fulfillment-Winning-Losing-One-Click-America/dp/0374159270 (Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America). Then, we listen to a panel discussion from the Betalab: Fix The Internet program at Betaworks. The discussion focuses on priorities for the regulation of social media, and features Yaël Eisenstat, Researcher-in-Residence at Betalab and formerly a CIA officer, a White House advisor, and the Global Head of Elections Integrity Operations for political advertising at Facebook; Jason Kint, the CEO of Digital Content Next, a trade association that advocates for media companies such as The New York Times, Conde Nast, ESPN, Vox, Politico and Insider, and the Chairman of TrustX, a cooperative digital advertising marketplace designed to address the industry's trust, transparency and accountability challenges in digital advertising; and Marietje Schaake, international policy director at Stanford University's Cyber Policy Center and international policy fellow at Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Between 2009 and 2019, Marietje served as a Member of European Parliament for the Dutch liberal democratic party where she focused on trade, foreign affairs and technology policies. 

On this episode of Building Local Power, host Jess Del Fiacco and ILSR Co-Director Stacy Mitchell are joined by award-winning journalist Alec MacGillis to discuss his new book, Fulfillment: Winning and Losing in One-Click America. Their conversation focuses on how the shift toward online shopping — led by Amazon — has reshaped America. Highlights include: How this shift has reshaped jobs and physical landscapes around the country. Amazon's ever-growing influence on the Washington, D.C., metro area. The troubling dynamic between local governments and Amazon, which often includes cities working on Amazon's behalf. The social and political consequences of the dramatic — and growing — gulf between rich and poor places in the United States. Whether or not these changes are inevitable, and what elected officials can do to shape our economy's future. “You're unable to even talk about problems because the issues manifest themselves so differently in different parts of the country. And housing is the best example. It's just surreal to be in cities where the housing debate is all about high cost and affordability… And then you go to other parts of the country where the housing problem is the absolute reverse, where it's just a problem of depopulation and blight and abandonment…. The most extreme or clearest example, of course, of this incomprehensibility to each other, is what's happened in our politics, in our electoral politics, these last few years.” Related Resources Transcript Jess Del Fiacco: Hello, and welcome to Building Local Power, a podcast, dedicated to thought provoking conversations about how we can challenge corporate monopolies and expand the power of people to shape their own future. I'm Jess Del Fiacco, the host of Building Local Power and communications manager here at the Institute for local self-reliance. For more than 45 years, ILSR has worked to build thriving, equitable communities where power, wealth, and accountability remained in local hands. In today's episode we're going to talk about how a shift towards online shopping, which was led in part by Amazon has reshaped our country. Jess Del Fiacco: I'm here with my colleague, Stacy Mitchell, the co-director of ILSR, and joining us is the award-winning journalist Alec MacGillis whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, and many other places. Alec has a new book out, which is called Fulfillment, Winning and Losing in One-Click America. Welcome to the show. Alec, we're happy to have you here. Alec MacGillis: Thanks for having me. Jess Del Fiacco: Could you just tell us a little bit about this book and why did you decide to write it? Alec MacGillis: This book has been in the works for a long time, and it's really goes back many years to my upbringing in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, small city in Western mass. That's gone through a really hard time after it lost General Electric and just becoming more and more worried about the huge gap, growing gap between places in America, places that all these towns and cities that really have been kind of left behind, even as you had these pockets, these other cities that were growing just more and more wealthy, more and more concentrated in their prosperity and watching this happening as I was about 10 or 12 years ago out on the road, a lot reporting as a political reporter for The Washington Post and going out to towns in Ohio or Wisconsin all over the country. And then coming back to Washington and Metro Washington, as it was becoming more and more intensely wealthy and kind of complacent in its wealth. Alec MacGillis: And this is around the time of the great recession, 2009, '10, when you could barely even see the great recession hitting in Metro Washington and seeing this divide growing ever wider between places and being really bothered by it and really worried about it, and also surprised that more people weren't talking about it. And then Trump gets elected in 16,