Ellen Ruppel Shell

An Atlantic correspondent evaluates America's penchant for making and buying cheap products while assessing the true economic, political, and psychological costs of such goods, in a report that argues that a focus on low prices is promoting negative practices.

The High Cost of Discount Culture

Cheap

"In a brilliant but sobering work of journalism, Ellen Ruppel Shell takes a hard look at the forces that are reshaping the nature of work in America, overturning the often espoused mythology that retraining workers in software, engineering, and the sciences is the key to job security and career success, and achieving the middle-class dream in the future. In a wide-ranging narrative that takes us from a downsized marketing executive in Massachusetts, to a father of three in Appalachia finding purpose and meaning working in a convenience store chain, to an unemployed autoworker retraining in "advanced manufacturing," Shell reveals how work is essential to our flourishing and pyschological well-being--and how so many of the avenues to well-paid and meaningful work will be challenged in the years ahead. The future of work is not being faced openly. We live in a world where the rewards of employment are concentrated in the hands of the few. Today, the top 10 percent of wage earners in the U.S. bring home 9 times the income of the other 90 percent, and the top.01 percent earn 184 times as much. The economic gap between the few and the many is so vast, Shell says, that we might as well be members of a different species. Moreover, since the 1970s, real wages for most of us have stagnated, and with it our purchasing power. Half of all Americans earn less than $30,000 a year. And the paths to landing those good-paying jobs that secure our financial future are disappearing in the wake of automation and the rise of AI"--

"In a brilliant but sobering work of journalism, Ellen Ruppel Shell takes a hard look at the forces that are reshaping the nature of work in America, overturning the often espoused mythology that retraining workers in software, engineering, and the sciences is the key to job security and career success, and achieving the middle-class dream in the future. In a wide-ranging narrative that takes us from a downsized marketing executive in Massachusetts, to a father of three in Appalachia finding purpose and meaning working in a convenience store chain, to an unemployed autoworker retraining in "advanced manufacturing," Shell reveals how work is essential to our flourishing and pyschological well-being--and how so many of the avenues to well-paid and meaningful work will be challenged in the years ahead. The future of work is not being faced openly. We live in a world where the rewards of employment are concentrated in the hands of the few. Today, the top 10 percent of wage earners in the U.S. bring home 9 times the income of the other 90 percent, and the top .01 percent earn 184 times as much. The economic gap between the few and the many is so vast, Shell says, that we might as well be members of a different species. Moreover, since the 1970s, real wages for most of us have stagnated, and with it our purchasing power. Half of all Americans earn less than $30,000 a year. And the paths to landing those good-paying jobs that secure our financial future are disappearing in the wake of automation and the rise of AI"--

work and its future in a time of radical change

The job

Critically acclaimed journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell uncovers the true cost--political, economic, social, and personal--of America's mounting anxiety over jobs, and what we can do to regain control over our working lives. Since 1973, our productivity has grown almost six times faster than our wages. Most of us rank so far below the top earners in the country that the "winners" might as well inhabit another planet. But work is about much more than earning a living. Work gives us our identity, and a sense of purpose and place in this world. And yet, work as we know it is under siege. Through exhaustive reporting and keen analysis, The Job reveals the startling truths and unveils the pervasive myths that have colored our thinking on one of the most urgent issues of our day: how to build good work in a globalized and digitalized world where middle class jobs seem to be slipping away. Traveling from deep in Appalachia to the heart of the Midwestern rust belt, from a struggling custom clothing maker in Massachusetts to a thriving co-working center in Minnesota, she marshals evidence from a wide range of disciplines to show how our educational system, our politics, and our very sense of self have been held captive to and distorted by outdated notions of what it means to get and keep a good job. We read stories of sausage makers, firefighters, zookeepers, hospital cleaners; we hear from economists, computer scientists, psychologists, and historians. The book's four sections take us from the challenges we face in scoring a good job today to work's infinite possibilities in the future. Work, in all its richness, complexity, rewards and pain, is essential for people to flourish. Ellen Ruppel Shell paints a compelling portrait of where we stand today, and points to a promising and hopeful way forward.

Work and Its Future in a Time of Radical Change

The Job

Ellen Ruppel Shell’s Slippery Beast is a fascinating account of a deeply mysterious creature—the eel—a thrilling saga of true crime, natural history, travel, and big business. What is it about eels? Depending on who you ask, they are a pest, a fascination, a threat, a pot of gold. What they are not is predictable. Eels emerged some 200 million years ago, weathered mass extinctions and continental shifts, and were once among the world’s most abundant freshwater fish. But since the 1970s, their numbers have plummeted. Because eels—as unagi—are another thing: delicious. In Slippery Beast, journalist Ellen Ruppel Shell travels in the world of “eel people,” pursuing a burgeoning fascination with this mysterious and highly coveted creature. Despite centuries of study by celebrated thinkers from Aristotle to Leeuwenhoek to a young Sigmund Freud, much about eels remains unknown, including exactly how eels beget other eels. Eels cannot be bred reliably in captivity, and as a result, infant eels are unbelievably valuable. A pound of the tiny, translucent, bug-eyed “elvers” caught in the cold fresh waters of Maine can command $3,000 or more on the black market. Illegal trade in eels is an international scandal measured in billions of dollars every year. In Maine, federal investigators have risked their lives to bust poaching rings, including the notorious half-decade-long “Operation Broken Glass.” Ruppel Shell follows the elusive eel from Maine to the Sargasso Sea and back, stalking riversides, fishing holes, laboratories, restaurants, courtrooms, and America’s first commercial eel “family farm,” which just might upend the international market and save a state. This is an enthralling, globe-spanning look at an animal that you may never come to love, but which will never fail to astonish you, a miraculous creature that tells more about us than we can ever know about it.

A True Crime Natural History, with Eels

Slippery Beast

The Science of Fat and the Future of Thin

The Hungry Gene

A provocative, cutting edge exploration of obesity probes recent attempts to uncover the underlying cause of this national epidemic, from scientists breeding superobese rats to the scientific search for the obesity gene and the race to create a pill to cure the fat problem. Reprint.

Ellen Ruppel Shell

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