My goal was to spend enough time in each of those communities that I could first find the right questions to ask. Since I began, I’ve published three big stories: on one of the poorest rural counties in Kentucky on a hotel housing homeless families in suburban Denver and on a five-year drop in the life expectancy of white women who do not graduate from high school, which I investigated by going to my home state of Arkansas. We know now, of course, that upward mobility has stalled, and that the middle class has been leaking from the bottom like a sieve, so it’s a rich topic, and an increasing but still small number of writers is drawn to it. I say I cover “opportunity.” America is a country that still believes it’s full of opportunity, and my project is to assess that belief. I first started to write about poverty in 2012 for The American Prospect, but I actually don’t describe my beat as “poverty,” though that’s how other people classify it, including my editors at the magazine. The American Way of Poverty: How the Other Half Still Lives By Sasha Abramsky
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