News
“Nickel and Dimed” Thesis Quartered
RALEIGH — Last summer, as UNC-Chapel Hill was assigning Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America to all incoming freshmen, sophomore Matthew Pulley was experiencing, for the first time, living on his own, with only a small income to sustain him. Rather than feeling lied to about the American Dream, Pulley left his experience puzzled about Ehrenreich’s published difficulties. In fact, as he wrote in Carolina Review, he has “a hard time seeing how [Ehrenreich] could have failed, other than the fact that she set herself up for failure from the start.”